Ep. 760: Teddy Roosevelt's Kids and Their Insane Quest To Kill a Giant Panda

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 760 Summary

Teddy Roosevelt's Kids and Their Insane Quest To Kill a Giant Panda
Release Date: September 8, 2025
Host: Steven Rinella | Featured Guest: Nathalia Holt, PhD

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Episode Overview

In this lively and insightful episode, Steven Rinella is joined by acclaimed author and molecular biologist Nathalia Holt, PhD, to discuss her latest book Beast in the Clouds. The episode zeroes in on the extraordinary, little-known true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons—Kermit and Ted Jr.—and their 1928 expedition to China in search of one of the world’s most mysterious animals: the giant panda. The conversation unfolds as a blend of outdoor exploration, history, family psychology, cultural intersections, and the early days of wildlife conservation—colored with the irreverent humor and curiosity typical of MeatEater.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Mystery of the Panda in the Early 20th Century

[02:19 – 07:59]

• Until the 1930s, Western science debated whether giant pandas actually existed. It “was almost as if I’m describing to you a unicorn...” – Nathalia Holt [03:49]
• Early panda evidence trickled in through missionaries and hunters in China, but most samples were poor quality or incomplete, keeping their existence shrouded in myth.
• By the late 1920s, pandas became regarded as the “most challenging trophy animal in the world” and were believed to be dangerous, possibly aggressive—“like a polar bear that could climb trees.” — Rinella [07:10]

2. The Roosevelt Boys & Their Upbringing

[09:47 – 23:48]

• Discussion on Teddy Roosevelt as a father. Contrary to assumptions, he was affectionate and playful, but also put immense pressure on his children:
  “Ted, the eldest son, had a nervous breakdown when he was 10 years old... the doctor told Teddy Roosevelt, this is because of the pressure you’re putting on him.” — Holt [19:12]
• Both Kermit and Ted Jr. struggled under their father’s legacy and quested to prove themselves, especially after personal and professional hardships (e.g., Ted Jr. was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal).

3. Linking Science & Hunting in the Age of Exploration

[31:46 – 37:06]

• Scientific collecting and hunting were inseparable in this era—museum scientists often were hunters, and acquiring a specimen meant killing it for study.
• The Roosevelts’ expedition was seen as unlikely to succeed: “Certainly nobody would have put money on the Roosevelts.” — Holt [36:37]
• Their party included Ty Jack Young (translator, NYU student), Sudham Cutting, and beleaguered British naturalist Herbert Stevens.

4. The Grueling Expedition to Panda Country

[39:29 – 47:50]

• The trek covered nearly 2,000 miles, traversing Myanmar, Yunnan, and into Sichuan, China—through dangerous terrain, civil war zones, and areas governed by independent Tibetan Buddhist lamas.
• The group encountered danger from bandits, lost mules, exposure, and suspicion from local peoples; they relied on gifts and diplomacy to gain safe passage.

5. Interactions with Local Cultures & the Yi People

[47:50 – 53:00]

• In Yi (Lolo) territory, the Roosevelts finally encountered people who had seen pandas, though even they rarely hunted the animal—regarding it as gentle and not a target for food or trophy.
• Reluctantly, Yi hunters agreed to help, assuming they’d never actually find a panda.

6. The Hunt for the Panda

[59:52 – 70:22]

• They finally spotted panda tracks in the snow—a huge moment after months of hardship:
  “At the moment when they finally see a bear print in the snow... it’s a really big moment in the book.” — Holt [60:17]
• The Roosevelts had a pact: if they encountered a panda, they would both shoot it simultaneously so they could share the credit.
  “It’s so infantile... Good Lord.” — Rinella [66:44]
• The panda was found resting in a tree, lethargic and peaceful—not the fearsome beast they expected.
  “This is not a polar bear. This is not a grizzly bear. This is something very different.” — Holt [69:17]

7. Aftermath and Consequences of Discovery

[72:30 – 85:19]

• The Yi villagers were horrified by the killing; the act violated a local taboo and the Roosevelts felt shame for the first time about their trophy.
• The hunting and collecting craze that followed their success greatly imperiled panda populations.
• Both brothers—especially Kermit—went on to champion panda protection and wildlife conservation. Kermit became vice president of the NY Zoological Society and later worked at the Audubon Society, lobbying for panda protections.

