The Daily Stoic - Wes Larson on Respecting the Awesome Power of Nature

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Ryan speaks with Wes Larson about how and why he dedicated his life to working with bears, the feeling of being alive that he gets when working up close with bears in the wild, what our inherent fear and fascination with dangerous forces can teach us about our relationship to nature, how we can better live with animals rather than dominating them, and more.Wes Larson is a wildlife biologist and television presenter who has been studying and working with polar, black and grizzly bears for over a decade. During that time, he graduated with a masters degree from BYU where he studied wildlife conservation with an emphasis on both polar and black bear human conflict mitigation. His work has been featured by National Geographic, CNN and Al Jazeera, and he has published many scientific papers and presented research findings in various wildlife meetings around the world, including at the International Bear Association meetings in Ljubljana Slovenia. Wes is also the co-host of the Tooth and Claw Podcast, and his work can be followed on Instagram at @grizkid and @toothandclaspodcast.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music download the app today Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each weekday we bring you a Meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics a short Passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are,

and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I woke up this morning. The freeze had lifted in Austin and there was some weird scat on my deck. Look like a raccoon. It got into something and then relieved himself all over the deck. Just another fun little interaction with wildlife that happens out where we live. Thankfully, we locked up the chicken coop. The animals were safe. Nothing got their head torn off, which has been known to happen. I remember when I first

moved to East Austin, we got some chickens and there was a very gruesome scene one morning and I had to go introduce myself to my neighbors, say hi, I'm Ryan. I live next door. I need to climb up on your roof and grab a decapitated chicken off of it that a raccoon had left after they finished having their way with it. These are the kinds of encounters that I have. Thankfully, there's not super big predators out where we live. My donkey has survived an interaction with a mountain lion. We lost some goats to some wild dogs. That's actually the major predator out here. And then of course, we've got hogs, which we'll talk about in today's episode

as sort of an invasive species, but thankfully not much in the way of a predator unless you, I guess you're a rattlesnake or something. But in today's episode, my guest is Wes Lerson, who has a master's degree from BYU, where he studied polar bears and black bears, specifically human bear conflict. He has an awesome podcast called The Tooth and Claw Podcast, which I heard about from my friend, Jeff Waldman, who's been a guest on the podcast. And if you've been to the painted porch and you saw the tree that's coming up from the floor stretching 20 feet up in the air going through the balcony. Jeff is the craftsman behind that. He and I go way, way, way back. And he was like, dude, you

gotta listen to this guy. He's awesome. And then have him on the podcast. So I did. West Larson is a bare biologist and TV presenter that's been working with wildlife for nearly a decade. He's worked with polar bears, black bears, grizzly bears, sloth bears, African wild dogs, sea turtles, and so much more. I really enjoyed this interview. You can follow him at Gris kid on Instagram. You can follow his podcast at tooth and claw podcast anywhere you get your podcasts. You can follow his podcast at tooth and claw podcast, or you can listen to the tooth and Club podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts. There's some stoke themes in this episode for sure, and certainly the stokes would have been familiar with bears and lions and wolves, not just from the floor of the Coliseum, but from the wild world that they then lived in and from their travels across the known world at that time.

This was a fun episode. Thanks to Jeff for the recommendation. I hope you enjoy listening. The Dell Technologies Black Friday in July event is on with limited quantity deals on top business PCs with Windows 11 Pro. Save on select Vostro laptops with built-in OS recovery fingerprint readers and antivirus protections. Plus, you can save on select latitude laptops with a wide range of built-in OS recovery, fingerprint readers and antivirus protections. Plus, you can save on select latitude laptops with a wide range of built-in privacy collaboration and connectivity features. Enjoy unmatched productivity and connectivity with incredible savings on our best tech, get free shipping and special financing with Dell business credit. Dell Technologies recommends Windows 11 pro for business.

Find the right tech for your needs by calling a Dell Technologies Advisor at 877-Ask Dell. That's 877-Ask Dell offered to business customers by Web Bank who determines qualifications for in terms of credit. Life can get you down, I'm no stranger to that. When I find things that are piling up, I'm struggling to deal with something, obviously, I use my journal, obviously, a turn to stosism, but I also turn to my therapist, which I've had for a long time and has helped me through a bunch of stuff. And because I'm so busy and I live out in the country, I do therapy remote, so I don't

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It's secure and private and in network with most major insurers as a listener of this podcast, you can get 80 bucks off your first month with talk space when you go to talk space.com slash stoic to match with a license therapist today and go to ToxBase.com.sashtoic to get 80 bucks off your first month and show your support for the daily stoic. That's ToxBase.com.sashtoic. Where do you live? I live in Montana, Missoula, Montana. Oh, yeah, nice. Yeah, it's great.

I love it out here. Where are you based? I live right outside Austin, Texas. Oh, great, cool. I was sometimes I like to tell my kids stuff that I try to think of things that I'll tell my kids that are true about my life that they won't believe is true, right?

That's like incomprehensible from their slightly more modern perspective or whatever. Like I try to think about things that that will do that. Like I was telling them once that when I was growing up, which is not that long ago, we had this Toyota truck and it didn't have a clock in it. Like not all cars had clocks in it because they like't have a clock in it. Like not all cars had clocks in it because they like digital clocks weren't in everything then. And I read that on the way to school like tour from school sometimes if we needed to know what time it was, my mom would turn the radio on a news station. And because the news station would save the time every 15 minutes they'd be like, you know, coming up on the quarter of the hour,

you know, whatever. And, you know, they're like, that doesn't make everything as a clock in the, how could you have not known what time it was. But one of them I was telling them the other day overlapped with your experience, I think, which is, I went to this Boy Scout camp. This would have been in like the early to mid 90s. I went to mid 90s.

I went to this Boy Scout camp in Central California. It would have been like, last and maybe somewhere. And there were bears everywhere, all over this camp, right? Because it's like filled with teenage boys, just like throwing food everywhere and then it kept here. Anyways, so the bears would show up.

And the camp counselors would just throw rocks at the bears to make them go away. And this was like a, they were like, oh, it's just a bear. And then they would have, away. And this was like, they were like, oh, it's just a bear. And then they would have, you know, what seemed like an adult to me, but in retrospect, there's probably a 17-year-old, just hurling rocks at a bear in front of a bunch of children.

