[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SOREN WHEELER: Whew! I mean, I don't have a real good game plan for how we start the show. But in the—in the spirit of the show, maybe we should just drop into that Radiolab staff meeting that we had.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah, sure.

JAD ABUMRAD: Yeah. I remember it. It was a very—people would be like, "Um, what?" Okay, to set it up, recently we came up with this...

SOREN: Challenge.

JAD: Challenge, yeah. For the Radiolab staff. We got everyone together.

SOREN: In an inappropriately stodgy conference room.

JAD: There is Soren dialing in.

ROBERT: From Wisconsin.

SOREN: All right. We're good to go?

ANNIE MCEWEN: Yeah.

SOREN: The big reveal! Everybody take a deep breath.

SOREN: I had warned them ahead of time that something big was coming.

SOREN: It's nothing—it's nothing bad, obviously.

RACHAEL CUSICK: Is it obvious? [laughs]

SOREN: Anyway, after we got over that little bump in the road, I just basically outlined this challenge.

SOREN: We came up with a little plan to—it basically boils down to this: on September 27...

SOREN: I hope. [laughs]

SOREN: We're gonna release a story—or a set of stories, really. And between today and that date, you will have to pitch, report, record, produce said story. You will have that much time to do it, and we will be putting it up no matter what.

SOREN: In other words, we're giving them like a week to pitch this story, and then a week to make it.

SOREN: And you will have to do a story either about breaking news, so something that just happened. Or you can do a story about bears.

STAFF: [laughs]

SOREN: So I'm calling the whole thing "Bad News Bears."

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Because you've had bears sort of in the room for so long.

JAD: Yes. And, you know, I remember the—in my memory—Soren, tell me if I'm right. This happened over text.

SOREN: It was a text, yeah.

JAD: This is one of those—like, you know, Robert, how you talk about Princess and the Pea? Like, there's a pea 14 mattresses down...

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: ...that just bothers you? Like, one of the peas that's been bothering me is the length of time it takes us to make these stories. Sometimes that can feel too burdensome. And we wanted to just do an experiment where we shortcut the hell out of that.

ROBERT: It was just this strange juxtaposition. "All right, I want you guys to go out now and find something that is hot, new and sudden and just breaking—like a real reporter. Or bears." [laughs]

JAD: [laughs] Right!

ROBERT: That's such a weird...

JAD: That's exactly it.

ROBERT: It's like, and how are you gonna cook that dish?

SOREN: Here's—let me explain how it's gonna go then. So you're gonna get paired up. I'll give you those pairings in a second. The story has to be under 10 minutes. The story must, at some point in it, include audio from the movie Bad News Bears, the original. The story must include at some point a recording from outside the office. Any narration has to be done in conversation, and has to be staring at somebody across the glass. You can not go in and track solo lines. Before I do your teams, your pairings, are there any questions?

PAT WALTERS: How are we defining breaking news?

SOREN: Pat had a reasonable question.

SOREN: I would give you a little bit—like, I would maybe be willing to accept something from last week. Otherwise, today forward.

PAT: Wow.

MATT KIELTY: Yeah, why are we doing this? [laughs]

JAD: Matt Kielty.

SOREN: It's gonna be fun. It's gonna be fun!

RACHAEL: All right, we probably have to clear out of this room.

SOREN: All right!

JAD: I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: Soren?

ROBERT: Soren?

SOREN: Oh, I'm—I'm Soren.

JAD: [laughs] Okay. This is Radiolab. Today, we are breaking bad news bears! Okay, so everybody went out from that meeting. And again, the task was to reiterate, the...

ROBERT: Breaking news story.

JAD: Breaking news story.

ROBERT: Or bears.

JAD: Or bears.

ROBERT: Week—one week to do everything.

JAD: Yeah, you gotta go out, you gotta get the tape. You gotta come back, put it in the computer, cut it up.

SOREN: Add the music.

JAD: Write the things.

ROBERT: And we have eight producers, so that...

JAD: Hey, fact checks. Fact checking.

ROBERT: Oh, fact check.

JAD: You gotta fact check.

ROBERT: Eight producers means four teams, so that means we end up with a grand total of four stories.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: Starting...

JAD: Who are we starting with?

SOREN: How about Molly Webster and Simon Adler?

ROBERT: Ooh!

JAD: Ooh!

SIMON ADLER: Well, I will say that we have checked both boxes here. We have a story that is both about bears and breaking news.

ROBERT: You're kidding! [laughs]

MOLLY WEBSTER: Ding ding ding! Extra points.

ROBERT: Well, you do get extra points.

SIMON: So all right.

SIMON: You there, Matt?

MATT MONTANYE: I am.

SIMON: Great!

SIMON: Last week, we gave this guy a call.

MATT MONTANYE: My name is Matt Montanye, and I am the director of public works for the city of New Bern.

SIMON: And you've got quite the task ahead of you, huh?

MATT MONTANYE: Yeah.

[NEWS CLIP: Yeah, it's big. That could do some destruction.]

[NEWS CLIP: Hurricane Florence is making landfall with devastating flooding and damaging winds.]

MATT MONTANYE: We had Hurricane Florence come through last week.

[NEWS CLIP: One of the hardest hit areas is New Bern.]

[NEWS CLIP: In New Bern.]

[NEWS CLIP: New Bern, North Carolina. This is a live look in New Bern, as the water has really overtaken this.]

[NEWS CLIP: There's relentless rain and wind. It's brought down trees.]

SIMON: If you've been watching the news at all over the past couple weeks, you've probably seen New Bern on TV.

MOLLY: As you just heard, it was one of the towns that was hardest hit by Hurricane Florence. Homes were destroyed. Tens of millions of dollars of destruction. Trees were knocked down.

[NEWS CLIP: And with those trees have come power lines. With the power lines down, the lights go out. Thousands of people are in the dark around here.]

MATT MONTANYE: You know, we talk about the flooding of New Bern, and we've got historic houses that were built in the 1700s and 1800s that were pushed off their foundation.

MOLLY: Oh, wow!

MOLLY: And as director of public works, it's Matt's job...

MATT MONTANYE: Our department is in charge of the cleanup duties. You know, not only leaf and limb debris, the trees and the shrubs, but also the—you know, the construction debris from the houses that are being gutted. And I'm actually at the disposal site right now looking at there's a line of about 30 tractor-trailer trucks that are lined up, getting ready to roll out to start doing debris cleanup.

SIMON: But what we called Matt about was the cleanup of something far smaller.

[NEWS CLIP: Trust me, this bear is not supposed to be here...]

SIMON: Far less vital.

[NEWS CLIP: ...Rrght now. But I'm sure they'll get them back where they need to be soon.]

MOLLY: But maybe just as important.

MATT MONTANYE: Let me step back here, and I'll give you a quick little history.

SIMON: Great.

MATT MONTANYE: The city of New Bern was founded in 1710.

BUDDY BENGEL: Our downtown is a really beautiful six, maybe eight square blocks, where you see the beautiful porches.

SIMON: This is local restaurant owner.

BUDDY BENGEL: Buddy Bengel. And our town was settled from Swiss settlers.

MATT MONTANYE: And if you look up the meaning of "Bern" in Switzerland, "Bern" means "Bear."

SIMON: And so over the next 300 years, they really ran with this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cheerleaders: Let's go bears!]

MOLLY: The high school mascot's the bear.

SIMON: They have a city flag that has a little black bear on it.

MOLLY: It's like a nod to their past, right? Where they came from.

SIMON: But it's also they've got all these bears in the woods surrounding them.

MOLLY: Simon found out a lot about bears in the woods.

ROBERT: Okay.

SIMON: Largest black bear ever recorded? From Craven County, North Carolina.

ROBERT: [laughs]

MOLLY: And the way this bear sort of obsession, one of the ways its taken hold, is that they have bear statues all over town.

MATT MONTANYE: They either stand up on their hind legs and they're about six foot tall, or they're down on all fours and they're about three foot tall. And there's probably somewhere between 60 or 80 of them around town.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cheerleaders: Go Bears go!]

