00:00:14 Speaker 1: My name is Clay Nukeleman. 00:00:16 Speaker 2: This is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called The Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual bear Grease podcast, presented by f HF Gear, American Maid, purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. 00:00:41 Speaker 3: I'm a little disappointed with I was listening to the podcast and the ad came on for the. 00:00:51 Speaker 4: Dog, the company that makes. 00:00:52 Speaker 3: The callers right, Yeah, And I feel like I feel like Jud's been Lloyd that he shouldn't get a bad rap on a commercial. 00:01:04 Speaker 4: Did Jed my coon dog? That's not very good? 00:01:10 Speaker 2: Jed oh Man. Yeah, all of a sudden, like some somehow, when I'm in my office alone recording the podcast. 00:01:23 Speaker 1: Ads that seemed completely fair might have been late at night. 00:01:27 Speaker 4: Now now it. 00:01:30 Speaker 2: Seems really it seems really Wronged is getting really old. 00:01:35 Speaker 1: Jed has been. 00:01:36 Speaker 2: When I see Jed walking through my yard, who's now like fully retired, he's just a yard dog. He has reverted Brent to wearing out a rabbit race. Really oh, he runs rabbits all the time. He loves But for I've given Jed a bad rap. Jed has literally been on hundreds of coon trees, hundreds of coon tracks, and I took him three times after Fern died, and he ran backtrack three times, and so I gave up on him. 00:02:06 Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably not. 00:02:07 Speaker 4: Fair, is what I want to know. 00:02:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, probably, Jedi. 00:02:12 Speaker 4: I have been on literally thousands of trees and I didn't treat one of them either. So I like, have you ever treated a rabbit? Nope? 00:02:21 Speaker 1: Well I thank you for bringing that up, Josh. 00:02:24 Speaker 4: It just it hurts me a little bit for Jed. 00:02:27 Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what, Jed helped me early back in the Bare Hunting magazine days. 00:02:31 Speaker 1: You know, Jed would jump up on the desk. 00:02:35 Speaker 4: That was Alexis favorite everything. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he was. 00:02:40 Speaker 1: He's quite the hound. 00:02:41 Speaker 5: He's a character, you know, Jed. He doesn't have the strength he used to, but he doesn't know it. And Tim is a little more athletic than Jed. Can't get across the yard pretty fast. And when Jed sees it, you can see in his eyes he's like, yeah, let's go, and then he tries to do it and it just moves. 00:02:56 Speaker 2: Really. 00:02:57 Speaker 5: So, whenever I go on wall, the dogs always come with me, and Jed used to. We couldn't let Jed come with us because he, you know, who knows where he'd go holiday be going. 00:03:07 Speaker 6: But he moves pretty slow. 00:03:09 Speaker 7: Id you still can run with the dogs. 00:03:17 Speaker 4: You're getting smarter. 00:03:18 Speaker 2: Well, we've we've got a great crew here today. To my right, Josh Landbridge, spillmaker. I'm to Josh's right, doctor Misty Nukelem. Hello, have you here? Misty's right bear John Newcomb, who has something in his hand that we're going to talk about here in a minute too. All right, we've got a mystery guest skipping over. The mystery guest, Brent Reeves. Great to hear. I hear almost every day that people tell me they still think you're an under undercover game warden. 00:03:49 Speaker 1: Really almost daily. 00:03:51 Speaker 4: Really, I'm retired, man. 00:03:55 Speaker 2: You know how what a great play though would be? 00:03:57 Speaker 4: Though, Yeah, that would work. Here's here's the that is the ultimate undercover assignment thirty two years, seven months, and then we're going to tell everybody you retired and like like that guy. I'm like that guy in the Mountains of Living by Itself and the government sins a helicopter. 00:04:15 Speaker 2: We got to have you back like Rambo First Blood Part two, Colonel Troutman goes back to the penitentiary, gets Rambo out after that crazy night up in Port up in Oregon. You tell Northwest, Yeah, and then they call him out and go back into Vietnam to get those POWs. 00:04:35 Speaker 4: I'd go, it's kind of like your movie. I'd go, Okay, I wouldn't come out just to get. 00:04:39 Speaker 2: You our mystery guest, Our mystery guest. It's Kyle Carroll. Yeah, Kyle, awesome to have you. 00:04:45 Speaker 8: Man. 00:04:45 Speaker 1: Came all the way from north west Missouri. 00:04:48 Speaker 2: North of the river. 00:04:49 Speaker 7: Good to be here on a great Arkansas spring day. Yeah. Man. 00:04:53 Speaker 2: So I intentionally have held off like talking to Kyle before he got here. When the time I was on Meat Eater, Uh, Steve Ronella wouldn't talk to me before I came. 00:05:04 Speaker 1: I was there like a little early, and I was. 00:05:06 Speaker 2: Just like, what a jerk and uh, And then I realized it was actually, it's a podcast strategy, and other podcasts that I've been on people have done that, They've not wanted to talk to you beforehand. So Kyle came in and I was like, oh, sorry, I can't talk to you. 00:05:21 Speaker 7: But well, Brenda understand this. If you're on time, you're late five minutes early. I did send a text, don't shoot I'm coming in. 00:05:30 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:05:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, Now listen, y'all don't probably don't know this. 00:05:34 Speaker 2: Do you see this? This painting right here of Tecumsa. I put that on my Instagram a couple of weeks ago. This is a what kind of what medium is that? 00:05:45 Speaker 7: The original was an oil painting and oil oil oil on I think it was on linen, maybe oil on canvas, I'm not sure. 00:05:52 Speaker 2: But yeah, So Kyle is an artist, a distinguished artist, which we're getting very interested in. This is to surprise you. He's a he was a he's a retired game boarding Missouri. 00:06:04 Speaker 6: I didn't know that. 00:06:05 Speaker 2: I didn't know that those two things could exist in the same person. 00:06:08 Speaker 7: Two game boards in a room kind of sort of. 00:06:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, sustin or. 00:06:15 Speaker 6: Second. 00:06:16 Speaker 1: Yeah, So how long have you been doing art that you know? 00:06:22 Speaker 7: I started actually out of uh when I went to college as an art major, and and I had to decide the first year. 00:06:31 Speaker 6: A lot of art majors law enforcement or art. 00:06:33 Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, going on paint over hook yet. No, it was just I didn't really know for sure what I didn't know how to get in the business. I knew that I kind of wanted to work like for for Missouri Missouri Conservation Department, and I knew they had one artist, so I'm thinking, how's that gonna work, you know. And then about the same time I was interested in applying for the game boarding position. I was either going to be in Wyoming or Missouri because I was working in owming in the summers. And so the summer that freshman year, they decided that you had to have a full college degree to apply in Missouri to be to apply it as a game ward. Okay, so I went ahead and switched to biology as a major, and so I just I never really left it, but I didn't start doing anything professionally or really seriously until about ninety nine or two thousand. 00:07:23 Speaker 1: So you were always as a good artist, just naturally. 00:07:25 Speaker 7: Well yeah, I mean my mom kind of encouraged it, and I always I drew stuff in entertained my brothers and sisters, you know, on paper, and then I turned the paper like this, so it's moving pictures, you know. 00:07:37 Speaker 2: Nice. So what kind of stuff did you draw when you were a kid, Like if your notebook was out in front of you during class what would. 00:07:42 Speaker 7: Probably two things. It's either wildlife or there were bombs going off like bombs you know. 00:07:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So this where did you get this image of tacumsa because you painted it? But were you looking at an image? 00:07:59 Speaker 7: That's it interesting that you asked that because I was asked to do that for a project that was put together uh by David Wright, a good friend of mine in Tennessee and really probably the reason I'm in any kind of artists today is his mentorship. But he was working on that that gun in the end, the painting is actually a gun that's in the Museum of the Fur Trade that has the UH can be traced back to tokumps And so they wanted they add a group that went out and they actually let them photograph it, take it apart, and they made an exact replica. And then when that story was going to be in the magazine, they wanted a cover piece for it. So there there are no picture where you you know from your research, there's really no picture of takumpasas. So that's a compilation of just what we know that by the time he was prominent, the tattoos had kind of gone away because whites weren't tattooed, so the Indians were prior to that pretty tattooed. So it's just sort of what we know, what we think. 00:09:00 Speaker 2: We did have a couple of legitimate portrait artists that painted him, yes, and so you I guess you had seen those. 00:09:07 Speaker 7: I had seen those, and I use some of what matched up with what I'd read and so forth. The Ostrich plume was something that they had done before. 00:09:17 Speaker 1: That always throws me off. 00:09:19 Speaker 2: You kind of have this romantic idea of Native Americans wearing a feathered headband, but you think of a native bird and then that, and then it comes has this huge Ostrich plume. It's just interesting. 00:09:34 Speaker 1: Because that's what that's what they said he wore. 00:09:36 Speaker 7: I read it somewhere. 00:09:37 Speaker 2: Yes, yes, absolutely, he was described. You know, back in those days, they didn't have video, they didn't have photography, so writers wrote about what they saw to report back as journalism, and they described they would describe what comes to look like when he met with these US military generals and British guys, and he would often have this big white plume and is in. 00:10:01 Speaker 7: Yeah, well that's the original went to a collector in Ohio. Pretty close to where it comes was from. 00:10:07 Speaker 1: And how big was the original painting. 