And they would just like, they looked at me like, I made up the most preposterous story I could possibly made up. It works, especially with those black bears. It works for sure. So you're saying that that's how one should protect themselves from bears, is just the hurl rocks.

Yeah, I mean, from black bears for sure, in California. Yeah, that'll do the trick, that's enough. So that's so nuts to me, your kids need to, they need to believe you. Well, in, in, in California, right, like bears are so common, they're, they're basically like big, dangerous raccoons in a lot of rice, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's not far off, to be honest. Like, they, they're so food conditioned in a lot of those places where they're just constantly rating bird feeders and trash cans and stuff

That they have just become like raccoons. That's a good comparison. They're just kind of dependent on us some most but every once in a while one still decides to To be a little rambunctious And then they end up paying the price for that usually. So. I was reading that Mary Roach book about like, where animals sort of intersect with human life.

And yeah, yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was so fascinating, just the way like obviously the bears are the problem but it's our fault. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's like they've lost important habitat, important food sources. And then meanwhile, we're putting out,

you know, we put out trash that like, if a bear gets into half a McDonald's cheeseburger or something that you threw away, that's the equivalent of eating berries for hours, trying to get that many calories. Meanwhile, it eats half the burger, and it's like, wow, this is the best thing I've ever eaten my entire life.

And so for it, it's like, it teaches it a lesson that it can't unlearn, that our food is calorie dense, delicious, and really easy to get. And for that bear, then, it's focused on that. It's willing to take risks that it wasn't willing to take before. Well, I mean, to be perfectly fair to the bears, that's sort of a metaphor for our own,

you know, the garbage that we eat. Right. It's like, hey, I could eat this thing, which is a trillion calories, all of which are designed to tickle my deepest and most evolutionary receptors, or I could eat this bag of lettuce. What am I gonna go for?

Yeah, yeah, it's like, obviously some of that fast food is terrible for us, but it's been scientifically formulated to be delicious. I mean, it's like, when you eat it, it's like, oh, this fat and all of this is like, this is what my body is asking for even though it's not what your body needs. So yeah. Yeah. I had an old friend that used to say you can say whatever you want about McDonald's

but what you can't say is that it isn't delicious. Totally. 100% agree with that. Yep. And I think bears bears would agree with this too. Yep. And I think bears, bears would agree with this too. Yeah. No, my other bear memory growing up in Lake Tahoe before like all these sort of like bear boxes and they sort of complicated receptacles were designed was you would put your trash out in, you know, the trash dare, whatever. And then it was like put a large rock on top of the lid. That will stop the bear.

And of course it didn't. I remember we walked out one morning. And the bear had hit the trash can with such force to knock the rock off that the rock had just slid, slammed into and then sort of slid down the side of my parents' car. Yeah. And it was an amazing testament to the strength of the bear. Yeah, even the small ones, I mean, they're strong.

Like, you don't really realize it until, like, when I've captured them, you hold their forearms and it just feels like steel. I mean, they're like, they look big and soft, but they pack a lot of muscle and they're incredibly strong. So walk me through what strikes me as a stranger unusual comment. Like how does one end up working with bears? Yeah, for me, it was kind of a long road. So I grew up in Montana, was fascinated with wildlife. It was always

like at the front of my brain, I was just thinking about animals, thinking about dinosaurs, thinking about, I think things that are really common for little boys or little girls to think about. But I think with a lot of kids that dies out as you get older and for me, it just intensified. And it would go to the library and check out every single book I could find on animals. It was like a very early national geographic subscriber, probably when I was like 11. And I would just flip through looking

for photos of animals. So it was an obsession for me. And then when I went to college, I realized that a lot of those jobs that involve wildlife don't really make a lot of money. There's not really a lot of stability behind them. So I started looking at other options, considered going into medicine specifically into optometry. And shadowed a doctor, like graduate in biology, got into a few up-pometry schools, shadowed

a doctor and just really didn't like it at all, felt very confined and boring to me. Shout out to all the doctors out there, you guys do great work. Just wasn't my thing. And so I then talked to a friend of mine who was doing wildlife work and he kind of said, you know, this is something you've always been into, maybe you should look into it. And I started emailing professors asking about doing a potential masters in wildlife biology. And because it hadn't been my focus up until that point academically, a lot of them just told me, you know, no way we have 20 people in

mind for the spot already. But I talked to this one professor in Utah, his name is Dr. Tom Smith, and he was doing bear work, and I had always been fascinated by bears growing up in Montana. It's hard not to always be thinking about bears. So I really wanted to work with him, and he gave me the same answers everyone else, but I just went in. I was living in Utah. I went in like every other week and met with him and talked with him and just became his friend and then he hired me to help out around the office. And after I approved myself there, he hired me to help on his polar bear project. And after proving myself there, he hired me as a master student. And I got my masters in both polar bear and black bear conservation with him.

And that's kind of how I got started just being really persistent and annoying. Well also though because I talk to people who are like they want to do something and they're kind of, it's not that they wait around to get chosen, but like they don't understand what you seem to have understood intuitively, which is like you have to go to where someone or some group of people are doing the thing that you want to do and you have to find some way into that world. So it's like if you want to be, if you want to be a record producer or musician or something, you don't just like wait to get a record deal. Like you need to get a job sweeping the floors of the hit factory or some record studio. Like that, that's your way into that. It's, it's, it's just to be in proximity and then that's at least the first step. Yeah, my first gig with him was literally looking through hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage of a polar bear den, which just looks like a snowdrift and just scanning through it, hoping to see a polar bear.

And I mean, it was mind-numbing. It was like, I would clock in, I would look through eight hours of footage, you know, which would be hundreds of hours, but I would go through it quickly in eight hours. And wouldn't see a single thing. And I would do that day after day after day. It was very boring. And I'd have to log in all the data even though I didn't see anything. But it's exactly what you're saying. I was in the right place and I knew that and I knew that I was having that face-to-face with the guy I wanted to work for. And I think, you know, I've definitely had other jobs in my life where I've been really well positioned or certain privileges that I have have gotten me those

kind of jobs. But this was one where I really just had to start from the bottom and hope for the best. And luckily I was persistent enough because I was passionate about it that I ended up getting it. Yeah, like I started, I did transcriptions for an author that I really admired that I wanted to work for or be like. And I would just spend hundreds of hours transcribing these interviews.