MATT MONTANYE: So that being said, you know, bears are everywhere.

SIMON: Including the morning of September 14, 2018.

MATT MONTANYE: You know, Hurricane—Hurricane Florence came in, and...

BUDDY BENGEL: By about mid-day, water started to seriously start rising.

MOLLY: Again, Buddy Bengel.

BUDDY BENGEL: We were up to seven feet by Thursday night. I mean, and it happened in some places just extremely quick.

MOLLY: And so Buddy and a few other locals...

BUDDY BENGEL: Took it upon ourselves that we needed to go out and help people.

MOLLY: And they would go to areas outside of the downtown, and they were just banging on doors.

BUDDY BENGEL: Saying, "Look guys, in the next six to eight hours, this water is going to be over your head and flood your apartment. You need to get out now and get to a shelter."

SIMON: Meanwhile, back in the downtown with the waters continuing to rise...

MATT MONTANYE: As close as we are to the river, we received about eight to ten feet in our downtown area.

SIMON: ...this strange thing started to happen: those giant bear statues that had for years just been looking out over the town, the rising floodwater actually managed to pick them up.

MATT MONTANYE: You know, they all sit on concrete slabs, but, you know, with the amount of water we received, a lot of them floated.

SIMON: Many of them were lifted, cement and all, and were just floating there, standing upright, bobbing gently along.

MATT MONTANYE: Yeah. A lot of them—a lot of them in that flooded area, they just moved.

SIMON: Down the downtown, through the alleyways.

MATT MONTANYE: Some of them floated just down the street.

SIMON: Others floated on for blocks.

ROBERT: Oh my God! Just close your eyes, hear the hurricane, see the water, and then astonishingly, watch the bears go by.

SIMON: And then as the water recedes, they're gently set down and left there in the still slightly flooded waters of the downtown.

RESIDENT: Wow. That's a whole new view for him.

MOLLY: Photos of these bears started showing up sort of virally.

RESIDENT: That bear over there? He decided to travel all the way.

MOLLY: Local residents started posting to social media. And then...

BUDDY BENGEL: So it was...

MOLLY: Saturday morning.

BUDDY BENGEL: You know, it was the first day that the winds really had subsided, and I was getting up to just assess damage of everything that was outside.

MOLLY: Buddy's at home. He wakes up in the morning. He goes down the door of his apartment building. He opens it up, and it's just like...

BUDDY BENGEL: My God, this town has just been destroyed. I got branches everywhere.

SIMON: The rain is still lashing.

BUDDY BENGEL: And there was a lot of debris and stuff flying, and...

MOLLY: When he looks just right in front of him, right outside the doorway? Right there...

BUDDY BENGEL: On its side, in kind of a little bit of a puddle of water, is a bear.

MOLLY: One of those floating bear statues had ended up at his apartment.

JAD: Oh!

MOLLY: And he immediately recognizes it as the city hall bear.

BUDDY BENGEL: So you have on there a lot of the colors and scenes from the city of New Bern that you have on there. Obviously...

MOLLY: The back of the bear is painted yellow like the New Bern flag. The middle of the bear is painted with the North Carolina state flag, and then the shoulders and head of the bear are red, white and blue.

BUDDY BENGEL: And that bear represents our entire city.

MOLLY: And there it was.

BUDDY BENGEL: Right in front of my door step. And a gentleman happened to just be walking by in the street who lives about a block, block and a half away from me. And so he helped me pick the bear up.

SIMON: He grabs the back legs. The other guy grabs the front legs. Front, back, whichever they grab. They march it across this, I presume to be probably still six inches of water sort of washing through the street.

MOLLY: And Florence is, like, not done, right, because it sat over the coast for a while. So the winds have gone down but, like, the rains were still torrential. There was, like, I mean, flood watches a week out.

BUDDY BENGEL: You know, we were trying to figure out what to do with it, and there was a bush right behind city hall with a little bit of an alleyway in between the bush and the building. So we put the bear in between there, because we knew it would be hidden enough.

MATT MONTANYE: Yeah, Buddy Bengel, he took the bear back across city hall and put it behind some bushes. And then...

MOLLY: A few days later, they're actually getting ready for—President Trump was going. And so Matt Montanye...

MATT MONTANYE: I was the director...

MOLLY: ...the head of public works, goes down to city hall to, like, prepare it.

MATT MONTANYE: I was asked to go down there and make sure we had a flag at city hall, and make sure it was flying high. And while we were down there, we took a couple extra...

SIMON: He and his team, they spot the bear, go over to it.

MATT MONTANYE: So two of us were able to pick it up very easily.

SIMON: They pick up the bear. They march it to the platform.

MATT MONTANYE: Set it back on the concrete pedestal like it was, and then bolt or screw one side of it into the bear's foot, and then put the other side into the concrete slab. And we actually did that on all four of the legs.

SIMON: And they step back, and take a—take a breath for a moment.

MOLLY: And then they raise a new American flag. And they move on.

ROBERT: Wow.

MOLLY: Is that you wiping a tear away?

ROBERT: No, I just have an itchy eye. But I could. No, it's nice when you have something that represents your heart—as odd as it may be. It could be a painted plasticine bear image, but still, that's called you back. Or we aren't over, or to quote Frances Scott Key, "You're still there."

MATT MONTANYE: When you look at the grand scheme of it, the bears, you know, it's not that important but, you know, it kind of symbolizes that we're putting New Bern back together.

BUDDY BENGEL: You need a symbol to get behind, and our symbol in this city are the bears.

ROBERT: Huh.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, resident: [laughs] Well, that's one bear down and 11 to go.]

JAD: Wow, all right. So what's...?

ROBERT: [singing] "And the home of the bears."

SOREN: No, bears. Bears.

JAD: Bears. [laughs] So what's—that was number one?

SOREN: Uh-huh.

ROBERT: Story number one.

JAD: So who's next? What's next?

SOREN: Yeah. Well, "who" is Pat Walters and Bethel Habte. And "what" remains to be seen.

ROBERT: Let me—let me do this.

SOREN: Sure.

PAT: Should we, should we talk about this thing?

ROBERT: Yes, talk about the thing.

PAT: Okay, yeah. So this is a story about...

PAT: Park right here. Right behind his Bobcat.

BETHEL HABTE: His Bobcat?

PAT: This guy named Rob.

PAT: Hi.

ROB DUBBIN: Hello.

BETHEL: Hey, really nice to meet you!

ROB DUBBIN: Nice to meet you. Hello.

BETHEL: I'm Bethel.

PAT: I'm Pat.

ROB DUBBIN: Hey Pat, I'm Rob.

ROBERT: And Rob is who exactly?

BETHEL: Rob Dubbin. He's a comedy writer. He worked in the city for a really long time. Like, 10 years plus working for the Colbert Report.

JAD: Oh, wow!

BETHEL: Just basically like a high-rise-living city guy.

PAT: Yeah. But about a year and a half ago, he and his spouse...

BETHEL: Sandy.

PAT: ...moved upstate.

PAT: Yeah, this is great.

ROB DUBBIN: Oh, thank you. It's been raining the last couple days, but stuff is happening.

PAT: Yeah.

BETHEL: They'd bought a little white house with a big yard and this beautiful mountain ridge in the distance.

ROB DUBBIN: But when it gets really rainy it gets super foggy, and then it sort of disappears.

BETHEL: Yeah.

ROB DUBBIN: The way that sometimes, like, a building would in Manhattan.

BETHEL: You're relating things to buildings still?

ROB DUBBIN: That's all I got [laughs]

PAT: And pretty quickly after they get there, they realize there's all this food growing in their yard. They have apple trees and then they find a pear tree.

BETHEL: Squash and kale and pumpkins.

PAT: And pumpkins and hops.

JAD: Wow, it's like Garden of Eden.

BETHEL: Yeah.

PAT: Had you ever had trees that grew fruit or food before?

ROB DUBBIN: No, no.

BETHEL: And right in the center of this yard is a peach tree.

