Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukeleman.
Speaker 2: This is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called
Speaker 2: The Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper,
Speaker 2: and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast,
Speaker 2: presented by f HF Gear, American Maid, purpose built hunting
Speaker 2: and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as
Speaker 2: the place as we explore.
Speaker 3: I'm a little disappointed with I was listening to the
Speaker 3: podcast and the ad came on for the.
Speaker 4: Dog, the company that makes.
Speaker 3: The callers right, Yeah, And I feel like I feel
Speaker 3: like Jud's been Lloyd that he shouldn't get a bad
Speaker 3: rap on a commercial.
Speaker 4: Did Jed my coon dog? That's not very good?
Speaker 2: Jed oh Man. Yeah, all of a sudden, like some somehow,
Speaker 2: when I'm in my office alone recording the podcast.
Speaker 1: Ads that seemed completely fair might have been late at night.
Speaker 4: Now now it.
Speaker 2: Seems really it seems really Wronged is getting really old.
Speaker 1: Jed has been.
Speaker 2: When I see Jed walking through my yard, who's now
Speaker 2: like fully retired, he's just a yard dog. He has
Speaker 2: reverted Brent to wearing out a rabbit race. Really oh,
Speaker 2: he runs rabbits all the time. He loves But for
Speaker 2: I've given Jed a bad rap. Jed has literally been
Speaker 2: on hundreds of coon trees, hundreds of coon tracks, and
Speaker 2: I took him three times after Fern died, and he
Speaker 2: ran backtrack three times, and so I gave up on him.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably not.
Speaker 4: Fair, is what I want to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, probably, Jedi.
Speaker 4: I have been on literally thousands of trees and I
Speaker 4: didn't treat one of them either. So I like, have
Speaker 4: you ever treated a rabbit? Nope?
Speaker 1: Well I thank you for bringing that up, Josh.
Speaker 4: It just it hurts me a little bit for Jed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what, Jed helped me early back in
Speaker 2: the Bare Hunting magazine days.
Speaker 1: You know, Jed would jump up on the desk.
Speaker 4: That was Alexis favorite everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: He's quite the hound.
Speaker 5: He's a character, you know, Jed. He doesn't have the
Speaker 5: strength he used to, but he doesn't know it. And
Speaker 5: Tim is a little more athletic than Jed. Can't get
Speaker 5: across the yard pretty fast. And when Jed sees it,
Speaker 5: you can see in his eyes he's like, yeah, let's go,
Speaker 5: and then he tries to do it and it just moves.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 5: So, whenever I go on wall, the dogs always come
Speaker 5: with me, and Jed used to. We couldn't let Jed
Speaker 5: come with us because he, you know, who knows where
Speaker 5: he'd go holiday be going.
Speaker 6: But he moves pretty slow.
Speaker 7: Id you still can run with the dogs.
Speaker 4: You're getting smarter.
Speaker 2: Well, we've we've got a great crew here today. To
Speaker 2: my right, Josh Landbridge, spillmaker. I'm to Josh's right, doctor
Speaker 2: Misty Nukelem. Hello, have you here? Misty's right bear John Newcomb,
Speaker 2: who has something in his hand that we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about here in a minute too. All right, we've
Speaker 2: got a mystery guest skipping over. The mystery guest, Brent Reeves.
Speaker 2: Great to hear. I hear almost every day that people
Speaker 2: tell me they still think you're an under undercover game warden.
Speaker 1: Really almost daily.
Speaker 4: Really, I'm retired, man.
Speaker 2: You know how what a great play though would be?
Speaker 4: Though, Yeah, that would work. Here's here's the that is
Speaker 4: the ultimate undercover assignment thirty two years, seven months, and
Speaker 4: then we're going to tell everybody you retired and like
Speaker 4: like that guy. I'm like that guy in the Mountains
Speaker 4: of Living by Itself and the government sins a helicopter.
Speaker 2: We got to have you back like Rambo First Blood
Speaker 2: Part two, Colonel Troutman goes back to the penitentiary, gets
Speaker 2: Rambo out after that crazy night up in Port up
Speaker 2: in Oregon. You tell Northwest, Yeah, and then they call
Speaker 2: him out and go back into Vietnam to get those POWs.
Speaker 4: I'd go, it's kind of like your movie. I'd go, Okay,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't come out just to get.
Speaker 2: You our mystery guest, Our mystery guest. It's Kyle Carroll. Yeah, Kyle,
Speaker 2: awesome to have you.
Speaker 8: Man.
Speaker 1: Came all the way from north west Missouri.
Speaker 2: North of the river.
Speaker 7: Good to be here on a great Arkansas spring day. Yeah. Man.
Speaker 2: So I intentionally have held off like talking to Kyle
Speaker 2: before he got here. When the time I was on
Speaker 2: Meat Eater, Uh, Steve Ronella wouldn't talk to me before
Speaker 2: I came.
Speaker 1: I was there like a little early, and I was.
Speaker 2: Just like, what a jerk and uh, And then I
Speaker 2: realized it was actually, it's a podcast strategy, and other
Speaker 2: podcasts that I've been on people have done that, They've
Speaker 2: not wanted to talk to you beforehand. So Kyle came
Speaker 2: in and I was like, oh, sorry, I can't talk
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 7: But well, Brenda understand this. If you're on time, you're
Speaker 7: late five minutes early. I did send a text, don't
Speaker 7: shoot I'm coming in.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now listen, y'all don't probably don't know this.
Speaker 2: Do you see this? This painting right here of Tecumsa.
Speaker 2: I put that on my Instagram a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: This is a what kind of what medium is that?
Speaker 7: The original was an oil painting and oil oil oil
Speaker 7: on I think it was on linen, maybe oil on canvas,
Speaker 7: I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: But yeah, So Kyle is an artist, a distinguished artist,
Speaker 2: which we're getting very interested in. This is to surprise you.
Speaker 2: He's a he was a he's a retired game boarding Missouri.
Speaker 6: I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that those two things could exist in
Speaker 2: the same person.
Speaker 7: Two game boards in a room kind of sort of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sustin or.
Speaker 6: Second.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So how long have you been doing art that
Speaker 1: you know?
Speaker 7: I started actually out of uh when I went to
Speaker 7: college as an art major, and and I had to
Speaker 7: decide the first year.
Speaker 6: A lot of art majors law enforcement or art.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, going on paint over hook yet. No, it
Speaker 7: was just I didn't really know for sure what I
Speaker 7: didn't know how to get in the business. I knew
Speaker 7: that I kind of wanted to work like for for
Speaker 7: Missouri Missouri Conservation Department, and I knew they had one artist,
Speaker 7: so I'm thinking, how's that gonna work, you know. And
Speaker 7: then about the same time I was interested in applying
Speaker 7: for the game boarding position. I was either going to
Speaker 7: be in Wyoming or Missouri because I was working in
Speaker 7: owming in the summers. And so the summer that freshman year,
Speaker 7: they decided that you had to have a full college
Speaker 7: degree to apply in Missouri to be to apply it
Speaker 7: as a game ward. Okay, so I went ahead and
Speaker 7: switched to biology as a major, and so I just
Speaker 7: I never really left it, but I didn't start doing
Speaker 7: anything professionally or really seriously until about ninety nine or
Speaker 7: two thousand.
Speaker 1: So you were always as a good artist, just naturally.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, I mean my mom kind of encouraged it,
Speaker 7: and I always I drew stuff in entertained my brothers
Speaker 7: and sisters, you know, on paper, and then I turned
Speaker 7: the paper like this, so it's moving pictures, you know.
Speaker 2: Nice. So what kind of stuff did you draw when
Speaker 2: you were a kid, Like if your notebook was out
Speaker 2: in front of you during class what would.
Speaker 7: Probably two things. It's either wildlife or there were bombs
Speaker 7: going off like bombs you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So this where did you get this image
Speaker 2: of tacumsa because you painted it? But were you looking
Speaker 2: at an image?
Speaker 7: That's it interesting that you asked that because I was
Speaker 7: asked to do that for a project that was put
Speaker 7: together uh by David Wright, a good friend of mine
Speaker 7: in Tennessee and really probably the reason I'm in any
Speaker 7: kind of artists today is his mentorship. But he was
Speaker 7: working on that that gun in the end, the painting
Speaker 7: is actually a gun that's in the Museum of the
Speaker 7: Fur Trade that has the UH can be traced back
Speaker 7: to tokumps And so they wanted they add a group
Speaker 7: that went out and they actually let them photograph it,
Speaker 7: take it apart, and they made an exact replica. And
Speaker 7: then when that story was going to be in the magazine,
Speaker 7: they wanted a cover piece for it. So there there
Speaker 7: are no picture where you you know from your research,
Speaker 7: there's really no picture of takumpasas. So that's a compilation
Speaker 7: of just what we know that by the time he
Speaker 7: was prominent, the tattoos had kind of gone away because
Speaker 7: whites weren't tattooed, so the Indians were prior to that
Speaker 7: pretty tattooed. So it's just sort of what we know,
Speaker 7: what we think.
Speaker 2: We did have a couple of legitimate portrait artists that
Speaker 2: painted him, yes, and so you I guess you had
Speaker 2: seen those.
Speaker 7: I had seen those, and I use some of what
Speaker 7: matched up with what I'd read and so forth. The
Speaker 7: Ostrich plume was something that they had done before.
Speaker 1: That always throws me off.
Speaker 2: You kind of have this romantic idea of Native Americans
Speaker 2: wearing a feathered headband, but you think of a native
Speaker 2: bird and then that, and then it comes has this
Speaker 2: huge Ostrich plume. It's just interesting.
Speaker 1: Because that's what that's what they said he wore.
Speaker 7: I read it somewhere.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely, he was described. You know, back in
Speaker 2: those days, they didn't have video, they didn't have photography,
Speaker 2: so writers wrote about what they saw to report back
Speaker 2: as journalism, and they described they would describe what comes
Speaker 2: to look like when he met with these US military
Speaker 2: generals and British guys, and he would often have this
Speaker 2: big white plume and is in.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well that's the original went to a collector in Ohio.
Speaker 7: Pretty close to where it comes was from.
Speaker 1: And how big was the original painting.
Speaker 7: I don't remember it. It's a little bit bigger than that.
Speaker 7: That's probably nine by twelve ish. I think what we
Speaker 7: did the Prince, but it was a little bit bigger,
Speaker 7: but I don't I don't remember. But it wasn't no, no, no, I.
