Steve Rinella Details After Effects of Grizzly Bear Encounter

I like that you think about how long you have left on the planet. I think you should. Yeah. I wake up, I try to think about that every day. You know all politicians, they'll enter our office and they'll make a clock set for four years or whatever and it counts down. I need to get one of those. For life. For roughly my life expectancy and it counts down backwards. Well don't you think that your life expectancy, I mean you are one of the few people that I know that has almost been killed by a grizzly bear. Well yeah, well. You had a real shot. In a brush. Yeah. A real shot. And something enough where it was scary enough that I now, now that I've studied it a fair bit that I now know I had a mental, I had a, I had a, I had like a near death experience mental, a near death experience mental experience even though I was unharmed. But it jarred my brain. So hard. It jarred my, the minute or the seconds that occurred jarred my brain so hard that as I studied, as I've tried to be curious about and study about what happened in my brain, its parallels are all found and it's discussed by people who discuss near death experiences. Which might just mean I'm not like, I'm mentally not that, I'm not as tenacious mentally as I'd like to be but I, my brain got joggled. But don't you think that- Does joggle the word? It is now. Don't you think that when you're in contact with an animal that's that large, I mean, a predatory animal that's, how big was it? Ten feet? How big was it grizzly? Easily? Yeah. I don't want to, I mean, like it was like struck all of us and we've looked at a lot of bears as being like a mature brown bear. Okay. So mature Kodiak brown bear. Yeah. That's what we wanted to talk about. Talk about where you were at a fog knack Island, which is a place that has enormous bears. That whole part of the world is known for some of the largest brown bears on earth. Yeah. It's separated from Kodiak by a narrow straight. It's like, so like the Kodiak brown bear being like the world's biggest barrels is a neighboring Island. But that specific specimen, you know, I don't know, a mature animal. Just huge. Just huge. Yeah. When you're around something like that, where there can be no doubt that you can't get out of the way, you can't fight it off. You can't, you're helpless. Like it must trigger something in your, your mind where you, you, you come to grips with the reality of predator and prey that you almost were on the menu. Yeah. Like there's just no way around that. You can't, there's no, there's no rationalizations you can play in your mind when you're confronted with such absolute superiority. Are you familiar with the term playing possum? Yeah. Obviously. Uh, our understanding of a possums now is that they're not playing. They conk out, right? Yeah. Yeah. Stress. He's not playing dead. He hits such an, like he hits such a stress level that he shuts off. I'm like embarrassed to admit, but I think it's instructive to point out that, uh, I was playing possum in that moment and I don't mean playing. Yeah. It like, it possum to me out. Let's tell everybody who doesn't know the story. Oh yeah. So real quick, um, fog neck island. Yeah, we've been yapping a long time, but we had, uh, we were hunting and it hung a elk up in a tree and left it for a day and a half. All the meat hanging in the tree. Um, then we're camped a few miles away from there and went back to retrieve, went back with a few guys to retrieve the meat out of the tree and a bear had found it. Um, and we were very, very aware that this might occur and went up and investigated the area around the tree and determined that the bear hadn't found it yet. In fact, that the carcass of the animals laying that far away was untouched. Um, in hindsight, there was a pile of bear shit that had been smeared on the, on the ground. And I remember looking at that pile of bear shit and then wondering if it had been smeared by a bear's foot or smeared by a boot. And I determined that it looked like it had been smeared by a boot, which would have been we'd smeared the shit when we were hanging the thing in the tree. And then stupidly, we like sat down and eat lunch and within a couple of minutes of sitting down and eat lunch, um, it came in, you know, the bear came in and it's, it's open mouth past, uh, just 18 inches from my head. And I was facing away. So I was the last one to see it. Um, yeah, honest who you know, but he had a pistol. He had bear spray, but he hit it in the head with a pair of, uh, black diamond trekking poles. He had sat down, he's got spray and set his pistol on his pack. But then when the, when I talk about like playing possum and all the shit that happens there, his instinct is to smack it with a trekking pole. Wow. Everything you spend all your, you know, you spend all your time thinking about how you're going to handle this, that and the other thing. Um, and, uh, sometimes it's disappointing that you don't handle stress that well. You know, I just, I don't know. I don't know where I went. One of our guys, I got ran over by a bear, wrote it down the hill. Um, at that moment I snapped out of