00:00:14
Speaker 1: My name is Clay Knucomb and 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. Brought to you by to Covi’s Boots. I’m a cowboy boot man and I’ve been wearing to Covis for years. The most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on. Good boots for good times. Man. Am I excited to talk about two things today, one being the Civil War which has been just like been burning in my bones for years now, finally get to talk about it with somebody.
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Speaker 2: Thank you all for being here and we’re just.
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Speaker 3: Esteemed panel of civil war experts have gathered.
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Speaker 2: Ye. Yes.
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Speaker 1: Secondly, very excited to have in the COVID hot seat today. Jordan Sellers of Blood Trails Meat eaters acclaimed true crime podcast Blood Trails now on It’s how many seasons have we done?
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Speaker 3: Second season? Second in the middle of our second season, so six episodes into season two, so now there are fourteen episodes. So if you haven’t started, you can and you’re you know, going on a road trip summer. We’re all taking trips to the beach sitting on the mower exactly. You got fourteen episodes. That’s over fourteen hours of interesting crime stories. Yeah, thank you.
00:01:51
Speaker 1: Also joined by Josh Lambridge Spilmmaker and his wife, Christy Lambridge spilm.
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Speaker 4: Hello, Hello, Christie Lanforde. I’ve really been working on my mustache player.
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Speaker 1: And my lovely wife, doctor Misty nukelem Hell. You two of the biggest Civil War buffs I know. Christy and Misty are here today to hash it out.
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Speaker 5: Southern bells.
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Speaker 6: You don’t know, never described like that.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: It’s it’s going to be good. So Christy, you’re you’re a big fan of Jordan’s p.
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Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, Jordan, you don’t know this, but you kept me company during some of the darkest moments of my life, which were which we’re cleaning out our shop.
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Speaker 7: Yes, Josh, that was.
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Speaker 5: Almost a true true crime podcast because she wanted to kill me.
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Speaker 3: A crime scene. Hey, I’m you know, I’ll find out who did it.
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Speaker 1: That’s that’s the good thing. It’s kind of like having I don’t know if having a buddy that’s a really good detective is better than having a buddy that’s like a good detector. Do you understand like if if I were killed, like Jordan just said, oh, I’d find out who did it. And it’s like, I mean that helps me a little bit, I mean not a lot better.
00:03:11
Speaker 3: I would at least tell everyone about, you know, whether or not someone else found out who did it. You know, if it was a cold case, I tell them, and if it you know, you found the murder, I’d tell them.
00:03:22
Speaker 1: So yeah, But I mean what I’m saying is like, probably a better friend would just be like a bodyguard play yeah, bodyguard essentially. And that’s and that is why that we’ve brought Josh here today. He started a new podcast called Meat Eater’s Bodyguard.
00:03:38
Speaker 5: That’s basically what I do for Clay when we go on interviews. I’m there as the muscle.
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Speaker 3: Okay, you’re the muscle.
00:03:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:03:45
Speaker 1: So Jordan and I just had a brief conversation a minute ago. I asked him before we started, I said, are you ever concerned? And this is a question that people ask me from the beginning of Bear Grease, But they say, are you ever concerned You’re going to run out of content? And I said, I say no, But my field of interest is broader, much broader than yours.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, and you say, what do you say, I mean, not anytime soon. I have a list right now and I think there’s over eighty stories for real on it.
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Speaker 8: Yeah, for real.
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Speaker 3: And my field of interest is pretty narrow. So we’re looking at people outside, so hunters, anglers, campers, hikers, and some type of crime has been committed or is suspected of being committed. So like this season, we covered a case of a hunter up in Maine who disappeared, never been found. We don’t know a crime has been committed, but it’s very suspicious because they’ve searched those woods over and over and over again and they’ve never found him. And he had he just had cancer. He was very weak. It’s very unlikely he left. He was seventy years old, and so they’re pretty com confident something happened to him in those woods and then he was removed in some way. So those are the types of stories that we cover, and there are unfortunately quite a few of them. But yeah, we’re not gonna be running out anytime soon.
00:05:13
Speaker 1: Would you say that most of the stories that you have done thus far there has been an element of foul play and air on the part of the person that died, I.
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Speaker 3: Would say largely. No, most of them have.
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Speaker 2: Just completely innocent, just victims.
00:05:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean. So, the episode that came out this week is from down where I am, near where I am in East Texas, and it was of a big time fisherman. He loved to fish out on Lake sam Rayburn, which is the lake he had a lake house out there. He disappeared. His truck was found burned out, his boat was found shot. It was one of those pontoon boats. Someone had shot the pontoons in an effort to sink it, but it didn’t sink, because that’s not how those boats. Apparently I didn’t know this before, but you can shoot those boats and they won’t sink. And so foul play is suspected. And the more I talk with people about this guy, the more I come to find out he kind of a larger than life personality. Everyone knew him in town. But maybe a bit of a lady’s man. Those words, those specific words were used multiple times by different people to describe him. But he was also married. Also, I found out he was an outlaw, so a guy who maybe didn’t care so much about wildlife laws. So we don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know why he disappeared. We don’t know anything, really, but it’s conceivable that something he got into is what led to his disappearance and presumed death. So there are some worries like that, but usually it’s someone who was just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, at the wrong person out in the woods.
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Speaker 2: Okay, that’s slightly unnerving. Yeah, I was hoping. I was hoping you’d be.
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Speaker 1: Like, Nope, every single one had drugs, alcohol, gambling, horse racing and all whatever.
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Speaker 2: I was wondering if you pick that, Yeah, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a bad person. But where I come from, we only race mules.
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Speaker 3: Is it? Is it the racing or the gambling gambling?
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Speaker 1: It’s kind of it’s like throwing back on a joke that happened like weeks ago that nobody thought was funny about about.
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Speaker 2: Horse racing being kind of a little sketchy.
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Speaker 1: But yeah, so it would only be gambling. My parents were raising hot springs and so you know, now mule gambling and racing, that’s fine, totally okay, I mean, because you.
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Speaker 2: Know, how serious could that be taken.
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Speaker 9: It’s interesting because you don’t have Clay doesn’t have a really long list. He does not have eighty potential podcasts. He is looking for, you know, trying to mine out the heroes, like rural redemptive.
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Speaker 6: Stories of rural people.
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Speaker 9: Would you agree or disagree with that americanization sometimes?
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Speaker 1: I mean sometimes we’re just doing like big historical stuff like Civil War, which is kind of a little bit unusual for Bear Greece because there’s not a direct tie to hunting or necessarily even rural America directly. I mean, it’s like all of America. This is probably the biggest, like all American thing that we’ve done in a long time.
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Speaker 9: Yeah, but I’m just saying it’s it’s interesting that there’s so much.
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Speaker 6: He has such a longer list than you do.
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Speaker 1: Well, and it’s it’s probably just a the nature of the way he plans.
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Speaker 8: Yeah, and.
00:09:00
Speaker 3: Stories I’ll definitely do. It’s like people send in a story, I look it up briefly and think this could work, and I put it on the list. Yeah, that’s the extent of it.
00:09:09
Speaker 2: Really, But I mean eighty stories, that’s years of work.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a lot. Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of hunters going missing under suspicious circumstances, but also like like I have I think I can think it’s three, off the top of my head, spouses killing their spouses and to make it look like a hunting accident. Yeah, duck, a duck hunting accident, and then two deer hunting accidents. All three interesting, probably not accidents.
00:09:38
Speaker 9: I wonder if if that worries you at all, Clay, Yeah, yeah, I don’t know, just kidding, just kidding, I don’t with Clay.