Speaker 1: Thought I thought maybe a big one. Taking some heat
Speaker 1: for that.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a The beep that you just heard
Speaker 2: was not a burrito going off. It was not a garment.
Speaker 2: It was not a burrito in a microwave. It's a
Speaker 2: battery pack from my computer. Somebody, somebody wrote me a
Speaker 2: very long, thoughtful email this week about how they thought
Speaker 2: it was my laptop and they were worried that my
Speaker 2: laptop was going to die. And so I'm working on that. Actually,
Speaker 2: every time that beeps during a render, we're going to
Speaker 2: give away thirty Unty's favorite conservation organization.
Speaker 1: That's a joke.
Speaker 7: You know. One benefit of not being able to hear
Speaker 7: real well out of my left ear is I don't
Speaker 7: hear it. I did not hear the beat.
Speaker 1: Okay, it was loud.
Speaker 2: The oh shoot, oh, I was going to say, or
Speaker 2: is going to ask you, what's your favorite, Like, do
Speaker 2: you you have a bunch of art? I mean, like
Speaker 2: you've got a lot of this kind of pain. What's
Speaker 2: some of your favorites stuff you've done.
Speaker 7: I use what I like at least, and I'm not
Speaker 7: talking so much about what I do, but what I like,
Speaker 7: which is end up what I do some of is
Speaker 7: something that's historically accurate that portrays frontier people, whether it's
Speaker 7: natives or us or whatever in a historical setting, so
Speaker 7: you get all the You can use your imagination, but
Speaker 7: you can see this nice, beautiful historic setting with a
Speaker 7: historic scene in it that's accurate. Or if you're just
Speaker 7: doing figures, I like to make sure that the accouterments
Speaker 7: and the gun and everything's right for the time. So
Speaker 7: it's it's a little harder to do historic art than
Speaker 7: it is just to do a portrait. You can do
Speaker 7: a portrait, you do that with something historically, you still
Speaker 7: have to do the art well, but then you have
Speaker 7: to do some research. But that's the fun part because
Speaker 7: it comes out of stuff that we read, like what
Speaker 7: you read.
Speaker 4: The detail on this is unbelievable. The latest one that
Speaker 4: you did that I saw on your Instagram, that mutual surprise.
Speaker 7: That new one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what was that one.
Speaker 4: It's a guy that's a dude in the canoe, the trapper,
Speaker 4: I guess, and he's, yeah, sculling down next to the
Speaker 4: edge of the bank, and all of a sudden you
Speaker 4: see him. He's kind of taking a back and as
Speaker 4: a bear stand up looking at him there and they're
Speaker 4: looking at one another.
Speaker 1: That one you just kind of created out of your
Speaker 1: own mind.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's not from any that's not from like a
Speaker 7: reference or anything. That's just I had. I had some
Speaker 7: good reference that I shot with a buddy in Tennessee.
Speaker 7: It with a that had made the dugout canoe and stuff,
Speaker 7: and so then I just put all that together. So
Speaker 7: sometimes you just make it up.
Speaker 4: It's fun.
Speaker 7: It's just I just posted it, okay, recent posting, So.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got to see it.
Speaker 1: So were you ever? So you did some art for
Speaker 1: the Missouri Department.
Speaker 7: Of Actually I never did work for them as an artist.
Speaker 7: There might have been something in a magazine I can't
Speaker 7: remember in the past, but all the time I spent
Speaker 7: there was as an agent, as an illustration officer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to I want to come
Speaker 2: back to that. Uh, we got I want to come
Speaker 2: back to your game ward and stuff. Bart, What do
Speaker 2: you got there in your hand? This is the rough.
Speaker 9: Outline of self bow that I'm making an O Sage
Speaker 9: self bow. So right now I'm probably like five hours
Speaker 9: into this one. I've got the limbs to where they
Speaker 9: can bend in kind of just like the general shape
Speaker 9: of the bow. I don't have it quite though, to
Speaker 9: where it tell us what a self bow is.
Speaker 2: Someone who doesn't just knows that archery means something that
Speaker 2: shoots an arrow.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 9: So selfo woud pretty much just be like a one
Speaker 9: piece traditional bow that would be like carved out of
Speaker 9: a stave or like a log, so like it wouldn't
Speaker 9: be stacked wood like a lot of traditional bows one
Speaker 9: piece of.
Speaker 2: Wooden bows are laminated wood, like most re curves you
Speaker 2: would buy in the commercial market are multiple pieces of
Speaker 2: laminated wood. A self bow, it's made from one piece
Speaker 2: of wood. Yep, that's it, yep. And so it split
Speaker 2: like a an O Sage log.
Speaker 9: And then we cut off our place here yep, that's
Speaker 9: been sitting for a few years, and then just pretty
Speaker 9: much cut you know, the outline of this bow.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it takes a while it's pretty hard work.
Speaker 7: But how is that that dry?
Speaker 4: Is?
Speaker 7: How is it to draw? Because it looks like it'd
Speaker 7: be hard.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it definitely is because osage is real tough and
Speaker 9: the draw knife I have isn't very.
Speaker 2: Sharp, especially now. But yeah, Osage wood is. It's really interesting.
Speaker 2: We live where we live in western Arkansas. We're really
Speaker 2: on the Echo tone, which is the transition zone between
Speaker 2: the eastern deciduous forest and the Great Plains, and the
Speaker 2: os Geornge is kind of a plains type tree, and
Speaker 2: so a lot of times people are really surprised that
Speaker 2: we have os Jordan's Bow dark in this region. And
Speaker 2: even two hours away any direct well two hours south
Speaker 2: of here, you might thirty thousand dollars conservation the even
Speaker 2: two hours south of here, there's not very many Osa George.
Speaker 2: You get east of here very far, and there's not many.
Speaker 2: And so oce George is a wild wild wood. When
Speaker 2: you cut it with a chainsaw, it almost the wood
Speaker 2: chips almost glow literally, they're they're bright orange. And as
Speaker 2: the wood is exposed to the sunlight, it darkens and
Speaker 2: it ends up darkening into kind of this like deep
Speaker 2: robust orange.
Speaker 1: But right now it's almost yellow.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I was gonna say yellow is how describe it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, right now it is, but and unfortunately it doesn't
Speaker 2: keep that color. But uh yeah, Bears getting into some
Speaker 2: primitive archery, and the self bo is the most primitive
Speaker 2: methodology of making a bow. There's there's no more primitive way.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you won't find one of those where I live.
Speaker 4: A bow dark just two and a half hours from here. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and it's closer than that in a straight line. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Bear's going primitive.
Speaker 3: So he's making a self bow until we get an
Speaker 3: at laddle season and then he's gone full on at laddle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well it's going like that. Dude, what was that?
Speaker 4: What was that guy's name we did? You did the
Speaker 4: podcast on had the hair like Crystal Gale?
Speaker 2: Oh, who are we talking about?
Speaker 4: The guy the.
Speaker 1: Had the long hair? I met the guy about him? Oh,
Speaker 1: Louis Wetzel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's where Bears bears going.
Speaker 1: Pretty notorious.
Speaker 4: Uh criminal saying anything like that.
Speaker 6: Trying to figure out what you are saying.
Speaker 4: I thought I thought I had something to do with No, Okay,
Speaker 4: he's just going going through the woods and taking control.
Speaker 5: When Bear was a little boy, he would gather up,
Speaker 5: you know, all sorts of stuff, anything you could find,
Speaker 5: would rocks, pieces of metal, and he would make stuff
Speaker 5: out of it.
Speaker 6: And I always thought he was going to be an engineer.
Speaker 2: That reminds me of you know that, you know that
Speaker 2: memes of the Internet. You've all seen it, the meme
Speaker 2: on the Internet of John Daily Arkansas standing there in
Speaker 2: like a pair of like pink golf pants smoking a
Speaker 2: cigarette and then there's this like really prestigious looking golf
Speaker 2: guy looking at him, and it always said, yeah, is
Speaker 2: it Tiger Woods?
Speaker 6: And it says, slightly more famous, what my.
Speaker 2: Parents thought they wanted me to become and what I became.
Speaker 1: And the best one I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: Is it's John Daley and they've they've cropped a coonskin.
Speaker 1: Hat on it.
Speaker 2: He's holding the back of corn and the boat. And
Speaker 2: then it said what my parents wanted me to become,
Speaker 2: what I became. That's kind of like what you're saying.
Speaker 2: And you thought Bear would be an engineer, he still
Speaker 2: might be an engineer.
Speaker 3: He'seering that boat, that's right, Uh huh, Yeah, yep.
Speaker 6: I'm pretty happy with how Bears turned out. I'm good.
Speaker 1: He's not done yet. He's just a kid.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think he's head towards engineering though.
Speaker 2: So Kyle, you you were, you were a Missouri game
Speaker 2: more than for twenty seven years. Yeah, that's right, just
Speaker 2: patrol like you had.
Speaker 1: What region of the state, did you.
Speaker 7: In the northwest part? Okay, all the time? I pretty
Speaker 7: much before I grew up in the northwest part of
Speaker 7: the state. So that was rolling hills, prairie, you know,
Speaker 7: big coons nice And I was thinking on the way
Speaker 7: down here, how much that changed from when I started
Speaker 7: in nineteen eighty coons were forty dollars a piece, So
Speaker 7: what would that be in today's dollars seventy bucks or something?
Speaker 7: Be crazy, crazy, it'd be better.
Speaker 4: It'd be better than a dollar and a half, because
Speaker 4: that's what it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, an engineering that's I got a question about engineers.
Speaker 1: You can you can shoot me straight here.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we did this Donnie Baker's yes, yes, about Missouri. Yes,
Speaker 2: it occurred to me as we were doing this that
Speaker 2: that could I don't know. Did you feel like that
Speaker 2: in any way undermined the law enforcement people in Missouri
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 7: No? No, I didn't think so well, I thought it
Speaker 7: was fairly handled. I thought that was a hard hitting podcast.
Speaker 7: Holy cow. Yeah, though, I mean.
Speaker 2: Because I basically I didn't I didn't give them. I
Speaker 2: tried to get the guys that dealt with Donnie.
Speaker 1: That's who I wanted. Wasn't that I couldn't do that.
Speaker 2: So there were I could have had other people in
Speaker 2: the department on kind of speaking on behalf of the
Speaker 2: Missouri game, and they and I chose not to do that.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what I'm getting out.
Speaker 7: I thought that was completely fair. I thought it was
Speaker 7: I understood what you wanted to do. I understood why
Speaker 7: they kind of were doing what they were doing. I
Speaker 7: thought it was all it was all good. It was fine. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I don't think it was They're a problem at all.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, yeah, good. So it's good here.
