Polar Bear Attack - A Violent Post-Party Polar Bear Encounter

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You know, we may have lost a member, but you have the bloodline still here, so West Larson, our bear biologist, and then I'm his brother Jeff, and Mike is out having fun in the Cook Islands right now. He's doing some dive in without us seeing humpback whales. West, this is our first surgery episode where I'm not the one suffering from a surgery. Yep, I had a surgery last week. It was a gum graft, so I had some bad gummer session because I used to brush my teeth way too hard, and our brother, our older brother Cyrus, who's a dentist told me that I finally had to do it. I did it, and they could either take gums from a cadaver and graft it onto my gums, so like a dead body. Or they could do it. Yeah, I would have asked for his gum specifically. Or they could do it from the top of my mouth, like my palate, and they cut your palate open, and then take tissue from inside and then graft it. And Jesse said she would never kiss me again if I did the cadaver once. And I didn't want the cadaver ones anyways, so they had to cut open my palate, and my gums are full of stitches right now. So I've been wearing a retainer, but I took it out just for this. So if I start seeing blood, if you start seeing blood coming dripping down out of my mouth, just know I'm willing to go to that length, Jeff, just for this here. It's podcast. People think podcasting is easy. It's not. Literally not bleeding out the mouth just to get you guys this information. Well, and we're doing a spooky episode, so I might as well have some blood leaking out my mouth, right? Be something. So we were we were getting ready to record, and I was finishing up my notes, and I look out the window on my shed, and I see Jesse and our neighbors running around, trying to chase our pigs into a trailer. And Jesse's really good at this stuff, and so is our neighbor, so I was like, I don't need to help him. But then I could see they were in over their heads. And so I went out and I've been trying to, you know, wrestle these hogs into the trailer for this. Yeah. If we didn't get them. So they're out in the yard right now, just eating our grass. Oh, you didn't get them. They want. No, no, they want. So we need we're calling reinforcements. Yeah. And later we'll try again. But I said I wasn't going to help with the pigs, but here I am helping with the pigs. But I it was kind of fun. And Jesse's worked really hard on them. And they haven't been that bad. So it wasn't. It was fun. You would have liked it. I like the videos you posted. Have you just shaken your apple tree for them to eat? Apple's there. No, there's a imaging footage. Imaging posted it. Yeah. Yeah. I do have to admit they're kind of cute. They are kind of cute pigs. They got a big fast. Yeah. Speaking of cute, you got pink hair, dude. Speaking of pigs. Yeah. Pigs of pink. Pigs are pink. Mine aren't. But yeah. Yeah. You know, I have a good people ask me like, why did I do it? I don't have a good reason. Just felt like I think it looks great. Thank you. I like it a lot. When pink, I'm excited to see how it grows out. You know, I want to see like the whole stage of it. But yeah, went with some pink hair. I'm thinking maybe for Halloween because I think this is scary. I'll be the pink starburst. Because I think it's scary to get to pink starbursts in your wrapper. So maybe I'll do that. That's really good. Yeah. And you're showing Mike. You're teaching Mike a valuable lesson on what it actually looks like to dye your hair. Because he was supposed to dye his hair purple and he did the weakest attempt ever. I think he's going to go to my guy now. I think he should. Was this Chris that you went to or was it someone else? No, Chris can't do Chris doesn't do. Yeah. So I just went to someone. There's a lot more expenses than I thought. Yeah. And they never told me I was kind of surprised, but I sit down and you're like, didn't go over pricing with you. I was like, no, he's like, well, it's like $250. I was like, oh, I guess what were you expecting? Like a hundred. Yeah. I guess I would have had no idea either. But so I don't know if I would have done it. Add I known that before, but well, it looks cool. I'm glad I did it. Yeah, I think it's cool. You know, total lip now though. Yeah. Yeah. You're not. All right. Well, yeah. So the gloves are off because Mike's not here. We get to do whatever the heck we want. Should we say because when he's on, we don't want to be nice to him. Should we say our favorite thing about Mike? Yeah, let's say something nice about Mike. Sure. Why don't you go first? Like I'd never say this to Mike's face type of thing. Uh-huh. Yeah. But I probably the funniest person I know. Yeah. I would have to agree with that. I think Mike's up there with funniest people I know too. I would just say that Mike is puts on this kind of like prickly demeanor, but he is one of the sweetest people in the world when it comes to like treating how he treats strangers and just people that he just met. I feel like he is very, very calm. I agree with that. Maybe not strangers, but like the people that come on our trips and stuff. I think they always need you. I'm thinking of the airport in India. Where are those guys just trying to do their job? He was getting really mad. But he's really, I think you mean like our travelers on our trips and stuff. He's so nice. Yeah. So much more than I ever would have thought even. Yeah. And I've always thought he was nice, but he even surprised me with that. So, all right. Well, now that we got that out of the way, we'll never let him know that. We're never listening. They'll never listen to this either. So it is October, like we mentioned in the Humboldt Squid episode. We tend to do episodes this month that are either spooky or kind of revolve around Halloween. All three of us are big Halloween fans. Have you been having a hard time getting into the season? It's been pretty warm here, which makes it kind of harder for me. It just doesn't quite feel I was getting into it like after Halloween. Yeah. Because once Halloween comes, I'm like, oh yeah, I should watch spooky movies. I've been getting into it because I've been watching a lot of horror movies already, but not as much as some years. And the surgery definitely knocked me back a step to because when I was on my painkillers, I didn't want to watch scary stuff. I just wanted to watch like cartoons and whatnot. But yeah, I don't know. I'll get more and more into it. And I'm coming to Utah soon to hang out with you guys. And that'll get me in the the spirit, the Halloween spirit. Yeah. Anyway, so we are going to do that. I'll go into it too. Oh boy. Well, this ever, I will say this, this, this species. So people ask me if I have like nightmares about animals and whatnot. This is the species that I do have the most nightmares about. It's a species I've worked with closely. And when I was doing polar bear work, you know, the bears in the title, I'm not, I don't need to hide it any longer. But when I was doing polar bear work, they are the bear that they're not as aggressive as grizzly bears. They're not nearly as territorial or whatever. But if one is kind of coming after you, it's, it's probably trying to eat you. So they are the bear that in my work, at least we were the most kind of head on a swivel, always looking for them, always being careful in polar bear country. And because of that, that got into my psyche. So when I do have dreams about polar bears, they tend to be dreams where the bears trying to eat me. And I do, I enjoy them often, like I wake up and had like a really fun dream. But it is always kind of this like, immovable force that's coming after me that I can't do anything about. And I do, they are kind of that way in a way. It'd be a lot. There's that hypothetical of like, would you take a million dollars, but a snail is going to try to kill you. And if it touches you, you're dead. I never heard that one, but I like it. Yeah. Like it's whole life is just going to be trying to get you. It's because you do that with a polar bear. It's like you get a million dollars, but one polar bear is just going to try to kill you. Full of purpose, just like the kids and weapons. I guess though we would probably figure it out before it got too far south. So that's a good snail can sneak through you anything. Yeah, I like that. That's a good hypothetical. No, you know, the purpose of this show is to dissuade those myths. And there is that myth out there that like polar bears are one of