And part of, I think what you're doing is showing Wes isn't crazy, Wes isn't a flake, like Wes isn't an idiot, right? Like all the things that you really can't even tell from interviewing someone, like you're eliminating the things that they are currently using as an excuse to not hire you. And you're getting paid subsistence wages to do that thing. That's, you're already essentially living the dream.

You're just hoping it gets a little bit better. Yeah. Yeah. I had a, I had a long haul trucking job that I was doing concurrently with that just to make ends meet. Yeah. Um, and that's, I just had to really scrape by it. But he told me later, he said, you know, I had another student that had kind

of had done the normal path to be in line for that job. But he's just like, you were so persistent and I knew how badly you wanted it that I decided to go with you. And and so I'm really glad he did because it did launch my whole career. Yeah, no, that's fascinating. Yeah, I think sometimes people like they want like a mentor or they want, you know, to be someone's protégé. And they think it's this kind of like official thing that you're like anointed. And I always sort of compare it to like dating someone. Like, you meet them, you strike up a conversation,

you go on what was kind of a date, then you go on more of an official date, then you're hanging out together, and then one day you look at each other and you're like, are we together? And you're like, yeah. And then one day, they're like, you're like, I think we kind of love each other, right?

It's like, it's a thing that ensues rather than something you pursue. And in fact, if you tell the person, like the first day you met, you meet them, like, I'm looking to get married to you. They're going to like, this is a creep, right? Like you, you have to trust the process and also love the, the intermediate stages enough to just sort of let it be what it's going to be. Totally. Totally. I definitely agree with that. And for me, speaking to that same point, for a lot of people that do what I do, their master's degree or their

PhD, and they'll see is kind of that intermediary part where they're kind of putting in their time to be able to become a biologist. And that makes it a chore if you do view it that way. And for me, I've sometimes really missed those days because it was when I just got to be a pure scientist. The one thing I was focused on was getting that research done, getting my thesis finished. And it gave me a lot of flexibility that you don't get when you go and work for, say,

the park service or someone else like that. So I do think I completely agree kind of relishing that middle point when you're working toward a goal is a really important lesson to learn. Yeah, you have to look. I mean, yeah, you love those days. I remember Robert Green who is the person I serve at Princeton, or one day he sort of had to go like, you can't work for me anymore. And I was like, what do you mean?

You know, like, because to me, I've wanted to keep doing it forever and at a certain point, he's like, no, I need someone who has less going on. Like I need someone at a different stage in their life. And there's also almost a fairness issue to it. Like you can't hold on to the spot because someone behind you deserves a shot too. But yeah, you got to love, you have to love the torture of it and the purity of the thing.

That's what allows you or qualifies you to be the more professional version of it earlier. But then yeah, you look back. I wrote my first book and I was still kind of a researcher when I lived in New Orleans and I was just back there. I was doing a talk and I sort of walked by the apartment that I lived in and I was just, it struck me. I was like, I used to live here. I was the same person, but literally all I had going on was that one thing. I didn't have kids, I didn't have responsibilities. I didn't have any money, I didn't have responsibilities. I didn't have any money, but I also didn't need any money. And I was just like, I was just present in the joy of it.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I love simplicity. For me, I'm a big fan of only taking on as much to where I can handle it because once I overdo it, I lose that simplicity and life becomes a bit of a chore for me. And I'm a believer in hard work, but I also am a believer in enjoying life too and doing whatever you can to get the most out of life and having experiences. So for me, I definitely don't like putting too much on my shoulders. Well, speaking of handling stuff, I got to imagine it's one thing to look at thousands of

pictures or hours of video of a polar bear. And it's something very, very different to be within a hundred feet of a polar bear. So walk me through the first time, professionally, I maybe had some in your childhood, but walk me through when the theory or the love of the the National Geographic version of the bears becomes, holy shit, that's a grizzly bear. Yeah, that, you know, for me, I started in polar bears. And I was working on a study where we are studying, um, dending females. So with polar bears, the only time you ever, if you're born a male polar bear, the only time you're ever in a den is when you're born. And then you spend the rest of your life outside of a den.

You don't hibernate, you hunt in the winter. Um, but females, when they're pregnant and then you spend the rest of your life outside of a dent. You don't irony, you hunt in the winter, but females when they're pregnant, they go back into dents. And we were looking specifically at female polar bears on the oil industry and how oil industry might be affecting them. And that, because that was such a vulnerable time for them, we really didn't do much hands-on and rarely would I see bears outside of their dens. But there is kind of with them, there's always this ever-present threat of like a rogue male polar bear that's gonna decide to chase you down. You do have to constantly be thinking about them when you're in polar bear, have a tattoo. So I think that's where that thought first became really real to me.

But then I think more of what you're getting at, when I'd start my black bear work, in my specific project, we would, we were coloring black bears. We'd put a GPS collar on the bears. And then these are bears that are hibernating, they're denning in the winter. And when the bear goes into its den, it presents us with a really good opportunity

to know exactly where that bear is, and have it in a somewhat controllable environment. So we can go in and actually check that collar out, make sure the fit isn't too tight, see if the batteries are, if they need replacing, there's a few different things we can do while they're in the den. But they are a very kind of weak hibernator, I guess, to be the word.

It's almost more of what we call it, a light sleeper. A light sleeper, yeah. They're not, like, fully almost dying like a ground squirrel or other hibernators do. They are hibernating. Their metabolism slows down. A lot of different things happen to their bodies, but they can come out of it really quickly. So when we do these den visits, we are always aware of the fact that the bear might be up

and it might not be super happy to see us. Why would it be happy to see you at all, ever? Yeah, exactly. There's one den in particular that was like an 80 foot long den, which was very like a non-likely den. Typically they're very shallow, but this bear managed to find this cave that just was like a tube that went 80 feet down into the mountain.