Speaker 1: So what's the main in your twenty seven years?
Speaker 4: What would you.
Speaker 2: Say was the bulk of the what were you patrolling for? Like,
Speaker 2: you know, if you were in some region of the country,
Speaker 2: it might be spotlighting deer. Another part of the country,
Speaker 2: it might be people fishing without a license.
Speaker 1: What was going on?
Speaker 7: Well, in that period of time, it changed obviously, when
Speaker 7: coons were forty dollars, I mean, I remember stopping a
Speaker 7: car one night that they had a spotlight plugged in
Speaker 7: and they had a had alligator clips on the wires
Speaker 7: and the light going out both sides, and I mean
Speaker 7: they were well, they had a rifle and a twenty
Speaker 7: two I mean a deer, right, so they're going to
Speaker 7: kill anything. But at that time, it was just you know,
Speaker 7: you had a lot of that at night because first
Speaker 7: were so high the deer and the turkey population was
Speaker 7: just developing, just booming, and so you you'd work that
Speaker 7: pretty hard from protection standpoint. In the daytime, as soon
Speaker 7: as they get dark, the calls that start coming out
Speaker 7: on spotlight. So there was a time there where you
Speaker 7: just worked and worked to work. It changed a lot
Speaker 7: of spotlighting. Yeah, it changed, uh, I mean just like
Speaker 7: it probably has everywhere. I think people are well, for
Speaker 7: one thing, we got plenty of lots of deer. Now
Speaker 7: the turkey situation is different. That's that's different. But over
Speaker 7: time it changed. Was it changed with the season you'd
Speaker 7: work fishing in the summertime, Uh, over limits, no permits, littering,
Speaker 7: stuff like that. Every once in a while you'd just
Speaker 7: you'd be off on some you know, drug investigation, that
Speaker 7: you'd come across, you know. Probably one of the craziest
Speaker 7: ones was quail in close season that turned into a
Speaker 7: multi state working with DEEA and everything else. When a
Speaker 7: drug thing.
Speaker 2: So, oh really, can you can you go in any
Speaker 2: more detail on that?
Speaker 7: Well, Uh, yeah, I guess I could. It was it
Speaker 7: was a marijuana growing operation.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 7: The guys had shot a quail off of a fence post.
Speaker 7: Somebody called us about that when we when I went
Speaker 7: with actually I called another agent friend of mine when
Speaker 7: when he and I went to investigate it. Uh, something
Speaker 7: just didn't that app It didn't smell right there. Like
Speaker 7: all those guys they were from Kentucky. They worked for me.
Speaker 7: I'll just pay their fine. It's okay. Well, nobody just
Speaker 7: wants to pay them, you know. So we did a
Speaker 7: little check in with Kentucky and figured out who we
Speaker 7: were dealing with, figuring out like something else. Long story short,
Speaker 7: it was with the highway patrol and investigation through the
Speaker 7: summer and to take down the fall. It's a couple
Speaker 7: of farms seized and so they're looking around.
Speaker 2: They had a marijuana they were growing illegal marijuana in Missouri. Yes,
Speaker 2: and these guys from another state had come in and
Speaker 2: shot at Quail.
Speaker 7: Well they the guys were from another state that were
Speaker 7: doing it. They were all from Kentucky.
Speaker 4: Uhh.
Speaker 7: And they would they had they would take it back
Speaker 7: to Kentucky and trucks looked like farm Gate.
Speaker 4: Quick.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that wasn't and that's that's kind of what was
Speaker 7: going on there. So yeah, it was that got to
Speaker 7: be a pretty hairy situation. So we had a couple
Speaker 7: of people ended up dead and questionable suicide supposed to
Speaker 7: be suicide, but I don't know if it was or not,
Speaker 7: you know kind of thing. So yeah, it was an
Speaker 7: interesting time for a little while.
Speaker 4: Sometimes people steal more change and they can swim with
Speaker 4: that's right.
Speaker 2: And they sink that's what that means. I just got
Speaker 2: done with a very interesting book. I wish I could
Speaker 2: figure out a way to do a bear grease podcast
Speaker 2: on it. It's a book called When Money Grew on
Speaker 2: Trees and it's about Uh I just picked it up.
Speaker 4: Oh is that about to share?
Speaker 2: It's about It was written by a guy named David Mack.
Speaker 2: It's kind of When I got the book, it was
Speaker 2: it was like a I felt like it was going
Speaker 2: to be like a homegrown like self published.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, I'm just so cold.
Speaker 1: Yep, you're hurting my bear.
Speaker 2: There we go. I thought it was going to be
Speaker 2: like this homegrown, not that well put together book. It's
Speaker 2: called When Money Grows on Trees from by David Mack,
Speaker 2: and it's about the sheriff in Madison County, Arkansas named
Speaker 2: Ralph Baker who's dead now, and he was a he was.
Speaker 1: A really crooked sheriff.
Speaker 2: But basically the story is about how this guy, David Mack,
Speaker 2: who's also now dead, for about ten years he was
Speaker 2: growing marijuana in Madison County at the marijuana boom. It's
Speaker 2: kind of funny, like Brent spent his life fighting illegal
Speaker 2: drugs and then now a lot of these drugs are
Speaker 2: not a lot are some of them are are legal?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Did you know that upset Sprent?
Speaker 4: That's the next verse. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Anyway, there was a lot of marijuana.
Speaker 1: Was a big deal.
Speaker 2: Marijuana was being grown in wild places, so game Mordans
Speaker 2: interacted with marijuana.
Speaker 1: Look, is that right?
Speaker 7: Yeah, we didn't have it so much in the northern
Speaker 7: part of Missouri. That was more like.
Speaker 4: Hard to start to hide it in the planes.
Speaker 7: Well, what they did was they they'd planted in corn.
Speaker 7: See corn was so cheap back then that they would
Speaker 7: go in and take out individual rose of corn, hide
Speaker 7: it in the corn. Unless you flew over it, you
Speaker 7: weren't going to see it. So that's kind of what that.
Speaker 7: But what these guys are probably you're talking about, is
Speaker 7: in the in the national forests and places, they plight
Speaker 7: it back up the hollers.
Speaker 2: And yeah they were. They were growing it all over,
Speaker 2: making which.
Speaker 4: Is this is just like thirty miles from here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're making a ton of money. Wild, wild, wild stories,
Speaker 2: just unbelievable stories. Ralph Baker was.
Speaker 7: Like Copperhead Road, baby, Yeah, that's what that's like.
Speaker 1: So Kyle, your game warden?
Speaker 2: What are you are you?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 2: How do you approach enforcement? Were you I don't know,
Speaker 2: you're you're such a.
Speaker 1: Nice guy, nice law enforce.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're way too. No, were you able to
Speaker 2: put on a hard face and bust somebody in the chops?
Speaker 1: Not physically like metaphorically when you needed to?
Speaker 7: You never wanted to do that. You didn't enjoy doing that.
Speaker 7: But yeah, uh, the only way I could describe, but
Speaker 7: if I was telling somebody like if Bear's gonna take
Speaker 7: my job, and he's gonna run, he's he's gonna start. Yeah,
Speaker 7: I'm gonna say, look, you you're gonna you're gonna be
Speaker 7: here for a long time. Your kids are gonna go
Speaker 7: to school with everybody's kids here. You know, treat people
Speaker 7: the way you want to be treated, and you can't
Speaker 7: be behind every tree. You have got to have cooperation.
Speaker 7: You've got to have people that will say, look, you
Speaker 7: need to know about this. You didn't hear it from me.
Speaker 7: But so that's the only way that works when you
Speaker 7: have four or five hundred square miles or one of you. Uh,
Speaker 7: it's not it's not like other kinds of law enforcement.
Speaker 7: And in a way it is. I mean, you have
Speaker 7: to have that kind of same rapport with people you
Speaker 7: work with, even the bad guys got to If you
Speaker 7: don't treat them with respect, you're not gonna get respect.
Speaker 7: So you have to do that. I think that's a prerequisite.
Speaker 1: You know, yes, yeah, so that makes sense.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so then when when it when it does go bad, uh,
Speaker 7: you know, they're they're actually sometimes will come come and
Speaker 7: help you, or you know, if you're finding somebody on
Speaker 7: the bank, which I know ever had this happen to me,
Speaker 7: but I had other guys that they have guys come
Speaker 7: pile in help them get everything straightened up, you know.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, what's the This is such a cliche question,
Speaker 2: and I've asked this to almost every law enforcement person
Speaker 2: I've ever dealt with.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, law enforcement people.
Speaker 2: It this is equivalent to someone asking me, Hey, Clay,
Speaker 2: have you ever been attacked by a bear? And I'm
Speaker 2: just like, come on, don't you have a better question
Speaker 2: than that. What's the wildest thing you've ever been a
Speaker 2: part of in law enforcement? Like a big sting or
Speaker 2: something a shootout?
Speaker 7: Like what? Here's the thing if if if I thought
Speaker 7: for five minutes, i'd tell you something i'd have I'd
Speaker 7: tell you something different tomorrow probably. I mean, it's just
Speaker 7: it just depends on what what the thing was.
Speaker 1: Do you ever felt really in danger?
Speaker 7: There are times there were I mean there were some
Speaker 7: times where the hair stand up on your neck pretty good,
Speaker 7: you know. Yeah, I mean I probably as a trooper
Speaker 7: you had to deal with that more often than so.
Speaker 1: You were a state trooper too.
Speaker 7: I retired as a trooper. Yeah, I went over when
Speaker 7: I was You.
Speaker 2: Were Game Warning for twenty seven and then worked as
Speaker 2: a Missouri State trooper.
Speaker 7: Right, that's that's why I retired as a trooper, so gotcha.
Speaker 7: And the context a number of contexts as a trooper
Speaker 7: does in a year's time, or like ten times what
Speaker 7: a what a game board does. So game boards all
Speaker 7: around people with firearms and everything all the time by
Speaker 7: yourself a lot, it's different, you know. But just approaching cars,
Speaker 7: night time stuff, search and buildings, drugs, people, you don't.
Speaker 7: People are just on a cell phone hitting you on
Speaker 7: the side of the road. It's probably as scary as anything.
Speaker 7: So uh so I.
Speaker 4: Don't quite as flashy to talk about though.
Speaker 7: No, it's not. It's not the way you want to
Speaker 7: want to go on a shootout, you know, you don't
Speaker 7: want to.