00:10:10 Speaker 7: I don't remember it. It's a little bit bigger than that. That's probably nine by twelve ish. I think what we did the Prince, but it was a little bit bigger, but I don't I don't remember. But it wasn't no, no, no, I. 00:10:22 Speaker 1: Thought I thought maybe a big one. Taking some heat for that. 00:10:28 Speaker 2: It's a it's a The beep that you just heard was not a burrito going off. It was not a garment. It was not a burrito in a microwave. It's a battery pack from my computer. Somebody, somebody wrote me a very long, thoughtful email this week about how they thought it was my laptop and they were worried that my laptop was going to die. And so I'm working on that. Actually, every time that beeps during a render, we're going to give away thirty Unty's favorite conservation organization. 00:11:02 Speaker 1: That's a joke. 00:11:03 Speaker 7: You know. One benefit of not being able to hear real well out of my left ear is I don't hear it. I did not hear the beat. 00:11:10 Speaker 1: Okay, it was loud. 00:11:12 Speaker 2: The oh shoot, oh, I was going to say, or is going to ask you, what's your favorite, Like, do you you have a bunch of art? I mean, like you've got a lot of this kind of pain. What's some of your favorites stuff you've done. 00:11:27 Speaker 7: I use what I like at least, and I'm not talking so much about what I do, but what I like, which is end up what I do some of is something that's historically accurate that portrays frontier people, whether it's natives or us or whatever in a historical setting, so you get all the You can use your imagination, but you can see this nice, beautiful historic setting with a historic scene in it that's accurate. Or if you're just doing figures, I like to make sure that the accouterments and the gun and everything's right for the time. So it's it's a little harder to do historic art than it is just to do a portrait. You can do a portrait, you do that with something historically, you still have to do the art well, but then you have to do some research. But that's the fun part because it comes out of stuff that we read, like what you read. 00:12:15 Speaker 4: The detail on this is unbelievable. The latest one that you did that I saw on your Instagram, that mutual surprise. 00:12:22 Speaker 7: That new one. 00:12:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what was that one. 00:12:24 Speaker 4: It's a guy that's a dude in the canoe, the trapper, I guess, and he's, yeah, sculling down next to the edge of the bank, and all of a sudden you see him. He's kind of taking a back and as a bear stand up looking at him there and they're looking at one another. 00:12:39 Speaker 1: That one you just kind of created out of your own mind. 00:12:42 Speaker 7: Yeah, that's not from any that's not from like a reference or anything. That's just I had. I had some good reference that I shot with a buddy in Tennessee. It with a that had made the dugout canoe and stuff, and so then I just put all that together. So sometimes you just make it up. 00:12:56 Speaker 4: It's fun. 00:12:57 Speaker 7: It's just I just posted it, okay, recent posting, So. 00:13:01 Speaker 2: Yeah, I got to see it. 00:13:03 Speaker 1: So were you ever? So you did some art for the Missouri Department. 00:13:07 Speaker 7: Of Actually I never did work for them as an artist. There might have been something in a magazine I can't remember in the past, but all the time I spent there was as an agent, as an illustration officer. 00:13:19 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to I want to come back to that. Uh, we got I want to come back to your game ward and stuff. Bart, What do you got there in your hand? This is the rough. 00:13:33 Speaker 9: Outline of self bow that I'm making an O Sage self bow. So right now I'm probably like five hours into this one. I've got the limbs to where they can bend in kind of just like the general shape of the bow. I don't have it quite though, to where it tell us what a self bow is. 00:13:53 Speaker 2: Someone who doesn't just knows that archery means something that shoots an arrow. 00:13:57 Speaker 4: Yep. 00:13:57 Speaker 9: So selfo woud pretty much just be like a one piece traditional bow that would be like carved out of a stave or like a log, so like it wouldn't be stacked wood like a lot of traditional bows one piece of. 00:14:15 Speaker 2: Wooden bows are laminated wood, like most re curves you would buy in the commercial market are multiple pieces of laminated wood. A self bow, it's made from one piece of wood. Yep, that's it, yep. And so it split like a an O Sage log. 00:14:33 Speaker 9: And then we cut off our place here yep, that's been sitting for a few years, and then just pretty much cut you know, the outline of this bow. 00:14:42 Speaker 1: And yeah, it takes a while it's pretty hard work. 00:14:45 Speaker 7: But how is that that dry? 00:14:48 Speaker 4: Is? 00:14:48 Speaker 7: How is it to draw? Because it looks like it'd be hard. 00:14:51 Speaker 9: Yeah, it definitely is because osage is real tough and the draw knife I have isn't very. 00:14:56 Speaker 2: Sharp, especially now. But yeah, Osage wood is. It's really interesting. We live where we live in western Arkansas. We're really on the Echo tone, which is the transition zone between the eastern deciduous forest and the Great Plains, and the os Geornge is kind of a plains type tree, and so a lot of times people are really surprised that we have os Jordan's Bow dark in this region. And even two hours away any direct well two hours south of here, you might thirty thousand dollars conservation the even two hours south of here, there's not very many Osa George. You get east of here very far, and there's not many. And so oce George is a wild wild wood. When you cut it with a chainsaw, it almost the wood chips almost glow literally, they're they're bright orange. And as the wood is exposed to the sunlight, it darkens and it ends up darkening into kind of this like deep robust orange. 00:16:11 Speaker 1: But right now it's almost yellow. 00:16:13 Speaker 6: Yeah, I was gonna say yellow is how describe it? 00:16:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, right now it is, but and unfortunately it doesn't keep that color. But uh yeah, Bears getting into some primitive archery, and the self bo is the most primitive methodology of making a bow. There's there's no more primitive way. 00:16:29 Speaker 4: So yeah, you won't find one of those where I live. A bow dark just two and a half hours from here. Yeah, and it's closer than that in a straight line. Yeah. Yeah, Bear's going primitive. 00:16:41 Speaker 3: So he's making a self bow until we get an at laddle season and then he's gone full on at laddle. 00:16:46 Speaker 4: Yeah, well it's going like that. Dude, what was that? What was that guy's name we did? You did the podcast on had the hair like Crystal Gale? 00:16:55 Speaker 2: Oh, who are we talking about? 00:17:01 Speaker 4: The guy the. 00:17:04 Speaker 1: Had the long hair? I met the guy about him? Oh, Louis Wetzel. 00:17:10 Speaker 4: Yeah, that's where Bears bears going. 00:17:16 Speaker 1: Pretty notorious. 00:17:17 Speaker 4: Uh criminal saying anything like that. 00:17:23 Speaker 6: Trying to figure out what you are saying. 00:17:26 Speaker 4: I thought I thought I had something to do with No, Okay, he's just going going through the woods and taking control. 00:17:34 Speaker 5: When Bear was a little boy, he would gather up, you know, all sorts of stuff, anything you could find, would rocks, pieces of metal, and he would make stuff out of it. 00:17:46 Speaker 6: And I always thought he was going to be an engineer. 00:17:50 Speaker 2: That reminds me of you know that, you know that memes of the Internet. You've all seen it, the meme on the Internet of John Daily Arkansas standing there in like a pair of like pink golf pants smoking a cigarette and then there's this like really prestigious looking golf guy looking at him, and it always said, yeah, is it Tiger Woods? 00:18:12 Speaker 6: And it says, slightly more famous, what my. 00:18:15 Speaker 2: Parents thought they wanted me to become and what I became. 00:18:21 Speaker 1: And the best one I've ever seen. 00:18:23 Speaker 2: Is it's John Daley and they've they've cropped a coonskin. 00:18:26 Speaker 1: Hat on it. 00:18:27 Speaker 2: He's holding the back of corn and the boat. And then it said what my parents wanted me to become, what I became. That's kind of like what you're saying. And you thought Bear would be an engineer, he still might be an engineer. 00:18:40 Speaker 3: He'seering that boat, that's right, Uh huh, Yeah, yep. 00:18:44 Speaker 6: I'm pretty happy with how Bears turned out. I'm good. 00:18:46 Speaker 1: He's not done yet. He's just a kid. 00:18:48 Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think he's head towards engineering though. 00:19:05 Speaker 2: So Kyle, you you were, you were a Missouri game more than for twenty seven years. Yeah, that's right, just patrol like you had. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: What region of the state, did you. 00:19:15 Speaker 7: In the northwest part? Okay, all the time? I pretty much before I grew up in the northwest part of the state. So that was rolling hills, prairie, you know, big coons nice And I was thinking on the way down here, how much that changed from when I started in nineteen eighty coons were forty dollars a piece, So what would that be in today's dollars seventy bucks or something? Be crazy, crazy, it'd be better. 00:19:40 Speaker 4: It'd be better than a dollar and a half, because that's what it is. 00:19:43 Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, an engineering that's I got a question about engineers. 00:19:49 Speaker 1: You can you can shoot me straight here. 00:19:51 Speaker 2: Okay, So we did this Donnie Baker's yes, yes, about Missouri. Yes, it occurred to me as we were doing this that that could I don't know. Did you feel like that in any way undermined the law enforcement people in Missouri at all? 00:20:13 Speaker 7: No? No, I didn't think so well, I thought it was fairly handled. I thought that was a hard hitting podcast. Holy cow. Yeah, though, I mean. 00:20:23 Speaker 2: Because I basically I didn't I didn't give them. I tried to get the guys that dealt with Donnie. 