ROB DUBBIN: And we had so many peaches. I think we pulled, like, 200 off this tree. We made jam and pie. And Sandy's an amazing pie baker. And so we had a ton of pie, crumble...

BETHEL: And so the next year rolls around, and Rob is, like, rubbing his hands together, like, "Yes, it's peach time!"

ROB DUBBIN: You know that they're ready because they come off when you gently tug at them. And if they're not coming off yet, they're not ready yet. So it was in the part where we were, like, waiting and ready for it to start to happen.

PAT: When he hears Sandy...

ROB DUBBIN: ...yell from the back of the house, "Ah! It's a bear!"

PAT: So he jumps up, goes to the back window and, and sees...

ROB DUBBIN: It was a bear! It was a—I mean, you can't mistake it.

BETHEL: Just sitting there!

ROB DUBBIN: Sitting like Winnie the Pooh on its butt, and it was just reaching up all lazy to the tree, and it was pulling off a peach. And it would, like, look at it, and it would put it in its mouth, and then it would drop a pit and it would reach up for another one. It was just having the time of its life. And...

PAT: I love that it's sitting.

ROB DUBBIN: Not only was it sitting, its back was to me, which I found also very upsetting in ways that I couldn't totally articulate at the time. I was like, "You need to be more aware of the fact that you've come to someone's house, taking their food."

BETHEL: And so he jumps up, he grabs this tambourine that he uses to punish his cat...

ROB DUBBIN: So I grabbed it and I ran outside and I started shaking it.

PAT: One of them took a video of it.

BETHEL: And then Sandy, his spouse, is, like, by the house, woofing like a dog.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sandy: Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rob Dubbin: Ah! Ah!]

BETHEL: [laughs] And, like...

ROB DUBBIN: The bear immediately was like, "Oh, no!"

PAT: The bear totally freaks out.

ROB DUBBIN: Then it booked it back into the woods that way.

BETHEL: So you walk up to the peach tree and...

PAT: The peach tree has been, like, massacred.

ROB DUBBIN: The parts of this tree that are six feet or below were pretty much stripped of peaches.

BETHEL: And there's just all these peach pits and, like, half-eaten peaches scattered around. And every one of those is like a peach that they're not gonna have. Like a pie crumble that they're gonna have.

PAT: What was the feeling that you had?

ROB DUBBIN: Just loss, and—and determination. I was like, "No. I can't—I don't want this to keep happening." At this point, I see the peaches that are left, and I would like them to be ours. I think the bear has had its fill, and this has to stop now.

BETHEL: So they go back inside, and Rob immediately Googles, like, "How to deter bears."

PAT: And then at some point they come across a website that says the one thing that bears are very afraid of is human voices.

ROB DUBBIN: Yeah. So I was like, "I think that what I need to do is make a giant playlist of podcasts and play it."

JAD: A podcast?

BETHEL: Yeah. And so he takes this old iPhone with a broken screen and he...

PAT: ...then begins to build this bear-deterring podcast device.

ROB DUBBIN: I have a telescope. It has a mechanical mount. And then I have one of those little power banks that you can get to charge your phone when you travel and stuff. And then a Bluetooth speaker that I connected directly to the phone.

BETHEL: And he covers that whole thing with a recycling bin on top of these logs. So he hooks the whole thing up, and he loads it with the entire catalog of Reply All.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Goldman: And I'm Alex Goldman.]

ROBERT: Reply All. This is a show about the internet.

BETHEL: Yes.

JAD: Oh my goodness! It's like the two most citified Brooklyn kids.

BETHEL: Yeah. So Reply All is this podcast by these two guys: PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman.

JAD: And a whole bunch of amazing producers.

BETHEL: Absolutely, an entire team of incredible people who produce the show. But anyway, yeah, Rob just happens to like Reply All.

ROB DUBBIN: It was—it was something that we were comfortable with.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: So Alex...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Goldman: Yes?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: You've been mostly out sick this week.]

JAD: I love imagining PJ and Alex just talking to no one in the middle of a garden.

PAT: So mainly I'm just curious what you thought about your podcast being used a scarecrow?

PJ VOGT: How do you feel about that, Alex?

ALEX GOLDMAN: I think—I thought it was great. Like, I thought the only—I thought that there were very limited ranges of application for this show. I'd like for our show to be like the duct tape of podcasts. You can do all kinds of stuff with it.

PJ VOGT: Yeah.

ALEX GOLDMAN: So far we've only figured out the two: listen to it and scare bears.

PJ VOGT: [laughs]

PAT: But he also thought, like, there's one aspect of Reply All that might be particularly effective at scaring away a bear.

PJ VOGT: [laughs]

JAD: It's the laugh?

PAT: It's the laugh. PJ's laugh.

BETHEL: [laughs]

ROB DUBBIN: I'm just imagining a bear that was like, "Mmm, I don't think it's people. I'm gonna walk a little closer. I'm gonna approach this tree." And then it was like [laughs]. That might be a little extra pop.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Goldman: Yes!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: [laughs]]

PJ VOGT: I do have the, like—I do mostly feel—like, I feel like I'm supposed to feel bad about it, but I mostly feel good about it. Like, I mostly feel good that it's just, like, useful, even if its useful in a very stupid way.

ALEX GOLDMAN: Right, I'd like for us...

ROBERT: Well the terrible irony is here's this city boy who escapes the city, learns to love the peace and quiet, and then has his peace and quiet invaded and turns it back into a city.

PAT: Yeah, I mean, they're—its like Brooklyn kind of followed him up there.

ROBERT: Some guy with a radio going on too loud in his convertible.

BETHEL: I'm sure though, it kind of felt reassuring to have that, like, going in the background. You know that your bear deterring machine is doing its job.

ROB DUBBIN: It was an instinctual choice that I felt, like, continually revealed itself to be the right one.

PAT: Yeah. So he goes out, he checks that first morning. The peaches are all safe. Goes out in the evening, Reply All's continuing to play.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: Hey Gene.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Goldman: Hey Gene.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, PJ Vogt: Gene, how are you?]

BETHEL: Next day, he goes out and there's no sign of any bears, and he gets, like, 10 peaches off the tree. And then the next day, no bears again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Goldman: I can explain this tweet, but I don't feel the tweet in my bones the way you—you might.]

BETHEL: PJ and Alex are still talking about the internet, and there's, like, 20 peaches off the tree.

ROBERT: So over the days, how many peaches did he capture from the bear?

BETHEL: Well...

PAT: He had counted that the bear had eaten about 40 peaches.

BETHEL: Based on the pits. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PAT: Yeah, yeah. So he had kind of counted in his rage, you know, as he was cleaning up the mess how many peaches that the bear had taken from him.

ROB DUBBIN: The way it shook out, we got about as many peaches as the bear did.

BETHEL: He thinks that he and Sandy got, like, 40 peaches too. So, like, by the end of peach season, he's thinking, "I win. Or at least I didn't lose. We tied." [laughs] And so anyway, he ends up writing this entire story on Twitter.

ROB DUBBIN: Put it up on Twitter, and I was like, "This is a story about what's happening in my yard right now." And it got a big response. And I was a little surprised, I think, at the number of people who took the bear's side, but it was like, "What's the problem? Why can't the bear have some? Not enough peaches for you? Like..."

PJ VOGT: Really? There's bear apologists?

PAT: Yeah.

ALEX GOLDMAN: Do they understand that there are other food sources than the one peach tree in Rob Dubbin's yard? Like...

PAT: Clearly no.

PJ VOGT: [laughs]

ALEX GOLDMAN: The way I see it is like, if Rob had domesticated the bear, raised it to only understand that food came from that tree and then sent it out into the woods, they would be justified. But other than that, that's ridiculous.

PJ VOGT: I'm not taking the bear's side.

ALEX GOLDMAN: No, no.

PJ VOGT: I wouldn't even—it's not even about, like, the morality of it. Its just the bear doesn't like Reply All, Rob does like Reply All. That's, like, very straight forward for me. Rob gets the peaches.

PAT: Do you think on any level, the bear, like, got something out of listening to the show?

ALEX GOLDMAN: No.