Speaker 2: Go well, you know, it's like, uh, it's kind of
Speaker 2: like training a mule. If you do it right, he
Speaker 2: doesn't bust.
Speaker 7: No true troopers and mules.
Speaker 2: That yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised you all didn't go with the analogy yourself.
Speaker 2: If you if you do it right, the meal doesn't
Speaker 2: buck and it's non climactic. So in a way, if
Speaker 2: you're doing it right, like you de escalate situation, that's
Speaker 2: don't get in trouble, you don't get shot at.
Speaker 7: That's the skill is you're trying to get somebody to
Speaker 7: do something you don't want them to do, they don't
Speaker 7: want to do, and you're going to talk talking them
Speaker 7: into it's easier than force them into.
Speaker 8: Yeah right, I mean that's that's I mean, that's so fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: one hundred percent. You just try to always let them
Speaker 8: dictate the level of That's right. How we talked, you know,
Speaker 8: how I talked to them, and yeah, lots of times,
Speaker 8: you know, escalated quickly. But you got to be on
Speaker 8: top of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And were you were you a game more than Missouri
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 7: No, seven would have been my last okay, right, So
Speaker 7: you know what I was thinking about though, when you
Speaker 7: had that date only with Donnie was the five hundred
Speaker 7: dollars I think was the maximum fine.
Speaker 1: You could get really really at that time.
Speaker 7: I think that was for white tail, well, for for
Speaker 7: for any misdemeanor.
Speaker 2: While is that right?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 7: So so now once in a while there'd be a
Speaker 7: hunting privileges could be revoked or something like that. That'd
Speaker 7: be the most serious thing probably would happen, even if
Speaker 7: you seize the firearm unless the judge orders that destroyed.
Speaker 7: Usually that went back.
Speaker 2: So huh, yeah, there's a lot different now, probably, I
Speaker 2: would imagine.
Speaker 7: I don't think it's I think there was some adjustment
Speaker 7: to that in general, but it's not that much different.
Speaker 7: They don't have liquidated damages, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: What about trophy penalties.
Speaker 7: That they don't have that?
Speaker 4: Iowa has thirty grand.
Speaker 7: Podcast, I don't hear it.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, so you don't think they have a trophy penalty?
Speaker 7: No, A lot of states do, Yeah, I know Iowa does.
Speaker 7: I think maybe Kansas does. I'm not sure, but uh,
Speaker 7: not so much for so many points or what the
Speaker 7: deer scores. We don't have that mm I. Any less,
Speaker 7: it's changed after I was there, and I don't think
Speaker 7: it has.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, okay, so interesting.
Speaker 1: Interesting. Why would it have only been five hundred dollars.
Speaker 7: That was that's the maximum for a misdemeanor crime. So
Speaker 7: whether it's you know, you threw a beer can out
Speaker 7: the window, maybe it's twenty five bucks, maybe throw the
Speaker 7: whole box out, maybe that was hot. You know, it
Speaker 7: could go up to the range that was a range, Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's a thousand here let's just change.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and really it may be a thousand there now too,
Speaker 7: because there was an adjustment to that whole criminal code
Speaker 7: about that time. And of course once you're once you
Speaker 7: it's not your thing every day. Well you could get
Speaker 7: by me, but it wouldn't shock me if it's a thousand.
Speaker 7: Put it that way.
Speaker 2: So interesting. We need to talk about American wilderness, all right. Uh,
Speaker 2: Kyle told me that he's he's been reading Roderic Nash's
Speaker 2: Wilderness in the American Mind, which is didn't you tell
Speaker 2: me that? Man? I sent that book to uh two
Speaker 2: people who will remain unnamed. They're not in this uh
Speaker 2: in this uh in this room.
Speaker 4: That were a couple of nerds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I actually sent it to him to read
Speaker 2: because I wanted to be a guest on the podcast.
Speaker 2: And they were basically like, uh, no things.
Speaker 1: So I love the book.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was interesting to hear some criticism of the book
Speaker 2: from from some of my guests. But uh, American Wilderness,
Speaker 2: there's so much I wanna I want to I want
Speaker 2: to talk about.
Speaker 1: Let me let me run through the list here.
Speaker 2: So we talked about the myth of American wilderness, and
Speaker 2: the myth was connected to this in a way towards
Speaker 2: the end of the podcast about the irony of American wilderness.
Speaker 2: You know how we you know, perceived a wilderness and
Speaker 2: then but then also later tried to after we had
Speaker 2: destroyed all the wilderness, tried to save some of it.
Speaker 2: And that's when I wrote the fourth verse to Ironic
Speaker 2: by Atlantis Morse.
Speaker 4: My friend Colts imposed down in Texas. He sent me
Speaker 4: a message said, friends don't let their friends.
Speaker 2: I told I actually I literally sent it to Phil
Speaker 2: Taylor at Meat Eater and said, Phil, I fully intend
Speaker 2: for this to be taken out.
Speaker 1: You let me know. And he wrote me back and he.
Speaker 2: Was like, I love it, Clay, you got to take
Speaker 2: it risk. I guess that's what we do every week,
Speaker 2: is put our necks on the line.
Speaker 1: Okay, a myth of wilderness.
Speaker 2: And then we talked about how scarcity is a more
Speaker 2: powerful thing than than than plenty. We talked about pragmatism,
Speaker 2: rock and ice, and then on the Bear Grease Academy
Speaker 2: pop quiz who wrote the Frontier thesis? Who wrote it?
Speaker 2: You know, we'll tell y.
Speaker 7: You've talked about Frederick Jackson.
Speaker 2: Turner's right, you have got that dude, This was on
Speaker 2: the Bear Grease Academy. Now this series leans on more
Speaker 2: of the academic side of what we do on Bear Grease.
Speaker 1: Okay, the Donnie.
Speaker 2: I feel like this year we've kind of gone to
Speaker 2: the pendulum, the pendulum of of kind of topics, Like
Speaker 2: the Donnie Baker story was this modern you know, didn't
Speaker 2: have anything to do with history, and it was this
Speaker 2: very huge It was a human interest story about wildlife crime,
Speaker 2: which is really cool. Which those are hard to come by.
Speaker 2: I mean, I probably do one like that, you know,
Speaker 2: ten times a year if I could get them in hand.
Speaker 2: They're just hard to come by when they work like that.
Speaker 7: There's not very many Donny Baker's. That's the problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But this one, to me is just as core
Speaker 2: to I feel like what we're doing here at Bear
Speaker 2: Grease because I think these things like I was an
Speaker 2: adult really before I learned about the really American history,
Speaker 2: the history of wilderness and all this stuff, and I
Speaker 2: looked back into the previous thirty years and was like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's where all that came from. So it's almost like
Speaker 2: I was reading a history book about myself. I wasn't
Speaker 2: learning new ways to think a lot of these ways,
Speaker 2: I thought, and it was it was so revelatory to
Speaker 2: me to come into a position of understanding about why
Speaker 2: as a Americans we think about wild places the way
Speaker 2: we do, and particularly as Americans that love to hunt
Speaker 2: and fish, we would be on the extreme of people
Speaker 2: that probably are thinking about wild places. There are others
Speaker 2: that don't hunt and fish that think about wild places,
Speaker 2: but we think about it in a particular way, And
Speaker 2: to me, that's really fascinating when you look back and
Speaker 2: see how you've been influenced unknowingly by culture. And that
Speaker 2: kind of goes back to the first episode when I
Speaker 2: was talking Steve Vanella and I messed up and brought
Speaker 2: up throat, But what I really was trying to ask him,
Speaker 2: What I was really trying to ask him was how
Speaker 2: have you been influenced unknowingly just because you're an American
Speaker 2: to think about wild places?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: And I think if I had asked that question, he
Speaker 2: might have answered a little different. But I know how
Speaker 2: I would answer is that I'm like, dude, I have
Speaker 2: a like I'm very much so influenced by my culture.
Speaker 2: But uh, who would like to start what what stood
Speaker 2: out to you about the second part.
Speaker 4: I'll tell you. What was cool to me was listening
Speaker 4: to the Rough Draft talking about Yellowstone. Well, you and
Speaker 4: I were riding through Yellowstone. Yeah. Yeah, the stuff they
Speaker 4: were talking about of finding value in something and looking
Speaker 4: at the window and being able to see it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that was that was a double for me.
Speaker 2: But it's just Brent and I were in Bozeman last
Speaker 2: week and yeah, I had to listen to the podcast
Speaker 2: before it came out, and so we were in a
Speaker 2: truck with Corey Coins for Meat Eater driving through Yellowstone
Speaker 2: looking at bison.
Speaker 1: We saw, Brent saw a wolf.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was very cool.
Speaker 2: We saw big horn sheep. We were like driving through
Speaker 2: and we're listening to this podcast about wilderness where we
Speaker 2: talked about the creation of Yellowstone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was just it was just very I
Speaker 4: wouldn't have gotten I didn't get more out of it
Speaker 4: by being there, but it was something I could, I
Speaker 4: could hear, and usually when I'm visualized in my mind,
Speaker 4: like you're talking about the cumpsor or any Daniel Boone
Speaker 4: or anything else. But I was able to look out
Speaker 4: and see the tangible benefits of what had taken place
Speaker 4: and what had been preserved and that's it was pretty
Speaker 4: awesome to be able to do that. And during that
Speaker 4: time of year, there wasn't a lot of people there.
Speaker 4: I mean there were stretches of road that we drove
Speaker 4: down there that we were only folks driving. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 4: for a few minutes, we didn't see anyone cool. So
Speaker 4: it's it's easy to see. I'm glad they saw the
Speaker 4: value back then. I'm glad they saw it. It could
Speaker 4: have been any number of historical things that could have
Speaker 4: happened and that never taking place. You think about the
Speaker 4: what it took for all that to happen, for Roosevelt
Speaker 4: to be president, for him to have the feelings that
Speaker 4: he had towards things that everyone in this room still
Speaker 4: has that same love and respect for wilderness, whether it's
Speaker 4: a capital W or either one. Which wilderness is wilderness
Speaker 4: to me. I dig it all, you know. I dig
Speaker 4: the scope of woods right here behind your house that
Speaker 4: you talk about not being really big, but it's all
Speaker 4: relative to where you are experience. You can only take
Speaker 4: up so much space regardless of where you are, So
Speaker 4: you know, one hundred acres doesn't look any different than
Speaker 4: two million.
Speaker 2: Because we had a review on iTunes where a guy
Speaker 2: that I think is a like likes the Beggars podcast,
Speaker 2: but he's he's written several reviews and he's, uh, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna call him out.