00:09:51
Speaker 4: Well, Josh and Josh took me turkey hunting a few weeks ago and we’re out at you know, it’s five am and we’re trapsing through the woods. Yeah, and I’m a little ways by, hi Josh, and he’s like just turns his and logs and he’s like, are you okay? And I was like, yeah, I’m great. I just probably shouldn’t have listened to blood trails for real, like before we came out here, Like this was a little much.
00:10:10
Speaker 3: Just stay away from strangers, That’s what I’ve learned. Just like you see a stranger.
00:10:14
Speaker 6: Just just go somewhere else, Just go somewhere else.
00:10:16
Speaker 2: Ways, Oh that’s your hot tip.
00:10:18
Speaker 3: I listen. I I would say, don’t, don’t get into conflict. No conflict ever with not worth it. Maybe if like if they’re obviously friendly and in their right mind, like you know, it’s fine talk to them, but like if they walk through your hunt, if they mess something up, just don’t say anything.
00:10:37
Speaker 9: Is that what a lot of your stories are about people kind of infringing on your hunting property.
00:10:42
Speaker 6: No, Well, so he’s got eightyse stories. I’m just curious.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: Where’s There are definitely a few that I haven’t looked into in a lot of detail where there is some conflict over one actually up in Michigan allegedly conflict over a bare baiting location. Oh wow, and there was a gunfight basically happened as a result. Yeah, but but definitely definitely. I mean, we did one this season of a hunter who just it was in the parking lot of uh, some federal public land. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but some federal public land down in Florida in the Panhandle, and they just got into a fight.
00:11:20
Speaker 8: The guy.
00:11:21
Speaker 3: The guy was walking his dogs and he said, hey, you should have orangehn because there’s hunters in the area. He didn’t like that. We don’t know exactly how it escalated. From there, but it escalated to the guy walking the dogs shooting the hunters and killing him.
00:11:36
Speaker 6: Yeah, and along dog walkers, peaceful people.
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Speaker 3: This was just a few years ago. Wow, yeah, yeah, not not long ago. And so that’s why I say, like, you just never know, Like and this guy, it turned out the murderer had a history of aggressive confrontations with his neighbors, just like kind of a not great guy. And the hunter didn’t know that. Well, but he’s not going to back down. You know, he probably should have, not that it’s you know, at all his fault, but you just never know who you’re gonna run.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Well, that’s I think that’s great advice.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: Just general advice for life is just stay out of conflict. Yeah, dude, I mean, you know there’s there there can be an ego thing rise up when someone really wrongs you that you feel like you need to stand in your space or whatever.
00:12:25
Speaker 2: That’s rarely actually something you need to do. Like if someone like in the field.
00:12:31
Speaker 3: Especially way out in somewhere. Yeah, it’s one thing. If it’s like in a restaurant with you know, one hundred people around you. It’s another thing if you’re by yourself with someone in the.
00:12:40
Speaker 6: Sticks so stay out of conflict with strangers in the woods.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is you know, I meant this checks out. Gary Nukum always taught me from the time I was a young kid, I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the woods. I really was more than the average kid. And he was always like, hey, you know, there’s nothing in these woods that’s going to hurt you except for people. And he always advised us just to stay away from people.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: You know.
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Speaker 1: I mean, that’s I’d say that’s relatively good advice for the most part.
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Speaker 5: Stay away from people. I’m keeping a list here.
00:13:17
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah, tips for life for Joshua exactly.
00:13:21
Speaker 8: I’m doing a lot of stuff wrong Jordan’s.
00:13:27
Speaker 3: High risk lifestyle.
00:13:30
Speaker 1: So the second season of Blood Trails, what’s your favorite episode you’ve done so far? One that stands out, one that was iconic, second, second, the second, just all of them you’ve done, because people ask me that all the time, and I’m always trying to like pick one bear, Like if we were like, what’s the best bear grease?
00:13:51
Speaker 2: Which one would you listen to if you only have.
00:13:54
Speaker 3: So so I can tell you our most popular so far this season, by far, has been the first episode we did. It’s from up in Montana near Helena. A guy named Mike krit was the victim, and Mike moved from Colorado to Montana basically to live off the grid. He bought eighty acres up north of Helena and built a cabin and kind of just kind of wanted to be left alone, but was also very kind of aggressive about keeping people off of his property. So really he did have some neighbors who got along with but he had conflicts with other neighbors. And that’s really at the heart of the story, is this conflict he had with a neighbor farthered down the mountain from him. So and then the other big thing about this story is that there’s this easement. There’s a bunch of properties on this mountain and there’s an easement, so a road that is not like a county road. There’s like this official, unofficial agreement that all the neighbors are going to be able to use this road. A neighbor farther down the mountain from Mike decided he to want people driving or entering his property at all, and so he would try to block off that road. This conflict escalated, escalated, escalated. There were shots fired at Mike that he got on video, and we got that video and it’s in the podcast. If you go on YouTube, it’s there as well, you can watch that. And so that was the type of conflict that was going on on this mountain. Mike disappears. His remains are found a couple months later, and it turned out someone had actually.
00:15:33
Speaker 8: Cut him up, just remembered him.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, put him in two separate plastic bags, deposited those bags on two sides of a pass, the McDonald Pass up there near Helena. And so they find these remains. This is all they’re back in twenty eleven, and so you think, well, they found their remains, they’re going to find some DNA, they’re going to figure out who did it. And obviously they’re looking very closely at this neighbor who he’s been having conflict with. Kind of fast forward and nothing really happens for a long time. They don’t make any arrest, they can’t figure out who killed Mike. Eventually they connect some zip ties that were found on the remains. They’ve been used to zip tide like the bones together. They connect those zip ties to another neighbor. There’s a different neighbor not the guy who’d shot at Mike, different guy on that same mountain. They connected to him. He’s he’s prosecuted, he goes to trial, but it’s a hung jury and so and then a year later, the prosecutor decides we’re not gonna refile the charges and try to prosecute him again because they don’t feel like they have enough evidence. So and like there’s eyes skimmed over, tons of detail, like there’s there’s all kinds of stuff in that podcast. But I think that one has done really well because there’s so much uncertainty about the story. There’s a lot of speculation. You can have your own opinions about, you know, the guy that they charged. Did you listen to that one? Okay, all right, well I’m I’m curious to hear them, But that that one really sticks out, especially this season, just with the uncertainty of it, the like, is Mike a good guys? He not a good guy?
00:17:19
Speaker 2: You know? What? Do you think?
00:17:20
Speaker 3: You’s complicated?
00:17:24
Speaker 5: I think he did it.
00:17:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So if you haven’t listened to the episode, Leon Ford is the guy that they eventually prosecuted, and the way they connected the ZIP ties to him is they were kind of unusual zip ties. They were apparently like really large heavy duty zip ties. You couldn’t you can’t really buy them like home deep over lows.
00:17:45
Speaker 5: But one of.
00:17:48
Speaker 6: You are doing a lot wrong.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: You did it.
00:17:55
Speaker 3: But but he had access to them because he worked at an air Force base in Washington State, and there’s a record of him checking out those zip ties like a couple weeks before Mike goes missing. The other big there’s two other big piece of evidence. One is the timing of it. So he didn’t live up there on the mountain. He he had property up there, but he only visited every couple of years. So he visits and like the next day Mike goes missing, So that’s kind of weird timing. Another thing is they got an opinion. Yeah, they had, They had trailcam footage of his truck going up there the day Mike goes missing, and they don’t really have footage of anyone else.