And I had to crawl in with this bear, well, it was crawling out toward me. And it's just, you really have to confront this very primal part of the human psyche to crawl into a really dark hole, knowing that there's a bear on the other side of it, and watching the bear the whole time as it's watching you. And so that was definitely very scary and kind of more the national geographic thing

you're talking about. Well, yeah, I imagine, and when I was saying national graphic, I mean, the sort of the pictures of bears versus being on that scene for the first, like, you know, that now the bears coming out of the magazine and is a real ferocious living thing. Yeah. At the same time, you know, the more you learn about them, the more you understand their

behavior, the more you understand the subtle little cues that an animal will give you when it is upset or when it's, you know, for whatever reason it's angry at you or being aggressive or defensive. And so, you know, as you get more and more in those kind of situations, you also get more and more comfortable. And you don't wanna cross that boundary

where you're too comfortable with a wild animal. But it does help to kind of navigate those kind of situations. Yeah, I mean, I've never hunted for a bear or anything, but I found that it doesn't matter what you're hunting, you know, you're up in the tree, you're walking or whatever. When you see the thing that you're looking for, there is this rush of adrenaline and hormones and presence, you know, that must go back, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of years, right?

This is like, this is, in the sense that the bears are bred to do certain things, this is a thing that we're bred to do, right? And it's, but because we don't really do it that much anymore, it's an overwhelming dump of, you know, chemicals and emotions that you're not ordinarily processing and you don't quite understand how and what to do with all that energy. Totally.

It's like, it's stuff that we, like you said, it's stuff we, you know, anciently as humans had to deal with every single day, those kind of feelings and that kind of primal response to another creature. And now it's something that very few people ever really have to encounter. And when you do it is, it can be overwhelming. It's like the adrenaline and the fear and everything hitting you at once, it's hard to explain. But it also is something that makes you feel very alive and makes you kind of feel like primal man probably felt and feel these kind of things that have been dormant for a very long time.

And it is somewhat addicting even. It's funny, I talk to lots of people and a good chunk of those people haven't been readers for a long time. They've just gotten back into it. And I always love hearing that and they tell me how they fall in love with reading, they're reading more than ever. And I go, let me guess, you listen audiobooks, don't you?

And it's true. And almost invariably, they listen to them on Audible. And that's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks don't you? And it's true, and almost invariably they listen to them on Audible. That's because Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs, and of course, ancient philosophy, all my books are available on audio, read by me for the most part. Audible lets you enjoy all your audio entertainment in one app. You'll always find the best of what you love, or something new to discover, and as an Audible member you get to choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog, including the latest best sellers and new releases. You'll discover thousands of titles from popular favorites, exclusive new series, exciting new voices in audio. You can check out stillness is the

key, the daily dad I just recorded. So that's up on audible now coming up on the 10 year anniversary of the obstacle is the way audio books. so all those are available and new members can try Audible for free for 30 days visit audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500 That's audible.com slash daily stoke or text daily stoke to 500 500 Is this thing all check one two one two Hey y'all I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress a singer an entrepreneur and a Virgo I'm just the name of you now I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki Palmer, I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me Kiki

Keep a Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a Bag Love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started, and there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will former child stars be if they weren't actors?

What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These are the questions that keep me up at night. But I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast.

Hey, prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Yeah, like when I'm driving and I see a deer, I'm like a deer, right? But if I'm sitting in the tree blind in the back of my property and there's nothing, there's nothing, the sun comes up and then the deer shows up. As you expected it to, as you've trained it to, suddenly though you feel and experience this thing that happens all the time, right? A deer, I see one, right?

Right. You experience it completely differently. And yeah, you feel very, very alive in a way that obviously were meant to feel alive. But it's totally. It's strange and surreal. You sort of realize you're an animal in that moment. Yeah, and honestly, that's part of the reason why I got into bear conservation specifically to begin with is the fact that

I did grow up around grizzly bears. And for me, that's an animal that when you are in grizzly country, it's very different from a black bear, you know, a mountain lion where in grizzly country, you really need to pay attention to what you're doing. You do need to be careful. There needs to be this heightened awareness because they are much more aggressive and a much more territorial animal than anything else out there, aside from maybe a moose. So when you're out there hiking around, you have to pay attention to your surroundings and it does. you have to pay attention to your surroundings and it does, it amplifies the whole experience. It makes the colors brighter, it makes the smell stronger, it just makes everything more

kind of intense and I love that feeling. It's like a feeling of true wilderness for me and it's something that you can't get when those large predators aren't there. Like you don't feel that when you're in central park necessarily, unless you're worried about someone mucking you or something like that. But as far as a large animal predator, that's the only way for me to get that feeling. That's why I feel so indebted to them and feel such a strong resolve to conserve them. Yeah, I mean, the mountain lion knows you're there before you know it's there and it's avoiding you, right? Exactly.

Like, unless it's some freak encounter or set of circumstances, the mountain lion is actively scurrying away and avoiding you. And if it is gonna hurt you, you probably won't know it until you feel it's teeth on the back exactly. Whereas the grizzly bear is much more of this sort of alpha,

I'm using words in precisely here, but it's sort of the ruler of the rules sort of walking around like you're in its territory and it will not hesitate to let you know that. And there's not really many other animals in North America that that's true for. Exactly. You hit on the perfect point there, like with a mountain lion or other big cats, when they attack a person, it's almost always to predate on them.

You know, that that lion for whatever reason decided that you were a meal. And that's such a rare thing for them to decide that, that it hardly ever happens. And every once in a while, bear will do that too. But what's much more common with grizzly bears is just them seeing you thinking, oh, this is a threat.

I'm going to neutralize it. And they just hit you with everything they got because they're a fight animal and not a flight animal. And like you said, that's not a common thing among animals to be fight, to go to that fight side rather than the flight side. And you do see it with like moose. Sometimes we'll do it. Grizzly bears, animals like hippos and elephants.

Kind of these big animals that know their top dog will sometimes decide to just neutralize the threat rather than run away from it. And those are the ones you really have to kind of constantly be thinking about because it's much more likely that happens than an animal decides to eat you. Well, I actually just saw a tweet about this the other day speaking of hippos and it was saying, what's so strange about hippos?

The hippos are like a hippo won't eat you, right? Like a hippo is not interested in you for food in any sense of the work. That's not what they do. Like, it's pure aggression and dominance and anger, basically, we're projecting some human emotions there, but like the, use the word neutralizing, it's like, I don't like you, you cross some sort of invisible trip wire and it's game over for you, dude.