Speaker 4: I love it.
Speaker 1: He says, I'm a Bison, not a buffalo. That's his name.
Speaker 2: And he said, listening to a bunch of Easterners squabble
Speaker 2: that Yellowstone isn't wild or wilderness is laughable. Over two
Speaker 2: million acres of back country of an intact ecosystem, pre
Speaker 2: European contact and harboring the most remote area from the
Speaker 2: lower forty A da da da da da.
Speaker 1: I was trying to remember did we talk about I
Speaker 1: think maybe in the first render somebody said, well, if
Speaker 1: Yellowstone's really a wilderness, and that was Josh. I think
Speaker 1: mister Buffalo, Miss mister Buffalo, our dear friend, mister Buffalo.
Speaker 3: I may I alluded to that there were wilderness areas
Speaker 3: in a not capital w wilderness areas, and mister Newcomb
Speaker 3: shot me down.
Speaker 2: Now, I mean it may have been me, but I
Speaker 2: don't think if we got down to it, that I
Speaker 2: was saying Yellowstone isn't wild. What I was saying is
Speaker 2: that highway corridors, the highway.
Speaker 4: Is accusing you of being an Easterner.
Speaker 2: It looks sounds like it. Oh that's a first well,
Speaker 2: I mean the cardinal direction is all the matter of perspective.
Speaker 4: That's profound t shirt.
Speaker 2: No, so I stand correct about it. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: Yellowstone is a massive wilderness. Yea, it is the highway
Speaker 2: corridors during the tourist months, like, it doesn't feel like
Speaker 2: a wilderness.
Speaker 7: There was a statement in the tail end of that
Speaker 7: book of Nash's book about the lower forty eight. Anyway,
Speaker 7: whatever the figure is, when you see that, what the
Speaker 7: wilderness number of wilderness acres in the United States sounds
Speaker 7: like a lot. It's equal to what we have paved.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's interesting.
Speaker 7: That gives you kind of a perspective. Really, it's in
Speaker 7: the last part of that if.
Speaker 1: It's in Nash's book.
Speaker 2: He did a revised version of that book in the
Speaker 2: last like fifteen.
Speaker 7: I think that's what he wrote.
Speaker 2: He originally wrote that book in nineteen sixty seven as
Speaker 2: a like a doctoral thesis, and then he revised it.
Speaker 2: But I was surprised to learn and it still seems
Speaker 2: like a lot to me. But this is the research
Speaker 2: that I found that there's one hundred and eleven million
Speaker 2: acres in America that are designated as federal wilderness, which
Speaker 2: is about five percent of the total land mass of America.
Speaker 4: I still don't really it's a lot, and kept saying
Speaker 4: that's a lot, dude.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of lank five percent, but five.
Speaker 1: Percent of federal wilderness.
Speaker 7: But that includes Alaska.
Speaker 1: Now probably it does, and much of it's in Alasta.
Speaker 7: So if you take yes, I think it was something
Speaker 7: like two percent whatever it was, the figure in the
Speaker 7: lower forty eight equals to paved acres.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's why two percent is what I think.
Speaker 2: That's it worked off of before that two percent is wilderness.
Speaker 2: But maybe it's two percent of the lower forty eight.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I found it interesting that the census caused
Speaker 3: so much of a stir.
Speaker 4: That people have angst.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that people had the that that was a thought
Speaker 3: to say, wait a minute, yeah, this is what defines us.
Speaker 3: And it's gone, like, what are we going to do now?
Speaker 3: How are we going to raise American kids? They're just
Speaker 3: going to be like every other kid.
Speaker 2: Well, think about eighteen ninety Yeah, in the country was
Speaker 2: founded in seventeen seventy six. So for one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty five years, basically, well one hundred and fifteen years,
Speaker 2: there had been a frontier. Yeah, I mean for a
Speaker 2: century there was a frontier. If you were an American,
Speaker 2: you could go to that frontier, like if you wanted
Speaker 2: to risk risk it for the biscuit, go west twice.
Speaker 7: And you have not said wimplification.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I got it right down, and we got
Speaker 2: to talk about whimpification.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, just you can see how it could be etched
Speaker 2: into American ideals of just what it meant to be
Speaker 2: an American. I messed up on the naming of this podcast.
Speaker 2: I named this podcast in haste. I should have named
Speaker 2: it Homo americanas that's that's what doctor Sarah Dant said,
Speaker 2: and that's a term that's used by by historians when
Speaker 2: they talk about America. And the idea is that there
Speaker 2: was this you know, new new kind of person created
Speaker 2: in the world, you know, the American.
Speaker 3: And it is a pretty unique experience, the American experience,
Speaker 3: especially during that time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Well, another thing that happened that helped turn the tide,
Speaker 7: you know, from the Howling Wilderness to the wilderness we
Speaker 7: wanted to protect was as a young country. We didn't
Speaker 7: have these big fancy you know, taj mahals and all
Speaker 7: these things over back in Europe. But we had wilderness.
Speaker 7: And once it looked like we were we could run
Speaker 7: out of that, that changed it. We wanted that. We've
Speaker 7: we've identified with that as Americans. It is Yeah.
Speaker 2: To me, that's one of the most fascinating things is that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we a our artists are our painters. They focused on Well, mister,
Speaker 2: what was this that you said about.
Speaker 5: That two thirds of the world lives in urbanized areas today?
Speaker 5: And I was actually just looking just at a map
Speaker 5: here and if you so, if you look at this map,
Speaker 5: it's like a line graph that has a huge jump
Speaker 5: in eighteen hundreds and it you know, continues to peak
Speaker 5: out in the nineteen hundreds when when people were moving
Speaker 5: to urban areas. And I was looking at that and
Speaker 5: then you can see it compared to this map, like
Speaker 5: the the graph.
Speaker 1: Uh interpreted, No, just interpret them.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm just I was just thinking about I was
Speaker 5: looking at that graph because I was thinking about the
Speaker 5: time that Josh was saying that angst was was happening.
Speaker 5: It was happening when there was this huge upswing in
Speaker 5: people moving, people move into the urban areas, and now
Speaker 5: it's you know, it's increased so much more. And they
Speaker 5: project that you know, by by twenty fifty, I think
Speaker 5: it's like maybe even eighty percent of people. And there's arguments,
Speaker 5: there's arguments about those numbers. It really depends on how
Speaker 5: you define an urban area. You know, if you a
Speaker 5: town in a suburb, you know, it really does depend
Speaker 5: on how you how you define the area. So there's
Speaker 5: a lot of arguments around it. But it's it's dramatically
Speaker 5: increased and we're becoming more urbanized and and yeah, it's
Speaker 5: it's just kind of fascinating how if you if you're
Speaker 5: in an urban area, how you would and if people
Speaker 5: were at that time, if the US was becoming more urbanized,
Speaker 5: how it would create that sense of anxiety.
Speaker 6: But it's interesting to me.
Speaker 5: It's a sense of anxiety, but there's still no one
Speaker 5: stayed in the wilderness, right, is kind of.
Speaker 2: Well, and it would be way different now the back
Speaker 2: in those days, people were so much more in touch with,
Speaker 2: you know, the natural landscape. Yeah, what I think about
Speaker 2: when you say that two thirds of the world is urbanized,
Speaker 2: I don't know what that would be in the US.
Speaker 2: But what does somebody that's lived their whole life in
Speaker 2: one of the major cities in the US and you
Speaker 2: talk to them about wilderness, like, what do they.
Speaker 1: What's their thought on it?
Speaker 2: And you know, I'm sure there's some people that live
Speaker 2: in the cities that would love wilderness and value it,
Speaker 2: but I'm sure there's a lot of people that have
Speaker 2: never been there. They have no context the value of it.
Speaker 7: Well, that part where you were talking about definitions of
Speaker 7: wilderness was pretty interesting because that is I mean, when
Speaker 7: you guys run the Mississippi excuse me, and it's night
Speaker 7: time and you're inside those levees, you're pretty much out
Speaker 7: there by yourself. Yeah, but it's not a it's not
Speaker 7: designative wilderness, but it's a wild country.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think it's interesting if you look I mean,
Speaker 5: and let's just take the US. If you look at
Speaker 5: the US and you look at where all the population
Speaker 5: centers are. I mean, this comes up every year, every
Speaker 5: single year when we talk about voting, because so much
Speaker 5: of the US is population is those people.
Speaker 6: Live in New York City, LA. You know, these big,
Speaker 6: these big.
Speaker 5: Hubs on the coast, and that's why they call the
Speaker 5: middle part of the US, the flyover States, because it's
Speaker 5: you fly over one the and it's a it's a
Speaker 5: big deal because they're making decisions politically that impact the
Speaker 5: whole country because there's more of them than there are
Speaker 5: the people in the middle. And so if you're thinking
Speaker 5: about the value of wilderness and you think about the
Speaker 5: people who are choosing to live outside of the wilderness,
Speaker 5: not just outside of it, but far far away from
Speaker 5: it and maybe never experiencing it, and that's the majority
Speaker 5: of the people now, then what how does that impact
Speaker 5: the decisions that are made in those places and whether
Speaker 5: people value it or not. And it's I've heard people
Speaker 5: I would not call us urban, like I some definitions
Speaker 5: would put us urban right here where we where we're
Speaker 5: sitting right now, and I would not. I would there's
Speaker 5: nothing to me urban about this location. But I've talked
Speaker 5: to people and they talk about like research and things
Speaker 5: that we're spending money on, and you know, the.
Speaker 6: What's that little lizard?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 6: The ozark? Hell bender? Is that what it's called? You know?
Speaker 5: And they want to know, like, why are we spending
Speaker 5: any money? Who cares if that little.
Speaker 7: It's a salamander?
Speaker 6: It's a it's a salamander.
Speaker 5: Yeah, who cares? Who cares if those things if we
Speaker 5: if those things are extinct or not. And and I
Speaker 5: just think about some of the things that you value
Speaker 5: about the wilderness areas you have to that value comes from.
Speaker 1: Expos Yeah, yeah, Bear, what stood out to you?
Speaker 9: Well, whenever I was listening to the first one, whenever
Speaker 9: you said it was going to be about wilderness, like
Speaker 9: just looking at the title here and you talk about it,
Speaker 9: it didn't really make sense to me, like what story
Speaker 9: could even be behind wilderness? And I thought it was
Speaker 9: interesting how like you kind of you talked about how
Speaker 9: like even just being an American can shape your perception
Speaker 9: of wilderness. Whenever I really thought about it, like I
Speaker 9: was just thinking about like the way that I look
Speaker 9: at everything, Like whenever I'm like in a city and
Speaker 9: I see, like, you know, a strip mall, I'm thinking
Speaker 9: like what was there before that?