00:18:33
Speaker 2: But they can’t they can’t pin it on him.
00:18:35
Speaker 3: Well, so, and I talked with the one of the primary investigators who ended up, you know, bringing this case to trial. What he what he told me is like if you take all of these things together, it’s very convincing. Right, it’s a pretty strong case, but each thing separately you can really pick it apart, which is exactly what his defense did. And so that combined with the other guy, I think the other neighbor throws a wrench into the whole thing. Because the defense calls the other neighbor who shot at Mike up to the stand and he pleads the fifth meaning he said, I’m not going to testify for fear of self incrimination.
00:19:17
Speaker 6: Oh man.
00:19:17
Speaker 3: The jury hears that and thinks, oh, well, this guy did it right. And so I actually got contacted by one of the members of that jury who told me it was like seven to five guilty. So it was very much split. And the jurors who said not guilty were like, Ford could have done it. There just isn’t quite enough evidence. And also this other guy, we feel like he was in on it, but he was never he was never charged. So the whole thing is just a giant mess all the way around.
00:19:52
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:19:53
Speaker 9: Wow, what are the ethics of like a story like that, like Josh just said, this guy’s name on and what are the ethics of telling these stories that you know someone. It’s one thing to say this person was found guilty by a trial, you know. And but but you’re talking about stories, and I’m curious both about the families of the victims. Have you ever run into a situation where the families don’t want the story told? Because I could I could see that being the case, or a situation like this one, where are you allowed to do what you’re doing? You know, are you how how do you navigate all that?
00:20:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think.
00:20:31
Speaker 6: And what are the legal parameters for?
00:20:32
Speaker 3: Yeah? So so like if someone hasn’t been convicted, you can’t say they did it. You have to say they’ve been accused of it, right, Well, but you can you can, I think, voice your opinion right like I could. I could maybe I could say I think he did it, right, but I have to say I think he did I don’t send to weigh in in the podcast, But yeah, you do have to be really careful, and especially if they have never been charged but their name is out there, like we covered another case.
00:21:07
Speaker 1: They not bother you personally though, to like say just.
00:21:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess you’re just a journalist, so you’re just like telling.
00:21:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, Like I matter of public record. It’s a matter of public records. So like another good example, we covered a case from Kentucky where law enforcement has been pretty vocal about who they think did it. But this guy has never actually been charged, but he has been named as a person of interest as a suspect. And so as a journalist, I can say, this guy, his name is Nick Nick Hawk, has been named as a person of interest in this murder. But then I also have to say he’s never been charged. He maintains his innocence, right, and all that is true, And I don’t know whether whether or not he did it, but I can say police say he did it. So if if law enforcement, law enforcement gives me a lot of cover as a journalist to say, well, this is just what law enforcement said, right, And it’s up to them whether or not they want to come out with names like that.
00:22:08
Speaker 8: So I want to revise my statement about Ford.
00:22:11
Speaker 5: If I had a magic eight ball and I shook it and turned it over, it would definitely say signs point two.
00:22:17
Speaker 2: Yes, you’re not have a magic eight ball.
00:22:22
Speaker 5: The well right and buts.
00:22:26
Speaker 6: So much wrong today.
00:22:28
Speaker 5: Also says the lot is cast in the lap, but the answers from.
00:22:31
Speaker 2: The lord so oh no, no, anything about eight ball.
00:22:38
Speaker 3: Probably would have used those.
00:22:39
Speaker 4: But in that story, that was crazy because there was a guy, the dad of the victim, of the of one of the victims, was putting billboards in town with people’s names on it.
00:22:48
Speaker 7: Not Nick, but the brother.
00:22:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Brooks. Yeah. So that’s the crazy. That’s that story is one of the most famous that we’ve covered. A lot of the stories we cover haven’t been covered elsewhere for whatever reason. I don’t know. People don’t care about Yeah, they’re a little bit more obscure. But that one guy named Tommy Ballard was shot in the chest while hunting. And previous to that, a year before, his daughter had gone missing, and he’d been very vocal but who he thought kidnapped and murdered his daughter? And so and Evan so again and spoil it in situations like that, like I can present the evidence, right. He had been doing been very vocal about this. He’d been naming this these brothers, like to the media. He had billboards around town, this guy killed my daughter, you know. And so then I can say, and then he was shot in the chest and law enforcement thinks the same people who kidnapped his daughter killed him. I don’t have to say, well, I think he did it. Yeah, it’s kind of doesn’t really matter, right what I think. But I present all of that, and you know, people can kind of draw their own conclusions.
00:24:10
Speaker 4: Have you have you have you had or ever had any pushback, like someone who’s related to one of these stories email you angry or mad or disagreeing.
00:24:21
Speaker 5: Have you ever gotten a letter from an attorney?
00:24:23
Speaker 3: Never gotten a letter from an attorney, Not about blood Trails. I have about some meat eater articles, and that’s a whole that’s a story we could maybe get into. But no, And and that’s honestly, one of the things I’m most proud of about blood Trails is that, you know, so far, I haven’t really gotten any messages like that.
00:24:42
Speaker 7: Yeah, it’s great.
00:24:43
Speaker 3: Usually the families that I’ve worked with have reached out and said, you know, we we liked the job you did, or they just some of them haven’t said anything. So I don’t know exactly what that means all the time, But you know, I really try very hard to get the details right, to tell the stories truthfully and accurately as far as I can, to admit when like I don’t know, I do that a lot to say, like this is a theory this is speculation. We don’t know exactly what happened.
00:25:18
Speaker 9: And have you ever had a situation where a family reached out and said, hey, we don’t we’ve heard you’re talking about this.
00:25:23
Speaker 6: We don’t want you to talk about this.
00:25:25
Speaker 3: Story the only one. Okay, Well, so there’s been two cases. In season one, we covered a case of an elk hunter in Montana who went missing and then his remains were found two years later. There was a lot of speculation that his hunting buddies who’d been with him had killed him, which is probably not true. In that case, I did reach out to those hunting buddies who then were in contact with his wife, and they decided not to participate. And they didn’t say exactly like his wife does and want you to do this, but they did say, like, we don’t love that this is being brought back to public attention, and the buddies kind of have a reason. And it turned out there was a lot of details there that that things they maybe could have done that would have prevented this situation. Not that they killed him, but just like things they could have done. So they had kind of a reason, and you know, they said, like he had he has a son. He was young when this happened, but he’s older now, and you know, we we think about those things very carefully and we try to, you know, tell the story in a responsible way. And for those families, I really try hard to present their loved one in like to humanize them to the audience, because that I think that gets lost a lot with these stories. True crime is kind of infamous, right for taking advantage of people suffering, and so I really try And so if the family talks me, that’s I love that because then I can actually do that. With this story. I had a hard time because don’t really talk to me, and so we couldn’t really say what kind of person Aaron was. I did have. So the episode that’s coming out Thursday, when we’re recording this, I wanted to cover the story last year. I reached out to the victim’s sister, who said it would be great if you didn’t cover this now because the murder is going to trial and we don’t want a bunch of coverage on this until after the title, right, And and you know, I wrestled with that a bit because as a journalist, like I don’t love people telling me like cover this story. Now or not now, or you know, not this one or that one. At the same time, like I’m not interested in like messing anything up for prosecutors or going after a bad guy. And so we decided to hold the story until after the trial. And it was also a little selfish because like a trials went, all the details come out right, and so it was gonna be a better episode anyway. But so she did ask that, and and and she said, like, I’d be willing to help with this after the trial, And sure enough I reached back out and she was That episode’s coming out on Thursday, and I think it’s one of the best of the season because we got al we got. So the name of the episode is Finding Justice for Dustin Jersom. Dustin Jersom was a Bozeman guy actually, so he was up just south of Bozeman camping and he got attacked by someone. They thought it was a bear attack at first, which kind of tells you how bad it was. But they they found the guy and they locked him up, and I got I talked with everyone. I talked with all the detectives, prosecutors, defense attorneys, everyone, so that that story is really fully formed, and I think people are gonna like it.