00:20:29 Speaker 1: That's who I wanted. Wasn't that I couldn't do that. 00:20:32 Speaker 2: So there were I could have had other people in the department on kind of speaking on behalf of the Missouri game, and they and I chose not to do that. 00:20:39 Speaker 1: That's kind of what I'm getting out. 00:20:41 Speaker 7: I thought that was completely fair. I thought it was I understood what you wanted to do. I understood why they kind of were doing what they were doing. I thought it was all it was all good. It was fine. Yeah, I don't think it was They're a problem at all. 00:20:55 Speaker 2: Uh yeah, yeah, good. So it's good here. 00:20:59 Speaker 1: So what's the main in your twenty seven years? 00:21:02 Speaker 4: What would you. 00:21:02 Speaker 2: Say was the bulk of the what were you patrolling for? Like, you know, if you were in some region of the country, it might be spotlighting deer. Another part of the country, it might be people fishing without a license. 00:21:15 Speaker 1: What was going on? 00:21:16 Speaker 7: Well, in that period of time, it changed obviously, when coons were forty dollars, I mean, I remember stopping a car one night that they had a spotlight plugged in and they had a had alligator clips on the wires and the light going out both sides, and I mean they were well, they had a rifle and a twenty two I mean a deer, right, so they're going to kill anything. But at that time, it was just you know, you had a lot of that at night because first were so high the deer and the turkey population was just developing, just booming, and so you you'd work that pretty hard from protection standpoint. In the daytime, as soon as they get dark, the calls that start coming out on spotlight. So there was a time there where you just worked and worked to work. It changed a lot of spotlighting. Yeah, it changed, uh, I mean just like it probably has everywhere. I think people are well, for one thing, we got plenty of lots of deer. Now the turkey situation is different. That's that's different. But over time it changed. Was it changed with the season you'd work fishing in the summertime, Uh, over limits, no permits, littering, stuff like that. Every once in a while you'd just you'd be off on some you know, drug investigation, that you'd come across, you know. Probably one of the craziest ones was quail in close season that turned into a multi state working with DEEA and everything else. When a drug thing. 00:22:35 Speaker 2: So, oh really, can you can you go in any more detail on that? 00:22:38 Speaker 7: Well, Uh, yeah, I guess I could. It was it was a marijuana growing operation. 00:22:46 Speaker 4: Uh. 00:22:46 Speaker 7: The guys had shot a quail off of a fence post. Somebody called us about that when we when I went with actually I called another agent friend of mine when when he and I went to investigate it. Uh, something just didn't that app It didn't smell right there. Like all those guys they were from Kentucky. They worked for me. I'll just pay their fine. It's okay. Well, nobody just wants to pay them, you know. So we did a little check in with Kentucky and figured out who we were dealing with, figuring out like something else. Long story short, it was with the highway patrol and investigation through the summer and to take down the fall. It's a couple of farms seized and so they're looking around. 00:23:19 Speaker 2: They had a marijuana they were growing illegal marijuana in Missouri. Yes, and these guys from another state had come in and shot at Quail. 00:23:28 Speaker 7: Well they the guys were from another state that were doing it. They were all from Kentucky. 00:23:33 Speaker 4: Uhh. 00:23:33 Speaker 7: And they would they had they would take it back to Kentucky and trucks looked like farm Gate. 00:23:39 Speaker 4: Quick. 00:23:41 Speaker 7: Yeah, that wasn't and that's that's kind of what was going on there. So yeah, it was that got to be a pretty hairy situation. So we had a couple of people ended up dead and questionable suicide supposed to be suicide, but I don't know if it was or not, you know kind of thing. So yeah, it was an interesting time for a little while. 00:24:04 Speaker 4: Sometimes people steal more change and they can swim with that's right. 00:24:08 Speaker 2: And they sink that's what that means. I just got done with a very interesting book. I wish I could figure out a way to do a bear grease podcast on it. It's a book called When Money Grew on Trees and it's about Uh I just picked it up. 00:24:23 Speaker 4: Oh is that about to share? 00:24:24 Speaker 2: It's about It was written by a guy named David Mack. It's kind of When I got the book, it was it was like a I felt like it was going to be like a homegrown like self published. 00:24:37 Speaker 6: I'm sorry, I'm just so cold. 00:24:38 Speaker 1: Yep, you're hurting my bear. 00:24:41 Speaker 2: There we go. I thought it was going to be like this homegrown, not that well put together book. It's called When Money Grows on Trees from by David Mack, and it's about the sheriff in Madison County, Arkansas named Ralph Baker who's dead now, and he was a he was. 00:24:59 Speaker 1: A really crooked sheriff. 00:25:01 Speaker 2: But basically the story is about how this guy, David Mack, who's also now dead, for about ten years he was growing marijuana in Madison County at the marijuana boom. It's kind of funny, like Brent spent his life fighting illegal drugs and then now a lot of these drugs are not a lot are some of them are are legal? 00:25:26 Speaker 4: Yeah? 00:25:27 Speaker 1: Did you know that upset Sprent? 00:25:32 Speaker 4: That's the next verse. Yeah. 00:25:34 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:25:35 Speaker 2: Anyway, there was a lot of marijuana. 00:25:37 Speaker 1: Was a big deal. 00:25:38 Speaker 2: Marijuana was being grown in wild places, so game Mordans interacted with marijuana. 00:25:42 Speaker 1: Look, is that right? 00:25:43 Speaker 7: Yeah, we didn't have it so much in the northern part of Missouri. That was more like. 00:25:47 Speaker 4: Hard to start to hide it in the planes. 00:25:49 Speaker 7: Well, what they did was they they'd planted in corn. See corn was so cheap back then that they would go in and take out individual rose of corn, hide it in the corn. Unless you flew over it, you weren't going to see it. So that's kind of what that. But what these guys are probably you're talking about, is in the in the national forests and places, they plight it back up the hollers. 00:26:08 Speaker 2: And yeah they were. They were growing it all over, making which. 00:26:11 Speaker 4: Is this is just like thirty miles from here. 00:26:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, they're making a ton of money. Wild, wild, wild stories, just unbelievable stories. Ralph Baker was. 00:26:18 Speaker 7: Like Copperhead Road, baby, Yeah, that's what that's like. 00:26:25 Speaker 1: So Kyle, your game warden? 00:26:28 Speaker 2: What are you are you? 00:26:32 Speaker 4: Like? 00:26:32 Speaker 2: How do you approach enforcement? Were you I don't know, you're you're such a. 00:26:40 Speaker 1: Nice guy, nice law enforce. 00:26:45 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're way too. No, were you able to put on a hard face and bust somebody in the chops? 00:26:52 Speaker 1: Not physically like metaphorically when you needed to? 00:26:55 Speaker 7: You never wanted to do that. You didn't enjoy doing that. But yeah, uh, the only way I could describe, but if I was telling somebody like if Bear's gonna take my job, and he's gonna run, he's he's gonna start. Yeah, I'm gonna say, look, you you're gonna you're gonna be here for a long time. Your kids are gonna go to school with everybody's kids here. You know, treat people the way you want to be treated, and you can't be behind every tree. You have got to have cooperation. You've got to have people that will say, look, you need to know about this. You didn't hear it from me. But so that's the only way that works when you have four or five hundred square miles or one of you. Uh, it's not it's not like other kinds of law enforcement. And in a way it is. I mean, you have to have that kind of same rapport with people you work with, even the bad guys got to If you don't treat them with respect, you're not gonna get respect. So you have to do that. I think that's a prerequisite. 00:27:47 Speaker 1: You know, yes, yeah, so that makes sense. 00:27:49 Speaker 7: Yeah, so then when when it when it does go bad, uh, you know, they're they're actually sometimes will come come and help you, or you know, if you're finding somebody on the bank, which I know ever had this happen to me, but I had other guys that they have guys come pile in help them get everything straightened up, you know. 00:28:06 Speaker 2: So, yeah, what's the This is such a cliche question, and I've asked this to almost every law enforcement person I've ever dealt with. 00:28:14 Speaker 1: I'm sorry, law enforcement people. 00:28:18 Speaker 2: It this is equivalent to someone asking me, Hey, Clay, have you ever been attacked by a bear? And I'm just like, come on, don't you have a better question than that. What's the wildest thing you've ever been a part of in law enforcement? Like a big sting or something a shootout? 00:28:36 Speaker 7: Like what? Here's the thing if if if I thought for five minutes, i'd tell you something i'd have I'd tell you something different tomorrow probably. I mean, it's just it just depends on what what the thing was. 00:28:50 Speaker 1: Do you ever felt really in danger? 00:28:52 Speaker 7: There are times there were I mean there were some times where the hair stand up on your neck pretty good, you know. Yeah, I mean I probably as a trooper you had to deal with that more often than so. 00:29:04 Speaker 1: You were a state trooper too. 00:29:05 Speaker 7: I retired as a trooper. Yeah, I went over when I was You. 00:29:07 Speaker 2: Were Game Warning for twenty seven and then worked as a Missouri State trooper. 00:29:11 Speaker 7: Right, that's that's why I retired as a trooper, so gotcha. And the context a number of contexts as a trooper does in a year's time, or like ten times what a what a game board does. So game boards all around people with firearms and everything all the time by yourself a lot, it's different, you know. But just approaching cars, night time stuff, search and buildings, drugs, people, you don't. People are just on a cell phone hitting you on the side of the road. It's probably as scary as anything. So uh so I. 00:29:42 Speaker 4: Don't quite as flashy to talk about though. 00:29:44 Speaker 7: No, it's not. It's not the way you want to want to go on a shootout, you know, you don't want to. 00:29:48 Speaker 2: Go well, you know, it's like, uh, it's kind of like training a mule. If you do it right, he doesn't bust. 00:29:57 Speaker 7: No true troopers and mules. 