Speaker 1: Like what what would have been there two hundred years ago?
Speaker 9: And so I think part of it could have just
Speaker 9: been like the way that you know, I was raised,
Speaker 9: and even like the way that like we hunt is
Speaker 9: like we try to go as deep as we can,
Speaker 9: and there's there's more value to something if you if
Speaker 9: you really kill it like wild, like like with a
Speaker 9: self bow, or like way back in a hard place. Yeah,
Speaker 9: and so I thought that that that was kind of interesting,
Speaker 9: just seeing the way that that actually did change my
Speaker 9: perceptions on like what I do.
Speaker 2: Did you see you saw some of the value systems
Speaker 2: that you had, you connected it back to deeper stuff
Speaker 2: than more than just like right, just what we've done together.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting, man, I really believe.
Speaker 2: And it's happening today, So it's not that profound to
Speaker 2: say this, but the most scarce invaluable commodity on planet
Speaker 2: Earth will one day be places that are unscarred by humanity.
Speaker 2: I mean there's no way, you know, like Renella said
Speaker 2: so emphatically, you can't get it back, like very rarely
Speaker 2: do you get anything back from civilization in any reasonable
Speaker 2: amount of time. I mean, like if the Earth persists
Speaker 2: another ten thousand years and you know civilization's rise and fall,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I'm foreshadowing it, but what's gonna
Speaker 2: be on the next episode, But perhaps one day what
Speaker 2: we've done here will be ruins like what's in the
Speaker 2: Amazon that they're finding with lidar and all this stuff
Speaker 2: where they're finding, like these civilizations, that nothing is left
Speaker 2: up just for a few ways they've crafted the land.
Speaker 4: And is that considered wilderness? You know what I mean?
Speaker 4: If there's ruins right right? Right? I mean, what at
Speaker 4: what point does it go? Could it ever go back
Speaker 4: to wilderness? Right? It's it just won't matter to us
Speaker 4: because we'll all be dead.
Speaker 2: Well, you're right, But in here I have my eighteen
Speaker 2: year old son in the room with me, and I
Speaker 2: think about, like there's something about seeing bear and mother
Speaker 2: kids grow up a little bit and become adults, and
Speaker 2: think about them having kids. Yep, and you think it's
Speaker 2: not but just like a couple of generation jumps, and
Speaker 2: you realize time is marching on, and what will the
Speaker 2: interface with wild places look like to my great great
Speaker 2: grandchildren I'll be gone, you know, Will they have the
Speaker 2: opportunity to interface with wild places like I have? And
Speaker 2: it goes back to this whole Homo americanas thing.
Speaker 1: I feel like for them to be like.
Speaker 2: Newcombs, they would have to have a wild place to
Speaker 2: interact with.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a romantic idea because maybe by that
Speaker 2: time that just won't be important. Or there's you know,
Speaker 2: I let go of the legacy, like you can't hold
Speaker 2: on to it that tight. But that's why I mean,
Speaker 2: we are reaping the benefits of stuff that all these
Speaker 2: guys did back in the day. I mean kind of
Speaker 2: basically around the mid nineteenth century, in the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 2: you know, the first the preservation of land in America.
Speaker 7: Leopold and Marshall and all those.
Speaker 2: Well, it was in the eighteen thirties. And best I
Speaker 2: could tell, somebody correct me, Byson out a buffalo, you
Speaker 2: can correct me. I'm pretty sure Springs, Arkansas was the
Speaker 2: first designation by the federal government of something that was
Speaker 2: blocked off, which was surprising that they know. They call
Speaker 2: it the first national park down there, which is not
Speaker 2: quite that there's a way to spin it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: But point being, those guys started doing something, and with
Speaker 2: the trajectory as it was going, they might have said, man,
Speaker 2: what in twenty twenty four, those futuristic humans. Will they
Speaker 2: be able to shoot a deer with a bow, Will
Speaker 2: they be able to hunt elk? Will they be able
Speaker 2: to see a bison? Will they be able to interact
Speaker 2: with you know, maybe I don't know what they would
Speaker 2: have thought or if they would have cared. But we're
Speaker 2: living inside the fruit of that. So people will live
Speaker 2: point being, people will live inside the fruit of our
Speaker 2: conservation decisions today. Should the earth persist, and you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know that it will, but we're going to
Speaker 2: be two hundred and fifty years from now and they're
Speaker 2: going to be talking about what we did during this
Speaker 2: time of massive ex of civilization, like unprecedented ever before
Speaker 2: in human history. It's so you know, you wake up
Speaker 2: and planet, our time is so deceptive. You wake up
Speaker 2: and you just think it's normal. You wake up and
Speaker 2: you think having a forward truck is normal, that uses
Speaker 2: you know, fossil fuels that have been dug out of
Speaker 2: the ground, and you think that getting water out of
Speaker 2: a tap. And you think that not having polio is normal. No,
Speaker 2: it's not normal. Those things would have been normal to
Speaker 2: most of humanity. And then we also just think that
Speaker 2: that it's just we're on such a fragile a fragile
Speaker 2: place with wild places in our interaction with us.
Speaker 3: When when you and Steve were talking about the he's
Speaker 3: the analogy of the britty mix concrete. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 3: there was a point in time when really the life
Speaker 3: of an American was about dominating the frontier, going to
Speaker 3: the frontier, right, And now it's like our philosophy is
Speaker 3: teaching our kids and imparting our kids into values that
Speaker 3: just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that that spills over into way more than just wilderness.
Speaker 3: I mean, that is a life principle that just because
Speaker 3: you can doesn't mean that you should.
Speaker 7: How Herring touched on that, you know, the last barrel
Speaker 7: of oil. Couldn't we get it? Yeah, we could get it.
Speaker 7: But as Americans, and you know, because of capitalism and
Speaker 7: our way of life, we have the ability to set
Speaker 7: we have the luxury of setting those things aside.
Speaker 2: But it's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: The thing that stuck with me through all this is
Speaker 7: that you see through all those different periods reading that book,
Speaker 7: that they'd come up with the idea and we do,
Speaker 7: we'd do Yosemite, But then they couldn't save hitch Hitchy.
Speaker 7: Then we'd got you know, it is a constant. Just
Speaker 7: because there's wilderness designated out there now doesn't mean that
Speaker 7: when bear's sitting here some day, it'll be there. If
Speaker 7: somebody decides they want to go get something they can
Speaker 7: at the political are you know what you guys are
Speaker 7: doing with this with podcasts and what media. It's important.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I mean I feel like I'm handing the baton off
Speaker 7: now to you guys. It's your turn to run with it,
Speaker 7: and you're doing a great job. But it's important that
Speaker 7: that that message is understood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it's.
Speaker 7: A constant gotta stay gotta stay vigilant, you know.
Speaker 5: So yeah, for sure, I could be I could be wrong,
Speaker 5: but I think that the the inspiration it was somehow
Speaker 5: influenced because they saw what was happening to Niagara Falls.
Speaker 5: Have you ever been to Niagara Falls? You've been there
Speaker 5: and and you know it's super commercialized, and that was
Speaker 5: happening way back and.
Speaker 6: Back in the day.
Speaker 5: And I mean, can you imagine what Niagara Falls would
Speaker 5: be like if you just stumbled on that, like, no,
Speaker 5: none of all the thing about, none of the shops,
Speaker 5: none of the none of that, and you just kind
Speaker 5: of walked up on that. I mean, that would be
Speaker 5: so incredible. That would be so incredible. And they were
Speaker 5: Teddy Roosevelt saw what happened there and how it had
Speaker 5: become commercialized and had basically been like, you know, a
Speaker 5: circus built right on top of this incredible wilderness area,
Speaker 5: and that was the that was in part the inspiration
Speaker 5: for preserving the other things.
Speaker 2: This series for me has been trying to understand if,
Speaker 2: in fact America had a unique ideology on wild places
Speaker 2: that was a given to me that we did. But
Speaker 2: you know, there's a lot of American myths that aren't real,
Speaker 2: you know, and we talk about American exceptionalism and all
Speaker 2: this stuff. You know, we like to pat ourselves on
Speaker 2: the back and say, oh, we're this great civilization and
Speaker 2: all this, and I mean, I want that to be true.
Speaker 2: And so that's kind of like, do we has the
Speaker 2: way that we've handled wilderness really? Is it really unique
Speaker 2: in the world. That's part of what I've been asking
Speaker 2: and and as it gets to the end of this,
Speaker 2: I think the answer is an emphatic Yes, we're not
Speaker 2: the only people that value wilderness, but we were. We
Speaker 2: did set a trend in the world. But it's not
Speaker 2: really comparing apples to apples if you're trying to establish
Speaker 2: like some like moral hierarchy of well, we were the
Speaker 2: civilization that that set aside wilderness because we did it.
Speaker 2: And going back to what you said and what House said.
Speaker 2: We did it because we could. We America became economically prosperous,
Speaker 2: and we had the liberty to set aside these huge
Speaker 2: wild places that we didn't have to extract resource from
Speaker 2: to feed our families. You see, prosperity is what allowed
Speaker 2: us to do this. I kind of made an analogy
Speaker 2: maybe even in the first one, about you know, sometimes
Speaker 2: you see somebody and you're like, man, why do they
Speaker 2: always why is their truck always cleaning their yard? Always mode?
Speaker 2: And they're they're this, always that, and they're this and
Speaker 2: this and this and this, and it's it's literally just
Speaker 2: they've got the they've got the money, they got the time,
Speaker 2: they got their life in order, and it's like finances
Speaker 2: is the fuel of their ability.
Speaker 1: To to do a lot of stuff. Not the perfect analogy, but.
Speaker 4: I cleaned my garage this weekend, and you're rich.
Speaker 2: Rich.
Speaker 5: No, you know, like I think about like Japanese farming
Speaker 5: practices and they're you know, how they their belief was
Speaker 5: that they were not farming for themselves, but they were
Speaker 5: farming for a future generation. And the way they had
Speaker 5: to do it was so it's not it's interesting to
Speaker 5: me because we're not the only ones who who valued
Speaker 5: preserving natural spaces for the next generation. It just looked
Speaker 5: it is a little different here. Then then we're not
Speaker 5: the only ones.