the only animals that hunt humans and that, you know, we're part of their food source. And that's not true. But what is true is when they do go after people, it is often based in predation. And that can be kind of scary. So that's something. I got a Twitter back and forth with someone a little bit recently where they put like polar bears are the one of the only four animals that will hunt humans. I think I saw your post. I was like, well, that's not true in there. Like well, actually it is. I was like, well, actually, I think I know more than you. And it's kind of fun to see you do that because I lost the energy for that online a long time ago. But you still have it. I like to give it to weeds every once in a while. But then I'm always like, I wonder like what tooth and claw listeners just watching this in the background and like, why is he so? Yeah, so I admit to attack this person. Yeah. No, but it's good. And it's good for the animals that people know that. So what would you put on the list of animals that hunt people? I would put saltwater crocodiles and I would put bangle tigers. Not lying to us. And I'd probably put leopards too. Lions, maybe. Yeah. I'd put lions if you're putting. Yeah, I'd probably include lions because they do. I mean, like usually when they attack someone, that's what they're trying to do. You know, yeah. And polar bears, I'm not saying polar bears don't hunt people sometimes, but it's it's opportunistic and they don't usually it's usually we'll talk about that in a minute. We'll get to that. Okay. All right. Let's get into the story though. Late Halloween night of 2013 in the sub-artic community of Churchill, Manitoba, 69-year-old William, Bill, Iot had fallen asleep in front of his TV. 69? 69, dude. It's a great year. Uh-huh. He fell asleep in front of his TV, but the sound of screams woke him up. And screaming on Halloween night isn't exactly unheard of, or maybe his TV had drifted to a classic horror movie while he was falling asleep. But as he woke up, he realized the screams were not coming from inside of his house. They were coming from outside on the street. And they weren't the kind of screams you'd hear from trick-or-treeders trying to scare each other or friends that are rowdy Halloween party. They were shrill and guttural. The kind of sounds you hear when prey is being eaten by predator. So Bill walks to the door and he opens it, not at all prepared for the horror that was unfolding on the road right in front of his house. A polar bear was attacking a young woman and was shaking her limp body through the air. Bill didn't have a gun, and he knew by the time the polar bear patrol got there, this girl would be dead. So he quickly looks around and his eyes fall on his heavy-duty metal snow shovel. Grab the shovel, wraps his finger around the handle, and then just standing in just as pajamas and slippers he says to himself, well you're either going to do something or you're not, and then he charges out into the night. Nice. Alright, so let's rewind a little bit. It's a tough situation. Not a really tough situation. We're definitely going to talk about that a bit when we get back to it. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify, especially designed to help you start, run, and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there, integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time, from startups to scale-ups, online, in-person, and on the go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up via $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Alright, we're going to rewind. So Aaron, Aaron Green had first come to Churchill in 2012, and immediately she was struck by how different it felt from her hometown in Montreal. People would say hi on the street. Everyone seemed to know each other. There was a strong sense of community built into the fabric of the town. And to Aaron, it felt like the town of roughly 900 people was exactly what she'd been looking for. Because Montreal has a bunch of French people, right? Yeah, also she doesn't have to speak French anymore. Yeah. Well, they just don't speak French. Don't speak French in Montreal. They're not happy about it. Really? Yeah. They get a little snooty sometimes when you don't speak French. Sorry to call you Montrealers out there. I've been to Churchill, and I felt the same way about it. It just felt like it was immediately of this really warm, welcoming community. It's really different from anywhere I've been. You have to either fly in or take a train. There's really only ways to get. You could also take a boat, but no one really does that. You either fly in or take a train. You drive a car. You couldn't drive a car in. No, there's no roads. That's the main thing. There's roads like in the Churchill area, but no roads leading to the town. If you could try a car, it'd be pretty much feel like everywhere. Yeah, that's what I was trying to get to. No. And then it's just kind of this, it's mostly flat. It's right on the shore of Hudson Bay. It's sub-Arctic, but it does. It gets very, very, very cold. It feels like the Arctic. There's northern lights. There's really cool wildlife. It's just a really neat place. All right. Put it on the list. There's Baluga. Yeah, there's Baluga whales. Arctic Fox will probably do a tooth and clotchrip there sometime. There's wolves. There's tarmigan. There's all these different critters that call Churchill home, but the town is really famous for one thing, and that's polar bears. Churchill is commonly known as the polar bear capital of the world, and it's likely the easiest or at least the most convenient place in the world to see polar bears. When I visited, I saw probably a dozen to two dozen polar bears in like a five day stretch. There's a lot of polar bears that are during a certain time in the year, and we'll talk about that too. Basically, we'll talk about it right now. Jeff, there's two kinds of sea ice. There's annual sea ice and multi-year sea ice. Annual sea ice is the kind that's going to be melting and re-freezing every year. This is what Hudson Bay has. Every year, the ice completely freezes up to the shore, and then it completely melts. The bears there have to come ashore and then leave back onto the ice as it freezes and melts, freezes and melts. Multi-year ice is ice that's going to spend, you know, it's going to be multi-year. It's going to stay for a long time. We're losing most of our multi-year ice. So when they say like, we might have an ice-free North Pole at some point, they're talking about multi-year ice that ice is there year after year after year. Sea ice is really important to polar bears. They will go out onto the sea ice to hunt seals, and do you remember any of the different ways that they hunt seals on the sea ice? They'll like wait by a hole for a seal to come up, right? Because they know that the seals need to breathe and they're under the ice. Exactly. I saw a video of someone out on the ice in the Arctic recently that they were just filming a seal hole just because they thought it was cool. And then the seal came through it and they weren't expecting it at all. Yeah. Yeah. So seals maintain these breathing holes that they they scratch with their flippers to get through the ice and they just keep them open and not way they can pop up as they're hunting to breathe. They also make their dens in the sea ice and they'll pull themselves out to just lay on top of the sea ice. So polar bears hunt seals by, yeah, they make dens for their pups. Seals do? Just for their pups, yeah. Like how? They kind of just like scratch a hole into the sea ice and then it gets covered up. It's kind of like a polar bear down almost. Their pups will be in that little enclosure. They scratch it through the bottom and make a little cavity into the sea ice. That's cool. Yeah. So polar bears in the spring especially will cave in those dens to get at the pups. That's their best feeding time of the year. But then throughout the year when there's sea ice, they'll wait by these breathing holes or they'll hunt the seals that have pulled up onto the open ice. So it's really important that they have sea ice because they can't hunt them when they're just free swimming or when there's no ice. That's what they need to hunt seals. That's why they are so tied to sea ice. It helps seals too, right? Yeah. A lot of little fish will go up to the sea ice and like seals can hunt better or two or something. The main thing is that it is the base level for the whole ecosystem and that there's algae that grows on the bottom of it. There's little fish