00:29:59 Speaker 2: That yeah, it makes perfect sense. 00:30:02 Speaker 1: I'm surprised you all didn't go with the analogy yourself. 00:30:04 Speaker 2: If you if you do it right, the meal doesn't buck and it's non climactic. So in a way, if you're doing it right, like you de escalate situation, that's don't get in trouble, you don't get shot at. 00:30:16 Speaker 7: That's the skill is you're trying to get somebody to do something you don't want them to do, they don't want to do, and you're going to talk talking them into it's easier than force them into. 00:30:25 Speaker 8: Yeah right, I mean that's that's I mean, that's so fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. You just try to always let them dictate the level of That's right. How we talked, you know, how I talked to them, and yeah, lots of times, you know, escalated quickly. But you got to be on top of that kind of stuff. 00:30:47 Speaker 1: And were you were you a game more than Missouri in two thousand and nine. 00:30:53 Speaker 7: No, seven would have been my last okay, right, So you know what I was thinking about though, when you had that date only with Donnie was the five hundred dollars I think was the maximum fine. 00:31:04 Speaker 1: You could get really really at that time. 00:31:06 Speaker 7: I think that was for white tail, well, for for for any misdemeanor. 00:31:11 Speaker 2: While is that right? 00:31:13 Speaker 4: Yeah? 00:31:13 Speaker 7: So so now once in a while there'd be a hunting privileges could be revoked or something like that. That'd be the most serious thing probably would happen, even if you seize the firearm unless the judge orders that destroyed. Usually that went back. 00:31:27 Speaker 2: So huh, yeah, there's a lot different now, probably, I would imagine. 00:31:30 Speaker 7: I don't think it's I think there was some adjustment to that in general, but it's not that much different. They don't have liquidated damages, I'm pretty sure. 00:31:41 Speaker 1: What about trophy penalties. 00:31:43 Speaker 7: That they don't have that? 00:31:45 Speaker 4: Iowa has thirty grand. 00:31:49 Speaker 7: Podcast, I don't hear it. 00:31:54 Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, so you don't think they have a trophy penalty? 00:31:58 Speaker 7: No, A lot of states do, Yeah, I know Iowa does. I think maybe Kansas does. I'm not sure, but uh, not so much for so many points or what the deer scores. We don't have that mm I. Any less, it's changed after I was there, and I don't think it has. 00:32:15 Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, okay, so interesting. 00:32:19 Speaker 1: Interesting. Why would it have only been five hundred dollars. 00:32:22 Speaker 7: That was that's the maximum for a misdemeanor crime. So whether it's you know, you threw a beer can out the window, maybe it's twenty five bucks, maybe throw the whole box out, maybe that was hot. You know, it could go up to the range that was a range, Yeah. 00:32:36 Speaker 4: It's a thousand here let's just change. 00:32:38 Speaker 7: Yeah, and really it may be a thousand there now too, because there was an adjustment to that whole criminal code about that time. And of course once you're once you it's not your thing every day. Well you could get by me, but it wouldn't shock me if it's a thousand. Put it that way. 00:32:56 Speaker 2: So interesting. We need to talk about American wilderness, all right. Uh, Kyle told me that he's he's been reading Roderic Nash's Wilderness in the American Mind, which is didn't you tell me that? Man? I sent that book to uh two people who will remain unnamed. They're not in this uh in this uh in this room. 00:33:26 Speaker 4: That were a couple of nerds. 00:33:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, and I actually sent it to him to read because I wanted to be a guest on the podcast. And they were basically like, uh, no things. 00:33:41 Speaker 1: So I love the book. 00:33:44 Speaker 5: Yeah. 00:33:44 Speaker 2: It was interesting to hear some criticism of the book from from some of my guests. But uh, American Wilderness, there's so much I wanna I want to I want to talk about. 00:33:58 Speaker 1: Let me let me run through the list here. 00:34:00 Speaker 2: So we talked about the myth of American wilderness, and the myth was connected to this in a way towards the end of the podcast about the irony of American wilderness. You know how we you know, perceived a wilderness and then but then also later tried to after we had destroyed all the wilderness, tried to save some of it. And that's when I wrote the fourth verse to Ironic by Atlantis Morse. 00:34:31 Speaker 4: My friend Colts imposed down in Texas. He sent me a message said, friends don't let their friends. 00:34:47 Speaker 2: I told I actually I literally sent it to Phil Taylor at Meat Eater and said, Phil, I fully intend for this to be taken out. 00:34:54 Speaker 1: You let me know. And he wrote me back and he. 00:34:57 Speaker 2: Was like, I love it, Clay, you got to take it risk. I guess that's what we do every week, is put our necks on the line. 00:35:05 Speaker 1: Okay, a myth of wilderness. 00:35:06 Speaker 2: And then we talked about how scarcity is a more powerful thing than than than plenty. We talked about pragmatism, rock and ice, and then on the Bear Grease Academy pop quiz who wrote the Frontier thesis? Who wrote it? You know, we'll tell y. 00:35:27 Speaker 7: You've talked about Frederick Jackson. 00:35:29 Speaker 2: Turner's right, you have got that dude, This was on the Bear Grease Academy. Now this series leans on more of the academic side of what we do on Bear Grease. 00:35:43 Speaker 1: Okay, the Donnie. 00:35:47 Speaker 2: I feel like this year we've kind of gone to the pendulum, the pendulum of of kind of topics, Like the Donnie Baker story was this modern you know, didn't have anything to do with history, and it was this very huge It was a human interest story about wildlife crime, which is really cool. Which those are hard to come by. I mean, I probably do one like that, you know, ten times a year if I could get them in hand. They're just hard to come by when they work like that. 00:36:14 Speaker 7: There's not very many Donny Baker's. That's the problem. 00:36:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. 00:36:18 Speaker 2: Yeah, But this one, to me is just as core to I feel like what we're doing here at Bear Grease because I think these things like I was an adult really before I learned about the really American history, the history of wilderness and all this stuff, and I looked back into the previous thirty years and was like, oh, that's where all that came from. So it's almost like I was reading a history book about myself. I wasn't learning new ways to think a lot of these ways, I thought, and it was it was so revelatory to me to come into a position of understanding about why as a Americans we think about wild places the way we do, and particularly as Americans that love to hunt and fish, we would be on the extreme of people that probably are thinking about wild places. There are others that don't hunt and fish that think about wild places, but we think about it in a particular way, And to me, that's really fascinating when you look back and see how you've been influenced unknowingly by culture. And that kind of goes back to the first episode when I was talking Steve Vanella and I messed up and brought up throat, But what I really was trying to ask him, What I was really trying to ask him was how have you been influenced unknowingly just because you're an American to think about wild places? 00:37:48 Speaker 4: You know? 00:37:49 Speaker 2: And I think if I had asked that question, he might have answered a little different. But I know how I would answer is that I'm like, dude, I have a like I'm very much so influenced by my culture. But uh, who would like to start what what stood out to you about the second part. 00:38:10 Speaker 4: I'll tell you. What was cool to me was listening to the Rough Draft talking about Yellowstone. Well, you and I were riding through Yellowstone. Yeah. Yeah, the stuff they were talking about of finding value in something and looking at the window and being able to see it. Yeah, that was that was a double for me. 00:38:34 Speaker 2: But it's just Brent and I were in Bozeman last week and yeah, I had to listen to the podcast before it came out, and so we were in a truck with Corey Coins for Meat Eater driving through Yellowstone looking at bison. 00:38:50 Speaker 1: We saw, Brent saw a wolf. 00:38:52 Speaker 4: Yeah, it was very cool. 00:38:54 Speaker 2: We saw big horn sheep. We were like driving through and we're listening to this podcast about wilderness where we talked about the creation of Yellowstone. 00:39:03 Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was just it was just very I wouldn't have gotten I didn't get more out of it by being there, but it was something I could, I could hear, and usually when I'm visualized in my mind, like you're talking about the cumpsor or any Daniel Boone or anything else. But I was able to look out and see the tangible benefits of what had taken place and what had been preserved and that's it was pretty awesome to be able to do that. And during that time of year, there wasn't a lot of people there. I mean there were stretches of road that we drove down there that we were only folks driving. Yeah, you know, for a few minutes, we didn't see anyone cool. So it's it's easy to see. I'm glad they saw the value back then. I'm glad they saw it. It could have been any number of historical things that could have happened and that never taking place. You think about the what it took for all that to happen, for Roosevelt to be president, for him to have the feelings that he had towards things that everyone in this room still has that same love and respect for wilderness, whether it's a capital W or either one. Which wilderness is wilderness to me. I dig it all, you know. I dig the scope of woods right here behind your house that you talk about not being really big, but it's all relative to where you are experience. You can only take up so much space regardless of where you are, So you know, one hundred acres doesn't look any different than two million. 