Speaker 2: Well, and it's it's different because of and And this
Speaker 2: goes back to what Dan Flores was talking about, which
Speaker 2: to me is probably the most interesting part of the
Speaker 2: whole Wilderness conversation, is that when Europeans got here, the
Speaker 2: bulk of Europeans got here, there had already been enough
Speaker 2: pre contact from Hernando de Soto and all these guys
Speaker 2: that had come in and basically spread disease in the
Speaker 2: interior of America that you know, what.
Speaker 7: Did he say, de peopled or something like that the people.
Speaker 2: But I believe he said there were nine They believed
Speaker 2: there to be nine million Native Americans. That dropped down
Speaker 2: to a million. So imagine, I told I was with
Speaker 2: Shepherd and one of his other basketball buddies the other day,
Speaker 2: were listening to the car and I said, imagine that
Speaker 2: there were ten people in your family and only one
Speaker 2: of them lived. Like That's essentially what happened to the
Speaker 2: Native American people. So by the seventeen hundreds, when a
Speaker 2: lot of European started coming here, they what they perceived
Speaker 2: was a what we called a wilderness, but really it
Speaker 2: was a great American civil a great Native American civilization
Speaker 2: on the decline because of disease cause ecological boom with
Speaker 2: animal I mean, it's just fascinating, and so that peculiar
Speaker 2: history made us come on to this. The only kind
Speaker 2: of dan floor is called the last undiscovered continent. Now,
Speaker 2: Miss doctor Newcomb over here earlier today was like, what
Speaker 2: about Antarctica? And I was like, well, okay, if we
Speaker 2: want to talk about an article.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm just saying it's not like.
Speaker 2: She's getting a tattooed Antarctica frontier.
Speaker 6: I've actually got lots of arguments. Were you even what
Speaker 6: you just.
Speaker 4: Said about lots of tattoos?
Speaker 5: I had zero, But about prosperity enabling us, it makes
Speaker 5: me think about you, remember this is like twenty years ago.
Speaker 5: There's someplace out in the Buffalo No it's it's it's
Speaker 5: a fun street. There's someplace close to the Buffalo River.
Speaker 5: You know, it's economically it's an economically depressed area.
Speaker 6: I can't think of the name of the city. But
Speaker 6: the guy was.
Speaker 5: Talking to you about how everyone out there, people would
Speaker 5: come in and it's such a well put together little town.
Speaker 4: But it's impossible Ville, Arkansas.
Speaker 5: It was not Yellville. But like all the houses were clean,
Speaker 5: all of those And and someone asked them. Someone came
Speaker 5: to the little diner that that guy said out, and
Speaker 5: they said, man, how do they always how they always
Speaker 5: keep this This place looks so nice and so well
Speaker 5: well put together, and everybody's poor.
Speaker 6: And and he said, well, pride's cheap.
Speaker 2: Pride cheap.
Speaker 5: In other words, you don't have to have the economic
Speaker 5: it's not necessarily prosperity that that causes you to value
Speaker 5: certain things and keep things in order and keep things protected.
Speaker 4: I mean what you say, because you have, your possessions
Speaker 4: are precious, regardless what they owe stewardship.
Speaker 2: I would argue that in America, the heartbeat, that the
Speaker 2: blood that runs through the veins of this place, Chevrolet, Chevrolet,
Speaker 2: just like that capitalism, capitalism, money. I mean, I I
Speaker 2: think it's Uh. I think we saved a lot of
Speaker 2: this wilderness by the skin of our teeth. And I
Speaker 2: think if we had been not as prosperous, we wouldn't
Speaker 2: have done it. And and uh, but we did it.
Speaker 2: So we we saved some of it, you know, which
Speaker 2: is honorable.
Speaker 6: But man, I just I just want to argue with that.
Speaker 1: Come on, yeah, I want to hear what.
Speaker 6: You I think that it.
Speaker 5: I mean, a person could argue that capitalism is actually
Speaker 5: what keeps us from saving the wild places.
Speaker 6: That is the is actually.
Speaker 1: That's why you nailed the fourth verse of my Atlantis.
Speaker 10: Again, isn't it that's written sur Yeah, we wiped out
Speaker 10: the wilderness and then right at the end we skid
Speaker 10: to a halt and saved five percent.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's both, it's both.
Speaker 1: Well, what Hal Harring said, he said.
Speaker 2: He said John Muir and Giff Pinchot were like two
Speaker 2: turbans spinning in opposite directions. Pinchot was utilitarian conservation, like
Speaker 2: utilize the land, take the resource, greatest good for the
Speaker 2: greatest number. And then John Muir was like, he's sacradlized wilderness.
Speaker 2: He was like, let's save it all. It's sacred, it's holy,
Speaker 2: it's this temple. And so it was these two things
Speaker 2: that created what we have, which is this very vast,
Speaker 2: vast ideology. Like some people are like, put an oil
Speaker 2: pipeline through Alaska. Yeah, we want to keep this thing.
Speaker 2: We want to keep this economy running, which is and
Speaker 2: I got to say it, it's wild to me the
Speaker 2: political positions that a lot of hunter and fisher hunters
Speaker 2: in the country like were typically most times would be
Speaker 2: very conservative, like like politically conservative, which I we are.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, politically conservative usually means very
Speaker 2: light on or very well, what's the right word, anti environment,
Speaker 2: you know, and then to be liberal means to be
Speaker 2: pro environment, and uh, you know, I've heard. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: it's kind of wild. It'd be cool if we could be.
Speaker 1: A couple of those things switched around, you know, and
Speaker 1: not cars.
Speaker 4: I think it would be really cool. And we ain't
Speaker 4: seen those yet. Flying cars, Buddy, the Turkey ain't safe.
Speaker 4: If I got a flying car.
Speaker 2: That was a good segue side of that.
Speaker 4: That was great.
Speaker 3: It's all Brent's been thinking about this whole podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, car, Hey, wimplification.
Speaker 2: Do you all think Google the Google algorithm is gonna
Speaker 2: pick it up?
Speaker 4: I hope so if someone if I mean, isn't it
Speaker 4: for everything? Yeah, not just wilderness? I got it.
Speaker 2: I got a good Hal Harry impression, the wimplification of America,
Speaker 2: I mean, give for Pinchot and John Muir, the like
Speaker 2: two turbines, and I'm telling you, by God, the Easterns
Speaker 2: force of white pines were falling like corn in front.
Speaker 1: Of a combine.
Speaker 2: That's pretty good, you know, Clay.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 4: Have Ben masters on there too.
Speaker 3: This film was really impacting to me when we saw
Speaker 3: it years ago, years ago. I think it was at
Speaker 3: the band Fountain film and man, have you ever seen
Speaker 3: that film?
Speaker 4: I did, but I didn't recognize the name. And we
Speaker 4: were listening to it driving through Yellowstone. Yeah, story, he
Speaker 4: said his name. I didn't realize who it was, and
Speaker 4: then he said the name of that movie, where I thought, oh, man,
Speaker 4: I watched that like last year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man it.
Speaker 2: Ben's done a lot of He's a he's a documentary
Speaker 2: filmmaker now made a lot of documentary films. So I'm
Speaker 2: sure me bringing up Unbranded would be like someone bringing
Speaker 2: up some.
Speaker 1: I did back.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah something, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cool. I
Speaker 2: haven't been on wimplification. Okay, we we I mean, did
Speaker 2: we talk about that or did we just laugh.
Speaker 4: About laugh laught about? I think we all know what
Speaker 4: it means.
Speaker 2: We got, Okay, pragmatism. That was one that I wouldn't
Speaker 2: have understood. How said, almost all the wildernesses in the
Speaker 2: West are our headwaters of major major.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: When we listened to that with Corey, you know, and
Speaker 4: Corey's from out there and has lived out there his
Speaker 4: whole life, and he didn't know that, right that that
Speaker 4: surprised me, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Talking about the Bob Marshall.
Speaker 7: Well, a lot of it was forest service ground before
Speaker 7: it was wilderness, and then it was because the watershed stuff,
Speaker 7: so it was protected before it was DESI needed you know,
Speaker 7: that came later. But yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 4: It was pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and then I have one more thing here,
Speaker 2: rock and Ice. I thought, I like, how.
Speaker 6: How how he got away with words?
Speaker 2: Well, he just knows he has a good grasp on
Speaker 2: the history and we didn't.
Speaker 4: He didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't give him a chance to touch on all
Speaker 2: of it. I just kind of cherry picked some of
Speaker 2: the stuff that he talked to me about. But how Yeah,
Speaker 2: we kind of get this sense of nobility about Yeah,
Speaker 2: we saved all this wilderness and we were the first
Speaker 2: in the world to do this kind of stuff. We
Speaker 2: also saved all the places that were completely like we
Speaker 2: couldn't do anything with it.
Speaker 7: Like he said, there's no national parks in Iowa.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was very good.
Speaker 7: And you think about if you had a national park
Speaker 7: and they kind of tried to do this, but it
Speaker 7: was way late in the Flint Hills area in Kansas.
Speaker 7: How cool that would be. And it's still pretty cool.
Speaker 7: They've protected it with that grassland Preserve and they've got
Speaker 7: agreements farm they still ranch some of it stuff. So
Speaker 7: it's it's cool what they've done. But think about it
Speaker 7: a national park there. But it's not rock and ice.
Speaker 7: It's pretty good stuff.
Speaker 2: Right right, Well, what we're going to get into this
Speaker 2: and we're gonna do one more episode.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm sorry, Josh.
Speaker 4: To win it now.
Speaker 2: Man, it's it's this is core to the bear grease
Speaker 2: way of life. We have to understand wildernance.
Speaker 3: We just must suffer, have to what doesn't kill us, folks.
Speaker 2: That's four times I had somebody I trust very much.
Speaker 2: I won't say his name. Was like, it was good,
Speaker 2: it was pretty academic. I'll be interested in seeing how
Speaker 2: many people listen to it.
Speaker 7: I thought, I thought, man, you have bit off a
Speaker 7: wad here. Yeah, but it's good. I mean, it's been good.
Speaker 1: I absolutely I love it.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 2: I just think it's we have to you know. The
Speaker 2: good thing about having loyal people that listen to something.
Speaker 2: And I realized that there's a lot of people that
Speaker 2: don't listen to every bear Grease, Like if you listen
Speaker 2: to maybe they've listened to twenty five percent of them.
Speaker 2: Or but if you just if you, if you could
Speaker 2: just bear with me and listen to them all.
Speaker 1: You have a pretty.