that eat that algae. There's bigger fish that eat those little fish seals eat those bigger fish and then polar bears eat the seals. So the sea ice is kind of the base level of that whole food web. So it's really, really important in many different ways. But every summer- It's like a chain of food or something. Exactly. Yeah. Every summer many of the polar bears in western Hudson Bay, that sub population will leave the sea ice as it melts and they spend the rest of the summer fasting and waiting for the ice to freeze up again. In the fall, many of them will gather on the shores of Hudson Bay and wait for the ice to re-freeze. And due to really specific geography and oceanography, the re-freeze often first starts right around Churchill. So when the sea ice re-freezes, they can head back out and hunt for seals. But if they don't have that sea ice, you know, as a hunting platform, they're simply just going to be fasting and burning their fat reserves. So when you visit Churchill in the fall, you're going to find a lot of bears that are simply waiting near the shore and taking advantage of any of their food opportunity that might pop up in the meantime. And they look in pretty thin. They look thin. They look just kind of, they're not moving very fast because they're saving their energy. They're in this state that we often call walking hibernation where their metabolism has gone down and they're kind of just trying to save as much energy as possible until it freezes. But some of them do look for other sources of food, and that can lead to some conflict in Churchill. And these conflict bears are often darted and then take into a bear holding facility, which is often called polar bear jail, where they spend the rest of their fast in a pretty comfortable cell. And it's a really novel way that they deal with these conflict bears that really can't be blamed for being a little bit hangry, you know? I saw a polar bear jail recently. It's like a huge warehouse. It looks like a Costco, but it's like for polar bears. It's massive. They have these concrete cells. They give them water, but they don't give them food. Yeah. Because then they start to associate people with food and they wouldn't be getting food out anyways. So they're just, they finish their fast in jail and then they're released as soon as the sea ice comes back. It's pretty neat. So after her first visit to Churchill, Aaron makes the decision she wants to move there and work there seasonally as a waitress in one of the local bars. She would return to Montreal in the colder months and live in Churchill when it thought out. By 2013, she'd already made a lot of friends in the little community, especially among the other seasonal employees, and more and more Churchill was feeling like home. That feeling of community was often strongest on Halloween night. Churchill always went really hard for Halloween and 2013 was no exception. Aaron's party hopping with their friends until late in the night while kids are out trick-or-treating in the small community. In this general, really festive atmosphere was all made possible through years and years of hard work. Because you see, Halloween presents some particularly tricky obstacles for trick-or-treaters and party goers in Churchill. And those obstacles are big starving polar bears. So decades ago, I respect them still going through it. I know. Like trick-or-treating. I feel like most places have kind of stopped trick-or-treating for no reason at all. And they're just like, we're gonna keep doing it even with polar bears. This is like in the heart of a polar bear season in Churchill, too. Halloween is right when it's about to re-freeze. There's lots of bears around. I was there on Halloween and we saw lots of bears. I mean, they are around. So yeah, they could have just easily said, K, we're not doing Halloween. But instead, what they did is they realized that Halloween specifically put their kids at risk. And they decided to start an intense polar bear patrol that was created on Halloween night. Both polar bear professionals and law enforcement will patrol the town and trucks and even helicopters to make sure that no bears cross paths with residents. So if they catch any bears, make the kids dress up as like vegetables since polar bears only meet. Yeah, what if you had a kid that just like really wanted to wear a seal costume or you hate your kid and you're just like, hey, I got your costume for Halloween. It's just like a seal. You're gonna be a ring seal. Oh yeah, that's a good point though. Just put them in like, yeah, you're a concoct. This year, you are a carrot. Yeah. Now that wouldn't work. But this polar bear patrol does seem to work really well and they've done a really good job of keeping bears out of the streets of Churchill on Halloween night. So in Halloween, 2013, Aaron goes pretty hard and so do our friends. It's possible that by the time she finally decided to head home on the hours, early hours of November 1st, I mean, this is like four or five a.m. November 1st. The polar bear patrol maybe had already called it a night. You know, they'd said, okay, we kept everyone out of trouble. All the kids are home. We're gonna go to bed. Or maybe a bear had just slipped their detection. But whatever the reason, a 250 pounds sub adult polar bear was quietly walking the dirt roads of Churchill at the same time as Aaron and her friends. And as they rounded a corner about five minutes from her house, the bear spotted them and it charged. Aaron's friend, Nikki, was the first to see this bear and in a panic, she said, oh my god, it's a polar bear. And the whole group started running in blind fear. So we know running isn't great. I, if I were in this scenario, if I'm with some people in a town and there's houses nearby and I don't have any deterrent and the bear is already running at me, I might run. I don't know if you have any other options. Yeah. I might try and get to safety because I don't think stopping and trying to be totally like dominant with this bear would have probably stopped it. I think it probably would have kept going. I feel like it depends a lot on your surroundings. Like, yeah, if there's anything nearby that you could put in between you and the bear, but if you're like, I'm not open, snowy road, then it's like, I'd still probably stand your ground because like, you're not going to outrun it. Totally. They don't have any good options at this point is what I'm trying to say. Like, we always say don't run it. It's a huge mistake in this one. Yeah. Yeah. We always say don't run because it's a bad option, but all they have is bad options here. They don't have anything good. So they run and Aaron and her friends who had both, you know, they'd all seen polar bears lumbering around the area in the past. They suddenly realized just how fast they can drop the candy. They should. Yeah. That's honestly, I probably would, but they weren't trick or treating their it up party. They realize how fast these polar bears can be when this bear is on them in seconds. One of Aaron's friends actually trips and falls, but the bear passes right by her and the other friend because it had already locked in on Aaron. The bears do this sometimes. Sometimes they just get tunnel vision where they pick a target and that is what they're going to go for. And even if there's closer people or people that are more vulnerable, they're kind of just laser focused on that one target. And that's what this bear was. There's another reason that one joke everyone always says doesn't work that I don't need to be faster than a bear. I just need to be faster than my friends. Exactly. Well, look at this story. She was faster than both of her friends and it still got her. Yeah. So shut the hell up with that joke. Yeah. That joke's canceled. Yeah. Yeah. As the bear came up behind Aaron, she knew that she wasn't going to be able to get away. So she actually stops running. Stand still and just braces herself for the attack. The bear runs up behind her, stands on its hind legs and clamps its jaws down over the back of her head, pulling her off the ground and whipping her through the air. That's crazy. Yeah. She starts screaming and the screams coming from her body felt unreal. Like she didn't know she had the capability to scream like that. And then she's kind of back on her feet. The bear's paws are on her shoulders. Its jaws are still locked around her head and she could feel the teeth scraping against her skull and the claws digging into her torso. And she starts punching and kicking at the bear. She knew that its snout was