Yeah, yeah. They're actually, there was a recent study, I think, 2015 that showed that they actually do every once in a while eat other animals that they kill. So it's not impossible that a hippo that attacks you might want to eat you. But yeah, 99% of the time, it's just a hippo wanting to, again, neutralize a threat, or it's just pissed off that you're in its area and it wants you out of there. And unfortunately when you have two-foot-long K-9s, that can be a very devastating encounter for the human. Well, I mean, and then also, like I've got, I'm looking outside of my, my donkey's wandering around and it's like,

I've watched my donkey get upset at like, coyotes and straight, actually straight dogs are like the number one predator out in where I live. And like watching what you don't think of as like, an offensive animal, do you know what I mean? Like an animal with any sort of means of like protecting or attacking, watching the donkey run while doing this thing with its feet to get at what it doesn't like. You're just sort of like, speaking of tooth and claw, you're like, man, nature is violent

and elite in its ability to do what it wants to do and to punish what it wants to punish. Yeah, that's a great way to sum it up. All these animals have survived to this point because they're either good at, you know, wording off a predator or they're good at being a predator. So they they've developed those tools to make that that happen and and we need to be careful around them. When how far back it goes, right? It's like Zebra's aren't as defenseless as you think they are. And you can watch a video of a zebra killing a cheetah or what at like like they the equilibrium of evolution, right? That for every advantage that a grizzly bear or a lion or a leopard has, it would become a nature would not be sustainable if it was not checked by the defensive or in other cases,

offensive weapons that the other species have. And just sort of, the tension of that is both beautiful and, I don't even want to say reassuring, but there is an elegance to it. There is, for sure. And I think the only way to pull yourself outside of that cycle is to develop new technology. And that's how humans have managed to kind of be outside of all of that and like it's not necessarily

Evolutionary advantage that are developed over millennium that have put us in our top spot It's the fact that we were intelligent enough to come up with technology to make us dominant Which is much to the detriment of many other species for sure? You know And I'm speculating here, because it's again, a random thing I read on the internet and this is probably outside your area of expertise. But speaking of humans in that sense, like, you know, that we've done all these experiments over the years of like teaching monkeys sign language and trying to communicate with them and all this stuff.

And what this person was saying, and again, it could not be true, but it's true enough to consider, I think, which is it was saying that monkeys will communicate with humans in this sense. But it's usually to ask for stuff. It's never to ask questions to acquire knowledge. So what I was sort of extrapolating, and interpreting from that is a sort of an ego,

a primitive ego of the monkey or the chimp doesn't think that it has anything to learn from the humans. It's not saying, how do I do this? How do I do this? It might be saying, do this? Can you do this for me? But it's not saying like, how does this work, right? And that that's really our ultimate capacities as the human species is our curiosity, our hunger to learn and our our desire to emulate, are, desire to emulate steel, you know, other forms of knowledge from other animals, other people, other, other human beings and on down the line.

Totally. And I think something there too that's really interesting. And, and this is like, we talk in tooth and claw, we talk a lot about animal attacks and what we can learn from them and how you can better understand why it's usually the person that did something wrong and not so much the animal being a bloodthirsty monster. It's the animal acting, you know, in accordance with its natural behavior. And the thing there, like the thing, kind of the base line for every single animal out there

is that it's just really, I mean, they're trying to survive and they're trying to breed. And that's about it, you know? Those are the two things they're trying to do. They're, like you said, they're trying to survive and they're trying to breed. And that's about it. Those are the two things they're trying to do. Like you said, they're not worried about culture, about necessarily bringing all this new knowledge and what not into their community. And there are animals that do have a culture.

And I shouldn't say, I am kind of dumbing this down. And there are kind of wider ways to breach out from that. But as far as like those baseline kind of reptile brain things that every single animal has, it's survival and it's reproduction. And if you view an animal from that viewpoint and you kind of think, okay, you know, what is this animal trying to do? You can learn a lot about how to interact with them and how to respond to an encounter. You brought up mountain lions earlier.

I think if a mountain lion, if you encounter a mountain lion when you're out hiking, it sees you and there's, you may not know this, but there's this calculus kind of running through its brain, deciding if you're prey or if you're a threat. Those are kind of the two options. And if you act like a threat, then the mountain lion suddenly decides, okay, I don't want anything to do with this. I'm out of here. Like, I'm getting out of this situation. And if you act like prey, if you turn and run, then it's like, oh, that's, that's what food does. Like food runs for me. I'm going to chase this

thing down. And so just understanding on a base level, those kind of real baseline natural behaviors and animals can take you a long way in being safer when you're out in the wilderness. Right. It's like you can't communicate to it, but you can help inform what category it's putting you in. And they're pretty bienn area categories. Yeah, we call that messaging. So like, you know, sometimes like just the messaging that you do between you and the animal can be, can determine how that that interaction is going to go.

So yeah. And I imagine a lot of that communication, particularly with the mountain lion or whatever, like by the time you encounter the animal, a lot of your opportunity to message is gone. Exactly. Yeah. So like you silently walking through the woods, just like, you know, the way you're swimming

in the ocean on your surfboard in your black wetsuit, you know, looking like from the bottom, indistinguishable from a seal. Like you've already told the shark or whatever most of what it needs to know. By the time, you know, it's about to get you, you've already said everything that needs to be said. Right, right. So a huge part of these interactions are prevention.

Like you said, if you're hiking through the forest, if you're a bow hunter and you're being really quiet and you're using out calls and you're just being as silent and as stealthy as you possibly can in a grizzly country, you're already removing a lot of the safeguards that you could have had before having that encounter. You're already putting yourself in a position where you might have a very up close encounter with the Grizzly bear, where otherwise,

had you been hiking in a group of friends and making loud noises, that bear takes off a few hundred yards before you even see it. So I do it. And a thing that's really important there, we're kind of getting into my bread and butter here. But if you encounter an animal then at a really close distance where you could have given

it a lot more time to react, you're really eliminating that animal's decision making. You're forcing it to make a really quick rapid decision and with an animal like a grizzly bear or a great white shark or something like that, a lot of times that decision is going to be to engage rather than disengage if it's a really up close and personal kind of encounter. So that's the thing to do. It's bred to do that and it's bred to win those encounters. Right. Exactly. They know they'll win. Yeah. It's not intimidated by that and it's bred to win those encounters. Right, exactly.