Speaker 3: Strong who only listens to these podcasts but won't listen
Speaker 3: to the render.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's a lot of people like why, I mean,
Speaker 1: do you.
Speaker 4: Remember, Clay, do you remember when we were in Saskatchewan
Speaker 4: bear hunt and it was like day four and we
Speaker 4: were seeing ten and fifteen bears a day, but they
Speaker 4: were all the same bears we looked at and they're
Speaker 4: standing thirty yards from we're inside of thirty yards to
Speaker 4: where we're sitting, and we've been doing this every day
Speaker 4: and we're in like our six of the day, number four.
Speaker 4: Clay Joe looks at me and I said, boring. But
Speaker 4: the best it came we got a bear later on,
Speaker 4: So you just wait. This is foundational stuff here.
Speaker 1: Foundational have a.
Speaker 4: Good way, you have a good way of bringing it all.
Speaker 2: The podcast can't all be downy Boker, Okay, I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I'll be uplifting and.
Speaker 3: Encourage you gotta suffer through it.
Speaker 2: We're in the Bear Grease Academy of Backwoodsmanship, Philosophy, and Culture.
Speaker 2: You guys are maybe going to be graduates if you finish,
Speaker 2: if you finished the series.
Speaker 4: It's going to be a test at the end of this,
Speaker 4: because that's gonna be a problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is gonna be huge tests.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Kyle, I'm gonna give you one last chance to
Speaker 2: tell me your best Game Warden story.
Speaker 7: Oh man, I'm just gonna tell you what pops into
Speaker 7: my head. So this was a day when and uh,
Speaker 7: we had a lake that opened, a new lake and
Speaker 7: so they're closed to fishing until they open up, and
Speaker 7: then when they opened usually got all kinds of fishing pressures.
Speaker 7: So we had a boat in the lake. Some an
Speaker 7: agent like watching. I'm on the shore. They watch everybody
Speaker 7: on this shoreline. They say, okay, they're all fishing, going
Speaker 7: go go down check them. So I walk down and
Speaker 7: I walk up to this the first the first people
Speaker 7: I come to this older black couple and I'm I
Speaker 7: think older then they're probably my age now, you know.
Speaker 7: But they were retired, we'll say fishing. And of course
Speaker 7: the lake. The lake has a fifteen inch slink limit
Speaker 7: on bass, and they're on a little stringer. There is
Speaker 7: obviously a short bass. And I'm like, I do not
Speaker 7: I do not want to, you know, ruin their day.
Speaker 7: They're just down here fishing. This bass is fine. And
Speaker 7: I said it was kind of a way from them,
Speaker 7: just a little ways. I said, what's the deal with
Speaker 7: the bass here? And they said, oh, we we don't know.
Speaker 7: We don't know about that guy, you know. So I said, well,
Speaker 7: if that guy comes back, tell him it's fifteen and
Speaker 7: slength limit and that need to let that fish go.
Speaker 7: So I go on down the lake. They check everybody,
Speaker 7: everything's fine. I come back and now the stringer is
Speaker 7: the bass has gone. The stringer sitting right by the gentleman.
Speaker 7: I'm like, oh great, they claimed this fish. The guys
Speaker 7: in the boat are probably going to say they you know.
Speaker 1: So I said, I don't understand. When you came back,
Speaker 1: they had not released them.
Speaker 7: So they released the fish and took this little twenty
Speaker 7: five cent rope stringer and put it with their stuff. Well,
Speaker 7: no I knew whose fish it was. I just wanted
Speaker 7: them to just I'm trying to just tell them that
Speaker 7: fish is not cool to you know. And so I
Speaker 7: come back and now that they have the stringer, and
Speaker 7: I know the guys in the boat probably saw him
Speaker 7: let the fish go. So I said, well, did you
Speaker 7: guys decide that fish is yours after all? And the
Speaker 7: lady said, no, sir, but we decided if he wasn't
Speaker 7: going to come back, we might as well have that stringer.
Speaker 7: Never came back again, and I walked up the hill.
Speaker 1: That's a good story.
Speaker 4: That's a good story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that answers my question about how you, uh, you
Speaker 2: handled dealing with people if.
Speaker 7: You could, if you could, I mean, you know, most
Speaker 7: most violations were not intentional. Yes, something happened, right, the
Speaker 7: bird flew up, You shots the wrong bird, You didn't
Speaker 7: plan to go out, and you know, something just happened. Yeah,
Speaker 7: So a lot of times you have to write those anyway,
Speaker 7: you know, like Donnie's deal. But it all works out
Speaker 7: in the end. So hey, I brought something for it.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, I wanted to not forget this before. Now
Speaker 7: it's not I don't want to get get to your
Speaker 7: hope's up too high here. I mean, it's it's not
Speaker 7: it's not from Cabelli's. But I had this on my
Speaker 7: desk for years. This is salt that I rendered from
Speaker 7: a salt lick at Boon's Lick. Yeah, it's just Nathan
Speaker 7: Boone and and Daniel Morgan Boone ran that salt works
Speaker 7: and so it still comes out of the ground. It's
Speaker 7: not a salty But I went there one time with
Speaker 7: a buddy and we got to get that's from maybe
Speaker 7: a gallon of water that.
Speaker 1: He boons lick and I didn't want.
Speaker 7: I didn't want. Wow, I didn't have two of them.
Speaker 2: Hey, that is so you've nailed it. You know what
Speaker 2: I tell you. I have a lot of people give
Speaker 2: me stuff, which I'm always grateful for. Hey, there was
Speaker 2: a lady I'm gonna call them out, uh Snake River
Speaker 2: Produce up in Idaho.
Speaker 1: I met I met.
Speaker 2: This this lady up in uh in Utah and she
Speaker 2: gave me a pack of uh dried onions. So people
Speaker 2: give me stuff all the time. Uh Kyle gave me
Speaker 2: that to come to painting, and I've made a post.
Speaker 2: I said, of all the gifts, this is like spot on.
Speaker 2: This is probably as good as it comes to painting.
Speaker 7: Well, you could.
Speaker 2: You can sprint right here by the by the bearers.
Speaker 7: All right, there you go. I have I'm having to
Speaker 7: move stuff out of my office to do some new flooring, so.
Speaker 1: That's cool.
Speaker 7: So Brent, Yeah, I don't have an old decoy for you,
Speaker 7: but I got a paper shotgunsholl.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 7: I don't know if you collect patches, but there's an
Speaker 7: ms h P pat.
Speaker 4: I've been getting a lot of these. I never was
Speaker 4: a patch collector. I've given away same hundreds, but since
Speaker 4: I've gotten on this platform, I get them from all over.
Speaker 4: I got him from a guy Michigan sergeant Michigan State
Speaker 4: trooper sent sent me some cool and something that he
Speaker 4: wore on his uniform. Yeah, there you go, thank you, brother.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I appreciated very much.
Speaker 1: Well, thanks for coming, Kyle, really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Enjoyed it, everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great conversation. We got one more and it's gonna
Speaker 1: be racy.
Speaker 2: I hate to tell you, it's just it's gonna get
Speaker 2: down right.
Speaker 4: Are you rewriting any more song?
Speaker 1: WHOA, You're not gonna believe the song I'm going to
Speaker 1: sing on that.
Speaker 4: Careful lots of foreshadow here.
Speaker 2: Hey, I gotta say this. I met Evan Felker in Montana. Josh,
Speaker 2: you know who that is?
Speaker 4: Should I?
Speaker 2: Yeah, the lead singer for the Turnpike Contributors.
Speaker 4: Okay, I do.
Speaker 2: Me and Brent met him, and man, there's no I wish.
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, he doesn't even know that. I have like
Speaker 2: five hit songs ready to be recorded literally as we speak.
Speaker 2: All he needs to do is say the word.
Speaker 4: He needs to just reach out on Instagram d M.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know whatever.
Speaker 2: Uh but uh no, I enjoyed. It's I think he's
Speaker 2: the first musician that I've ever met that I actually
Speaker 2: wanted to meet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well no, Hawking
Speaker 2: Horse doesn't count. He's like my friend, Andrew will is
Speaker 2: my friend. But no, so I so I was like, uh.
Speaker 4: It's like, hey, man, like, can you sign my shirt?
Speaker 4: What are you doing?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Anyway, I've been I've been jamming out of the
Speaker 2: Turnpike Truders a lot. So maybe I'll maybe, I'll I'll
Speaker 2: probably ride a fourth verse love it to do this
Speaker 2: to turn You just got the band back together, all right, guys? Well,
Speaker 2: oh March ninth, Brent and I black bur Banana.
Speaker 4: I'll be there too.
Speaker 1: Josh will be there, Josh Lambridge will be there.
Speaker 7: John, I'm going to try.
Speaker 1: Kyle's going to be there. Doctor Nuklem probably be there.
Speaker 6: I'm betting.
Speaker 5: I'll just be honest, I'm betting that Ship is going
Speaker 5: to play in the state championships.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, we got major problems ships in the state championship,
Speaker 2: which we have four games to win between here and there.
Speaker 6: It's not very many.
Speaker 2: Misty basically prophesied ten years ago that Shep would be
Speaker 2: the state champion in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 6: Now I said that he'd playing the state championship in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: Okay, you know that she has done a lot of that,
Speaker 4: and I know I'm telling no about the flood. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm talking about Yeah, it comes to fruition very good.
Speaker 1: Shep Newcomb hitting nine and threes two nights.
Speaker 6: Ago in the regional championship.
Speaker 1: He was in a haze.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like it was like watching a wolf
Speaker 2: ketchup like a bison calf and then just go catch
Speaker 2: another one for no reason.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They did lose though, that's all right.
Speaker 1: That the regional championship, Regional chip. They lost the regional championship.
Speaker 5: Now they they've done pretty far. They were pretty good
Speaker 5: little scrappy team. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch.
Speaker 1: This is like a bonus segment here, so all of
Speaker 1: us will most likely.
Speaker 4: You know, have to pay extra for this part, folks. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Misty may not be there, maybe at the
Speaker 2: state championship, and I may be streaming on my phone
Speaker 2: the live podcast that we're gonna do. We have we
Speaker 2: oh man, we got a lot planned. We're gonna have
Speaker 2: some live music. It won't be me, Brent, I'm out.
Speaker 1: But we got we gotta will be the musicians.
Speaker 6: What you won't, It's gonna be our friend, Brent.
Speaker 1: I might just step up and take over.
Speaker 6: You know you will. I mean, there's no chance you won't.
Speaker 2: Alright, maybe all right, thank you guys,