probably a little bit more sensitive, but not surprisingly, these punches and kicks don't really do anything. And aside from maybe giving her like a brief pause in the mulling, but then when the bear starts mulling her again, it pushes her down on the ground, pushes its paws against her shoulders. I think she's on her stomach and it like puts her paws on her shoulders for leverage, bites into her skull and starts peeling her scalp back. So like you can picture it kind of like grabbing her by the head and like peeling it backwards. Yeah. It's not good. Check engine, Lai Jeff. Yeah. One of her friends is like frozen in place. The other had sprinted on hopefully to get help. But Aaron felt really alone as the bear continued to bite at her head. And she feels the warm blood spilling over her body in a constant flow on this cold night. You can make someone faint on this one. Yeah. And she knew, I hope so, it's a Halloween episode. She knew that that much blood meant that the bear was doing some real damage. And she could feel her strength fading. She'd stop screaming. She thinks. And she suddenly has this realization that she's probably going to die out there on this icy road. And she figures all of the commotion would probably draw attention and sooner or later the polar bear patrol would show up. But by then the bear would have done enough damage to kill her. But that's when Bill Iyote charges out of his house in his pajamas with his snow shovel. Nice. Yeah. So Bill had been yelling at the bear, but it was ignoring him as it continued to shake this girl through the air. Terror scalp off. So he made up his mind to use the shovel. And again, like I said in the beginning, he was standing there and he's like, well, you're either going to do something or you're not. You can't just stand here and think about it. And I think this guy just happened to be that like 0.001% of the world that is willing to charge at a polar bear with the snow shovel to stop it from killing someone he's never met in his entire life. I think I would do that. I think you would too. And I think I would because we've talked about it enough. But I don't think most people would. I who knows? Not to discredit him. It's like incredibly brave. But I just feel like people do want to help other people and give him the opportunity. They do. I think me like knowing polar bears and this guy, he's got indigenous blood. I don't know if he's full indigenous or not. He's from Churchill. I think he probably knows these animals very well. It probably goes way. And I think he probably knows that this isn't enough. Like a snow shovel is not going to stop a polar bear. It's probably going to piss it off. And you probably if you know that like I would know that too, I would know that I'm about to get mulled if I run up and hit a polar bear with the snow shovel. But it might stop this other person from being mulled. So it is. It is. A duty snow show. Yeah. But it's not enough for a polar bear. And sure enough, he runs up and he just pulls this heavy duty snow shovel behind him as hard as he can and just brings it down and slams it down on the face of the bear. And this does get the bear's attention. It drops there and immediately and turns toward William. Aaron doesn't waste a second. She gets up, she's focused on Williams or sorry Bill. I've been calling him Bill, but Bill's open door. He runs his full name's William, but we're going to call him Bill. She runs into his open door, runs inside of his house, she's leaving a trail of blood the whole way, and when she gets in the house, she pulls out her phone and calls emergency services. There is a recording of her 911 call that we might put in here. There's a bear! There's a bear! There's a bear! There's a bear! She's eating nabble. There's a bear! There's a bear! And then she looks up to see Bill's wife coming down the stairs in a towel and seeing just like this strange white woman covered in blood in her entry. Yeah. Like she doesn't know what's going on. She just knows there's a woman covered in blood. She's like, where's my shovel at? Yeah. I was about to go shovel the driveway. Aaron pleads for help. She said she's been attacked by a bear and Bill's wife, who was a nurse, takes her up to the bathroom. And this whole time Aaron is holding her hand on the back of her head, because that's where all the blood is coming from and she's trying to hold the blood in. The despair is mostly sculptor and what she didn't know is that several of her arteries on the back of her head had been severed. But she did know she needed to just be kind of holding everything together back there. She said she felt like if she took her hand off, her brains were going to fall out. Yeah. So Williams' wife, or Bill's wife tells her that she wants to see the damage and that she needs to take her hand off. And Aaron's like, I don't want to. And she's like, listen, I'm a nurse. I just want to see how bad it is. So Aaron takes her hand off and blood literally sprays all over the back wall of the bathroom. And Bill's wife says, holy shit. And tells her to put her hand back on her head. Meanwhile, out in the street, the bear had quickly turned its attention to Bill and now the shovel is no longer any help. Bill turned to follow Aaron back into the house, but the bear shot its paws out, grabbed him by the leg, trips him and knocks him to the ground, and then it climbs on top of him and starts biting and clawing at his torso and face. This is another kind of gnarly detail, but at one point the bear bites Bill's ear and starts to tear at it and he could actually hear the tongue of the bear as it was moving around in his ear and then he could hear the ripping tissue of his ear as it was torn off his head. Oh, man. Yeah, but he wasn't really even worried about it. He was just worried about where the bear was going to bite next. He knew that his ears is, you know, to spend, or what's the word? Why can't I think of it? When something is like dispensable, right? Yeah, dispensable. But like if it's biting his throat or somewhere else he might die. Hmm. Too. Non-vital. Yeah, non-vital. By now the commotion had woken up some of the neighbors and some of them are armed, but they're a little too nervous to fire directly at the bear while it's mulling Bill. So they fire into the air, the yell, they throw things at the bear, but nothing's really deterring it. And finally, one of the neighbors drives his truck straight at the bear and at Bill with the headlights flashing in the horn blaring. And Bill actually like, in one of the interviews I read, he said that he thought he was back to get ran over, but luckily the truck stops just in time. And the bear does back off and the neighbors rush in to help him. Yeah. And the crazy thing for me is as soon as they pull him up, his first thoughts go to Aaron, and he's hoping that she got away safely and that she's okay. And then he thought, well, if the bear's going to come back and finish me off, I at least want to be on my feet and die like a man. So he stands up, he tells his friends to help him up. And they're like, no, we're getting you out of here. They throw him in the back of the truck and whisk him away to the local hospital. It's almost like the money python the night that's like it's just a scratch. Come around me. This dude's cool. He's really cool. Both of them are really cool. Actually, we'll talk about it a little bit more. But then he goes to this local hospital. The doctor stabilizes him and they put him under. And then the next thing he knows, he wakes up. He's a thousand miles south in Winnipeg in a much bigger hospital. The first thing he asked the doctors is whether or not Aaron was okay. And they say she's in the next room and she's fine. Bill ends up spending a week in the Winnipeg hospital where doctors worked on the lacerations to his eyelid, his face and his scalp, which included a laceration that was seven inches long. He had bite marks to his right shoulder and chest. And he had lesser abrasions and lacerations to his torso and his thigh. He also underwent a four-hour surgery with a plastic surgeon to have his ear reattached. Kind of like me and my gums, you know. And have gums reattached. Yeah. Here's his voice. Yeah, it's definitely making this hard. Sorry if I sound extra spitty this episode, but it's not easy. No, I'd rather have what, yeah, then what you have. Yeah. Yeah, I had it pretty hard. I'm also kind of a hero. Aaron was diagnosed with a concussion. She was treated for puncture wounds to her shoulder, a torn scalp, and her ear was also torn. She had claw tears on her knees and her abdomen. At the time of these interviews that I watched in red, she had mostly recovered, but she was still suffering from a compressed spine and pain in her knees, her knees and her shoulders from the bear shaking her and whipping her through the air. But she was she pulled her recovery. Interesting. Yeah, it hit her pretty hard on the ground. Mm. Yeah. I'll do it. The bear was killed that night. It was found to be a 250-pound subodult male, which do tend to be the polar bears that cause these kinds of problems. These subodults, and especially subodult males, are the ones that kind of haven't really figured out yet that any of the food they get outside of seals or marine mammals isn't really going to be enough to sustain them. So they're the ones that do tend to go into town and kind of look for other food opportunities. They do cause a little bit more problems than the adult polar bears that have kind of learned how to be a polar bear. Well, it's an important stage for them to get a lot of food too, right? Like, you need to get a lot of food to have good mating opportunities and to be able to get into like a big ol' bear. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a bear, you want to be big, biggest possible. Big ol' bears. Big ol' bear. And 250 pounds isn't very big for a polar bear. That's it's really small for a polar bear. I mean, we caught black bears twice that size. Yeah, exactly. It's black bear, yeah. Yeah. And Homer, our bear Homer, and Grandpa Glenn were both that bigger, bigger. So yeah. So Aaron really grew a lot from this experience. She's one of those people that I find really inspirational because rather than like never wanting to be in Churchill around polar bears ever again, her feeling of community in Churchill deepened really greatly, she knows fully that Bill saved her life and the two of them are friends now. And at least at the time of the interviews I watched and read, she was living full time in Churchill. And she said that she wanted to live the kind of life that Bill would be proud of because he had kind of given her, you know, her life back. So she wanted to make sure that that wasn't in vain. Kind of like Matt Damon crying, like a little baby at the end of saving private Ryan, you know. I'm talking about. Yeah, you have to live for all of it. Yeah, you have to live for all those guys that died. That is crazy. It's like, I just killed me if that's what I got to live for, you know. Yeah, do you think he has to do everything like 30 times? I think if he messes up, he's got to feel bad for each one of those people that died that's like, that's too much. They should have lived. I should have, I should have died because they went to. Still in that apple. Yeah, that's even harder than like thinking of Jesus seeing everything you're doing. Oh, yeah, dude. I'd rather he am than like, he's a very easy compared to that. I should say that. Jesus had it hard. Anyway, she does still live in Churchill. I looked it up on Instagram. She owns and runs a stand-up paddle boarding company in Churchill that takes visitors to see Beluga Wales, which is really cool. Yeah, that's amazing. So she's part of this community now. She's there full time and it seems like she's making the most of her life in the wake of a really traumatic event, which I just think is amazing. And then Bill was recognized for his bravery with the Carnegie Medal in September of 2015, along with receiving the Canadian star of courage from then the then governor general David Johnston. And he was inducted into the Order of the Buffalo Hunt in 2014, which I think is kind of a prestigious group for indigenous heroes. He echoed that's why he did it. He wanted those awards. It's no. I was about to say he echoed the response of many of these different heroes by saying, I never saw myself as a hero and I still don't. Your Delta situation, you either respond or you don't do anything. The only thing I could think was if I don't do anything, she's not going to make it. And I think that's pretty impressive. He's like, what? I like the Dwight Shrute quote where he's like, I don't see myself as a hero. To me, heroes are that every day ordinary people who, behind the scenes, put on a cape and conflite. You know, we've done a lot of these stories. And I'm not going to say that this is the most heroic thing from any of our stories because I honestly can't remember all of them. Like Cindy Parallelins, one that I think of the woman who fought off the mountain line for an hour to save her kids. We've had some really amazing heroes, but this guy's up there for me. Like running out. I mean, if this isn't heroic, what is, you know? Yeah, hitting a polar bear with a shovel knowing full well, that's probably going to make it target you instead of someone else that you don't know is like pretty fracking heroic. That's hard to beat. So I really respect this guy a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Good for him. Good job. Yeah. Good for both of them. Good job, Bill. You know, and I do think we'll go to Churchill at some point, whether it's with the Toothie group or just us. So Aaron, if you hear this, we'd love to meet you and go out on paddle boards. We should like give them a medal from 2 o'clock, too. Yeah, we should make Toothie medals. Like a good idea. Like, hey, Bill. Toothie heroes. We saw your story and we just want to give you this Toothie and Cloud medal for bravery. Yeah. Let's call it the old, old, mad, Damon medal. Yeah. Do you have any questions about the story before we go to categories? I just thought maybe, I don't know if it's even so much a question, but it was interesting, like, thinking about the black bears we worked with it were the same size or even a little bit bigger. And how they really weren't very threatening. And just like how this polar bear is like the same size and still a bear, but just like, has that confidence in it or something. It does, I think it gives a little more validity to the argument that they hunt people and that it was not at all afraid of these people. Let's see. You know, I think, I think like this is a situation where if you bump into a polar bear at night on the streets of Churchill where one shouldn't be, you know, you know that bear is looking for food. And that's a scary situation. That's when this is an animal that's hunting, you know, and it would probably decide to hunt a person. And so this is a really scary scenario. I agree, like, I was thinking about this and I was thinking about what my reaction would be for a black bear, a grizzly bear, and a polar bear and the exact same scenario. A black bear, I'd sit there and watch it. A grizzly bear, I'd probably slowly back away to a safe distance and watch it. And a polar bear, I'd get to shelter as quickly as possible. And I guess part of what I'm saying too is it just felt like it knew how to kill a person way better than a black bear that size would. Like a black bear. I feel like a lot of times it'll tackle a person and just start biting wherever. And this polar bear, it's like I'm going to bite their freaking heads and like they just seeing like good predators as I'm saying. They are. I mean, this is our only bear that is purely carnivorous. Like all they do for food is hunt. And our other bears hunt opportunistically. And depending on where they live, they may almost never hunt in their lives. They would get the candy instead of the people. The polar bear is still going to get the people. And that doesn't mean they don't have that built into their biology. They know how to hunt black bears know how to bring down prey. They know how to kill prey. So do grizzly bears. But for polar bears, they have to do it all of the time. And so that yeah, you're right, they are really good at catching and killing prey. And if it's a person, you don't have long once a once a polar bear gets a whole of you, you're probably not going to survive very long. If you don't have a way to intervene. So bear spray does work on polar bears. There are a ton of data points out there. But all the ones that that has been used, it's shown to be very effective. So do carry bear spray in polar bear country. But I also, like I always say, if you're camping or recreating in polar bear country where you don't have immediate access to shelter, you also want to have people with you that know what they're doing in our armed and have ways to deter polar bears. Because if they do, even though it's incredibly rare, incredibly rare, if they do decide to come at you, you have to stop them. Yeah. And bear