White Man Lives With Black Bear: Who Will Women Choose?

In today’s New Year’s Day episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive into a wild (literally) real news story: a California man has been sharing his home with a massive 550-pound black bear for over a month — and the government won’t let him remove it! 🐻🏠

They connect it to the infamous “man or bear” debate, discuss insane wildlife protection bureaucracy (wrong bear trapped, noise devices abandoned, homeowner banned from scaring it himself), and explore parallels with protected bat colonies forcing people out of their own homes.

The conversation spirals into fascinating tangents:

* Future of genetically edited pets (talking dogs, odorless ferrets, domesticated raccoons & foxes)

* Domestication experiments (Russian foxes, urban raccoons evolving cuter features)

* Bat biology, dinosaur parasites, superior bird respiration, and WWII bat bombs 🔥🦇

* Why government inaction is exploding (qualified immunity, pothole-fixing lawsuits)

* Self-defense fantasies, Home Alone cultural appeal, and Appalachian trickster vibes

Plus: bear stereotypes, Tasmanian devil cancers, T-Rex diseases, and why humans have the best immune systems.

Episode Transcript:

Malcolm Collin: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. Remember when that thing went around that was like, would you rather run into a random man in the woods or a bear? Yeah. Or a bear. Okay, so what have I told you? And this is, I kid you not a real news story that right now in California.

There is a white man being forced to live with a black bear. Oh, by the California government? I saw, no, I saw

Simone Collins: a headline, but I didn’t click through to it. I think on Drudged it was something like man, man, still Living with Bear, or something like that. Man. Can’t get rid of bear.

Speaker 18: . It’s been over a month since that 550 pound black bear moved into his home, . He can hear it from inside of his home.

Malcolm Collin: Why? Why does it matter?

That he’s a white man. I [00:01:00] don’t know, but it seemed to matter that it was a black bear. So I’m just telling the story as I read. ‘cause no, because

Simone Collins: if it were a grizzly bear, it would be a dead person, a dead body and a house. It’ll be a dead body soon with a, a black bear. It’s a large black bear, bear attack.

When they feel, when they’re approached aggressively or they perceive to be aggressively, or

Malcolm Collin: Simone, it’s living in his house. It’s living in his house. I mean, a lot

Simone Collins: of irresponsible people adopt tiger cubs and lion cubs. This is a wild adult bear. Yeah. Well define wild. You know, when, when, when you discover that, it, it’s been living around cities and people for so long that it, it has developed habits that have adapted to them. In fact, people have found that urban raccoons have developed different morphological traits from Oh, really? Yeah. They’ve, they, they actually have more dog-like traits now. They look [00:02:00] more approachable and friendly.

They floppier ears and I think shorter snouts, they just look cuter. So yeah.

Malcolm Collin: Oh, I’d, I’d be very interested to see you know, when we go to space, if we bring raccoons with us or something. I mean, I think, I think raccoon, I think

Simone Collins: that that’s already been foretold by the Marvel cinematic

Malcolm Collin: universe.

Speaker 3: you stupid raccoon. Don’t call me a raccoon. I’m sorry I took it too far. That meant trash panda. Is that better?. It’s worse. It’s so much worse.

Malcolm Collin: This is the thing it gives true, but like, if you, if you are as soon as we can start genetically editing animals.

Yeah, it’s gonna dramatically open up the types of animals that make good pets. Yeah. And a few that like are lower tier right now Yeah. Are gonna move to high tier with genetic editing. So I know people

Simone Collins: are talking about designer babies. The thing is people are already cloning their pet dogs. It’s first gonna be designer.

And gene edited pets. Oh, right. If people are already CLO dogs, they’re going to [00:03:00] genetically modify pets super soon and already, like I can tell, our next generation is super open to that. Octavian was working next to me this this afternoon, and he’s sitting there and trying to think about what he can invent and he’s like, well.

They already invented helicopters and they already invented humans. And I’m like, well, you can invent a better human. And then he starts asking about alligators and crocodiles and worm versus cold-blooded like I It’s ha, I see the gears turning. Alright, this is happening. We’re gonna have our talking dog soon.

Well, professor two or the Commodore, whatever, we’re gonna name our next dog. It’s gonna be a talking dog.

Speaker 5: . The Soviet put me on a rocket knowing full well I never to return and I’ll die. But one thing even Uck Soviets never do is call me bad dog. God, you just let it go. A bad dog. Oh, it never stop hurting.

Malcolm Collin: But if you put pox P two [00:04:00] in dogs Yeah. It looks like you might be able to get a dog with fairly minor genetic edits that could understand human speech significantly better. Yeah. And, but what I’m saying here is I don’t even know if dogs are going to be the ultimate species to edit.

I mean, I do think we’ll do a lot of edits to dogs, but I think that there’s other species examples here would be ferrets. Ferrets would be a much more amazing pet if they didn’t smell so bad. Oh, I was just gonna say it was like. But the smell, Malcolm, with genetic edits, you can remove the smell problem from What about the greasiness?

Simone Collins: I don’t know. I feel like the, the greasiness and smelliness is a big part of their whole

Malcolm Collin: thing. Physiology.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collin: Well, I don’t know. Again, with raccoons, if you can, if you can make raccoons more domesticated, like a half dog, half raccoon, I think will be, well, we already have those. Like I said, we’re getting closer.

They’re doing it on their own. But I’m thinking, you know, what do you have on? Yeah, we, yeah. In

Simone Collins: other words, we can, we can do this. In one year rather than through tons of generations of raccoons living and dying. I mean, that, that’s your [00:05:00] whole point.

Malcolm Collin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, and they’ve tried to do this with other animals.

It is hard to domesticate some species. Like there was an experiment to domesticate foxes in Russia.

Hmm. Yeah.

And they went back to a wild form fairly quickly and you, and you can still buy them by the way, if you wanna buy these like semi domesticated foxes really from Russia’s during the, the communist period.

And they developed a lot of traits of dogs like floppy ears and stuff like that, similar to the raccoons. And the, do they

Simone Collins: behave? Mostly like dogs as pets. Should we get a fox next? No, they’re love fox.

Malcolm Collin: They’re smellier. Is the biggest downside. And I, I actually wonder if that’s one of the core things was dogs and cats that we brought out of them with smelliness.

Simone Collins: That’s really interesting. I mean, if you’ve been around a dog that farts. And we all have, I think we can all beg to differ. The dogs are not stinky, but

Malcolm Collin: but most, most non like dog and