8. Fates of the Roosevelt Brothers & Legacy

[85:39 – 90:17]

• Both brothers died during WWII:
  • Ted Jr. landed with the first wave on D-Day, died days later of a heart condition [86:16].
  • Kermit, plagued by alcoholism and depression, died by suicide at Fort Richardson, Alaska [88:18].
• Their story illuminates the complicated and often tragic legacy of “living up to the Roosevelt name,” while also highlighting their underappreciated role in conservation history.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Up until the 1930s, it was debated whether there was actually... a panda bear.” — Steven Rinella [02:19]
• “It’s almost as if I’m describing to you a unicorn.” — Nathalia Holt [03:49]
• “Ted, the eldest son, had a nervous breakdown when he was 10... the doctor told Teddy Roosevelt, this is because of the pressure you’re putting on him.” — Holt [19:12]
• “This is not a polar bear. This is not a grizzly bear. This is something very different.” — Holt [69:17]
• “You can imagine that it was very prized for both men and women [to be guides]... half the guides on the trip were women.” — Holt [48:16]
• “They see Ted and Kermit as the savages in this situation, having to go through skinning this animal... to an animal they felt was sacred and gentle and that they didn’t hunt.” — Holt [71:04]
• “In 1930, they didn’t know about them. In 1970 it’s like, look, China: it’s a panda bear!” — Rinella [82:05]
• “Ted and Kermit became so passionate about protecting pandas afterwards, because they knew how rare these bears really were.” — Holt [83:12]

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Important Timestamps

• 02:19 — Introduction to “Beast in the Clouds” and panda mystery
• 09:47 — The Roosevelts’ upbringing and family dynamics
• 19:10 — The pressure of being a Roosevelt child; Ted’s childhood breakdown
• 23:48 — The Roosevelt brothers’ pathway to the panda expedition
• 31:46 — How science and hunting overlapped for early explorers
• 39:29 — Logistics and dangers of the expedition
• 47:50 — Arriving at the Yi people and their cultural attitudes toward pandas
• 60:17 — The pivotal moment: finding panda tracks in the snow
• 66:12 — The “simultaneous shooting” plan and eventual kill
• 72:30 — Aftermath: shame, taboo, and effects on panda populations
• 85:39 — World War II and the fates of Ted Jr. and Kermit

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Other Notable Points

• Panda Natural History: Pandas are highly specialized bamboo eaters, do not hibernate, are solitary, and ecologically and behaviorally quite distinct from other bears. Even now, wild sightings are rare and difficult.
• Cultural Commentary: The episode draws parallels to American attitudes toward iconic or sacred animals, exploring how perception and policy can be shaped by a single high-profile expedition.
• Conservation Legacy: The brothers’ transformation from trophy hunters to passionate conservationists echoes shifts in American attitudes toward wildlife in the 20th century.

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Further Reading

• Beast in the Clouds by Nathalia Holt — A detailed account of the Roosevelt brothers’ panda expedition.

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This episode offers a riveting window into the golden age of expeditions, the unexpected intersections between exploration and psychology, and a cautionary tale about the costs—and responsibilities—of discovery.

Transcript

[Nathalia Holt]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

First Lights Navigator hoodie was built and tested where plans fall apart and weather doesn't ask permission. It's built to perform built to last. Breathable insulation that dumps heat fast on the hike in. Stretch fabric that stays silent for close encounters. Moisture control that wicks away sweat on the packout. Because in the field, the plan shifts, the wind changes. The moment comes sooner or later than you thought. When. When it does, you adapt without hesitation. First Lights Navigator delivers on versatility no matter the situation and happens to be my favorite piece of gear they make right now. I live in it. Check it out@first light.com. that's F I R S T L I T E dot com. This is the Me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Randall]

We hunt with the Meat Eater podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't predict anything. Brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise. Gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out@first light.com. that's f I R S T L I T E. Hot damn. We're joined today by big time writer Nathalia Holt, one of the most credentialed writers we've had on. No, that's not true. Among the most. I mean, like, like a, like a writer writer.

[Nathalia Holt]

I think David Gran is going to have some words about that. I'm not sure that's true, but I'm.

[Steven Rinella]

Really excited to be here among the big time. The big, like writer writers.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, that's very.

[Steven Rinella]

Among the big time writers. You know what I mean? You know, here's what I'm trying to say. We've had, now that I think about, we've had a number of esteemed generalists. But you're a generalist nonfiction writer.