whatever I was in, but I was, it shut me down bad. I even noticed, um, I even noticed there's a thing that happens to people when they get really cold. They enter a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy mentality. When you start to get cold, um, you lose as you start to get really cold, like where you get like, where you could be in a hypothermic situation. Um, people stop doing the obvious things that you would do to get warm. And I, as aware of that as I am, as many times as I've experienced that I still see it happen to me. I still have to snap myself out of it. Like you just like, you're getting cold, you're getting lethargic, you're getting cold, more lethargic, the cold's getting worse. And I have to be like, you can stop, you can step in right now and stop this. And I have to remind, it's still, it's like, it still doesn't come naturally. You know, when you talk to people who train, like, um, you talk to people who train for this kind of stuff, they have to train in a very realistic environment. They have to train to like, keep your head, you know, and just like make good decisions. If you walk into like a active car crash scene or whatever, and there's a severed hand laying on the ground, right? Some people are just going to see that hand and they're not going to see anything else. Some people are just going to see chaos and they're not going to focus on any particular thing. But it's like the person would come in, see the hands, see everything around them, like assess all that. It's like, it's just from exposure to that super traumatic stuff, not to getting cold is traumatic. But I do, when I, when I look at how I respond to things, I do catch that there's like a mentality to practice and learn. Yeah, it's, it's understandable that something like a bear attack would trigger senses and trigger response that you're just not conditioned for. You're not, I don't know how you would ever get conditioned to a bear attack. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. On that same Island, these dudes at the same Island, there was some guys, some, uh, the same Island, I think it was later that same year, uh, some operative, some military guys happened to be hunting there. They got attacked by a bear and killed it. Really? Yeah. Got, one of them got messed up bad, but he killed it. I'm like, why'd he kill it? And I didn't. Well, maybe they had their gun out, right? You were in a weird situation too. Cause if you guys were relaxed eating lunch, with your guards down, you're sitting there chewing on a sandwich. I always laughed. You know, I was in the middle of saying what like I was in the middle of a sentence. I'll never forget because someone was laughing about why we're putting some sandwiches together and someone was laughing about why my sandwich looks so much nicer than someone else's sandwich. And I said, if you want, I was in the middle of saying, if you want a sandwich like this, get your own fucking TV show. But I was never able to finish the sentence, but I know I was in the middle of saying that when all of a sudden the people around me erupted off the ground. Uh, as though like a landmine had gone off underneath us. Cause they saw it and I didn't see it. I was looking the other way and it came in running. Oh, yeah. That was scary, man. And I've had like, you know, fair bit, fair bit of exposure. Um, and, and I'm, yeah, like, I mean, relative to most a ton of exposure to those things. I got to expose my 10 year old kid to him this year, a couple of times, you know, um, hunting caribou in Alaska. And it was, it was, it was like cool to kind of see his thought process. You yeah, you've been exposed to a more than 99.999% of the population. For it to rattle you like that. It was disappointing, man. Cause we're always talking about, I'm going to do this and I'll do that. And we're always like, yeah, you know, I actually prefer the 44 over to three. Cause you know, if I can't get it done with this 13, you know, I got 13 reasons. He doesn't want to charge me with this semi auto. It's like all this like bullshit, you know, and all of a sudden it like hits and like, you know, spot it with a track and pull. I've only seen one grizzly ever in the wild, uh, up close. And, uh, it wasn't a big one. It was like a six foot pair, but, uh, it looked at me in a way that, uh, another bear has never looked at me before. Uh, I've seen black bears, black bears look at you like, what are you? Who are you? What's going on? Can I walk by you? Like black players look at people in a weird way. Yeah. They're like denizens of the underbrush, man. The grizzly looked at me like this. Just locked on me. And I was like, Oh shit. Like that is just a different thing. Like it looked at me like, am I eating you? Am I going to eat you? Yeah. There's a mindset probably that comes from, uh, there's a mindset that probably comes from just not being challenged. Yeah. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere. But after December 1st, they will only be available on Spotify, but they will be free that includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. 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