00:28:58
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, yeah sounds good.
00:29:00
Speaker 6: My last question, how do you sleep?
00:29:07
Speaker 2: Yeah?
00:29:07
Speaker 3: I sleep okay? It Yeah, covering the stories, I don’t think bothers me too much. So I will say the one time that it kind of crept up is we live on We live on about four acres, but it’s kind of like a neighborhood where like everyone is on four acres, but we have like a back part of our property that’s all wooded and our older two kids go out and play back there. Well, one day we needed them to come inside, and we yelled for them and yelled for them and yelled for them, and they weren’t there. And like it’s not a huge piece of you know, you can kind of like look and see both sides. And so I’m like starting to kind of freak out. My wife is starting to freak out. And so I’m walking down the street because I think maybe they went to a neighbor’s And as I’m walking, I’m like, this is like the beginning of a budget. I’m like writing the script in my head as I’m walking, like this is not maybe not super healthy. So but it doesn’t like, you know, bother me just generally, I think just thinking about like those horrible things and how things change in an instant.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you.
00:30:21
Speaker 1: When you said you have only had you have eighty episodes scripted out in front of you, I was thinking about how statistically, with the amount of people that are hunting, fishing using American public lands, I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a very rare thing for something terrible to happen.
00:30:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, super rare.
00:30:41
Speaker 2: So it’s it’s it really is super rare.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: I mean, probably probably more rare than a lightning strike or something, you know, I think it probably is. But but but we we we fixate on the anomalies, you know. Yeah, we have a we have a bias for the extreme things, and that’s why it’s interesting.
00:31:03
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:31:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, well it’s a good thing that we have the Civil War to.
00:31:11
Speaker 3: Talk about now, lighter fair light.
00:31:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, are you much of a civil war?
00:31:18
Speaker 3: No? No, not really. I did grow up in northern Virginia, so if I wanted to be, I really I really could have. Really could we We would go up to Harper’s Ferry occasionally. Oh it was right up there, John brown Way, Yep, No, I don’t. I don’t claim to know a ton about the war itself. I was very interested though in kind of the like the cultural the ways that it still impacts culture today.
00:31:49
Speaker 2: Well, that was a great one.
00:31:50
Speaker 1: So the to tackle a Civil War series is a big bite.
00:31:56
Speaker 2: I mean, there’s just there’s just a thousand ways you could do it. J D.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: Hewittt was our expert guest. He has a really great YouTube channel. JD is a high school history teacher. Yeah, and then has a really huge YouTube channel called History Underground, and I mean just top notch expert in my book, and he says that there are people, there are academics who spent their entire careers learning about specific battles in the Civil War. I mean like there are guys that like their whole academic career has been about you know, Gettysburg or whatever. And so you know, to think that you could bite off a big chunk about like and try to really understand the Civil War is a bold thing to do.
00:32:41
Speaker 2: But I’ve.
00:32:44
Speaker 1: You know, as I’m picking topics to discuss, it usually has to do with some unanswered questions that I’m like, you know, what, it’s time I really understand that. And so the Civil War is something that I mean I would be as familiar as the next guy.
00:33:01
Speaker 2: About you know.
00:33:03
Speaker 1: I mean, I was just public school educated, went to college, maybe took a college history class, but what really wouldn’t have known that much about the Civil War, but did have this history that I disclosed on episode, which oddly was kind of I was a little bit nervous about, like saying that where I came from in my and I was quick to not pinted on my dad because literally, if Gary Nukan were here, he would.
00:33:33
Speaker 2: Be like, who told you about that? But yeah, I just rural Arkansas.
00:33:39
Speaker 1: This idea that the Confederacy was just this, you know, kind of honorable thing, and we’re going to get into it more in the future.
00:33:48
Speaker 2: But I mean, I think there is absolutely a way to.
00:33:52
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, look at your historical heritage and not be ashamed of something. I mean that like when you look into this war, you see both sides had lots of crazy stuff right going on. So again, and I said, I’m neither ashamed nor proud of that.
00:34:10
Speaker 2: It’s just kind of the way it was.
00:34:13
Speaker 1: And uh and and I’ve had multiple people from from the Northern United States write me and say they had no connection to.
00:34:23
Speaker 2: The Civil War. Since this podcast is well, like I had like like I disclosed that.
00:34:29
Speaker 6: I had, right, but so since that time, oh yeah.
00:34:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, people, because I surmised and so did J. D. Hewitt.
00:34:35
Speaker 1: Then in the North there was not this deep seated pride that you fought for the North, like there would be a pride in the South that your ancestors fought for the Confederacy.
00:34:46
Speaker 2: And that has been confirmed by many people.
00:34:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that that really rang true for me. I feel like that’s probably true. And I was trying to think of of why that would be true, because usually if you are on the losing side, you’re the most proud. Yeah, and so it doesn’t like intuitively, it doesn’t quite make sense. I was wondering if maybe it’s because like like everything changed in the South and so and so, like you know, things were kind of turned on their head, but the North just sort of went along business as usual. And so it doesn’t it’s not like it doesn’t take up as much headspace if you grew up in the North and that’s where your family was from, because there wasn’t this like big moment where everything changed. Yeah, I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
00:35:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought JD’s Rocky analogy was pretty good, pretty great too. Yeah yeah, But I want to I want to project about what’s coming. I really didn’t have a idea of like how this was going to be scripted out. We just built an hour long episode and kind of got up to the beginnings of the war, like we didn’tven start the war yet. And the next episode, honestly is gonna be quite a bit about pre Civil War as well. We’re going to talk about Lincoln and just fascinating. And I would have known Lincoln just in in general overview, but when you start actually looking at what he said and what he did, you realize that he’s not quite the guy. I mean, not taking anything away from him, but I mean like there’s some bizarre quotes that we’re gonna read that that that will rival the quotes from this episode, which were so unique and wild as well. But but what I would just like to open the floor, Christy, Misty, Josh Jordan, what what stood out to you and how could we?
00:36:47
Speaker 2: Uh?
00:36:50
Speaker 1: If I had anything to do over, I would have done the beginning of the episode over.
00:36:55
Speaker 2: I felt like I kind of way.
00:36:57
Speaker 1: Well, I uh, yeah, I don’t know. I wasn’t super happy with the beginning of the of the episode.
00:37:07
Speaker 8: I’m not supposed to tell people that.
00:37:09
Speaker 2: Well, I mean this is the render where we talked about you. Now what what stood out to you? Christy?
00:37:16
Speaker 4: I think what maybe the obvious thing that stood out is just what felt so duplicitous? Is that a word, Misty excellent word with Thomas Jefferson, like, it’s really hard to reconcile. And I think even the episode you were like how even a JD like, how do you, like, how do you reconcile that? And there still was no answer, like it’s very hard to reconcile that I live one way. I profess that something different should be happening, and how do you how do you walk that out?
00:37:46
Speaker 3: That?
00:37:47
Speaker 4: That was just fascinating to me. So and I don’t I don’t have that resolution quite yet. I mean, yeah, I also didn’t know that his mistress and his wife were.