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, I've got the PhD, so I think that gives me a little credibility in there. But yeah, you've had some big writers on this show and I'm pretty excited to be part of it.

[Steven Rinella]

On the lower rung of the top. No, I'm joking.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, that's me. Bottom shell.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Among our prestigious writers we've had on the show, our generalist nonfict fiction writers that we've had on the show. Nathalia Holt is here and her new book is the Beast in the Clouds. And get this. This is what we're going to talk about today. It's kind of crazy. I had no idea up until the 1930s. This is the story we're going to tell. Up until the 1930s, it was debated whether there was actually, like, in the Western world, there was an active debate. Is there such a thing as a panda bear?

[Nathalia Holt]

That's right. This is the last 1930s. Unknown to science. Up until the 1930s, up until the Roosevelts did this expedition, there was serious debate in the scientific community about whether pandas were real.

[Steven Rinella]

People would say, like, hey, there's this big white and black bear up in the mountains. And people would be like, bullshit, Right.

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, at that point, you have all of the bears that are known to science, and they have been known for a long time. So polar bears had been known for thousands of years. They had been kept in early zoos. Black bears, grizzly bears were all known, pandas were not. And it started in 1869 with a French missionary who was in China. And he asked the hunters there to just go find him interesting animals. And they brought me. And bring me one. Yeah, bring me all the interesting animals you can find. I want to see that. Yeah, it's not bad.

[Steven Rinella]

Every time the hunter sees an animal, he's got to be like, but is it interest?

[Nathalia Holt]

He got a lot of interesting animals through this. Yeah, it worked. And one of them was a small black and white cub. And so he is wondering what this could be. There's no animal quite like it. He sends the skin of it to scientists in Paris and the hide is missing part of the head. It's not a very good specimen. And of course, he has not seen the animal himself alive. He's only ever seen this dead skin. So it's very hard for him to describe it. And so he is describing to the scientists what a panda looks like. Just from the descriptions that he's heard, you can imagine what a scientist might think. It's almost as if I'm describing to you a unicorn. What does a unicorn look like? And then you're trying to make a picture, and you could probably make a pretty good picture, but it doesn't mean that it's a real animal. And so from that point, scientists were very interested to find out if this was real, if there was actually a black and white bear in China. And so Fast forward to 1916, and you have a group of German hunters who then came into China, also began looking for interesting animals, found local hunters and asked them, go find us a panda. We're looking for a black and white bear and they bring back pandas. They bring back a live Cuban as well as skins of several pandas but they're unable to keep the cub alive. However, they are the first Westerners to have finally seen a live panda. But they don't bring back any of this evidence to the West. And so scientists in the west are still, maybe this is true, maybe this isn't. It's a lot of hearsay at this point. Then in 1919, an American missionary named Joseph Milner sends a specimen that he found in a marketplace in China to the American Museum of Natural History. And it's finally, we have the skin of a panda. And so the Museum of Natural History announces it. They're very excited. They call it a rare beast from eastern Tibet. And they say, we don't really know much about this animal. We don't know where it lives, we don't know what it eats because Joseph Milner had never seen the animal, he knew very little about it. But we really think this is real. Now there are pandas out there. And so you can imagine immediately all of these expeditions form. This is prime time for expeditions, right? This is the time explorers are going out in the world looking for interesting things. And so you have all these expeditions that go out to China, desperate to find the panda and they all return empty handed. 10 years pass and at this point scientists are really in conflict because it seems as if, yes, this panda is real, but at this point, why haven't they found it yet? Why hasn't there been a specimen brought to the museum that can actually be studied scientifically, that can be compared to other animals? And, and so when the Roosevelts leave for their expedition in 1928, the panda is considered the most challenging trophy animal in the world. It is really considered the epitome of a bear to find. And it's also thought to be a dangerous animal. So little was known about the panda that they expected it to be this cross between polar bears and black bears. They thought they were going to find one of the most aggressive predators on Earth as they search out like a.

[Steven Rinella]

Polar bear that could climb trees.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And I mean, really, when the Roosevelts go out, you can imagine these are the two eldest sons of President Roosevelt. And of course, the challenge of getting the most prized trophy animal in the world, that is something that is going to speak to them. But really very little is expected from their expedition because they are a small group, much smaller than the expeditions that had traveled previously. And it's not a group that is particularly impressive. You've got the two eldest Roosevelts. These are not accomplished scientists, although they obviously have a lot of experience as hunters, and they're going with a ragtag group. So as they're leaving, as they're going on this expedition, few think that they are the ones that are going to be able to discover the panda.