PJ VOGT: No. [laughs] I don't know. We just don't design it with bears in mind.

ALEX GOLDMAN: What would a show designed with bears in mind sound like?

PJ VOGT: Hmm. Radiolab. [laughs]

JAD: Oh my God, it's our next spinoff. Radiolab Presents...

ROBERT: Radiolab For Bears.

JAD: For Bears.

ROBERT: Yes, we've been under, sort of, estimating the size of our bear audience.

JAD: Listen, real talk here, okay? We like bears. We like...

ROBERT: We do.

JAD: We could do many more episodes about bears.

SOREN: No, in particular, we've run across so many, and they, our staff, has run across so many things about bears that we've got a whole bear season worth of...

JAD: We could do a whole season.

ROBERT: Or we could leave...

JAD: Honestly, we could do that. We could just decide that right now.

ROBERT: We could.

JAD: We could make...

ROBERT: Or we could try again, see if there's anybody in the house who's gonna do a non-bear story.

SOREN: Yes, we are still—we have two more. And so next up is Matt Kielty and Rachael Cusick.

JAD: With breaking news, I hope.

ROBERT: We'll see.

MATT: All right. You just want us to go barreling into this or something?

SOREN: Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah, go.

MATT: Okay. Well, if we start all the way at the tip top, we drove out to Oak Ridge, New Jersey.

RACHAEL: Yep.

MATT: Which is about an hour and a half west of the city here.

SOREN: Okay.

MATT: Drove out for a story about a bear.

RACHAEL: Surprisingly.

MATT: Who would have thunk it?

MATT: I've definitely heard dogs barking in the video. Oh! Oh, that's a dog.

MATT: But not just any bear. A famous bear.

RACHAEL: The most famous bear, you could say.

MATT: Yeah.

MATT: Hey, how's it going? My name's Matt.

RACHAEL: I'm Rachael.

MATT: We're reporters...

MATT: So we showed up totally unannounced to this house. A woman answers the door, a little suspicious. We explain who we are.

MARISSA MCGOWEN: Hi Matt, I'm Marissa. Hi Rachael, I'm Marissa.

MATT: Eventually we get her name. Its Marissa. Marissa McGowen.

MARISSA MCGOWEN: Hi!

GREG MCGOWEN: Hi!

MATT: We meet her husband, Greg, who had just gotten home from work.

GREG MCGOWEN: Rachael?

RACHAEL: Yes. Hi, nice to meet you.

GREG MCGOWEN: Matt?

MATT: I'm Matt.

GREG MCGOWEN: Nice to meet you as well.

MATT: Nice to meet you.

MATT: So Greg walked us around to the backyard.

RACHAEL: This is really beautiful!

MATT: Where there's this huge forest.

MATT: Yeah this is gorgeous!

MATT: And then...

GREG MCGOWEN: All right, we can try this. The kids are playing games.

MATT: Thanks so much.

MATT: ...let us into his basement.

GREG MCGOWEN: Let's go in there. Well shut the door and try to be somewhat isolated.

RACHAEL: Okay. Sure, sure, sure. Oh, this sounds great.

GREG MCGOWEN: They'll start screaming in two minutes.

MATT: Yeah. I guess we were just curious, like, I mean, Marissa was telling us a little bit about the first time she saw the bear. Like, when did you—did she tell you about that? When did you first...

GREG MCGOWEN: Yeah, my wife saw him the first time. I caught just a glimpse of him. But the time I videotaped him was actually the third time I saw him.

RACHAEL: So it's the summer of 2014.

GREG MCGOWEN: It was—it was a weekday, and it was the night time. It was about six o'clock at night or so. And I was hanging out on my deck.

RACHAEL: When he sees this bear.

GREG MCGOWEN: Coming from the woods up towards the street.

RACHAEL: A black bear.

GREG MCGOWEN: So I ran out, I grabbed my cell phone and just started videotaping with an old Samsung Note 3.

MATT: It's like a shaky video, right? Sort of just like panning the phone all over the place.

GREG MCGOWEN: To try to find it with the phone.

MATT: Marissa's outside.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Greg?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: It went to the front.]

GREG MCGOWEN: She gets another video.

MATT: Oh so she's taking a video too?

GREG MCGOWEN: She's got a video of me taking a video of the bear.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: I don't see it.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Just keep your eye on it.]

MATT: So he starts walking up his front yard. He's going down his driveway, and he's looking. He's still looking for this bear. And really, like, you just see a little picturesque, like, slice of suburban America. Its just like some—you see some trees, a road.

RACHAEL: Green grass everywhere.

MATT: And then...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: There it is! There it is!]

MATT: All of a sudden, Greg zooms in on this, like, blurry blob that is moving across his neighbor's driveway.

RACHAEL: And—and its grainy, but what you see is this black bear.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: That is a bipedal bear!]

RACHAEL: Walking on its hind legs.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: Walking across the street.]

RACHAEL: Like a human.

JAD: Oh my God! Wait, that's the bear?

MATT: That's the bear.

SOREN: So the bear is just straight up walking on two feet. It could totally be like a kid in a bear suit. Like, its, like...

RACHAEL: Yeah, yeah. Actually, the first time I saw it I was like, "That is what my dad looks like when he stumbles out of the hallway in the middle of the night without his glasses on, but still motoring."

SOREN: Yeah, its motoring, and also sort of puttering.

RACHAEL: Mm-hmm.

SOREN: But puttering with purpose.

MATT: Okay so Greg—Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg, Greg—oh yeah. Okay, so Greg's filming this whole thing.

GREG MCGOWEN: Yeah, I'm over in the front yard of my house.

MATT: Watching this walking bear.

GREG MCGOWEN: That's when I see him walk up my neighbor's driveway, into the street.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: Walking towards me. I am walking backwards.]

MATT: Then the bear—so the bear ends up crossing the street over into another neighbor's front yard.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: He's walking through the front yard right now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Oh, I see it!]

MATT: And somewhere off-camera, you hear their neighbor...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Does she know that's a bear?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: You know that's a bear, right?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Bear, lady!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neighbor: I know!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Okay. Just look out, man.]

ARCHIVE CLIP, neighbor: He's definitely walking through my house on his hind legs.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Through your house?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neighbor: Through the yard.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Marissa McGowen: Oh, okay. Just look out. Don't get hurt!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, neighbor: I'm fine. He's just hysterical. He's walking like a person!]

RACHAEL: The video lasts for about three minutes, and then...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: Yep.]

RACHAEL: Greg stops recording.

GREG MCGOWEN: So we got the video. We watch it go through the woods and stuff. I go inside, I start giving the kids baths and stuff. And I just take it and I want to share it with some people, so I throw it on YouTube, you know? And a half hour later after it uploads, I go and send out a couple emails.

MATT: To, like, some friends and family, just to be like, "Hey, I saw this weird, wild bear walking. Like, check it out."

GREG MCGOWEN: And that's it. Go to bed. And then the next day...

RACHAEL: Greg checks his phone.

GREG MCGOWEN: And I start seeing my emails popping up again and again and again and again. And its people from viral media companies, its family members. Somebody put it on Facebook, and it was spreading on Facebook. And I was blown away.

RACHAEL: But then, all these other people start putting up videos because this bear is being spotted all over town.

MATT: Some of the videos are, like, of the bear...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: Awesome.]

MATT: Coming out at, like, nighttime or, like, dinnertime. Like, walking in and out of the woods.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Greg McGowen: I think he walks better than you, Don.]

MATT: But there's also videos of this bear just, like, strolling down neighborhood streets.

RACHAEL: Popping his head into garbage cans.

MATT: Going through people's backyards.

WOMAN: It was like...

MATT: Underneath this woman's deck.

WOMAN: It was amazing. He would come, like, right there. You know, right there.

MATT: Right there?

MATT: The two of them were, like, 20 feet away.

WOMAN: He looked up at me.

MATT: They made eye contact. Then the bear kept strolling.

WOMAN #2: There's a pear tree over there.

RACHAEL: Showed up across the street from this woman's house.

WOMAN #2: And we saw him one time there getting the pears out of the tree. It was great to see him, you know, because he's so famous.