00:40:43 Speaker 2: Because we had a review on iTunes where a guy that I think is a like likes the Beggars podcast, but he's he's written several reviews and he's, uh, I'm gonna call him out. 00:40:58 Speaker 4: I love it. 00:40:59 Speaker 1: He says, I'm a Bison, not a buffalo. That's his name. 00:41:02 Speaker 2: And he said, listening to a bunch of Easterners squabble that Yellowstone isn't wild or wilderness is laughable. Over two million acres of back country of an intact ecosystem, pre European contact and harboring the most remote area from the lower forty A da da da da da. 00:41:16 Speaker 1: I was trying to remember did we talk about I think maybe in the first render somebody said, well, if Yellowstone's really a wilderness, and that was Josh. I think mister Buffalo, Miss mister Buffalo, our dear friend, mister Buffalo. 00:41:32 Speaker 3: I may I alluded to that there were wilderness areas in a not capital w wilderness areas, and mister Newcomb shot me down. 00:41:41 Speaker 2: Now, I mean it may have been me, but I don't think if we got down to it, that I was saying Yellowstone isn't wild. What I was saying is that highway corridors, the highway. 00:41:54 Speaker 4: Is accusing you of being an Easterner. 00:41:56 Speaker 2: It looks sounds like it. Oh that's a first well, I mean the cardinal direction is all the matter of perspective. 00:42:04 Speaker 4: That's profound t shirt. 00:42:07 Speaker 2: No, so I stand correct about it. I mean, yeah, Yellowstone is a massive wilderness. Yea, it is the highway corridors during the tourist months, like, it doesn't feel like a wilderness. 00:42:26 Speaker 7: There was a statement in the tail end of that book of Nash's book about the lower forty eight. Anyway, whatever the figure is, when you see that, what the wilderness number of wilderness acres in the United States sounds like a lot. It's equal to what we have paved. 00:42:41 Speaker 4: Wow. 00:42:41 Speaker 1: Wow, that's interesting. 00:42:43 Speaker 7: That gives you kind of a perspective. Really, it's in the last part of that if. 00:42:47 Speaker 1: It's in Nash's book. 00:42:49 Speaker 2: He did a revised version of that book in the last like fifteen. 00:42:53 Speaker 7: I think that's what he wrote. 00:42:54 Speaker 2: He originally wrote that book in nineteen sixty seven as a like a doctoral thesis, and then he revised it. But I was surprised to learn and it still seems like a lot to me. But this is the research that I found that there's one hundred and eleven million acres in America that are designated as federal wilderness, which is about five percent of the total land mass of America. 00:43:16 Speaker 4: I still don't really it's a lot, and kept saying that's a lot, dude. 00:43:18 Speaker 2: That's a lot of lank five percent, but five. 00:43:21 Speaker 1: Percent of federal wilderness. 00:43:23 Speaker 7: But that includes Alaska. 00:43:24 Speaker 1: Now probably it does, and much of it's in Alasta. 00:43:27 Speaker 7: So if you take yes, I think it was something like two percent whatever it was, the figure in the lower forty eight equals to paved acres. 00:43:34 Speaker 1: Okay, so that's why two percent is what I think. 00:43:37 Speaker 2: That's it worked off of before that two percent is wilderness. But maybe it's two percent of the lower forty eight. I'm not sure. 00:43:43 Speaker 3: Yeah, but I found it interesting that the census caused so much of a stir. 00:43:49 Speaker 4: That people have angst. 00:43:51 Speaker 3: Yeah, that people had the that that was a thought to say, wait a minute, yeah, this is what defines us. And it's gone, like, what are we going to do now? How are we going to raise American kids? They're just going to be like every other kid. 00:44:05 Speaker 2: Well, think about eighteen ninety Yeah, in the country was founded in seventeen seventy six. So for one hundred and twenty five years, basically, well one hundred and fifteen years, there had been a frontier. Yeah, I mean for a century there was a frontier. If you were an American, you could go to that frontier, like if you wanted to risk risk it for the biscuit, go west twice. 00:44:33 Speaker 7: And you have not said wimplification. 00:44:35 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I got it right down, and we got to talk about whimpification. 00:44:41 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:44:42 Speaker 2: Well, just you can see how it could be etched into American ideals of just what it meant to be an American. I messed up on the naming of this podcast. I named this podcast in haste. I should have named it Homo americanas that's that's what doctor Sarah Dant said, and that's a term that's used by by historians when they talk about America. And the idea is that there was this you know, new new kind of person created in the world, you know, the American. 00:45:17 Speaker 3: And it is a pretty unique experience, the American experience, especially during that time. 00:45:23 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:45:25 Speaker 7: Well, another thing that happened that helped turn the tide, you know, from the Howling Wilderness to the wilderness we wanted to protect was as a young country. We didn't have these big fancy you know, taj mahals and all these things over back in Europe. But we had wilderness. And once it looked like we were we could run out of that, that changed it. We wanted that. We've we've identified with that as Americans. It is Yeah. 00:45:54 Speaker 2: To me, that's one of the most fascinating things is that, Yeah, we a our artists are our painters. They focused on Well, mister, what was this that you said about. 00:46:05 Speaker 5: That two thirds of the world lives in urbanized areas today? And I was actually just looking just at a map here and if you so, if you look at this map, it's like a line graph that has a huge jump in eighteen hundreds and it you know, continues to peak out in the nineteen hundreds when when people were moving to urban areas. And I was looking at that and then you can see it compared to this map, like the the graph. 00:46:31 Speaker 1: Uh interpreted, No, just interpret them. 00:46:35 Speaker 5: Well, I'm just I was just thinking about I was looking at that graph because I was thinking about the time that Josh was saying that angst was was happening. It was happening when there was this huge upswing in people moving, people move into the urban areas, and now it's you know, it's increased so much more. And they project that you know, by by twenty fifty, I think it's like maybe even eighty percent of people. And there's arguments, there's arguments about those numbers. It really depends on how you define an urban area. You know, if you a town in a suburb, you know, it really does depend on how you how you define the area. So there's a lot of arguments around it. But it's it's dramatically increased and we're becoming more urbanized and and yeah, it's it's just kind of fascinating how if you if you're in an urban area, how you would and if people were at that time, if the US was becoming more urbanized, how it would create that sense of anxiety. 00:47:34 Speaker 6: But it's interesting to me. 00:47:35 Speaker 5: It's a sense of anxiety, but there's still no one stayed in the wilderness, right, is kind of. 00:47:41 Speaker 2: Well, and it would be way different now the back in those days, people were so much more in touch with, you know, the natural landscape. Yeah, what I think about when you say that two thirds of the world is urbanized, I don't know what that would be in the US. But what does somebody that's lived their whole life in one of the major cities in the US and you talk to them about wilderness, like, what do they. 00:48:09 Speaker 1: What's their thought on it? 00:48:11 Speaker 2: And you know, I'm sure there's some people that live in the cities that would love wilderness and value it, but I'm sure there's a lot of people that have never been there. They have no context the value of it. 00:48:24 Speaker 7: Well, that part where you were talking about definitions of wilderness was pretty interesting because that is I mean, when you guys run the Mississippi excuse me, and it's night time and you're inside those levees, you're pretty much out there by yourself. Yeah, but it's not a it's not designative wilderness, but it's a wild country. 00:48:42 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:48:43 Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think it's interesting if you look I mean, and let's just take the US. If you look at the US and you look at where all the population centers are. I mean, this comes up every year, every single year when we talk about voting, because so much of the US is population is those people. 00:49:01 Speaker 6: Live in New York City, LA. You know, these big, these big. 00:49:05 Speaker 5: Hubs on the coast, and that's why they call the middle part of the US, the flyover States, because it's you fly over one the and it's a it's a big deal because they're making decisions politically that impact the whole country because there's more of them than there are the people in the middle. And so if you're thinking about the value of wilderness and you think about the people who are choosing to live outside of the wilderness, not just outside of it, but far far away from it and maybe never experiencing it, and that's the majority of the people now, then what how does that impact the decisions that are made in those places and whether people value it or not. And it's I've heard people I would not call us urban, like I some definitions would put us urban right here where we where we're sitting right now, and I would not. I would there's nothing to me urban about this location. But I've talked to people and they talk about like research and things that we're spending money on, and you know, the. 00:50:04 Speaker 6: What's that little lizard? 00:50:05 Speaker 4: Is it? 00:50:06 Speaker 6: The ozark? Hell bender? Is that what it's called? You know? 00:50:08 Speaker 5: And they want to know, like, why are we spending any money? Who cares if that little. 00:50:12 Speaker 7: It's a salamander? 00:50:12 Speaker 6: It's a it's a salamander. 