They know when. Yeah, it's not intimidated by them. Yeah, exactly. And honestly, I agree, white might not be the best example of that, but like a moose or grizzly bear or bull elephant. One of these animals that just, if you're too close, it's going to let you know. One of the things I always like, you know when you had to like them,

but you know when you watch like a fight video on the internet, it's like two guys at a bar fighting, yeah, or you know, whatever, something breaks out in a high school and you're watching the fights. It's always struck me just how animalistic isn't even what I mean, but like how like,

like now we have this like the artificial intelligence, I bet artificial intelligence could script a human fight video with like Komet me bro. What are you doing? Like the boxing stance that humans go into. It's funny to, it's, it's comical and funny, although obviously violent and horrific and, you know, when you zoom out and you forget that these are two human beings inflicting potentially mortal harm on each other. You go, this is like two kangaroos doing exactly what kangaroos do. And this is what two bull elephants do. And a grizzly bear that like we are, we go into a place that's indistinguishable from the sort of same dynamic we're talking about with predators in the wild.

Yeah, without a doubt, I think as much as we try to separate ourselves from the natural world, when we're forced to kind of, you know, act on instinct and act on our most base behaviors. We very much realize, like, oh, we are animals. We're part of these systems. We act in the same kind of ways. So, yeah. And, but again, the difference in humans is that you can train, and you can either,

you can train yourself to be above that, to resist the provocation, to disengage, right? Total. And also, as we see in martial artists and boxers, etc. Like a lot of the things that humans naturally do in these encounters, right? The sort of charging, swinging wildly. These are like what we have learned is that these are the absolute worst

things to do. And people who know what they're doing have very easy counters to these things. And, you know, the last thing you want to do is meet one of those people in a fight because your flood of emotion, wild response, is actually makes you incredibly vulnerable, and that's when you get your clocked cleaned or worse. Totally. Yeah, and I think in some ways that is again, like something that you can extrapolate to the natural world where if you do prepare yourself for animal encounters

and you prepare yourself in it, and you know, if you listen to our podcast or if you go through these different kind of brochures and everything, all the safety information out there, you can be prepared in a way that it doesn't remove you from the risk, but it much reduces the risk. And that can be as simple as carrying bear spray in grizzly bear country, or, you know, if you're surfing, like surfing, avoiding murky water and avoiding surfing at dusk or dawn, little things like that can greatly reduce your risk of having an encounter that ends in injury.

Well, so to go to the name of the podcast, I'm assuming it's a reference from Tennyson, right, red and to nature, red and tooth and claw. Exactly. Yeah. There is something about nature that's beautiful and lovely, and then there's also something that's just so sobering and humbling in its cruelty and violence and utter indifference to any one individual. Yeah, totally. I think there's another, there's an E.O. Wilson quote, where he says, we love our monsters,

and he's talking about predators, and the human fascination with predators. And it speaks to that kind of morbid fascination with these predator prey dynamics. I think even with like, you know with a lot of people's fascination with true crime kind of taps into those same things, where these are things that were inherently biologically, evolutionarily terrified of,

but that terror and that fear also leads into fascination and interest and kind of this primal response that you can't get anywhere else. And I do think, you know, we use that, in Tooth and Claw, in the podcast, we use that kind of connection and relationship to pull people into these stories

because I do think they're interesting stories to people because of that fascination. And then we use that kind of like gore and shock to educate and to actually teach people, okay, this isn't a monster. This is actually an animal that was behaving very naturally or an animal that had been confronted in a way that it reacted defensively to what the human was doing.

And then again, kind of putting on top of that a conservation message, where it's like, okay, we just learned about a tiger shark that decided to attack someone and feed on them, which is awful. But also, let's look at the fact that we're killing, you know, 70 to 100 million sharks every year. And so I'm not saying that makes the loss of human life justified, because it does. And I think, you know, like it's always a huge tragedy when those kind of things happen, but we're definitely a much, much, much larger threat

to every single animal we talk about on the podcast than they are to us. And it does kind of weigh it. It's interesting, right? The Stoics have this notion of sympathy that we're all part of this sort of enormous ecosystem. We all have this small role in it and that we all sort of have these obligations to each other.

But yeah, there is this sort of fundamental human egocentrism that is thinking about, you know, the rise in, yeah, shark attacks or this or that. And then totally ignoring the fact that not even intentionally, like putting aside like the intentional, we're just devastating these exact same animals and have waged a ruthless,

almost genocidal campaign against them and their ancestors for pretty much the entire time we've been on this planet. Yeah, and the human cultures that have relied on them, historically, you know, they're also being, they're also victims in that fight. And I think a big, a big kind of culprit in all of that, too, is the media because they really like to stoke the fear of,

like the flames of fear when these kind of things happen. Like whenever there's a shark attack, there's almost always the phrase shark infested waters, which to me is so silly. Because that's regular water. The ocean where they live, that's their home. Like, that's, you know, their human infested waters is what they are.

Sure. Like, we don't belong there. And they are, like, it's great that we're able to go to the ocean and recreate in the ocean and do all the things we do in the ocean, but that's their home. And so I do think you know that that kind of messaging and that kind of talking about, you know, how we frame these kind of interactions is so important. Because if you do make people think that a shark or a grizzly bear or a bangle tiger or whatever is a bloodthirsty monster,

then people don't really care when they're killed. It doesn't really matter to them because they see it as a threat, not as something that's living its life and reacting naturally. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident

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So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Well, yeah, I think about where you live and, you know, the massive success of the reintroduction and the protection of wolves and grizzly bears and bison, you know, instead of being this shared success story, you know, is seen by a lot of people as a threat. And I go back and forth because I get it, right? Like I have cows and donkeys and goats that I love

that if something was ruthlessly killing them, you know, the reassurance that this is natural or part of the ecosystem that this is a success story, that would be hard for me to celebrate or understand as an individual. And yet, I didn't move my cows next to the historic homeland of said, not just majestic species, but keystone species. Yeah, I do think that's something that people often

don't really understand about wildlife biology is how much of it is actually interacting with stakeholders in those ecosystems and figuring out ways to make sure that this balance kind of is able to persist. And you brought up a really good example of that, which is a current one with grizzly bears. There's been a lot of protection for grizzly bears

in Montana historically. Montana was even one of the first states to outlaw hunting grizzly bears with dogs. That was a long time ago when there was a full on war on predators. Montana was progressive enough to realize, OK, this is an animal we want to keep around. And even recently, they got to numbers in the Yellowstone ecosystem where we should have