MAN: This bear is amazing. Everyone: he walks on two legs!

RACHAEL: Eventually, folks in town give him the name Pedals.

[NEWS CLIP: Pedals, from the word bipedal.]

RACHAEL: He hit, like, Good Morning America.

[NEWS CLIP: Finally today, walking tall.]

RACHAEL: And, like, all the national news.

[NEWS CLIP: A black bear walking on it's hind legs.]

[NEWS CLIP: He walks on his hind legs.]

[NEWS CLIP: With the agility and ease of any human.]

[NEWS CLIP: Completely upright like a human.]

MATT: And everybody's just kind of like, "Oh my gosh! Like, what a fun, cute, adorable animal doing something that looks like a human! That's so fun!"

RACHAEL: Well, sort of everyone.

MATT: Which is...

RACHAEL: Where we get to Lisa.

RACHAEL: Hi, I'm Rachel.

LISA: You snuck up on me.

RACHAEL: Oh, sorry!

RACHAEL: So basically, we heard about Lisa. She was like a big player with this whole love affair with Pedals. So we go inside, we sit down at her dining room table.

RACHAEL: Okay.

MATT: Like, where—when did you first learn of the bear?

LISA: I don't remember the exact date. And I even have a hard time with years. But I think it was in 2014 that...

RACHAEL: She was on Facebook.

LISA: I saw a post about this bear, and he was in a video walking by. And I was like, "Oh, my God. This is so sad!"

RACHAEL: Like, you didn't think it was, like, funny, or...?

LISA: No, I thought it was sad.

SOREN: Why does the video make her sad?

MATT: Well, so Lisa actually works in animal rescue, and she explained that, you know, rather than being, like...

LISA: Just in awe of it. Like "Whoa!"

MATT: For her, when she watched the video, what she saw was a bear that was injured.

LISA: Yeah.

RACHAEL: So the thing is that if you look at some screenshots of Pedals close up, you'll see...

LISA: He really had no hands. One was, like, amputated.

RACHAEL: It was like a stub. It was, like, pretty much missing.

LISA: And the other one was just broken.

RACHAEL: Mangled.

MATT: And Lisa said that's why...

LISA: He walked on his hind legs. I mean, I'm sure he ate whatever berries or whatever he could get.

MATT: But Lisa said it was probably because he couldn't use his paws is why he was walking around these neighborhoods.

LISA: Because he was starving and he couldn't feed himself.

MATT: And so her first thought was...

LISA: We have to help this bear.

RACHAEL: So she gets in touch with a couple women. They start a GoFundMe campaign.

MATT: "Help Save Pedals."

LISA: Raised $25,000 in, like, four days.

RACHAEL: To basically guard him, transport him and house him at this place called the Wildlife Orphanage.

LISA: There's a couple other wild bears there, a couple of tame, like, retired circus bears, if you will.

RACHAEL: There's a pond, a lot of trees.

LISA: And it's private. You know, it's not a zoo.

MATT: So the very last thing they had to do was petition the state of New Jersey to just, you know, like, do it.

LISA: Because that's against the law for us just dart a bear and put him in a trunk and take him.

MATT: So they get this petition going, and it ends up going, like, around the world.

LISA: Like, 400,000 signatures.

MATT: 400,000?

LISA: Yeah.

MATT: They send it off to the state.

LISA: We're all ready to go. Everything was in place.

MATT: And the state says...

LISA: No.

MATT: We're not doing that.

SOREN: Really?

MATT: Mm-hmm.

SOREN: Why?

RACHAEL: Well, so I got in touch with the press people at NJDEP, which is, like, the environmental department of New Jersey. And basically they said, "We have no interest in commenting on this."

SOREN: Wait, why would they not even comment?

RACHAEL: Well, I think you can understand that if you know the rest of the story of Pedals.

MATT: Yeah, there's a lot more to this story.

RACHAEL: Dun dun dun dun!

MATT: That you don't know.

SOREN: All right, let's hear the rest then!

JON MOOALLEM: Okay. Well, so what you basically have is you have a collision of two ideas about black bears and what they are and what they need.

RACHAEL: Okay, so that's Jon Mooallem.

JON MOOALLEM: I'm a writer at large with the New York Times Magazine.

RACHAEL: Long time Pedals fan.

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. More—I knew more about his earlier work, like, before he got famous.

RACHAEL: He's written a lot about animals, including Pedals. And Jon explained to us that what you had was this divide, where on the one side you had people like Lisa, who when they looked at the bear they thought...

JON MOOALLEM: That the bear needed help.

RACHAEL: It's injured.

JON MOOALLEM: It seems to be struggling.

RACHAEL: We gotta get it out of there. But on the other side, you have the state of New Jersey.

JON MOOALLEM: And they came at it from a completely different viewpoint, where they, you know, were just as interested in quote-unquote "helping" the bear and making sure the bear could, you know, uh, live its—I don't know—best life, I suppose you'd say. But they wanted to go about in a very different way. As far as they were concerned it was a wild animal, and you don't take a wild animal out of the wild unless absolutely necessary.

RACHAEL: And the fact that you saw this bear walking on two legs...

JON MOOALLEM: They basically saw the bipedal bear as a real survivor.

RACHAEL: This is like a feat of evolution. Like, this bear evolved to survive. We should just let him do his thing.

JON MOOALLEM: It was still out there being a bear.

MATT: So we're gonna leave the bear there.

SOREN: Hmm.

RACHAEL: It's the right thing to do.

MATT: So this is the part of the story about Pedals that we haven't told you yet. So Pedals was first found in 2014. First showed up.

RACHAEL: Yeah. Showed up again the next summer. And then...

MATT: Showed up in 2016.

RACHAEL: Yeah, even early 2016, there were videos of Pedals. And then nothing. And then...

[NEWS CLIP: A bear that had become a national sensation is dead.]

[NEWS CLIP: The bear known as Pedals...]

RACHAEL: So in October of 2016, news broke that Pedals had been killed.

[NEWS CLIP: Was killed during a bear hunt on Monday. We told you about this...]

RACHAEL: In the annual bear hunt that takes place in New Jersey.

MATT: And pretty quick, a familiar story played out.

[NEWS CLIP: Growing outrage this morning over the apparent killing of a famed black bear.]

MATT: There was anger, protests.

[NEWS CLIP: Death threats against whoever may have killed the bear.]

[NEWS CLIP, protester: This fucking hick piece of shit.]

MATT: Death threats against an innocent hunter.

[NEWS CLIP: Against himself, his family. People have actually threatened to burn down his business.]

MATT: People posted photos of his home.

RACHAEL: His wife's name.

MATT: And in the midst of all of this...

[NEWS CLIP, protester: I think everybody out there should be going after the state of New Jersey.]

MATT: People were angry at the state.

[NEWS CLIP, protester: The state of New Jersey did nothing about the bear.]

[NEWS CLIP, protester: Where was the DEP when people reported this bear being injured for years?]

RACHAEL: That this is their fault.

[NEWS CLIP, protester: Where were they then?]

LISA: That was so rough. Yeah. I've had my moment, you know? But people sent me bear things. You know, like, I have—I have, like, the little—see the bear on top of the radio? And Sabrina got me a picture that looks just like Pedals from a beautiful artist that doesn't even know Pedals, but made this picture of a bear that looks just like him. And it's just cool, so she just me one of those. You know, it's just nice. People thought, you know? They saw how hard we fought. Yeah, but the book is the best. It really is. And what's the writer's name?

MATT: Jon Mooallem.

LISA: Yeah, I talked to him. He was nice.

MATT: He's a really nice guy.

LISA: I remember being like, "You wanna what?"

RACHAEL: [laughs]

MATT: So Jon actually wrote an obituary for Pedals.

RACHAEL: Do you have a copy of the magazine? That was cool.

LISA: Let's just look really quick, and then you guys can...

MATT: It was for the New York Times Magazine's annual "Lives They Lived" issue.

RACHAEL: You got it?