00:50:14 Speaker 5: Yeah, who cares? Who cares if those things if we if those things are extinct or not. And and I just think about some of the things that you value about the wilderness areas you have to that value comes from. 00:50:30 Speaker 1: Expos Yeah, yeah, Bear, what stood out to you? 00:50:36 Speaker 9: Well, whenever I was listening to the first one, whenever you said it was going to be about wilderness, like just looking at the title here and you talk about it, it didn't really make sense to me, like what story could even be behind wilderness? And I thought it was interesting how like you kind of you talked about how like even just being an American can shape your perception of wilderness. Whenever I really thought about it, like I was just thinking about like the way that I look at everything, Like whenever I'm like in a city and I see, like, you know, a strip mall, I'm thinking like what was there before that? 00:51:10 Speaker 1: Like what what would have been there two hundred years ago? 00:51:13 Speaker 9: And so I think part of it could have just been like the way that you know, I was raised, and even like the way that like we hunt is like we try to go as deep as we can, and there's there's more value to something if you if you really kill it like wild, like like with a self bow, or like way back in a hard place. Yeah, and so I thought that that that was kind of interesting, just seeing the way that that actually did change my perceptions on like what I do. 00:51:45 Speaker 2: Did you see you saw some of the value systems that you had, you connected it back to deeper stuff than more than just like right, just what we've done together. 00:51:57 Speaker 1: Yep, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting, man, I really believe. 00:52:04 Speaker 2: And it's happening today, So it's not that profound to say this, but the most scarce invaluable commodity on planet Earth will one day be places that are unscarred by humanity. I mean there's no way, you know, like Renella said so emphatically, you can't get it back, like very rarely do you get anything back from civilization in any reasonable amount of time. I mean, like if the Earth persists another ten thousand years and you know civilization's rise and fall, I mean, you know, I'm foreshadowing it, but what's gonna be on the next episode, But perhaps one day what we've done here will be ruins like what's in the Amazon that they're finding with lidar and all this stuff where they're finding, like these civilizations, that nothing is left up just for a few ways they've crafted the land. 00:53:02 Speaker 4: And is that considered wilderness? You know what I mean? If there's ruins right right? Right? I mean, what at what point does it go? Could it ever go back to wilderness? Right? It's it just won't matter to us because we'll all be dead. 00:53:18 Speaker 2: Well, you're right, But in here I have my eighteen year old son in the room with me, and I think about, like there's something about seeing bear and mother kids grow up a little bit and become adults, and think about them having kids. Yep, and you think it's not but just like a couple of generation jumps, and you realize time is marching on, and what will the interface with wild places look like to my great great grandchildren I'll be gone, you know, Will they have the opportunity to interface with wild places like I have? And it goes back to this whole Homo americanas thing. 00:54:03 Speaker 1: I feel like for them to be like. 00:54:10 Speaker 2: Newcombs, they would have to have a wild place to interact with. 00:54:14 Speaker 7: You know. 00:54:16 Speaker 2: It's kind of a romantic idea because maybe by that time that just won't be important. Or there's you know, I let go of the legacy, like you can't hold on to it that tight. But that's why I mean, we are reaping the benefits of stuff that all these guys did back in the day. I mean kind of basically around the mid nineteenth century, in the eighteen fifties, you know, the first the preservation of land in America. 00:54:47 Speaker 7: Leopold and Marshall and all those. 00:54:50 Speaker 2: Well, it was in the eighteen thirties. And best I could tell, somebody correct me, Byson out a buffalo, you can correct me. I'm pretty sure Springs, Arkansas was the first designation by the federal government of something that was blocked off, which was surprising that they know. They call it the first national park down there, which is not quite that there's a way to spin it. Yeah, yeah, But point being, those guys started doing something, and with the trajectory as it was going, they might have said, man, what in twenty twenty four, those futuristic humans. Will they be able to shoot a deer with a bow, Will they be able to hunt elk? Will they be able to see a bison? Will they be able to interact with you know, maybe I don't know what they would have thought or if they would have cared. But we're living inside the fruit of that. So people will live point being, people will live inside the fruit of our conservation decisions today. Should the earth persist, and you know, I don't know that it will, but we're going to be two hundred and fifty years from now and they're going to be talking about what we did during this time of massive ex of civilization, like unprecedented ever before in human history. It's so you know, you wake up and planet, our time is so deceptive. You wake up and you just think it's normal. You wake up and you think having a forward truck is normal, that uses you know, fossil fuels that have been dug out of the ground, and you think that getting water out of a tap. And you think that not having polio is normal. No, it's not normal. Those things would have been normal to most of humanity. And then we also just think that that it's just we're on such a fragile a fragile place with wild places in our interaction with us. 00:56:40 Speaker 3: When when you and Steve were talking about the he's the analogy of the britty mix concrete. Yeah, it's like there was a point in time when really the life of an American was about dominating the frontier, going to the frontier, right, And now it's like our philosophy is teaching our kids and imparting our kids into values that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Yeah, and that that spills over into way more than just wilderness. I mean, that is a life principle that just because you can doesn't mean that you should. 00:57:20 Speaker 7: How Herring touched on that, you know, the last barrel of oil. Couldn't we get it? Yeah, we could get it. But as Americans, and you know, because of capitalism and our way of life, we have the ability to set we have the luxury of setting those things aside. 00:57:33 Speaker 2: But it's yeah, yeah. 00:57:35 Speaker 7: The thing that stuck with me through all this is that you see through all those different periods reading that book, that they'd come up with the idea and we do, we'd do Yosemite, But then they couldn't save hitch Hitchy. Then we'd got you know, it is a constant. Just because there's wilderness designated out there now doesn't mean that when bear's sitting here some day, it'll be there. If somebody decides they want to go get something they can at the political are you know what you guys are doing with this with podcasts and what media. It's important. 00:58:06 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:58:06 Speaker 7: I mean I feel like I'm handing the baton off now to you guys. It's your turn to run with it, and you're doing a great job. But it's important that that that message is understood. 00:58:16 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it's. 00:58:18 Speaker 7: A constant gotta stay gotta stay vigilant, you know. 00:58:22 Speaker 5: So yeah, for sure, I could be I could be wrong, but I think that the the inspiration it was somehow influenced because they saw what was happening to Niagara Falls. Have you ever been to Niagara Falls? You've been there and and you know it's super commercialized, and that was happening way back and. 00:58:44 Speaker 6: Back in the day. 00:58:45 Speaker 5: And I mean, can you imagine what Niagara Falls would be like if you just stumbled on that, like, no, none of all the thing about, none of the shops, none of the none of that, and you just kind of walked up on that. I mean, that would be so incredible. That would be so incredible. And they were Teddy Roosevelt saw what happened there and how it had become commercialized and had basically been like, you know, a circus built right on top of this incredible wilderness area, and that was the that was in part the inspiration for preserving the other things. 00:59:25 Speaker 2: This series for me has been trying to understand if, in fact America had a unique ideology on wild places that was a given to me that we did. But you know, there's a lot of American myths that aren't real, you know, and we talk about American exceptionalism and all this stuff. You know, we like to pat ourselves on the back and say, oh, we're this great civilization and all this, and I mean, I want that to be true. And so that's kind of like, do we has the way that we've handled wilderness really? Is it really unique in the world. That's part of what I've been asking and and as it gets to the end of this, I think the answer is an emphatic Yes, we're not the only people that value wilderness, but we were. We did set a trend in the world. But it's not really comparing apples to apples if you're trying to establish like some like moral hierarchy of well, we were the civilization that that set aside wilderness because we did it. And going back to what you said and what House said. We did it because we could. We America became economically prosperous, and we had the liberty to set aside these huge wild places that we didn't have to extract resource from to feed our families. You see, prosperity is what allowed us to do this. I kind of made an analogy maybe even in the first one, about you know, sometimes you see somebody and you're like, man, why do they always why is their truck always cleaning their yard? Always mode? And they're they're this, always that, and they're this and this and this and this, and it's it's literally just they've got the they've got the money, they got the time, they got their life in order, and it's like finances is the fuel of their ability. 01:01:18 Speaker 1: To to do a lot of stuff. Not the perfect analogy, but. 01:01:22 Speaker 4: I cleaned my garage this weekend, and you're rich. 01:01:27 Speaker 2: Rich. 01:01:28 Speaker 5: No, you know, like I think about like Japanese farming practices and they're you know, how they their belief was that they were not farming for themselves, but they were farming for a future generation. And the way they had to do it was so it's not it's interesting to me because we're not the only ones who who valued preserving natural spaces for the next generation. It just looked it is a little different here. Then then we're not the only ones. 01:01:54 Speaker 2: Well, and it's it's different because of and And this goes back to what Dan Flores was talking about, which to me is probably the most interesting part of the whole Wilderness conversation, is that when Europeans got here, the bulk of Europeans got here, there had already been enough pre contact from Hernando de Soto and all these guys that had come in and basically spread disease in the interior of America that you know, what. 01:02:24 Speaker 7: Did he say, de peopled or something like that the people. 