pulled them off the endangered species list. They were there. Like, it was a conservation success story. But because of the attitudes of a lot of people in those ecosystems that just wanted to kill bears. I mean, they're ready to just kill them. A lot of biologists, including myself, were really nervous about celebrating that decision and saying, hey, let's pull them out at the Endangered Species List. Because then you might see what's happening with wolves, where suddenly laws that are

very liberal about the killing of wolves are passed, where it's like, hey, a 100 can kill an entire pack if they want. And if it's, if you have that kind of same response with grizzly bears, an animal that's slow to reproduce, slow to repopulate, it can be devastating. And so that human element of wildlife biology is very important. And it's kind of like what you're saying that, I do agree that if you live in a place, if you decide, hey, I want to move to Montana because it's so wild and beautiful,

and it has this kind of feeling that other places don't have, you need to accept that, part of the reason it's that way is because there's grizzly bears on the landscape. And if you decide to bring a slow moving prey animal into their habitat, it's gonna happen. Like it's just going to. And that's part of living in Montana, in my opinion,

that's just like, that's the appeal. Well, you bred these animals to be talking about, you bred the horns off of them. Right. You bred them to be fatter than they ordinarily would be. Slower than they would be. More docile than they were. You bred them to be easy pickings

and then you're wondering why something is picking them off. Right, right. And doing it indiscriminately, exactly. I mean, you hear these stories of wolves going in and killing dozens, if not hundreds of sheep. But it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're a wolf wolves going in and killing dozens if not hundreds of sheep. But it's like, yeah, I mean, if you're a wolf and you have to fight for your survival every single day

and you suddenly can surplus kill a hundred sheep, you might do it, you know? And it's just, it's unfortunate. And I agree with you, you know, we had some chickens recently at my house that were killed by a fox. And it's sad. It sucks.

It's like, ah, shoot, I put a lot of time into raising these chickens. I wish that I would have taken more precautions to protect them from that fox, but I don't blame the fox for being a fox. Like, that's what they do. Yes. But I think that triggers a very human thing,

which is like, we are protective of vulnerable things in our orbit, right? Totally. What dogs, babies, you know, children, et cetera. And so there's a, I think, a part of us that's noble, right? The same thing that makes us care about, I don't know, something some violence happening overseas or whatever, is triggered when I walk out to my group,

I'm looking at it out the window, and yeah, there's the remains of 10 chickens just eviscerated. I, that, it's like, I let them down. I screwed up. I want to go punish and prevent this thing from happening again. That's a human impulse that's led to a lot of bad things but also a lot of good things. And then you're not, but when you direct that at a wolf,

you're not teaching the wolf a lesson because it's not the same and it's hard to, just it comes down to this very idea of like, you have to accept these things happen and that your chickens were born to be killed. I remember we had these, we had these geese and we have this goose that was our favorite. And one time I got attacked by a predator and I got sort of like a viscerated, but it survived. We went to the vet, you know, paid like $500 to get this goose sowed up, you know, something you like a more seasoned country person

would never do. And then, you know, promptly like six weeks later, it gets totally eaten, right? Like it just disappears. And it struck me as I watched the other geese waddle back to the house, not even thinking about it, right? And going like, I'm sadder about this than they are. And there's a DH Lawrence line, he says, you know, a wild thing has never felt sorry for itself. Yeah. And realizing that these are human emotions we're projecting on the animals.

Totally. To them, it's a fact of life. Yeah, it's just like that's daily life for an animal. Like a goose or a chicken worrying about predators I and I think I think you know when it comes to these kind of conflicts between you know ranchers and And large predators. I I do want to clarify I think if you're a rancher in Montana and you walk out your door And there's a wolf attacking your livestock. I think you're well within your rights to put that wolf down

I do what what doesn't sit right with me is if you then decide there's a wolf attacking your livestock. I think you're well within your rights to put that wolf down. I do. What doesn't sit right with me is if you then decide, a wolves don't belong here, I'm gonna campaign to get rid of all of wolves or all the wolves or I'm gonna go and get my wolf tag and try and kill that entire pack. That to me is the best thing.

I'm gonna leave out poison as humans have done for hundreds of years. To me, that's where the disconnect is. That's where someone doesn't understand that they're just part of that system. They're a cog in that wheel. And if you decide that you want to take that away from another animal, you're really being very egotistical. Although I remember I read an interesting op-ed.

It was some activist in Africa. Remember when that dentist killed that famous lion, Cecil? And she wrote something, she was like, obviously, this isn't right. But she's like, you know, it's very easy for you Americans having killed all your lions to tell us what to do about ours. And they're what that did. It's sort of, I will. I never thought about it that way. And it is very easy to sit in a state, for instance, like Texas that's gotten rid of 90% or probably 99% of bears,

unless you live in Big Bend or something, to then pontificate or try to legislate what other people should have to live with in places where the idea is not so theoretical. Definitely. Yeah, I think you always have to check yourself when you get into those kind of debates and think about what kind of stake you actually have in there and if you are coming from a good place when you talk about it. Yeah, I 100% agree with that, but I do think in these Western states that are really growing quickly, like my home state of Montana, a lot of the people that are the loudest, angry as voices are people that have moved here in the last couple of years, you know? And they suddenly feel this ownership, and I don't think it's wrong to move to a new place and feel ownership over the piece of land that you bought. But I do think it speaks to a certain type

of American viewpoint, thinking that suddenly because you own that land, you own all the creatures and animals that have historically used that habitat. And for me, that's just, I don't know, it's a little misguided. It's a lot misguided. I love this term. I think it's a Gen Z term,

but they call it main character energy. Have you heard this? Totally. We have a lot, as a species, but then as Americans, and then Americans of certain political persuasions. Definitely. There's a lot of main character energy going on.

Yes, there is. And it's very loud. It's often the loudest voice in the room. So yeah, I agree with you. That's definitely a common problem. And I do think people that tend to gravitate toward Western living do tend to be from certain persuasions and tend to have that energy in force. Well, my friend, Jeff, who turned me on to your stuff,

he's a big fan, he and I were talking a couple years ago about wild hogs, and that's the predator out here, right? Is there's like several million wild hogs in Texas. And you know, they tear up big chunks of my property. They also make for delicious eating. I hunt them from time to time. But I said something about how they're like invasive pests. And he said, you know, they date to the same time

that we came here, right? He's talking about European settlers. Like the Spanish and the French brought the we came here, right? You're talking about European, like European settlers, like they're the Spanish and the French brought the horse here, like 400 years ago. And thinking about it that way, it was interesting to me, because it's like, yeah, we were, we were both artificial European things that were imported to America and then infested to use your word earlier. Yeah. And it's not so fair to be harsh to one and then watch as they build a track housing development, not far from here either. Those are two different forms of invasion.