spray can do that. So yeah. Get a 200 pound credit for the next one. Go to LinkedIn.com slash lead to claim your offer. Terms and conditions apply. All right. Should we move on to our categories? Yeah, let's do it. Cool. So the first one, your favorite unassuming pop culture hero. Because I don't think you would look at Bill and just say, oh, this guy looks like what we see as a hero, but he's very heroic. So your favorite unassuming pop culture hero. I mean, I went with straw hat, Luffy on this one. I feel like he's into it pretty well. And yeah, yeah, I think that's a really good pick because he's just like a kid, like a gangly kid that you wouldn't think is a hero. He just kind of like falls into spots where he like has to save the day, but he's not actively trying to. Yeah. I had a lot. I kind of bounced around a lot with this one. I thought of mad mad mad again. Is that his name from Willow, like Val Kilmer's character? How he doesn't really want to be a hero, but he becomes a hero. But the one that I really just kept coming back to his Han Solo or Cassi and and or either those two from Star Wars, where they're kind of they have no business really with the rebellion. They don't really care. They're just kind of doing their own thing, but they get pulled in. And then once they're in, they become they can't walk away from injustice and a fight. And they're kind of like the biggest, you know, bad asses in those in those universes. So I really like those two for unassuming heroes. If you haven't watched Andorra, go watch Andorra. It's so good. Just love it. If you haven't watched Star Wars, you should watch it as well. All of them. Yeah. All right. Maybe not all of them. But that's something we can say when Mike's not here. Go watch the prequels. All right, Jeff, what's the weirdest thing that's ever happened? You want Halloween night? I didn't have a great one for this. I want to hear your answer more. But my freshman year of college, I did have on my floor, there's a Chinese student. And they didn't really like have Halloween over there. So like he really wanted to go trick or treating. And like he told us that. And my instinct was just to be like, oh, that's for kids. But then I was just like, yeah, man, we can go trick or treating. And a bunch of us just went trick or treating in every house was like, I think you guys are a little old for this. And we're like, yeah, just give us the treat, lady. You want a trick? Oh, I think so. So I have two answers. One is definitely the weirdest thing. And then seconds, like just kind of a cool weird thing. But when I was probably like nine or 10, we went to our direct neighbor in the house that me and Jeff grew up in. It was the first house we stopped at because we'd left our house to go trick or treating. We went to his house. And his costume was just like, he showed up. I may have told this on the podcast before. He came to the door and just a trench coat. And then after he gave us the candy, he opened his trench coat. And he was dressed, but there was this fake dawn that like popped out of his trench coat that like came out. And he thought it was really funny. And this was like in the 90s. And that was his costume was like a molester. And he was doing it to like 10 year old kids. And I was just like, even at the time, I was like, whoa, it like scarred me, you know, there's a crazy first house. Yeah. And like luckily, I had trick or treated a lot in the past and kind of news. I don't think so because I don't would go swim at their house. Yeah, I know. But it wasn't like he was just doing that. That was for like every kid that yeah, which doesn't make it any better. But yeah, I know. I think it was either hammer. It was he a hammer the next house. But I'm pretty sure was him anyway. And then the other one was that was trick or treating one year. And as all the way up on the hill behind us, there was this huge meteor that came all the way down through the clouds and exploded like above the city that night. And it was the first time I'd ever seen that. And it was really shocking. And it was while we were trick or treating. And that was really cool. So that's my other answer, my backup answer. If we have to delete the long story. All right. What's your favorite Halloween memory from when we were kids? Is it just the candy for me? I thought it's yeah. I feel like we were a little sugar deprived or something. We were all three addicted to sugar. And just having a day where like you could spill a whole pillowcase of candy on the floor, which is the best. Yeah, our parents were really careful about sugar because they both had sweet tooths. And I think they wanted to make sure we weren't just like overloading on it. So we were a little candy deprived, especially. And I remember that too, just like the joy of having a pillowcase full of candy bars and no limits on like there was honestly not a candy. I didn't eat because it's just like so valuable to have candy. There's definitely an order like by the end I was read like to see rolls in those like orange and black candies like those weird ones that only exist for Halloween. Uh-huh. Yeah. That was a good memory for me. It was just seeing how creative mom would get to like make costumes for us that didn't cost any money whatsoever. It's so funny. Yeah. We had some pretty I was just a vampire for like four years in a row, but I love vampires. But she would just like draw little things under my teeth and put a little bit of blood makeup in that. And then like that was pretty much it. One of my favorite Halloween memories from not being kids was just us, me, you, Mike, and whoever else just like sitting at the wall at BYU campus and just watching the students dressed up because like, you know, BYU has a high percentage of dorks and they really go for for Halloween. But like I'm saying that to their credit because it was really fun and like they like the attention we gave them is a common like you're entertaining us we're entertaining type of thing. My favorite would be if someone had just like the most obvious costume in the world and we'd always be like, Hey, what are you? What are you? Yeah, and have to like stop and explain it to us. Yeah, that was really fun. It's a good memory. My favorite was just the girl who like didn't really dress up but then put like a paper bird beak on her face. It's like, it's like so silly. The whole day you're just explaining that to people. All right, we kind of already did this. What costume do you want to be if you're attacked by a polar bear on Halloween night? What would you actually want to be? We said the seal thing if you didn't want that. But what would you actually want to have on as a costume if you're being attacked by a polar bear? I'd put seal as my answer. I was mad when he said, I want to see it back. You want to go quick. Then they're going to be quick. Yeah, I was thinking like a juggernaut from X-Men. Remember him? He's the one of the big metal helmet. That's what I want to have. It's one I have my full juggernaut costume. Like a night just in chain mail. Yeah, or you're just like a concrete block or something. Yeah. Okay. All right. Next category is something you recommend this week, Jeff. You know, I'm going to go with the UFC fighter Alex Pereira. Okay. I just really like watching his fights. Yeah. And he had one pretty recently. He's the most like electric person for not doing anything electric. Kind of like how quiet Leonard used to be. Where's just like the lack of stuff he does is almost like adds to it. You know. Yeah. But his only thing he ever says is Chama. And then his a Chama. He's Brazilian. He doesn't speak much English. Yeah. But all he says is Chama. I think it's his nickname. It is his nickname. So he just says Chama. And then he'll dress up as like a Brazilian warrior and do like a bow and arrow like right at someone's face and be like Chama. And this opponent he fought had beat him in March. And this was the rematch. And the opponent in their press conference was like no more Chama. And it made him so mad. It's like when he just won, he was like mocking the guy. And then when they eventually shook hands after he beat him, he is like Chama. Chama. Like he's like the most offensive thing in the world to him was the guy saying no Chama. So it's just very silly. And like his fights are fun though. He's like his whole story total like had nothing in Brazil. Very poor upbringing. And then like he beat one of the best USC fighters ever. Odessanya and a kickboxing fight. And then Odessanya made it as a USC fighter. And everyone's like