00:38:00
Speaker 7: Half sister.
00:38:01
Speaker 3: That I didn’t know that either, very weird it At the same time it’s was like hard to reconcile, it also felt very human to me, like like I have these ideals that I believe in, but like implementing them in my life would really be hard, you know, like I have this huge like plantation, this like this estate that I’m managing, and to you know, live my ideals out would just throw everything for a loop. And I’m not I don’t know if that was actually his motivation, but that that strikes me as as very human.
00:38:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:38:40
Speaker 1: You know, somebody wrote in and told me that Thomas Jefferson was in massive debt. Like he he he had a lot of financial debt, and their assumption was that just the economics, the economics of it just didn’t make sense for him to just free all his slaves based upon just his moral compass.
00:39:02
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, so maybe it’s something you hope will happen when you die. Like George Washington, I think you mentioned he freed his slaves upon his death, which is a bit of a cop out, right, It’s like you’re not having to live through the hardship that that would bring. But you understand this is a bad thing, and so you’re going to try to rectify it.
00:39:22
Speaker 9: And to that in I think a lot of times people and you hear things like this, how can we possibly do that?
00:39:27
Speaker 6: We’re just doing what the rest of the world is.
00:39:30
Speaker 9: We can’t play by a different set of rules that everybody else plays by and stay competitive or whatever. You hear that in politics a lot like until the law changes, we have to still operate by these standards. And I thought the whole thing, you know, just kicking the can down the road twenty years, right, it felt like such a modern solution. Yeah, it is a politician, right, it’s very politically Yeah, And I think there I wasn’t.
00:39:54
Speaker 2: I knew.
00:39:56
Speaker 6: Because I’ve taught classes, like high school.
00:39:58
Speaker 9: Classes on on like the US Constitution things like that, and so I knew some of those things, but hearing it all together in this context, and it just felt everything it feels a little bit like there’s nothing new under the sun. As you hear these things, it feels so political. And how many laws are passed now with the sunset clause that this we’re going to do this for now, but then this is going to go. And then when the sunset clause hits, it wreaks havoc on the on the system, which you know that just happened with the healthcare rules and things like that, and it’s just it’s, yeah, it’s people who want to take a stand but don’t want to are maybe they’re just not able to get the political cover that they need in the moment, and so you put these parameters around it, and it is it’s it’s.
00:40:46
Speaker 6: It felt like a Marl.
00:40:47
Speaker 2: What did you learn? Did you learn anything?
00:40:50
Speaker 9: Well, Jefferson, I didn’t know about wife and sister. I didn’t know about that. I’m trying to think if I learned.
00:40:56
Speaker 1: Because you know, there’s when you make a podcast, you’re trying to provide a service to people.
00:41:04
Speaker 2: And I mean I learned a lot.
00:41:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, I learned a lot about the about the the way cotton was such a I mean I would have known that cotton was important and it was a big part of the Southern economy, but to compare cotton to like the oil of the Middle East very comparison.
00:41:25
Speaker 6: I thought that was a very good comparison.
00:41:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes you you’re like, oh, okay, I get it, Like these people were willing to do anything to save this thing. And and then you know, I was also trying to address something that I’ve heard about just how the Civil Wars about states rights. You know, it wasn’t it wasn’t about slavery. And I honestly didn’t intend to just like get in this like big time conversation about slavery. But if you asked, I think ninety percent of the people in the country would say the war was about slavery. I think they would say that, right, but to really including me. But now I know the ins and outs of it.
00:42:10
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. So I did learn a lot.
00:42:12
Speaker 1: About you know that from the very beginning of the country, this was a tiger by the ears.
00:42:17
Speaker 2: What was taken out by Jefferson or or was independent?
00:42:23
Speaker 8: I had no idea that.
00:42:24
Speaker 2: Was in there.
00:42:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, well, I just thought that was fascinating tying what was what was left out of the declaration of Independence to the civil war, which is how many how many years separated.
00:42:34
Speaker 2: I mean like nearly one hundred Yeah.
00:42:36
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean like that was pretty interesting.
00:42:39
Speaker 2: Yes, yes it was.
00:42:42
Speaker 9: And that the trouble persisted, right, I mean, that’s that’s what’s that’s what’s interesting.
00:42:47
Speaker 1: I’m I’m always just bewildered by our ability to revise history and just like look back.
00:42:56
Speaker 2: At these people and be like, how could they have been so dumb? But man, and and.
00:43:03
Speaker 1: You can’t cast shade on something as clearly wrong as like this this kind of slavery. But at the same time that had been going on since the beginning of time. I mean like when people finally started writing stuff down in history, like they were writing about I mean, they had slaves, right, We don’t know even when it started. So this was like this practice that was fairly normalized across basically all cultures. And I do recognize that there’s like different levels of slavery and all this. And then so you know, like a Thomas Jefferson, you know, kind of saying all men are created equal, But I don’t know, it’s just so easy to look back and and just pin them to the ground on. But at the same time, there there was I don’t think it was ever okay to.
00:44:00
Speaker 2: Slave a person, right.
00:44:02
Speaker 3: But that quote you had towards the end from the Mississippi was it Mississippi They’re like declaration of Independence? That was I’d never heard that before. Yeah, that was pretty incredible, and I thought that that was a great way of like explaining this was it was about the states rights to have slavery. So it’s kind of like you can’t just say it was about states rights, it was about slavery. It was about both. It was about them that those two issues kind of married together, and that quote I felt really kind of brought that home and I’d never heard those those types of arguments before. And you can see how people would be like our economy, like the whole economy will collapse, you know, and people are are, you know, weak in a lot of ways, and like if you say you’re you know, you’ll lose your house if this happens, Yeah, you’re probably not gonna want it to happen. Yeah, yeah, it still happens today, you know.
00:45:02
Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:45:03
Speaker 4: Who was the quote Clay towards again, I think maybe towards the end of the episode where they were talking about the classes, like if the king come King Cott.
00:45:14
Speaker 1: No, it was the Senator from souths James Hammond. What were you going to say about it?
00:45:20
Speaker 4: Well, I just I mean it rubbed me the wrong way, and I like, and I think that.
00:45:26
Speaker 7: Whole philosophy exists today.
00:45:28
Speaker 4: I mean, if you don’t have I mean, how many how many publications are there about CEOs what they make, and then you know at the base of their company what their entry level people make, and the disparity between the two. And if you don’t have the entry level person, you don’t have the CEO who’s getting paid what they’re being paid. It doesn’t work that you know, it doesn’t exist. And I thought, so today we don’t have slavery in the sense of like a manual labor class that that you know, but he he clearly says, if you don’t have them, then you don’t have the other classes. And it’s it’s I think that’s my rustle, right is you’re like, You’re like, I don’t it hurts me to hear that, like, oh we have to so we have this class so you can have the other class.
00:46:10
Speaker 7: That doesn’t seem to jive with you.
00:46:12
Speaker 1: Well, it was fascinating to me. Essentially, if you haven’t listened, he said. He basically said, slavery is the is the architecture of human existence. He said, basically, in the South, we hire our menial working class for life and take care of them. And they said, you people in the North that don’t have slaves, hire your slaves essentially by the day, don’t take care of them, pay them poorly.
00:46:44
Speaker 2: And I mean it was a a it’s a wild idea.
00:46:48
Speaker 9: It’s a wild idea also because they they didn’t take care of them. I mean, when we can, like that’s that’s part of the thing. That’s a little bit like, Okay, great speech. It is built online, and I think you have to have to say that. And you can even just look in recent history people who lived through Jim Crow laws, like was that taking care of them?