[Steven Rinella]

So you mentioned having a PhD. What did you study?

[Nathalia Holt]

I have a PhD in molecular biology, and I've done field work in a lot of really interesting places in Alaska, in redwood trees, in South Africa. So I'm able to bring some of that experience of doing science in the field to this book. And. And it does help. It helps kind of give me some of that background.

[Steven Rinella]

And you are? Nathalia Holt, PhD. You're a new York Times bestselling author. So Beast in the Clouds, which you're here to talk about today, Past books, Wise Gals, Rise of the Rocket Girls, the Queens of Animation, and the book Cured. You've written for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic Slate, Popular Science, pbs, and Time. And a former fellow at the Reagan. What is that?

[Nathalia Holt]

It's the Reagan Institute. So it's a science group that's part of Harvard MDH, and MIT in Boston.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. She is a former fellow at the. I would read that Reagan. Because we know how Reagan's spelled.

[Nathalia Holt]

I know. I understand. It's like.

[Steven Rinella]

It's one of the things we learned from Reagan. How to spell Reagan. The Reagan Institute of mgh, which is.

[Nathalia Holt]

The Massachusetts General Hospital.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, okay. Mit. The alma mater of Ted Kaczynski.

[Nathalia Holt]

Nice.

[Steven Rinella]

No, he was a teacher there in Harvard University. And you live in Pacific Grove, California?

[Nathalia Holt]

I do, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so we're gonna pick up this story. And I got my. My first question coming out of this when we picked the story back up, is we gotta go back up, because I need to know what, like, what kind of a dad was Roosevelt? So just stew on that a minute.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's an important question.

[Steven Rinella]

Before we embark them on this journey of trying to shoot him or collect a panda bear against all odds. I need to know, was Roosevelt like, an absentee father? That. That you stew on Adam in it.

[Nathalia Holt]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

But first, we have our Christmas tour coming up. The 20. The 2025 live tour. We're calling it the Christmas Tour. We were. It's all in the South. Mm. It's all in the South. And it's a Christmas tour. So my first idea is that we would make a poster where it's like the old spaghetti western posters, like Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but it'd be Santa Clauses and elves with bandoliers and pistols, like the spaghetti Westerns. That was my first vision. Then Randall and I got sidetracked, talking about an idea where we were dressed as Yankee soldiers and it was the North's coming again or Randall wanted to do the tour. He wanted to do the tour of the south along the path of Sherman's March.

[Randall]

And I said that to you in confidence.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's like, it's going to be the media. The tour poster is going to be the Yankees are coming again. But we checked with a couple Southerners who felt away. Well, Hunter Spencer. We called Hunter Spencer. First call I made, I was like, hunter, if we brand this as like the Yankees are coming again, he thought it's a little too soon. He thinks it's a little too soon.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, my God.

[Steven Rinella]

So maybe in 100 years. Yeah, what would they. What's in 100 years? The 20. The 2125. If this is the 20. Yeah. When the 2120.

[Randall]

When they're just doing holograms of us tour.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, we'll just need to bring Steve.

[Steven Rinella]

Back like the direwolves in the 20 end of century. Maybe we'll do the the Yankees are coming, but instead we're just branding it more as something everyone can get on board with. Well. Well, that most people can get on board with, which is the Christmas tour. But I do want you to know, you know, I don't want any people. You know, I don't want to discourage people of other faiths, but we're calling it the Christmas tour. The Christmas tour is coming. Not the Yankees. It's in the South. It's in the south, but it's not like a bunch of Yankees from up north, though. It. You know, we're bringing Clay.

[Randall]

Yeah, Clay will be there.

[Steven Rinella]

He's from Arkansas.

[Randall]

It'll be a little twang on the ish.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, Southish. He's coming. We could have done it like that. Since Clay's from the south and Brent's from the south, we could have had it be like the reconciliation tour. And the poster would be Yankees and Confederates.

[Randall]

It would look like the paintings of Appomattox.

[Steven Rinella]

Yankees and Confederates with our arms around each other. And we call it the reconciliation tour. And it'd be that Yankees and Arkansas people are coming to your town, but.

[Nathalia Holt]

Are you gonna wear the hats is my question.

[Steven Rinella]

We're not. We're going all Santa Claus. It's just like we're putting the.