Yeah, I think if you were to stack up the ecological destruction caused by European settlers and European hogs, it's definitely gonna be very heavily against us. So yeah. Do you ever see, like, bringing it back to bears? Like, there's clips of bears like on game cameras and they'll just grab a hog like in one bite. Like, yeah, they're good at it.

I mean, that like, it's usually black bears because a lot of those wild hogs are in the south where they overlap with black bears and black bears tend to be a they're pretty highly vegetarian. They're mostly eating grass and berries and that sort of thing, acorns, but they're an animal that are they're very opportunistic. They don't turn down an easy meal. So if they happen to stumble upon a family of hogs and it's able to grab one at will and that's a great boon for a black bear. So yeah, I've seen a few of those.

It's impressive. Yeah, I mean, that's a, it's just a couple, you know, dozen pounds of protein just walking around. Totally. That's like the best possible thing for a bear. Yeah, and it makes you realize how, you know, like, and just walking around. Totally. That's like the best possible thing for a bear. Yeah. And it makes you realize how, you know, like, if you were to try and tackle one of those hogs and hold it down, you wouldn't be able to physically, it would be, it would be

really hard. I mean, there's probably people out there that have learned how to do that, but it's not easy. And for Black Bear, it's nothing. And it makes you realize like, we're very lucky they don't see us as a food source. It's that it's rare that they ever do decide to feed on us because if they did, it wouldn't be hard for them to take us out. I mean, I'm not saying as a population, but individual people, it's not hard for a bear to subdue you and to eat you and to literally sit on

top of you and feed on you while you're slowly bleeding out. I mean, that's not outside of their power. Yeah, I mean, even getting, I was hunting hogs once, they were over in my neighbor's place NASPIT. If I won them, I went over again and I sure shot at once and there's these big, thick things. You know, it didn't knock it. I was shooting up with like a 232, maybe. No, 243. And then this two, 300 pound hog turns and charges me. And you know, I'm never gonna hunt like any real predators.

That's not really my thing. But in that moment where that thing is coming at you and it's angry and you have to very quickly reload a bull action rifle, it gives you a taste of what both what the humans are able to do in those moments, but then also just, you know, what nature can, like, you know, it's one of those, you're like, oh, shit, this is real, totally.

Yeah. And I think that backs up my earlier point of, like, if you are a predator and your daily job is to subdue something like that, you have to weigh your wrists. You have to decide if it's worth it. And if you're a mountain lion, and like if you break a leg as a mountain lion or something or if a hog gores you, and you can't move the way you used to be able to move, it's a death sentence for you. It came over.

Yeah, you're going to die. And so that's why they don't like to take risks that they don't have to take. Yeah, it's not worth it for them. A grizzly bear can break its leg and it'll probably be okay, but a mountain lion can't do that. So, that's just a really important lesson is that every single animal out there is constantly doing a risk analysis. And once you learn that, you can kind of figure out what's worth it to them.

No, and we're more similar to that than we probably think we are too, right? Like our ability to go what risks are worth it, what's the cost benefit here? You know, we're also similar to the bear though, which is like, hey, we, that's probably the adaptive mechanism of the bear. The reason it can survive the leg breaking is that it can go live on berries for the next three months while it heals. Whereas the mountain lion can only do the one thing. Exactly. Yeah. Having that kind of plasticity is really, that's really why bears are able to be so successful. That's why a black bear can live on the fringes of human society.

are able to be so successful. That's why a black bear can live on the fringes of human society. Is it has this ability to exploit so many different food sources? And that's why humans are so successful too. We're really good at being adaptable. And the more adaptable in animal is often the better it can do. Like coyotes are another really good example of that, where no matter what we try and throw at coyotes, they adapt to it and they figure it out and they thrive because of it. And yeah, and unfortunately for everything else, we're the ultimate adapters. We're really good headed. Yeah, we're the coyotes, right?

Yeah, we are. We're the coyotes. And yeah, our ability to adapt and to adjust and to tweak. That's our strength. That's what makes this difficult to kill. It's also what puts us in conflict with so many different species, right? Like total. Have you read David Epstein's book, Range?

I haven't. No. It's really good. His point is, he quotes that famous line, I forget what it is, but it's a specialization is for insects is what it says, but it's, you know, a mountain lion does one thing like really, really well. And a bear does a bunch of things pretty well, and that's why bears can be so fucking big, because they've got some redundancies built in, right? That they're not having to hone every muscle and every, you know, thing. And human beings are, I think, we have range.

We can do a bunch of different things, not range in the sense that a mountain lion has a large range, but range in terms of a toolkit. Yeah. I mean, we've managed to survive in literally every single habitat on like a terrestrial habitat on the planet, which is insane when you think about it. That's not something that other animals are able to do. A really good example that I always think about, and this is again, when you think about conservation, there's some animals like a polar bear is a really good example where it is so niche in what it needs to survive.

It needs the fat of marine mammals to survive that if, you know, even the smallest changes to its ecosystem can affect its ability to hunt and to reproduce and to like pass its genes on. And so for a polar bear, something like climate change is a de-sentence. It's something that completely removes its platform for hunting and feeding. Whereas a grizzly bear or a black bear, they have this ability to kind of switch food sources. And in Yellowstone, we saw that grizzlies really depended on the white bark pine nuts as a, like kind of a cash crop for them. And we started losing those due to climate change and doose factors, and they've switched to other things. And you can only push them so far

before they kind of run out of other options, but having that kind of ability to track. They start in a trash. Yeah, exactly. And then they get in trouble, and then that's a problem for them. But it's something that not every animal has, and as we see these kind of huge conservation issues come out

and these mass extinctions of species, the ones we're gonna see go first are the ones that are so niche in their, in their kind of ecosystems and their natural behavior. That's fascinating, man. Thank you so much. I think that's a great spot to stop. Yeah, great, perfect.

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