JON MOOALLEM: I just thought, you know—the way I've always—you know, I've always thought of "The Lives They Lived..."

MATT: There's a Bowie picture.

JON MOOALLEM: You know, it's about these people's lives.

LISA: So many people!

JON MOOALLEM: But it's also just an interesting way to talk about the world that we live in.

MATT: Janet Reno.

LISA: Pedals the Bear.

MATT: And there's Pedals.

JON MOOALLEM: One reason why I find conversations about animals so interesting is because the animals always have no comment, right? That they're—you basically have groups of human beings...

MATT: Oh, it's Pedals!

JON MOOALLEM: ...standing around this...

RACHAEL: It's like a little screenshot...

JON MOOALLEM: ...object...

RACHAEL: ...of Pedals standing.

MATT: Yeah.

JON MOOALLEM: ...trying to figure out what to do with it.

MATT: Walking towards the mailbox, just fetching the mail.

LISA: Yeah. And this is actually the picture that I used on his—our version of, like, rest in peace, Pedals.

MATT: For like a memorial page?

LISA: Yeah.

JON MOOALLEM: Yeah. Do you want me to—I felt like—do you want me just to read the end of the piece?

MATT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be great.

JON MOOALLEM: Okay. "It was impossible to know the circumstances: whether the hunter knew the bear's identity before he or she fired; whether Pedals, who did spend some time on all fours, had been distinguishable from an ordinary bear; whether he had been standing upright in the wilderness, looking preposterous and conspicuous, and conspicuously like himself. That is, the bear's posture — the very proof of his resilience — might have marked him for death.

JON MOOALLEM: It was never clear what we owed Pedals, exactly. You could argue that allowing Pedals to live in the woods and be hunted, like any other bear, was an act of respect—a validation of his wildness. You could also argue that it was a gruesome lapse of human compassion. Pedals stood for something. We may never agree what it was."

SOREN: So wait, do you guys even have—did you—there wasn't a clip in there. You didn't use a clip from the movie. Do you have a clip from the movie?

RACHAEL: Well, as a matter of fact we do. [laughs]

MATT: Yeah we've got a clip. Where does this—where did you send that thing again?

RACHAEL: It's in the Selects.

MATT: Oh, all right. Okay, I found it. We—we call...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bullshit.]

MATT: ...On your stupid rules.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

MATT: You want to play it again?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Bullshit.]

SOREN: And yet, in doing so you followed it.

RACHAEL: That's right. That's the beauty of it.

SOREN: Yeah. All right, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna take a little break, and we're gonna clear the air. We're gonna come back with a couple of producers who have a little bit more respect for the rules. More in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Jason Stutstill, calling in from Seattle, Washington. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

SOREN: "Breaking Bad News Bears." And we've got three bear stories so far, and maybe, I—you know, maybe this is the moment I should admit that everybody broke for bears.

JAD: Yeah that was—I could see that coming.

ROBERT: You know, really, if you had the choice, you know, and you woke up in the morning full of vim, vigor and excitement, would you do the hard news, or would right away go to...?

SOREN: And these days, would you do the bad news? Or would you...?

JAD: That's true. That's true.

SOREN: What I was hoping actually, and I mean, admittedly Molly and Simon's had a little bit of, like, the hurricane had just come in. But what I was really hoping was that somebody was gonna get a solid, rock-solid breaking news about bears kind of thing.

ROBERT: Yeah.

SOREN: And I actually had one in my sights that I was just sitting on, waiting to see if anybody got it. So something that the Trump administration did—though most people don't know actually the seeds of it were planted during the Obama administration—was that the grizzly bear came off the endangered species list. They were delisted.

SOREN: And in the wake of that, there was about to be, for the first time in almost 50 years, a hunt around Yellowstone because the grizzlies have gone from, like, you know, whatever it was, 100 left, to now around 700. They've also started encroaching on hikers, campers, hunters and ranchers. And so the idea is that once you delist them—which should be a success. Hey they came back! We can delist them now. But also at the same time, that means that we can start...

ROBERT: Cull them, or shoot them.

SOREN: Yeah, so the ranchers are geared up to get their licenses and head out there and have this hunt. And at the last moment, there was a court case and a judge said, "No, no. Not time to do the hunt." And that happened a couple weeks ago, and then that...

ROBERT: That was just at hunting season?

SOREN: It was days before the hunt or whatever it was.

JAD: And what was the reasoning from the judge?

SOREN: I think clearly some activist had come to them and said, "They're not yet ready. This will damage the population." And so yeah, the judge had, kind of, like, that maybe that the administration hadn't shown enough recovery to warrant hunting. But that then just two days ago, that ruling got sort of like either confirmed or upheld, or whatever it is. And now that functionally actually means that the grizzly is not delisted.

JAD: Huh.

SOREN: That it is still on the endangered species list. And there is even some among bear-concerned folk that you talk to, they're not quite sure what to think. Because if you're gonna have an endangered species list, you need to occasionally have an animal come off of it.

JAD: Yeah, you need a win.

SOREN: You need a win. Otherwise, you just lose the political will to even...

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: Yeah, totally.

SOREN: ...do it. Or you just show that doing it is pointless, and you're gonna lose them eventually.

ROBERT: And that once you get on it, you never get off of it.

SOREN: Right. No, you need someone to get off. And I guess, you know, you could probably go back and forth for a lot about whether it's time for the Yellowstone grizzlies to be off or not. But yeah, so nobody got to that, but still we have one more story, and it comes from Annie McEwen and Latif Nasser. Of course, it's about bears.

LATIF NASSER: I think in some ways both.

ANNIE: Both!

JAD: Really? This is another...

ANNIE: Yes, Soren!

LATIF: It's not breaking news in the sense that it's recent, but it's breaking news in that we're saying stuff that is true about the world that has not been reported before.

JAD: Oh, so it's breaking news about bears.

LATIF: Yeah!

ANNIE: I think so.

JAD: Okay. Where do you start?

LATIF: We start in the far north, in the Arctic islands in Canada. The coldest, wintriest place you can imagine. With an Inuit hunter...

DAVID KOTANA: All right.

LATIF: ...named David Kotana.

DAVID KOTANA: I was born in Kugluktuk in igloo in April 13, '59. And I live in a small community of 400 and something people, and everybody knows everybody. Pretty well we're all related.

LATIF: Anyway, he told us this story of a hunt that he was on that was unlike any hunt he had ever been on before, where he caught a bear that was unlike any bear he had ever seen before.

JAD: Wow, what happened?

DAVID KOTANA: Well...

ANNIE: April, 2010.

DAVID KOTANA: Me and my wife go hunting. It was a nice morning. Soft snow on top, nice weather.

ANNIE: He and his wife set out on their Ski-doos into...

JAD: What's a Ski-doo?

ANNIE: A Ski-doo is a snowmobile. It's just what they're called up there. Yeah, just sort of like the snow machines that you can...

JAD: It's the mechanical device.

ANNIE: Yeah. They hop on their Ski-doos, they head out across the sea ice. And they're heading towards this island that they are planning on camping in this empty cabin.

DAVID KOTANA: And we got to that cabin, and we were gonna camp there, but the cabin was damaged by some bears.

JAD: Wow, they knew that immediately.

ANNIE: Yeah. And then they decide let's go back to another cabin.

DAVID KOTANA: After we had tea and filled up and everything, we start heading back about four o'clock in the afternoon. And as we were following the coast, getting close to our cabin, there was a hill, and you could see some tracks coming down, down to the cabins.

ANNIE: Fresh bear tracks around this cabin.

DAVID KOTANA: They were not there before when we were going forward, and when we were coming back, they were there.

ANNIE: And as they approach it, they see that this cabin has also been ransacked. The bear has gone in...

DAVID KOTANA: Pulled out a mattress. It broke the window.

ANNIE: "Okay, well we'll continue on."

DAVID KOTANA: And we run into another cabin.

ANNIE: So this is a third cabin they pass.

JAD: Wow.

DAVID KOTANA: Broke the door open. Made a mess inside.

ANNIE: Is it normal for a polar bear to go into cabins and throw mattresses out?