00:47:08
Speaker 2: Was that?
00:47:08
Speaker 6: I mean?
00:47:09
Speaker 9: Or sharecropping, like even even take There are people who are alive who live through those things. And so I think it’s like, yeah, you’re that’s not true. But what you’re saying is just false. Is not true. You didn’t take care of them. Maybe some people did, Maybe there were people who were, And that’s one of the arguments that that I think always exists.
00:47:28
Speaker 6: But but it it was a pretty i mean, it was extremely impressive environment.
00:47:33
Speaker 2: Yes it was.
00:47:34
Speaker 9: And that was one of the things that in the history books that I’ve read, that was one of the things that really stuck out about about slavery at that time in the in the US South, was just how brutal, how brutal it was.
00:47:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, they call it chattel slavery. Yeah, yeah, it’s like very brutal. And that’s the difference, right, It’s like the people who work, you know, as a day laborer, they could decide not.
00:47:58
Speaker 1: To yeah, yeah, and that and obviously The reason that’s that quote is interesting and relevant is because it gives you insight into the people that were willing to die for this thing.
00:48:11
Speaker 2: Because that’s why it’s like, wait a minute, why would someone be.
00:48:15
Speaker 1: This, Yeah, this devoted to the cause of slavery, like you know, trying to understand where someone could come from.
00:48:21
Speaker 2: So it’s not that anybody today.
00:48:23
Speaker 1: Would agree with that, but it’s just like, golly, you can you can at least understand a little bit of the way.
00:48:30
Speaker 9: I mean, you can understand the logic of the argument. But the problem is is the argument itself is founded on lines. What he was saying was not true, right, And and that’s that’s the that’s the that’s the whole thing. You have to just kind of shut off a part of your brain to be able to make that that argument a part of reality and facts to make that argument.
00:48:51
Speaker 4: I think definitely the part of we take care of that exactly he did. He did He clearly stated or what I heard is that this class does exist, so these other classes can also exist, right, And I think that philosophy still exists in the world time like that is nothing new under the sign exactly you were talking about earlier, and it’s like it looks different today and what we would see in modern America, but it’s that mindset still exists. Oh yeah, yeah, which is wild, like still kind of wild to me that the classes system still yeah, I mean yeah.
00:49:27
Speaker 5: I’m trying to break things down into simple concepts in my mind, and what kind of stands out to me is like this thing was perpetuated by greed, Like it all kind of came from a position of greed of keeping the economic status the way they wanted it, so people made money off of cotton. And I think that position of greed caused people to compromise values and justify things that were really, when you break it down, are unjustifiable.
00:50:00
Speaker 2: You know, mm hm for sure, Well it was.
00:50:10
Speaker 1: It was news to me as well that the the backdrop of the Civil War was massive American prosperity. Yeah, you kind of wouldn’t think about I would have probably felt that on a Civics test if it said when was the greatest rise in American prosperity from this, you know, from antebellum antebellum America. I probably and I’m not sure that we didn’t continue to rise even at.
00:50:37
Speaker 2: A faster j curve after that.
00:50:38
Speaker 1: But America’s rise to global prominence through economics began, you know, way before the Civil War. And point being to you what you said, Josh, is that prosperity breeds its own devils.
00:50:54
Speaker 2: Yep, you know.
00:50:55
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:50:55
Speaker 3: And and expansion of the country, right, and that was a big reason for the war too, is like the country is expanding and these new states are being formed. Are they going to be slave states or free states? And I think it’s hard for us now to imagine like the excitement of like growing your country and creating new states, and the stakes of like what is this new country going to be? And like are we going to be a country with slavery or not? And you can kind of see why people would fight over that, Like if this is this giant new country we’re making right now, you know what, what what is it going to look like in the future?
00:51:37
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm mm hmm. This is so This book right here.
00:51:42
Speaker 1: Is the the main book that I have have read, and it’s it’s a good one.
00:51:47
Speaker 2: Battlecraft Freedom.
00:51:48
Speaker 1: It was written in the eighties, Pulitzer Prise winning book. It’s a it’s a it’s a general overview of the Civil War, and it’s pretty thick, Yeah.
00:52:00
Speaker 6: Pretty si.
00:52:02
Speaker 7: What did you what did you relate it to?
00:52:03
Speaker 2: You thick as an Appalachian Bible, that family bible.
00:52:08
Speaker 1: I guess people appleachas a big print because they’re sure.
00:52:12
Speaker 8: We had a family bible? Did y’all have one?
00:52:15
Speaker 5: We had a family bible like this? I mean it was, isn’t it? Paintings in it and stuff I.
00:52:20
Speaker 9: Think about like the importance of the Bible and my family, you know, I mean, and we didn’t have a family Bible and no, and like when my when my grandma died, my mom that’s what she wanted was her Bible. And she brought it to me one day and it was kind of like it just happened. But my daughter was in the room. I was at the I went my my daughter and I went to my mom’s house and she handed me, you know, we were looking through the box of things that she brought back after her mom died, and she handed me the Bible and I start reading it and just reading her notes in it, like I just start crying. And my mom is sitting across from the room and she starts crying. And it’s because it was just such a meaningful you know, just such a meaningful art of my grandma’s life. And it’s like this heritage that she passed on to us extremely extremely important.
00:53:06
Speaker 6: At no point did anyone in our history have have a Bible.
00:53:09
Speaker 9: I mean a family a family bible that was passed down. This was just my grandma’s personal Bible with her notes in it. It wasn’t a family bible, like, we didn’t have one of those where you would register things. And I wonder they were migrant people, like all my grandparents were migrants, and they were migrant farmers, and she’d be taken out of school. And I just can’t help but wonder if it’s not the the more stationary you are, the more likely you are to have a giant bible that’s passed down intergenerationally.
00:53:38
Speaker 2: And if you have a giant Civil War book. We do have a war book.
00:53:42
Speaker 6: It’s true, it’s true.
00:53:43
Speaker 9: And yeah, I wish we had something cool like that, but we we didn’t.
00:53:49
Speaker 1: Did y’all learn anything about John Brown? Would y’all have known that Christy Jordan?
00:53:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was aware of some of the things that he did, having been to you know, Harper’s Ferry.
00:54:01
Speaker 2: As a kid. Oh that’s right. Yeah, But I didn’t know you grew up with that.
00:54:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn’t know all of the details or kind of the implications for like how this I mean basically like a terrorist attack would spur the South and would like terrify the South. Yeah, I’m sure I’ve been taught that at some point, but I don’t. I didn’t remember.
00:54:21
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:54:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, so there’s a college over here in northwest Arkansas called John Brown University and it is not the same John Brown.
00:54:30
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, but no, I I didn’t. I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have known that that was a.
00:54:38
Speaker 1: Part of history that that I would would have not been too dialed on, but super important. And it’s interesting how people, uh their lives become known for really more than what they were really. There was a huge emphasis in this particular book about how John Brown was like a madman, like everybody was just like this guy was easy and it’s it’s I could hear the modern news cycle of the the other side like saying, oh, you think it’s okay to like kill people because John Brown, women and children was on the right side, you know, today of this thing about yeah, there shouldn’t be slaves, slaves should be set free, like I think we all could agree that’s that’s the good side to be on on this deal. Yet he was murdering people with a broadsword. Yeah, so it’s you know, you can hear this this side of the media going.
00:55:42
Speaker 2: Those guys are crazy. We’re just down here, you know, doing our agriculture. And so anyway, you just you see all this up.