[Randall]

You know, when I heard about this, my first thought was last year. I had to make do with a pretty, not movie quality Santa Claus. Costume for all of the office hijinks. And so I thought if, if we're doing a live Christmas tour, maybe it's time that we invested.

[Steven Rinella]

Because I believe me, I have no serious tailor.

[Randall]

I went to the sites and I saw the, I went to all the websites of real high quality Santa gear just because it seems like something that, you know, you buy once and, and it. You're good for 15 years.

[Steven Rinella]

Like a dude that has a job at a mall.

[Randall]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He's wearing a legit.

[Randall]

Like I looked into the different styles of belts. You know, a lot of them are actually overalls underneath the jacket, the different trim styles. And then you. To say nothing of the wigs and beards.

[Steven Rinella]

I did a lot of research.

[Randall]

So I'm. When we have our budgeting meeting for the tour, I'm gonna, I have a presentation.

[Steven Rinella]

Like a tailored suit?

[Randall]

Yeah, like a real, A real Santa suit. And then are you actually doing full on boots or are you doing boot covers? Because most of the cheap ones have boot covers. So you assume that a real Santa would have the actual boots. But in fact quite a few of the real high end Santa costumes, they're still using boot covers.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't like that one bit.

[Randall]

Yeah, well, we can talk about it.

[Steven Rinella]

You're gonna bring the suit. Well, that's. Yeah. So here's the deal for people, for southerners out there, you know who you are if for Christmas, right. You'd be like, hey, what I want is tickets to the Christmas tour. Yeah.

[Randall]

Uncle Eddie will be in town, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So that's what you should. So if you're listening, tell your spouse, your boyfriend or your girlfriend that what you want is tickets to the Christmas tour. And Randall's going to be there in a suit.

[Randall]

There'll be carols.

[Steven Rinella]

And listen, don't be afraid to bring your grandpa because we're not going to bring up the war between the states. Like I don't want you to go back. I'm not going to bring that up again. I don't want you to think we're going to enter into a big controversy. It's just pure Christmas tour. Yeah. We're going to sing carols. We're going to do like a normal meat eater live show. There'll be contests and whatnot and people be winning all kinds of stuff. But it'll have a Christmas overlay to it. Nothing to do with the. Nothing to do with the. You know, I'm not gonna say it anymore.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's where we're going six stops Birmingham, Alabama. Oh, I got a great Birmingham story I'm going to tell on that. I one time drove. I took a Greyhound across the tour. Oh, that'd be a good idea, wouldn't it? I was just told it. Good gracious. Birmingham, Alabama. Nashville, Tennessee. Memphis, Tennessee. Fayetteville, Arkansas. Fayetteville.

[Randall]

Fayetteville.

[Steven Rinella]

I was just joking. Fayetteville, Arkansas. I just talked to Evan Felker. He's going to come to the from Turnpike Troubadours. He's going to come to the show and him and Clay are going to do the Bird Hunters live at the start of the show. Wow. Isn't that cool?

[Randall]

Maybe he could carol for us a bit too.

[Steven Rinella]

Dallas, Texas, where we've been before and Austin, Texas, where I don't think we've done a show. If you want to go to the meater.com you can sign up for a thing we got for a pre sale. Ho ho ho In a rebel yellow Ho, ho, ho and a rebel yell Coming to the south. Good gracious. I was gonna tell a big story about having a hard hat because Randall's like, I'm not gonna tell that. Probably get it back into panda bears. But yeah, Randall's under pressure to get all your things from growing up out of your mom's house, and she wondered if you still wanted your hard hat.

[Randall]

Yeah, that and a crossbow and a K bar knife.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. But never mind that. What kind of dad was Roosevelt? Was he mean, like he couldn't have been around much?

[Nathalia Holt]

You're. You're wrong about that, actually. He was an incredibly caring, affectionate father. He was the kind of dad who got down on the floor, played with his kids. He, even when he was gone, and he was gone for long stretches of time, he would write his kids these long letters. He would tell them how much he loved them. He would draw little pictures for them in his letters. And he loved to play just crazy rowdy games with his kids when he was home. They would chase around the house. I talk in the book about a game they played called Bear Hunt, where they would chase after their dad, looking for him all around the house. And when they found him, it was all tickles and giggles and kisses and all that kind of stuff. But the other side of that is that he did put a lot of pressure on his kids. And you can imagine that for the sons of any famous man, this is a lot. Right. There are advantages, but there are also disadvantages.