DAVID KOTANA: No. No, polar bear doesn't really do that. So we started tracking it again. We could see the tracks all the way.

ANNIE: And this point, they started getting a little worried, because these tracks...

DAVID KOTANA: They was coming towards the community, to Kugluktuk. So we started going faster.

ANNIE: A fourth cabin ransacked. And a fifth.

JAD: Jesus!

ANNIE: Also been through. And right next to the fifth, there was a sixth cabin.

DAVID KOTANA: I noticed it was not opened, so I better not get too close to this cabin.

JAD: Oh, so this is presumably the next destination for the bear.

ANNIE: Right.

DAVID KOTANA: So I went a little further and started going around it. And sure enough, this bear was hiding behind the cabin. He had his head sticked out, he shooked his body and started running. So I started chasing it. I got kind of close to it, I stopped my Ski-doo, I went for my rifle on the sleds. Back of my hair was literally just standing up, you know?

ANNIE: And why were—why were you afraid?

DAVID KOTANA: I don't know. I just never run into that kind of bear before.

ANNIE: He was used to polar bears, but this bear? He just had this feeling that it was different. Something was off.

DAVID KOTANA: Then I take a shot at it. I hit it.

JAD: He kills the bear?

ANNIE: He does.

JAD: Okay.

DAVID KOTANA: And then we went to it.

ANNIE: They approach it on their Ski-doos, they get off. This bear looks strange.

JAD: Hmm.

DAVID KOTANA: It's a blonde bear. I just thought it was just an ordinary grizzly bear, because I never once catch a grizzly bear before, and that was my first time. And the legs are dark, so it's just like it got boots on or socks or whatever.

ANNIE: It also has dark circles around its eyes.

JAD: Wow, interesting.

LATIF: So he takes it back to town, and he checks in with this government officer. And this guy takes a look at it and he's like...

DAVID KOTANA: "David, I think this might not be a polar bear, it might not be a grizzly bear. It might be a hybrid bear."

JAD: A hybrid bear?

LATIF: Yeah.

JAD: Like a little bit of both?

LATIF: A little bit of both. And David had never even heard of that before.

JAD: I have never actually heard of that.

LATIF: It's not a common thing that happens, but a few years before David's bear...

[NEWS CLIP: An extremely rare creature shot and killed in the Canadian Arctic.]

LATIF: The first one ever was caught in the wild.

[NEWS CLIP: Have you ever heard of a grolar? A grizzly-polar bear hybrid?]

LATIF: And the media...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Attenborough: Grizzly bears...]

LATIF: ...David Attenborough included.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Attenborough: The result of polar bears and brown bears interbreeding.]

LATIF: ...got really excited about it. So we've known for a while that it's happening out there.

JAD: Wow!

LATIF: And even David has encountered a few more out there in the wild.

DAVID KOTANA: I ran into a mother polar bear with two little teddy bear cubs which are hybrid. So cute!

JAD: So this is some kind of cross-breeding between these two species?

LATIF: But the crazy twist was when this guy David Kotana shot this thing, this particular pizzly bear, he sent it off for genetic testing.

DAVID KOTANA: They told me it's called a first second-generation bear. The mother was half polar bear, half grizzly and the father was a full grizzly.

ANNIE: This bear that David shot is the first indication that these bears are fertile.

JAD: No way!

ANNIE: Which is something that you wouldn't think if a horse and donkey, say, would breed together and make a mule. Those mules can't then have offspring.

JAD: Wait, wait. I thought that two different species—because you have different species, right?

LATIF: These are different species. They branch off evolutionarily, like, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

ANNIE: Pretty much the same time that we broke off from the Neanderthals. And so it would be like us meeting a Neanderthal out in the Crown Heights bar or something, and going home with that person and creating—creating an offspring.

JAD: [laughs]

LATIF: That's really specific. It sounds like you've had...

ANNIE: [laughs] Franklin Ave. April 10. Call me! Just kidding.

JAD: [laughs] Wait, wait. Wow, that's—so they branched—so the polars and the grizzlies branched at the same time as us and the Neanderthals?

LATIF: Around. Ballpark. I mean, all these are ranges. So yeah.

ANNIE: That just goes to show how far apart they actually are.

JAD: Wow. So okay. So, I thought that that's not—that doesn't work.

LATIF: Well it kinda shouldn't work.

MARSHA BRANIGAN: Um...

LATIF: But wildlife manager Marsha Branigan says it sort of does.

MARSHA BRANIGAN: That's kind against the biological terminology that we use for species.

ANNIE: Oh, they're breaking the rules?

MARSHA BRANIGAN: Yeah, they're breaking the rules. But the rules we made, right?

[NEWS CLIP: The number of polar bear and grizzly bear hybrids has been growing over the last few years.]

[NEWS CLIP: It's evolution in action. We're seeing it take place before our eyes.]

[NEWS CLIP: The polar bear may not be considered a rare creature for too long.]

ANNIE: And the sort of general idea about this whole new species is that it's linked to the changing climate.

LATIF: Because now these two species are overlapping.

[NEWS CLIP: Hotter temperatures are moving Alaska and Canada's grizzly bears north, while polar bears are losing much of their ice and spending more time on land.]

LATIF: So for instance, polar bears have hair covering the bottom of their feet. Grizzly bears do not.

JAD: They have pads.

LATIF: They have pads, yeah. But then the grolar bears has, like, partial hair covering. So, like, maybe you get the best of both worlds. You can grip or whatever, but also, you're warm.

ROBERT: Oh, so it's a good thing to be one of these half...

LATIF: Right. Hybrid vigor. Best of both worlds kind of thing.

ROBERT: This is the new bear in town.

LATIF: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, David Attenborough: So pizzly bears are not bizarre, Frankenstein-like creatures. They're valuable new hybrids that may become increasingly common.]

LATIF: So that's kind of like—and that's the story we got interested in, and that's the story that has been reported, but then last year this paper came out and it kind of completely changes the story. And...

JAD: Are we at the place where the bears become breaking news?

LATIF: Yup.

ANNIE: Yes, this is it!

LATIF: I actually think it's even more interesting than that first story.

ANNIE: It's way, way weirder.

LATIF: It could more dramatically play out on like an HBO mini-series. [laughs]

ANNIE: Yes.

JAD: Okay. Lay it on me.

LATIF: So last year a paper came out.

ANNIE: And that scientist we talked to, Marsha Branigan?

MARSHA BRANIGAN: Yup.

ANNIE: Is one of its co-authors.

LATIF: And what they did is they basically made a big giant list of every sighting of a hybrid bear, and of all the genetic analysis of, like, every time we've seen this happen in the wild, and all the information we could possibly glean from that. And what she found was that every single one of these hybrids can be traced back to...

MARSHA BRANIGAN: One female polar bear.

LATIF: One single bear.

ROBERT: Really?

LATIF: Named bear 10960.

JAD: [laughs] Only a scientist would name a bear that.

LATIF: She is—she is literally mother of all hybrid bears in the wild.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: So there's something about this polar bear that seems to attract grizzly gentlemen?

ANNIE: Or she was just interested in grizzly gentlemen.

ROBERT: Whoa!

ANNIE: We mostly just have kind of guesses of how it went down since there were no witnesses.

LATIF: This is Alisa McCall. She's staff scientist at Polar Bears International.

ALISA MCCALL: But what we think could have happened is that there was this female polar bear, and maybe she did have some, you know, interesting personal preference for brown bears. Or maybe it was simply that she was in estrus, and a male grizzly bear...

ANNIE: That means she was in heat or something?

ALISA MCCALL: Yeah, she was basically in heat, so she was giving off a scent that she wants to mate.

ANNIE: Okay.

ALISA MCCALL: They leave these stinky foot trails. And so males will follow them on the ice.

ANNIE: What do those smell like?

ALISA MCCALL: Oh my gosh! You know, I've never smelled them, but I know to a male polar bear they smell good.

ANNIE: Really?

ALISA MCCALL: That's all I know. But as the female puts down these smelly footprints, the males are like, "Oh yeah!" And they'll follow her for, you know, days. And its cute. They'll actually put their feet right in the footprints as they follow her.