actually this guy has lost one. It's Odessanya. And it's to this random Brazilian guy. So then they brought him into the US. Really? And he's just been dominating. Yeah. That is a cool story. I like that. Cool. Mine. I'm going to pick a sports one as well. Actually sports related sports going. Yeah. Yeah. Sports corner. I really, I've been to a few Montana Grizzly football games this year already. And I think there's something really special about hometown sporting events. Like if you are living in a place that you have connection to, if you go to one of those hometown sporting events, there's a sense of community there. And there's just like a sense of everyone kind of being excited for the same thing. Especially this time of year when it's not too cold yet. At most of the places in the US at least. I recommend if you have like a local university team or high school team that you go for that you that you support, go to a football game or go to a local game and just kind of like dip into that community feeling because it does make you realize that a lot of the crazy stuff that's happening in the world is still happening and we don't want to ignore that. But sometimes it's just nice to remember that you also just have your local community that you can you know rely on and depend on it. And I really like that. Yeah, the refs with everyone. Yeah. Yeah. You get to get some out of Greshan out. Shout out refs for just taking it. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out, Raffes. The Grizzly and Viral this week because their uniforms are weighing this weekend are so cool. Their throwbacks are so cool. Yeah. Their old colors are way better. The Montana Grizzlies it used to be copper, silver and gold were the team colors. And it's just like I miss it. Yeah. They honestly that their color switch I think was one of the worst ones ever or like branding and I get it like maroon and silver is so much easier to sell. But copper silver and gold is so cool looking. So yeah, look up. Grizz throwback uniforms if you're interested and they are they are sick. They're so cool. The bear logo on the helmets. Awesome. Yeah. All right. Some listener questions. I'll grab a couple here from Patreon. This one here is from Iceman TV7. Question for all three of you but West the Candy Lover in particular. I'm I'm be honest with you Iceman. All three of us are huge Candy Lover's not just me. This question is have you ever tried Albany's gummy bears or call you three deliberating between Black Forest and Haribo but no mention of Albany's they're my favorite by far. Jeff, what do you think at Albany's gummy bears? I think that the bear cubs are delicious. That's like one of my it's probably my favorite gummy bear is the tiny ones. Okay. For like normal size ones I don't think they hold up. Yeah. I like the interesting flavors. I really like some of the weird flavors that Albany's has come up with. But for me they're like a special treat every once in a while but my stalwarts are still Haribo. I like Haribo the most I think so I usually go with them but I do I do think they're good. So Jeff, have you started Great British Baking Show yet? Yeah. I'm like too excited. I haven't but so this question will be directly for you then. Mike's been talking about it too. What do we think of the seasons lineup? What do you think? Mike was just complaining that his favorite person got out right away. Spoilers. I haven't seen it yet. Don't spoil anything. I don't know if that spoils it too much but yeah it may be a little bit. But the cast in general you're enjoying I'm still like I'm still trying to figure out a favorite for this season. There's no one that's like really stuck out to me as like a this is the person I love with the most. I actually haven't seen a bake that's really like knocked me off my feet yet either. Okay. I saved this show for early December when all the episodes are out it puts me in the Christmas spirit kind of. So I really is because it's just so nice and like comfortable and warm. So I actually always save it for like the first couple weeks of December. So that's what I'm doing but I'm excited to watch. I love that show. I think it's like one of the purest shows on TV. One more from Holly. Holly says, will we ever get a Hyene episode? So just a little bit behind our kind of workflow and how we do things here. We definitely will do Hyenas at some point, especially spotted Hyenas. We want to do this for a long time and part of that is like saving animals for for down the line because we if we like get through every single animal immediately then we're just going to be doing repeats for the rest of the show. And so it's kind of hard to like continue to save some of these animals that we haven't done yet. Like we have yet to do a full main feed episode on elephants on either species. We haven't really done Bengal tigers yet which are a huge one. We haven't done Hyenas. There's a number of animals we haven't done yet because we want to still have them to do in the future. So yes, we will get to them but it will be somewhere down the line. I can't say if that'll be this year or five years from now or who knows but we will get to them. Jeff you asked for some spooky questions on Instagram. You got any for us? Sure did. Let's see. Unnaturally asked favorite bat species. It's vampire bats for me. Really? Yeah. They're not cute enough for me. I don't know what which ones are really cute. The flying foxes like fruit bats are the cute ones. Not like a little one. You remember that little flying fox we saw in Borneo though? That really cute one that like that. Yeah, that's a fruit bat right? Yeah. I like that. Or yeah. Yeah. It's brilliant how you're seeing this. Yeah. I remember you're going to get defensive here. But I remember telling you like oh there's the bat right here come look and you came to look and then you want to get a picture really close of it. I was like don't get too close. They'll fly away. You're like it's not going to fly away and then it flew away. I don't remember it that well. So I'm not going to get defensive but I can definitely see myself doing that. All right. Conservate or wait conservation Casey favorite haunted house or hay ride you've ever been to. That's a really good question. Montana we used to drive like 40 minutes to a haunted corn maze that was like yeah it's kind of scary to have just people with acts or with chain saws hiding in the corn maze. Yeah. There was for a little while that one in Missoula too. The one where you got hurt. Yeah. That one was a haunted though. The one in Vickery they had like people. Yeah. They still do it I think. But Utah so when we all lived in Utah Jeff and Mike still do Utah's famous for haunted houses. They do haunted houses really good. And there used to be this one called Rocky Point that was just amazing to me. It felt like all of the rooms were like Hollywood grade kind of haunted house stuff. So that was probably my best one that I'd ever been to. Nightmare on 13th is really good too. What's one did you say was your best? It was called Rocky Point. It doesn't exist anymore. But I really like Nightmare on 13th too. I think they do a really good job. I think it's way too expensive but I think they do a great job. Here's a good one. Flea bit and Bren are you guys scared for when Mike quits the pod? Yeah we are. I mean he's he loves traveling to like Asian. Well I guess he's not really in an Asian country. No. I'm just worried. He won't come back from his trip right now. He's on. He'll find some way to just stay out there. Yeah. I think though we might have too good of a gig for him to ever really leave. Yeah. I think I do think if any of the three of us quit it would really hurt our momentum and hurt our show. But yeah Mike's the one that threatens at the most but he usually is just joking. I don't think he actually ever really wants to quit. Aside from maybe when we're doing normal episodes and the chimpanzee episodes I think he did want to quit during those few minutes. Yeah. CJ Turner 13 says do you believe in animal ghosts? Hmm. I guess I kind of have to because I believe in people ghosts. So I would have to believe in animal ghosts. So yeah I think I do. I don't believe in ghosts. Ghost can I mean fat ghosts if they're here. Yeah. Get out of here. Like squit. I already got freaking volunteer spying on me and now I have ghost spying on me. It's just like leave me alone. Let me just be by myself. I don't want you guys watching me all the time if you are. You know. So I hope they don't. I hope they're gone. I hope they're gone. Yeah