[Steven Rinella]

That's what I'd be curious about is, is when I, when I was reading, I didn't know that they did crazy expeditions like their own man did. So I was picturing two driving like I was picturing two scenarios. Scenario one, they have a great relationship with their dad. The stuff he does is cool. He introduced them to doing cool stuff, and they just want to continue along because they admire that lifestyle. Or scenario two is they never got his love. And the one way that they could try to, like, get his attention is to mirror his adventurous activities and go have a big discovery and finally get dad to be like, hey, good job, Kermit.

[Nathalia Holt]

You know, it's a little bit of both because obviously he loved his kids very passionately, he was very affectionate with them, but he put a lot of pressure on them. So, Ted, the eldest son had a nervous breakdown when he was 10 years old. And the doctor told Teddy Roosevelt, this is because of the pressure you're putting on him. It's too much.

[Steven Rinella]

At what age?

[Nathalia Holt]

10? He has 6.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know what that looks like. A 10 year old nervous breakdown.

[Nathalia Holt]

I mean, you can imagine that it's not easy to be the son of Teddy Roosevelt. This is a larger than life figure. And he is very concerned about his son's being strong. He says repeatedly in letters that he's worried that Kermit is gonna be a weakling.

[Steven Rinella]

He says that to who, his bodies?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, he says it to family members and to friends. And he talks about this with Kermit as well. And he and Kermit obviously have a close relationship. They go on several expeditions together. So they go in 1909, they go to Africa, where Kermit is able to hunt an elephant. He's able to get a calf that's right now in the American Museum of Natural History.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

And then after Teddy Roosevelt loses the election in 1912, they go on a River of Doubt expedition. And of course, that one is told so beautifully in Candice Millard's book, River of Doubt, where it is a perilous expedition. It's one that Teddy Roosevelt almost dies in. And so you see how close their relationship was and how important it was to the two eldest sons to really carry on in their father's footsteps. And it wasn't easy for them to do that in other aspects of their life. So Ted, for example, wanted to be a politician like his father. That was his goal. That was his dream. And before this expedition happens, where they go for the panda, those dreams are completely scattered. There's no way he's going to be able to do that because.

[Steven Rinella]

Because of his own limitations or because of his popularity, so.

[Nathalia Holt]

Because he was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal. So he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, which is a position that his father had held as well before becoming president. And during that time, it was found out that the government was giving oil leases preferentially by taking bribes.

[Steven Rinella]

I've heard of this, but I have no idea what it is. Yeah, the Teapot Dome scandal. Sort of like in the way back of my head, there's like a. I feel you've heard of that before.

[Nathalia Holt]

This is a few years ago, so, you know, it's been a while.

[Steven Rinella]

The Teapot Dome scandal.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. And so after that, even though Ted was not convicted of any crime, he was implicated in this.

[Steven Rinella]

He got canceled.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, he got canceled. In fact, you even have Eleanor Roosevelt campaigning against him in a giant teapot costume.

[Steven Rinella]

What?

[Nathalia Holt]

It's brutal. I mean, that's.

[Steven Rinella]

So their family got to fight.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. So that's, you know, FDR and Eleanor, where there was a feud between them. So they're distant cousins.

[Steven Rinella]

And is it true that the one side. Is it true that the one side was that Theodore's clan was Roosevelt and that the Franklin clan was Roosevelt? Have you ever heard this before?

[Nathalia Holt]

I have.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that not true?

[Nathalia Holt]

I don't think so. I think it's just the way that people from different areas pronounce the name.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's like Roosevelt across the board.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, got it.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. And so.

[Steven Rinella]

And then which. In this story you're telling, which one? Just so people are kind of aware, this is, like, foreshadowing. Which of his two boys ends up killing himself?

[Nathalia Holt]

That's Kermit.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. He ends up killing himself, and he's the one rolled up in Teapot Dome.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, that's actually the eldest brother.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Nathalia Holt]

That is rolled up in that. And it's interesting to me, because what we see is that Teddy Roosevelt often went on expeditions during difficult points in his life. So when he lost the election and he went to the river of Doubt, when he lost his mother and his wife, he went to the Dakotas. And you really see his sons following in those footsteps, deciding to go on this expedition during a difficult time for them. So Ted had just was politically obliterated is the way his wife put it. And Kermit was having many issues. He was just not a successful businessman. He was having a lot of difficulties. He was having problems with his family, too. So both of them were at a point in their lives where they were ready to escape. They were ready to go do something different. And going into the woods going on hunting expeditions was always a big part of their lives.