01:02:27 Speaker 2: But I believe he said there were nine They believed there to be nine million Native Americans. That dropped down to a million. So imagine, I told I was with Shepherd and one of his other basketball buddies the other day, were listening to the car and I said, imagine that there were ten people in your family and only one of them lived. Like That's essentially what happened to the Native American people. So by the seventeen hundreds, when a lot of European started coming here, they what they perceived was a what we called a wilderness, but really it was a great American civil a great Native American civilization on the decline because of disease cause ecological boom with animal I mean, it's just fascinating, and so that peculiar history made us come on to this. The only kind of dan floor is called the last undiscovered continent. Now, Miss doctor Newcomb over here earlier today was like, what about Antarctica? And I was like, well, okay, if we want to talk about an article. 01:03:34 Speaker 6: I mean, I'm just saying it's not like. 01:03:36 Speaker 2: She's getting a tattooed Antarctica frontier. 01:03:40 Speaker 6: I've actually got lots of arguments. Were you even what you just. 01:03:43 Speaker 4: Said about lots of tattoos? 01:03:46 Speaker 5: I had zero, But about prosperity enabling us, it makes me think about you, remember this is like twenty years ago. There's someplace out in the Buffalo No it's it's it's a fun street. There's someplace close to the Buffalo River. You know, it's economically it's an economically depressed area. 01:04:00 Speaker 6: I can't think of the name of the city. But the guy was. 01:04:03 Speaker 5: Talking to you about how everyone out there, people would come in and it's such a well put together little town. 01:04:09 Speaker 4: But it's impossible Ville, Arkansas. 01:04:12 Speaker 5: It was not Yellville. But like all the houses were clean, all of those And and someone asked them. Someone came to the little diner that that guy said out, and they said, man, how do they always how they always keep this This place looks so nice and so well well put together, and everybody's poor. 01:04:27 Speaker 6: And and he said, well, pride's cheap. 01:04:30 Speaker 2: Pride cheap. 01:04:31 Speaker 5: In other words, you don't have to have the economic it's not necessarily prosperity that that causes you to value certain things and keep things in order and keep things protected. 01:04:40 Speaker 4: I mean what you say, because you have, your possessions are precious, regardless what they owe stewardship. 01:04:51 Speaker 2: I would argue that in America, the heartbeat, that the blood that runs through the veins of this place, Chevrolet, Chevrolet, just like that capitalism, capitalism, money. I mean, I I think it's Uh. I think we saved a lot of this wilderness by the skin of our teeth. And I think if we had been not as prosperous, we wouldn't have done it. And and uh, but we did it. So we we saved some of it, you know, which is honorable. 01:05:33 Speaker 6: But man, I just I just want to argue with that. 01:05:37 Speaker 1: Come on, yeah, I want to hear what. 01:05:40 Speaker 6: You I think that it. 01:05:41 Speaker 5: I mean, a person could argue that capitalism is actually what keeps us from saving the wild places. 01:05:48 Speaker 6: That is the is actually. 01:05:50 Speaker 1: That's why you nailed the fourth verse of my Atlantis. 01:05:55 Speaker 10: Again, isn't it that's written sur Yeah, we wiped out the wilderness and then right at the end we skid to a halt and saved five percent. 01:06:07 Speaker 7: Yeah, it's both, it's both. 01:06:09 Speaker 1: Well, what Hal Harring said, he said. 01:06:11 Speaker 2: He said John Muir and Giff Pinchot were like two turbans spinning in opposite directions. Pinchot was utilitarian conservation, like utilize the land, take the resource, greatest good for the greatest number. And then John Muir was like, he's sacradlized wilderness. He was like, let's save it all. It's sacred, it's holy, it's this temple. And so it was these two things that created what we have, which is this very vast, vast ideology. Like some people are like, put an oil pipeline through Alaska. Yeah, we want to keep this thing. We want to keep this economy running, which is and I got to say it, it's wild to me the political positions that a lot of hunter and fisher hunters in the country like were typically most times would be very conservative, like like politically conservative, which I we are. But at the same time, politically conservative usually means very light on or very well, what's the right word, anti environment, you know, and then to be liberal means to be pro environment, and uh, you know, I've heard. Yeah, it's it's kind of wild. It'd be cool if we could be. 01:07:28 Speaker 1: A couple of those things switched around, you know, and not cars. 01:07:33 Speaker 4: I think it would be really cool. And we ain't seen those yet. Flying cars, Buddy, the Turkey ain't safe. If I got a flying car. 01:07:44 Speaker 2: That was a good segue side of that. 01:07:47 Speaker 4: That was great. 01:07:48 Speaker 3: It's all Brent's been thinking about this whole podcast. 01:07:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, car, Hey, wimplification. 01:07:54 Speaker 2: Do you all think Google the Google algorithm is gonna pick it up? 01:07:57 Speaker 4: I hope so if someone if I mean, isn't it for everything? Yeah, not just wilderness? I got it. 01:08:03 Speaker 2: I got a good Hal Harry impression, the wimplification of America, I mean, give for Pinchot and John Muir, the like two turbines, and I'm telling you, by God, the Easterns force of white pines were falling like corn in front. 01:08:18 Speaker 1: Of a combine. 01:08:19 Speaker 2: That's pretty good, you know, Clay. 01:08:23 Speaker 1: I love that. 01:08:25 Speaker 4: Have Ben masters on there too. 01:08:26 Speaker 3: This film was really impacting to me when we saw it years ago, years ago. I think it was at the band Fountain film and man, have you ever seen that film? 01:08:34 Speaker 4: I did, but I didn't recognize the name. And we were listening to it driving through Yellowstone. Yeah, story, he said his name. I didn't realize who it was, and then he said the name of that movie, where I thought, oh, man, I watched that like last year. 01:08:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, man it. 01:08:49 Speaker 2: Ben's done a lot of He's a he's a documentary filmmaker now made a lot of documentary films. So I'm sure me bringing up Unbranded would be like someone bringing up some. 01:09:02 Speaker 1: I did back. 01:09:05 Speaker 2: Yeah yeah something, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cool. I haven't been on wimplification. Okay, we we I mean, did we talk about that or did we just laugh. 01:09:19 Speaker 4: About laugh laught about? I think we all know what it means. 01:09:22 Speaker 2: We got, Okay, pragmatism. That was one that I wouldn't have understood. How said, almost all the wildernesses in the West are our headwaters of major major. 01:09:37 Speaker 7: Yeah. 01:09:38 Speaker 4: When we listened to that with Corey, you know, and Corey's from out there and has lived out there his whole life, and he didn't know that, right that that surprised me, right, Yeah. 01:09:48 Speaker 1: Talking about the Bob Marshall. 01:09:51 Speaker 7: Well, a lot of it was forest service ground before it was wilderness, and then it was because the watershed stuff, so it was protected before it was DESI needed you know, that came later. But yeah, that's that's. 01:10:03 Speaker 4: It was pretty interesting. 01:10:04 Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and then I have one more thing here, rock and Ice. I thought, I like, how. 01:10:10 Speaker 6: How how he got away with words? 01:10:14 Speaker 2: Well, he just knows he has a good grasp on the history and we didn't. 01:10:17 Speaker 4: He didn't. 01:10:18 Speaker 2: I didn't give him a chance to touch on all of it. I just kind of cherry picked some of the stuff that he talked to me about. But how Yeah, we kind of get this sense of nobility about Yeah, we saved all this wilderness and we were the first in the world to do this kind of stuff. We also saved all the places that were completely like we couldn't do anything with it. 01:10:40 Speaker 7: Like he said, there's no national parks in Iowa. 01:10:43 Speaker 4: Yeah, that was very good. 01:10:46 Speaker 7: And you think about if you had a national park and they kind of tried to do this, but it was way late in the Flint Hills area in Kansas. How cool that would be. And it's still pretty cool. They've protected it with that grassland Preserve and they've got agreements farm they still ranch some of it stuff. So it's it's cool what they've done. But think about it a national park there. But it's not rock and ice. It's pretty good stuff. 01:11:08 Speaker 2: Right right, Well, what we're going to get into this and we're gonna do one more episode. 01:11:16 Speaker 1: Okay, I'm sorry, Josh. 01:11:19 Speaker 4: To win it now. 01:11:19 Speaker 2: Man, it's it's this is core to the bear grease way of life. We have to understand wildernance. 01:11:27 Speaker 3: We just must suffer, have to what doesn't kill us, folks. 01:11:36 Speaker 2: That's four times I had somebody I trust very much. I won't say his name. Was like, it was good, it was pretty academic. I'll be interested in seeing how many people listen to it. 01:11:53 Speaker 7: I thought, I thought, man, you have bit off a wad here. Yeah, but it's good. I mean, it's been good. 01:11:59 Speaker 1: I absolutely I love it. 01:12:02 Speaker 4: Man. 01:12:03 Speaker 2: I just think it's we have to you know. The good thing about having loyal people that listen to something. And I realized that there's a lot of people that don't listen to every bear Grease, Like if you listen to maybe they've listened to twenty five percent of them. Or but if you just if you, if you could just bear with me and listen to them all. 01:12:26 Speaker 1: You have a pretty. 