I hope so too. The animal ghost. Pretty crazy. Like all animals. They'd be so bored as a ghost, you know? My allergies would be twice as bad. Yeah. I hope there's animal ghosts though because I I think like of everything or like every person or animal that I've lost. Bryce would be the one I want to see the most again. So I would love to see. But don't you think like Bryce as a ghost would just want like scratches and you can't scratch it. Like what do we do? She think of Bryce. What's Bryce going to do as it goes? Maybe I'd kill myself then so I could give her ghost scratches. All right. Yeah. You got any heart? Let's say what's the best scare you've ever given someone? Best scare I've ever given someone? I don't know. That's like a hard one for me to think of. My mind goes to like scaring you as a kid because that was pretty easy and I definitely got you pretty bad a couple times. But just because I was five years older than you, it was like a very like easy big brother thing to do. But that doesn't really I don't have anything specific. I can't think of one that wasn't as scared as much as just like surprise. But our cousin Brent to me I was driving and he was in the backseat of a car that was driving. And I hadn't looked in my mirrors for like 40 minutes. And I just glanced in the rear view mirror and he's just like staring straight at me through the mirror. And he had been waiting for so long just to like get me to look at him in the mirror and it really surprised me that like he was just staring at me the one time I looked like it's like how long have you been waiting to do that? That's the ones that get you are the ones where they like really wait for a long time. Yeah. Some of my favorite ones online are the ones where people are driving behind a truck that's like dragging another car and that car's facing forward and their person their passengers fall asleep and they like screamed the way come up because it looks like they're about to get hit by something. That's really funny. That's really funny. I can't think of a better one a better answer though. I don't know. All right. Well, let me just call it. Yeah. Sure. We're going to do conservation really quick. This is a Hudson Bay Western Hudson Bay is a subpopulation of polar bears. That's where you find these Churchill bears is in that subpopulation. And this is one of the subpopulations. It seems to be getting hit the hardest by climate change because it is really southern as far as polar bears are considered. And the sea ice dynamics in Hudson Bay are very they're kind of very variable. So just for like some quick numbers in 1987 they thought there's probably about 1200 polar bears in this subpopulation by 2004 that had fallen to about 935. And then the most recent survey was in 2022. It was published and they guessed it was about 618. So in roughly 50 years we've gone or less than that about 40 years less less than 40 years we've gone from 1200 bears to around 618 bears. So a 50% loss within my lifetime which is pretty crazy for a subpopulation of polar bears. And the main thing that's happening there is just as the sea ice becomes less and less dependable they have to fast longer and longer. And we're not necessarily seeing big die-offs in adult polar bears but what we are seeing is much poorer recruitment. And what that means is that they're not really having as many cubs and their cubs aren't surviving to adulthood. So there's less and less bears every year. And we will get to a point where we'll start to see die-offs in adults as well. As we push that fast longer and longer every year. So it is it's kind of death by a thousand cuts and you will see that there are years like I'm pretty sure 2022 was a really good year for for polar bears where the ice kind of changes and there's weird polar vortexes and stuff that suddenly they have a really good year. But the general trend is that every year they have less and less ice and that trend continues because of climate change. So this is one of the subpopulations that is at most risk. Are they getting like dumb or two? Like only the dumb bears will have kids. The smart ones know that the sea ice is melting. It's not like an in-honk. It's not like an in-honk. A stonk. Kind of situation. No. No. Unfortunately. What would you say? Unfortunately. That's not the case. What would you say to someone that says like climate or yeah climate change is just a big government conspiracy? To be honest, I don't even engage with those people anymore. I think at this point, If you still got your head in the sand with climate change, like something that's just been proven to be happening now for decades, like there's been consistent good science. But like what sort of thing? What's happening? I wouldn't. I would just say like, they've seen it already. Like these people that are still denying climate change have seen plenty of articles and data and everything to prove that it's happening, and they choose to ignore it. And so at this point, I don't engage with climate deniers. That's just where I'm at. I don't have the energy for it. I think for me, and this is getting more into my personal views now, I think that as long as we let unfettered rampant capitalism run the way that it's running, we're never going to be able to tackle climate change. I think we need to get at the source of the problem. And that's these huge corporations and billionaires that are kind of destroying our planet. So that's how I see it. Well, I mean, did you know billionaires have donated more money to climate change than any other group of people? I'm sure they have. Yeah, but it's not. Yeah, it's not enough. They're not doing enough. So it's like shooting someone three times and then paying for their medical bill. Right, right, exactly. It's like, yeah, you did pay for my medical bill after you shot me three times. Yeah, I think the overall people know that it's happening. And if they choose to ignore it at this point, I don't think you're going to convince them otherwise. I really don't. That's just bad. Polar bears can't talk, you know? Yeah, talk for them. Yeah, there are one thing that I, if people bring up polar bears specifically, they almost always reference like one or two biologists that are like on the oil industry's payroll that are purposely kind of saying that polar bears are doing fine. And I'm quick to defend, you know, that science, not their science, like the science that proves those guys are wrong. But how much would it take for you to get on there? I don't have a price for that. I wouldn't do it. You don't have a price, a billion dollars, you wouldn't say it. Yeah, polar bears do. I don't want to be a billionaire. No, I wouldn't do it. Well, if you could use that billion dollars to save polar bears. Jeff, I could do that. Like I could reach out to the, I couldn't use it to say them. But what I'm saying is I could reach out to oil industry right now and probably be a millionaire by doing that. And I won't do it. Like I'm not going to. There's not worth it to me. So yeah, but if you're ever are a billionaire, we can be like, wait a second. You'll probably know how. Let's connect some dots here. Yeah, my opinion is that if anyone's a billionaire, they've done something to exploit someone else or something else to get there. But that's a Taylor Swift. I think Taylor Swift also has. But that is also my opinion. All right. Anyway, we're in the weeds here. You do Travis Kelsey's penis is as big as she said. I'm not talking about that. I'm just not getting into it at all. Jeff can do his own little side podcasts to talk about it. But thank you, everyone, for listening. If you have been kind of debating whether or not sign up for our subscription episodes, and if you're a fan of all things spooky, this is a good time to do it. Me and Mike have been running back some horror movie stuff. We've had some really good recent subscriber episodes. Mike just did one on Amelia Earhart. Jeff, what was your last one again? It was really good. I did. I did. What's it called? The Kenya capital. Oh, yeah, we talked about Nairobi and kind of. Nairobi attacks. Yeah, for our listener that asked about hyenas, listen to that subscription episode. So there's some really fun content coming out. It's $10 a month. You get access to our whole library of extra episodes, subscriber episodes. So it's really a great deal. And yeah, you can either do it on Patreon or on our Apple Gris Club, whichever you prefer. All right. All right. Love you up. We love you. We'll meet you with Mike next time. We miss you, buddy. We'll see you.