ANNIE: Oh, no way!

ALISA MCCALL: Yeah. So maybe there was this just this really aggressive brown bear/grizzly bear male who...

LATIF: Followed the female tracks, and...

ALISA MCCALL: Could've fought off other polar bear males.

JAD: Maybe this is a case of ,like, non-consensual...

LATIF: But if you look at sort of at like the genetic analysis, it looks like...

MARSHA BRANIGAN: She mated with two different grizzly bears.

LATIF: She had babies with two different grizzly bears, and with one of them she had babies years apart.

JAD: Oh, so she's had three litters with different...

LATIF: With two different grizzly bears.

JAD: Interesting.

MARSHA BRANIGAN: And all the offspring are from those three non-hybrid bears.

ANNIE: So this is narrowing in scope really quickly.

JAD: Interesting!

LATIF: Yeah it's not like, oh this is this—yeah, this, like, species-wide, you know, new adaptation. It's just like, here's this one lady who has this one kink.

ALISA MCCALL: Has a strange taste in men, I guess.

ANNIE: Right!

LATIF: Also, there is a possibility that it's like those were just the only dudes around.

ANNIE: But I was thinking like, "Oh my God, maybe this bear is a genius," and she's seeing this, like, ice change around her, and she's saying, like, "I need to save my DNA, and the best way to do it is to put it with a grizzly 'cause they're doing better than I am."

ALISA MCCALL: That's hilarious. I mean, yeah, imagine that there's—that would be pretty good. Unfortunately, the hybrids were kind of a mess, to be honest.

ANNIE: Really?

ALISA MCCALL: They weren't really well suited for land or for ice. They were such an in-between bear, that they really just weren't that fit.

ANNIE: Really?

ALISA MCCALL: Grizzly bears are so well adapted to life on land and finding food. They've got the big hump, they've got the big wide head, they've got these long claws for digging.

ANNIE: Right.

ALISA MCCALL: They don't have fur on the pads of their feet because they don't need it.

ANNIE: Right.

ALISA MCCALL: Polar bears are so well adapted for the ice. They've got a much smoother, sleeker head that helps them get in and out of seal holes.

ANNIE: Oh!

ALISA MCCALL: They've got thicker, sharper claws to grab seals and help them walk on the ice.

ANNIE: Okay.

ALISA MCCALL: Their fur is hollow, which helps trap warm air against their bodies. And the hybrid, they're like this weird in-between. So their head is kind of like not really sleek but not really boxy, kind of this weird in-between. They don't really blend in that well with the ice or with the land, because they're kind of this creamy color.

ANNIE: Right.

ALISA MCCALL: And then their fur itself is—depending on where the fur is on the body, is like a mix of hollow but not hollow.

ANNIE: Oh!

ALISA MCCALL: Like, so yeah, it backfired on her if that was her original thought. [laughs] But I like that idea.

ANNIE: So these pizzly bears are just probably not the new horizon of the bear that will be. And actually on top of that...

LATIF: So okay, so if you're imagining the family tree, right? So there's a mama polar bear with these two grizzly bears at different times, right?

JAD: Okay.

LATIF: So there's the dad and the stepdad. One of the kids, a daughter—and she's the only one whose had kids herself, so the third generation came from her. But it turns out that all those third-generation bears, including the bear that David Kotana shot, that bear, the daughter bear...

MARSHA BRANIGAN: She mated with her father.

ANNIE: Wait. There's some sort of incest part to this?

MARSHA BRANIGAN: Yeah.

ANNIE: That's so weird.

MARSHA BRANIGAN: I know. And she also mated with the other bear that...

LATIF: Kind of like dated the stepdad sort of thing?

MARSHA BRANIGAN: Yeah, sort of. [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah.

ANNIE: She slept with the same two dudes that her mom did.

ROBERT: Oh my gosh!

JAD: Whoa! Now we're going from like HBO to, like, Shakespeare.

LATIF: Yeah.

ANNIE: Yeah, or like Greek tragedy or something.

JAD: Yeah, that's a weird family tree.

LATIF: So now all of a sudden it looks less like a species-wide movement for life will find a way, and it looks a little more like this is one crazy interbred family.

ANNIE: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: So what do you make of that?

ANNIE: Maybe this one, like, crazy inbred family is the first, you know, quite awkward attempt at what may become, like—you know, might be, like, evolution striving forward, making shaky step after shaky step.

LATIF: 'Cause nature is raunchy. It's not, like, pretty the way you expect it. It's raunchy because sex, like—like, animals try things. It's, like, this could—maybe this is gonna keep going but only time will tell. There's no way for us to know.

ANNIE: And one last thing, which is kind of an afterthought, but maybe not, because while it's not clear whether our polar bear family is an awkward evolutionary step forward or just plain freaky, what we do know is that nature is not exactly shy when it comes to being sexually creative.

ANNIE: Is this Seventh Ave? Yes.

ANNIE: So it turns out, at the Museum of Sex they have this exhibit called "The Sex Lives of Animals." And my brother was coming into town.

JIM MCEWEN: People aren't shy with the horns.

LATIF: And we thought incest is on theme, so let's send both of them.

JAD: I'm glad you went there, 'cause my mind went there and I was, like, "Whoa!"

ANNIE: It's funny. I sort of organized this before I learned about the incest thing, just so you know. But then it just made it all that more uncomfortable. But anyway...

ANNIE: Okay, let's go in.

LATIF: He also didn't know about any of this going in, so poor guy. Yeah.

JIM MCEWEN: Why are we here? I mean, really.

ANNIE: But we got into that room, and a very nice woman named Stephanie Spicer showed us around. And we learned just like, nature is trying some crazy stuff.

JAD: Give me—give me, like, a listicle.

ANNIE: Dolphins have sex through their blowholes.

JAD: Whoa!

JIM MCEWEN: I guess why not?

ANNIE: Tortoises have a crazy tongue penis...

JIM MCEWEN: Whoa!

ANNIE: ...that comes out of nowhere.

JIM MCEWEN: That looks like something from Alien.

ANNIE: Ducks have sex with each other while they're dead somehow.

JAD: Oh, wow!

ANNIE: And deer have threesomes. There's all kind of butt stuff.

JIM MCEWEN: What is that? Is that...?

ANNIE: I don't know if I want to get into it.

ANNIE: And actually at one point, we were sort of surrounded by clitorises and other things.

JIM MCEWEN: I am starting to feel like I've been in here a while and I'm feeling a little queasy.

ANNIE: And then we were like, "They need like an abstinence room for brother, sisters." Like, we just need a minute. Can we have a minute? Just where's the celibate space? And then we got free passes to the booby bouncy castle, and I was, like, "Jim, we gotta do it."

JAD: [laughs]

ANNIE: And so we did it, and he's like, "Okay." And I just sent pictures to my parents and they were just like, "What is happening?"

JAD: "Come back to Canada right away."

ANNIE: Yeah. Like, this is too much.

JAD: That's wonderful!

SOREN: That's how you end a bear show right there. Every bear show ends in a sex museum, I think.

JAD: I did not expect that coming. Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser. Annie's brother, Jim? Is it Jim?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: Jim.

SOREN: Real quick special thanks. Thanks to Wendy Carr.

JAD: And thanks also to composer Anthony Plog and the Fourth Movement from his Fantasy Movement titled "Very Fast and Manic," performed by the Euphonix Tuba Euphonium Quartet off their album titled "Nuclear Breakfast" available from Potenza Music.

SOREN: And Stephanie Spicer at the Museum of Sex. And also, of course, bear 10960.

ROBERT: And thank you Soren for actually stuffing this whole idea into the hopper and come out with the—with what we came out with. It was kind of crazy.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah, for real.

ROBERT: We should go.

SOREN: Yeah, I'm gonna go hibernate.

ROBERT: You go hibernate. We'll say goodbye.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Soren?

SOREN: And I'm Soren Wheeler.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To play the message press 2. Start of message. [bear panting] End of message.]

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