00:55:52
Speaker 1: But then John Brown becomes massively more than, uh than than what he actually did. He did have a backup plan, his military. His tactics were just bizarre. Suicide mission didn’t work.
00:56:10
Speaker 3: You say, it was like seventeen people or something in total.
00:56:14
Speaker 1: I think it was twenty three. I think it was seventeen white people and five blacks. And then they did not get a single slave to come with them. So they actually did get some arms, go down into some plantations and like bust into someplace and be like let’s go got guns.
00:56:33
Speaker 2: And people were like, wait a minute, what I mean.
00:56:36
Speaker 1: That’s why I understood the story to be and just a few so it’s like it didn’t work at all. But then his legacy, you know, sparks this thing.
00:56:49
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was so funny the comment that Lincoln makes to the uncle Tom’s Cabin Harto, like the little lady that that’s like started. Yeah, it’s like WHOA. I wonder how she felt about being told.
00:57:13
Speaker 2: Have any of y’all read Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
00:57:15
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:57:15
Speaker 2: Have you read it? You read it in school?
00:57:17
Speaker 6: Yeah? Yo?
00:57:18
Speaker 2: Did you?
00:57:19
Speaker 9: I think I that was one of the My mom always bought books from some some magazine and where we were bored in Hatfield the nineties, and we read all those books and that was one of the that was in that that little subscriber thing that she had, that was one of the books that she bought.
00:57:35
Speaker 1: Well, I started reading it. I’ve got it and uh it. You know, that book during the eighteen fifties sold in America only second to the Bible, which at the time was kind of the best seller.
00:57:52
Speaker 9: And it does really show the power of culture and turning. Like even Lincoln’s comment to her, it shows the power that that really the arts and uh, you know, there would be different things now that would probably be as influential, but it shows the power of those things and just stories to shift a narrative and to shift perspective and to ignite people into action and and engagement with this because it’s kind of like the the example he gave of the the kids, you know in the cobalt mines in Africa.
00:58:21
Speaker 6: It’s it’s there, it bothers you.
00:58:22
Speaker 2: But I thought that was It’s so good. It was.
00:58:26
Speaker 5: Yeah, it puts things in perspective. Yeah, I mean when he said it, I’ve like had this sense of guilt.
00:58:32
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:58:32
Speaker 8: Why does that not bother me more?
00:58:34
Speaker 3: You know?
00:58:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, as you have a giant watch on your hand that probably has lots of precious metals in that probably.
00:58:44
Speaker 7: To the list of things is doing wrong.
00:58:46
Speaker 9: Yeah, but Josh, this has really been an opportunity for us to examine your life.
00:58:51
Speaker 5: I mean that I’m fifty yea, everybody’s after me.
00:58:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, well the.
00:58:59
Speaker 1: I’m I’m excited about the rest of the Civil War episode. When I do these, I feel like if I had if I had like a trophy room, like I would have podcasts like Up on the Wall, I mean, like deer Heads. That’s the way it kind of feels like, Yeah, the Gold Records, got that taken care of, Civil War dusted off.
00:59:21
Speaker 6: You’ll feel good when you’re done him of this series.
00:59:22
Speaker 1: I will, Yeah, because it’s been on the docket for a long time and I was kind of over planning for it. Yeah, I was thinking, Man, this is going to be so hard, this is I need to get all these guests. I don’t really know where to start. And I finally just was like, I’m just gonna start with JD. We’re just going to dive in.
00:59:41
Speaker 6: He was a great a great first guest. He really was.
00:59:43
Speaker 2: He was.
00:59:44
Speaker 6: He was a great narrator.
00:59:47
Speaker 2: And I quit trying to feel like I needed to.
00:59:52
Speaker 1: We needed to service people that really knew a ton about the Civil War. Like, I just thought, man, I’m probably a pretty central figure in terms of knowledge of the war, and I don’t.
01:00:05
Speaker 2: I don’t know that much, and but I’m.
01:00:07
Speaker 1: Very interested in it should and I feel like j D brought some really interesting stuff and it’s it’s just gonna it actually keeps getting better.
01:00:18
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I feel like you started at the right place, right because when you when you ask someone like what do you think about the Civil War? One of the first things they think is, well, what started it? Where you know? Is it about states rights? Is it about slavery? And the first episode does a great job of kind of outlining the complexities of that. Yeah. I also think the points you made about like kind of marveling at how this is still relevant seventy five years later. That’s super interesting. It did make me think, so my my my wife’s her grandparents on her mom’s side, that family has been in San Antonio, like South Texas area for hundreds of years, but her grandmother was born in like the nineteen twenties, like nineteen twenty three, and I knew her, and of course, you know, my wife knew her. She lived to be you know, late nineties. I think it occurred to me that, like, if she was born in nineteen twenty three, her grandparents would have been around. Yeah, so, like I interacted with, my wife, grew up interacting with someone who knew people around during the Civil War, which really kind of makes it seem much closer to our day, even though so many things seem so different. Like people are around who knew people who told them about the Civil War, which is crazy to think about, but you know, it kind of makes sense. You can understand why it’s still relevant and people still talk about it and are interested. So I think people are going to be how many episodes do you think it’s going to take?
01:01:55
Speaker 2: Time?
01:01:55
Speaker 8: Twelve over thirteen?
01:01:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, Ken Burns over.
01:01:59
Speaker 1: Here you know, we’ll probably we’ll probably do We’ll probably do three.
01:02:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably do three.
01:02:05
Speaker 1: Because what I don’t really care to get into is like all the specifics of the battles.
01:02:12
Speaker 2: And different stuff.
01:02:13
Speaker 1: I mean, I don’t know, there’s there’s a lot of yeah, there’s a lot of information about those things. I’m I’m I’m interested in the main players Robert E. Lee Uleases this, Grant Lincoln, other people that were, you know, like a John Brown or or I’m just interested in like kind of some of these big players. And I had I had a guy write me, a friend of mine, Tal Jones. He wouldn’t mind me saying his name. He he he grew up in East Tennessee. This goes back to your statement about why is it still relevant? Why are we still talking about it? And he said, and I’m going to paraphrase what he said, but he said he growing up, he never heard anybody talking about the Civil War. But in the sixties and seventies, the symbolism of rebellion, particularly the South, latched onto and that’s when And you know, I’d have to get some of the details to really fully quantify what he’s saying, but I believe that he talked about mascots becoming the rebels, and a lot of the Civil War statues and different things didn’t happen in these in eighteen seventy. They happened like the in the sixties and seventies, Dukes of Hazzard like massively popularized the Confederate flag, which was always called the Confederate flag, but I grew up knowing it as the rebel.
01:03:52
Speaker 2: Flag, the rebel flag, starbar flag, stars and bars. Yeah, and so he picked up on that.
01:04:01
Speaker 1: We kind of attached to the symbolism, and honestly, when he said it, I was like, yeah, I think that’s what the people that I was around, and even me I was interested in it was. It was like kind of a rebel right, you know, just a rebel Yeah.