01:12:27 Speaker 3: Strong who only listens to these podcasts but won't listen to the render. 01:12:33 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's a lot of people like why, I mean, do you. 01:12:36 Speaker 4: Remember, Clay, do you remember when we were in Saskatchewan bear hunt and it was like day four and we were seeing ten and fifteen bears a day, but they were all the same bears we looked at and they're standing thirty yards from we're inside of thirty yards to where we're sitting, and we've been doing this every day and we're in like our six of the day, number four. Clay Joe looks at me and I said, boring. But the best it came we got a bear later on, So you just wait. This is foundational stuff here. 01:13:11 Speaker 1: Foundational have a. 01:13:14 Speaker 4: Good way, you have a good way of bringing it all. 01:13:16 Speaker 2: The podcast can't all be downy Boker, Okay, I'm sorry. 01:13:21 Speaker 4: I'll be uplifting and. 01:13:22 Speaker 3: Encourage you gotta suffer through it. 01:13:26 Speaker 2: We're in the Bear Grease Academy of Backwoodsmanship, Philosophy, and Culture. You guys are maybe going to be graduates if you finish, if you finished the series. 01:13:39 Speaker 4: It's going to be a test at the end of this, because that's gonna be a problem. 01:13:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, is gonna be huge tests. 01:13:46 Speaker 2: Yeah, Kyle, I'm gonna give you one last chance to tell me your best Game Warden story. 01:13:54 Speaker 7: Oh man, I'm just gonna tell you what pops into my head. So this was a day when and uh, we had a lake that opened, a new lake and so they're closed to fishing until they open up, and then when they opened usually got all kinds of fishing pressures. So we had a boat in the lake. Some an agent like watching. I'm on the shore. They watch everybody on this shoreline. They say, okay, they're all fishing, going go go down check them. So I walk down and I walk up to this the first the first people I come to this older black couple and I'm I think older then they're probably my age now, you know. But they were retired, we'll say fishing. And of course the lake. The lake has a fifteen inch slink limit on bass, and they're on a little stringer. There is obviously a short bass. And I'm like, I do not I do not want to, you know, ruin their day. They're just down here fishing. This bass is fine. And I said it was kind of a way from them, just a little ways. I said, what's the deal with the bass here? And they said, oh, we we don't know. We don't know about that guy, you know. So I said, well, if that guy comes back, tell him it's fifteen and slength limit and that need to let that fish go. So I go on down the lake. They check everybody, everything's fine. I come back and now the stringer is the bass has gone. The stringer sitting right by the gentleman. I'm like, oh great, they claimed this fish. The guys in the boat are probably going to say they you know. 01:15:19 Speaker 1: So I said, I don't understand. When you came back, they had not released them. 01:15:22 Speaker 7: So they released the fish and took this little twenty five cent rope stringer and put it with their stuff. Well, no I knew whose fish it was. I just wanted them to just I'm trying to just tell them that fish is not cool to you know. And so I come back and now that they have the stringer, and I know the guys in the boat probably saw him let the fish go. So I said, well, did you guys decide that fish is yours after all? And the lady said, no, sir, but we decided if he wasn't going to come back, we might as well have that stringer. Never came back again, and I walked up the hill. 01:16:04 Speaker 1: That's a good story. 01:16:05 Speaker 4: That's a good story. 01:16:06 Speaker 2: Yeah, that answers my question about how you, uh, you handled dealing with people if. 01:16:13 Speaker 7: You could, if you could, I mean, you know, most most violations were not intentional. Yes, something happened, right, the bird flew up, You shots the wrong bird, You didn't plan to go out, and you know, something just happened. Yeah, So a lot of times you have to write those anyway, you know, like Donnie's deal. But it all works out in the end. So hey, I brought something for it. Oh yeah, I wanted to not forget this before. Now it's not I don't want to get get to your hope's up too high here. I mean, it's it's not it's not from Cabelli's. But I had this on my desk for years. This is salt that I rendered from a salt lick at Boon's Lick. Yeah, it's just Nathan Boone and and Daniel Morgan Boone ran that salt works and so it still comes out of the ground. It's not a salty But I went there one time with a buddy and we got to get that's from maybe a gallon of water that. 01:17:06 Speaker 1: He boons lick and I didn't want. 01:17:08 Speaker 7: I didn't want. Wow, I didn't have two of them. 01:17:10 Speaker 2: Hey, that is so you've nailed it. You know what I tell you. I have a lot of people give me stuff, which I'm always grateful for. Hey, there was a lady I'm gonna call them out, uh Snake River Produce up in Idaho. 01:17:24 Speaker 1: I met I met. 01:17:25 Speaker 2: This this lady up in uh in Utah and she gave me a pack of uh dried onions. So people give me stuff all the time. Uh Kyle gave me that to come to painting, and I've made a post. I said, of all the gifts, this is like spot on. This is probably as good as it comes to painting. 01:17:47 Speaker 7: Well, you could. 01:17:47 Speaker 2: You can sprint right here by the by the bearers. 01:17:50 Speaker 7: All right, there you go. I have I'm having to move stuff out of my office to do some new flooring, so. 01:17:59 Speaker 1: That's cool. 01:17:59 Speaker 7: So Brent, Yeah, I don't have an old decoy for you, but I got a paper shotgunsholl. 01:18:06 Speaker 4: And. 01:18:07 Speaker 7: I don't know if you collect patches, but there's an ms h P pat. 01:18:12 Speaker 4: I've been getting a lot of these. I never was a patch collector. I've given away same hundreds, but since I've gotten on this platform, I get them from all over. I got him from a guy Michigan sergeant Michigan State trooper sent sent me some cool and something that he wore on his uniform. Yeah, there you go, thank you, brother. 01:18:33 Speaker 7: Yeah, I appreciated very much. 01:18:36 Speaker 1: Well, thanks for coming, Kyle, really appreciate it. 01:18:38 Speaker 7: Enjoyed it, everybody. 01:18:40 Speaker 1: Yeah, great conversation. We got one more and it's gonna be racy. 01:18:45 Speaker 2: I hate to tell you, it's just it's gonna get down right. 01:18:52 Speaker 4: Are you rewriting any more song? 01:18:54 Speaker 1: WHOA, You're not gonna believe the song I'm going to sing on that. 01:19:00 Speaker 4: Careful lots of foreshadow here. 01:19:03 Speaker 2: Hey, I gotta say this. I met Evan Felker in Montana. Josh, you know who that is? 01:19:10 Speaker 4: Should I? 01:19:11 Speaker 2: Yeah, the lead singer for the Turnpike Contributors. 01:19:14 Speaker 4: Okay, I do. 01:19:15 Speaker 2: Me and Brent met him, and man, there's no I wish. Uh yeah, he doesn't even know that. I have like five hit songs ready to be recorded literally as we speak. All he needs to do is say the word. 01:19:36 Speaker 4: He needs to just reach out on Instagram d M. 01:19:39 Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you know whatever. 01:19:41 Speaker 2: Uh but uh no, I enjoyed. It's I think he's the first musician that I've ever met that I actually wanted to meet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well no, Hawking Horse doesn't count. He's like my friend, Andrew will is my friend. But no, so I so I was like, uh. 01:20:05 Speaker 4: It's like, hey, man, like, can you sign my shirt? What are you doing? 01:20:13 Speaker 2: Yeah? Anyway, I've been I've been jamming out of the Turnpike Truders a lot. So maybe I'll maybe, I'll I'll probably ride a fourth verse love it to do this to turn You just got the band back together, all right, guys? Well, oh March ninth, Brent and I black bur Banana. 01:20:36 Speaker 4: I'll be there too. 01:20:37 Speaker 1: Josh will be there, Josh Lambridge will be there. 01:20:40 Speaker 7: John, I'm going to try. 01:20:42 Speaker 1: Kyle's going to be there. Doctor Nuklem probably be there. 01:20:45 Speaker 6: I'm betting. 01:20:45 Speaker 5: I'll just be honest, I'm betting that Ship is going to play in the state championships. 01:20:49 Speaker 2: So, yeah, we got major problems ships in the state championship, which we have four games to win between here and there. 01:20:58 Speaker 6: It's not very many. 01:21:00 Speaker 2: Misty basically prophesied ten years ago that Shep would be the state champion in twenty twenty four. 01:21:09 Speaker 6: Now I said that he'd playing the state championship in twenty twenty four. 01:21:12 Speaker 4: Okay, you know that she has done a lot of that, and I know I'm telling no about the flood. Yeah, I'm talking about Yeah, it comes to fruition very good. 01:21:22 Speaker 1: Shep Newcomb hitting nine and threes two nights. 01:21:25 Speaker 6: Ago in the regional championship. 01:21:27 Speaker 1: He was in a haze. 01:21:29 Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like it was like watching a wolf ketchup like a bison calf and then just go catch another one for no reason. 01:21:36 Speaker 4: Yeah. 01:21:37 Speaker 2: They did lose though, that's all right. 01:21:39 Speaker 1: That the regional championship, Regional chip. They lost the regional championship. 01:21:43 Speaker 5: Now they they've done pretty far. They were pretty good little scrappy team. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch. 01:21:51 Speaker 1: This is like a bonus segment here, so all of us will most likely. 01:21:55 Speaker 4: You know, have to pay extra for this part, folks. Yeah. 01:21:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, So Misty may not be there, maybe at the state championship, and I may be streaming on my phone the live podcast that we're gonna do. We have we oh man, we got a lot planned. We're gonna have some live music. It won't be me, Brent, I'm out. 01:22:13 Speaker 1: But we got we gotta will be the musicians. 01:22:15 Speaker 6: What you won't, It's gonna be our friend, Brent. 01:22:18 Speaker 1: I might just step up and take over. 01:22:20 Speaker 6: You know you will. I mean, there's no chance you won't. 01:22:24 Speaker 2: Alright, maybe all right, thank you guys,

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