01:04:18
Speaker 9: So but if you look at what was going on in the sixties and seventies in the South with civil rights and things like that, I think even that has its roots in and something pretty terrible, Yeah, I mean, yeah, pretty and it was rebellion against what it was, rebellion against this move for civil rights and inequality, and that’s and it was it was this they had. I mean, I think that that’s a big piece of the of the of the story. And I think growing up in Arkansas, I’m working in some of the fields that I’ve worked in, in the places that I’ve worked in, it’s like the legacy of the Civil War. Can I feel like you get like pockets of time where it just hits, hits really hard, the reconstruct era in the Jim Crow Laws. Then you get into the sixties and seventies in that fight and you’re you’re still feeling the pangs of that. And when we first covered this in the school I worked for, when the kids were really young, you know, I talked to people, we have good friends from the Caribbean, and we talked about, like, why is this so different to cover in the US than it is to cover in the Caribbean, Because there’s so there’s no like emotional the emotional ties to this subject are much different when you cover it in the Caribbean. And you cannot say that they had different experiences in that time period, you know, I mean it. And one of my friends said, I don’t know many people who are alive, like when it was over, it was over in the Caribbean, and there’s not people who are alive today who can tell you the stories of the harsh discrimination that they experienced, like there are in the US.
01:05:50
Speaker 6: Because it just kept going so long.
01:05:54
Speaker 9: Yeah, the repercussions of.
01:05:57
Speaker 6: It lasted for so long.
01:05:59
Speaker 9: And I’m thinking about like my parents lifetime, your parents’ lifetime, I have, I have stories of my childhood of some of these things. Still, some of this discrimination that really starts back at our founding persisting, and and so I don’t I don’t know. I just think it’s like really dark stories.
01:06:21
Speaker 1: Not yeah, and so I just think it not something to be celebrated. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. Well it is fascinating. It seems like so long ago, but it wasn’t that long ago. Yeah, I mean, it just it just wasn’t that long ago. Like our our grandparents, my grandparents, your grandparents would have known people that were alive in the Civil War, like we knew what World War two veterans, right, right, That’s essentially what it would have been.
01:06:50
Speaker 2: Like.
01:06:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, like my grandfather, who was like a massive influence in my life. Well, let me think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he would have known Civil War vats like I knew him.
01:07:02
Speaker 2: Essentially. My grandfather was born in nineteen nineteen, like your wife’s grandmother.
01:07:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
01:07:08
Speaker 1: I mean that just is just like, wow, yeah, that wasn’t that long ago.
01:07:12
Speaker 3: I mean, and I think you mentioned the podcast something about like if an alien came down, right, and I forget the context of that, but if an alien came down, I think and saw in such a short amount of time our country going from chattel slavery not a person, right, we can sell buy them and sell them like a commodity to where we are now in the space of time for basically like two grand two generations of grandparents. It would be incredible, right, Like they would say, that’s a pretty amazing that’s pretty amazing progress in the you know, relative to human history a pretty short amount of time. And I’m amazed by that. Learning about the Civil War, thinking about that time, thinking about where we are today, you know, it’s it’s a pretty incredible story overall.
01:08:06
Speaker 1: Well, I’ll leave you with one foreshadowed piece of data that will come out and it’s pretty interesting. But the the American Civil War, which we now see really was fought about slavery. There has never been in the history of the world an enslaved group of people that was set free by another outside group.
01:08:39
Speaker 4: Oh, it’s all so history would say, they’ve been set for you by their own not like.
01:08:45
Speaker 1: That’s unique as I understand it, that is unique to the situation in America.
01:08:53
Speaker 2: That does that make sense?
01:08:55
Speaker 1: Y’all seem not like baseasically everywhere else in history that there has been a group of marginalized people that were never was there an outside group that it really had nothing to do with them that came in.
01:09:14
Speaker 3: And oh the North I got it, Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
01:09:21
Speaker 1: I thought that was interesting because I mean, I think most most of most things would come from the inside.
01:09:30
Speaker 9: Yeah right, You’re going to have to convince me on that. I’m looking forward to you.
01:09:37
Speaker 2: You can check that up with mister James.
01:09:39
Speaker 1: Make sure hold on, hold on, Josh, give us a closer while I try to find this.
01:09:44
Speaker 9: I don’t believe that. I’m not I’m not ready to believe James. He’s not earned my trust just yet.
01:09:54
Speaker 5: Well this Clay finds his quote. I want to throw in a couple of things unrelated to the Civil War. Make sure and check out the Bear Grease YouTube channel. Yes, Bear is throwing out some fantastic content. My wife watched his entire video.
01:10:10
Speaker 7: Of the.
01:10:14
Speaker 2: She was riveted. I was, she was riveted.
01:10:18
Speaker 7: Fantastic.
01:10:18
Speaker 5: So he’s putting out some great stuff, so make sure and pay attention to that.
01:10:22
Speaker 8: Number two.
01:10:24
Speaker 5: Starting June first, we’re gonna be uh, we’re going to be opening up a bear Grease podcast, Bear Grease Feed survey, listener survey for everybody. Yeah, you take that to to and we’ll we’ll be announcing it again because it won’t be open until June first, so it’ll be after this podcast comes out. But get on there, fill out the podcast. We want to know what you guys think about the about the the the content, about the schedule that it comes out, all our feet everything. There’s some great questions in there. You guys can help us discover what you want to hear more of, So do that. That will be up in June first. We’ll be announcing the link for that, so just be ready, so get on there and do that. Also, Jordan Siller’s in the Taka’s hot seat courtesy of you will be receiving a pair of Takovi’s books. So yeah, look at the surprise on his face. He’s like ready, he’s like stoked.
01:11:25
Speaker 3: So oh, I am super stoked.
01:11:27
Speaker 2: A pair of Christine Nikes.
01:11:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know I just got these. I thank you. I have a pair of Covis. Oh really, I have their ostrich skin, extremely soft, extremely comfortable. So I am some of that plug beyond excited and I’m not that’s pretty sincere. I’m very excited about this Christy’s Sporting boot.
01:11:53
Speaker 8: So yeah, you’ll be receiving that from from the Covis.
01:11:57
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you to Covis, Thank you to covi. Ye.
01:12:00
Speaker 8: Anyway, I was able.
01:12:03
Speaker 9: To find it, but isn’t that where we’re going. You don’t need you don’t need to find it today. Just you’re gonna have to sell me on that.
01:12:09
Speaker 8: Just make sure I.
01:12:10
Speaker 7: Had one more question I forgot to ask. Am I allowed to ask you? We have time? You keep thumbing. I was.
01:12:18
Speaker 4: I was super intrigued when you were talking on the podcast and you basically said, all I’m doing is I’m asking questions a JD. Like we were driving down the road in a truck, and I was curious if you were driving down the road in a.
01:12:32
Speaker 5: Car doesn’t have a truck sons with the question.
01:12:39
Speaker 1: The conversation in a car would have just been a little more comfortable and quiet, because when you’re a you have to yell.
01:12:48
Speaker 2: What do you think about the Civil War? You want to roll the windows up for a minute. The air conditions doesn’t work very good.
01:12:54
Speaker 9: Yeah, and there’s just like a little bit more stress in the room because, like I hope it makes it to the next desk. The nation and and the recurring nature of the the AC to turn off at this point in the truck’s.
01:13:06
Speaker 7: Life, I am okay, I’m satisfied.
01:13:10
Speaker 1: Great, well, I can’t wait. Thanks, thanks for listening, Thanks for coming. Jordan really appreciate it. I look forward. I know everyone’s looking forward to more blood trails and how to avoid being a blood trail. Conflict conflict of people, avoid strangers, avoid strangers in the woods.
01:13:30
Speaker 6: Have a good relationship with your spouse.
01:13:32
Speaker 5: Yeah, exactly, keep your wife.
01:13:35
Speaker 8: That’s key.
01:13:35
Speaker 1: Actually on one of my big tenants has been keep your friends close, your enemies closer.
01:13:42
Speaker 8: I follow you around everywhere.
01:13:47
Speaker 1: Thanks everybody, thanks so much. Keep the wild places wild because that’s where the bears live.
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