[Steven Rinella]

So how, like, how did they get. They got their finger on the pulse of the world, I guess, when it comes to exploration and wildlife discoveries. But how does, how does the panda mystery or the panda controversy, like, how does it land in their lap? Like, how do they become the recipients of this and be like, hey, we'll be the ones that go find it?

[Nathalia Holt]

You know, it's luck, honestly, because at that point, you have 10 years of expeditions that have gone out and have not been able to find the panda. The Roosevelts are able to get funding from the Field Museum, and because of that, they're able to go do this expedition. And honestly, the museum is not expecting them to come back with the panda, but they're thinking they'll find other animals. And they do. They find many other animals besides the panda on this expedition.

[Steven Rinella]

And at this point in time, how many pandas are alive?

[Nathalia Holt]

It's hard to say. So the best estimate we have is somewhere in the 2000 range. There's not a lot of pandas at that point.

[Steven Rinella]

There's only 2,000 pandas.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, pandas have always been fairly rare, and they're only found in a few very small parts of China. So even in China, the panda was not well known. And it makes sense when you think about how divided China was at that point too, because this is a country that is very territorial. So you have many different cultures, many independent kingdoms. And in the places where the panda lived, it's remote mountains and people there did not have a lot of roads and did not have a lot of contact with the Chinese. And they themselves did not consider themselves Chinese.

[Steven Rinella]

Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre order right now. Meat Eaters American History The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery. How they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east and like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects. And you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre order Meat Eaters American History The Hide Hunters 1865-1883. Wherever you get your audiobooks. And you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14th. This is like deep. I won't judge if you don't know the answer to this. Let's say you go back. Let's say we went back 10,000 years or whatever the hell was it like, Was it at a time, was there a million pandas, do you know? I mean, let's say you went back to whatever marker. Does it, does it seem like they were being forced into some kind of bottleneck at this point? Or was it just that somehow they managed to exist as an always very limited animal?

[Nathalia Holt]

So the panda went through some big evolutionary changes. And so at one point, we think the panda was found in other continents, even in Europe. There's evidence of early pandas, but they look so different than we think of them today. And then the panda changed. It adapted to its environment. They are one of only a few species in Carnivora that are herbivores. And so they developed a unique thumb that's perfect for grasping bamboo. Their teeth changed. So they went to this herbivore diet. And all of those changes led them to being very linked to these mountainous bamboo forests that are only found in certain parts of the world.

[Steven Rinella]

So if you laid out a hunk of, I don't know, man, you lay out like a hunk of meat hanging there. Is he gonna. I'll eat that or is he just gonna not eat it?

[Nathalia Holt]

Panda's not gonna eat a hunk of meat.

[Steven Rinella]

He's not gonna eat it.

[Nathalia Holt]

No. Yeah, it's not gonna work. But if you looked at earlier ancestors to the panda, you have omnivores that were eating meat at that time, but that's way better.

[Steven Rinella]

So even if they can get it, my question was more like, is it just that they're. That they were confined to a certain area and so in that area, what they had to eat, that was bamboo? Or was it that they were. That was what they. They were specialists. Like, that's what they consumed.

[Nathalia Holt]

They are highly adapted to consume bamboo. They're not, you know, they're not scavengers like black bears. They're very different than other members of the bear family. And I think, you know, when you really think about it, it. They are pretty special. They're very rare for being a bear. So perhaps it's. It's not crazy that the Roosevelts weren't expecting them to be like that. They really thought they would be predators. And it sort of makes sense when you think about all the other members of the bear family in comparison.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, man, that blows my mind. Just 2,000 of them.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Yeah. It's not many. And it's not many today either.

[Randall]

What I was struck by reading this book is as they're going through, you know, like, when you think about outsiders coming into a place in Asia or Africa looking for something, oftentimes like, what they find to be very unique or rare. They get there and the people are like, oh, yeah, I know what that is. But they keep going into these villages, and it's like, maybe someone has seen one. But there's. It's not like they arrive on the scene and there's a knowledge of panda bears when they arrive. Like, it's almost as much a. M. To the people that are sort of helping them as it is to the Roosevelts.

[Nathalia Holt]

That's true. Yeah. So they have this group of guides they're working with who are kind of like the Sherpa people of Nepal. They're the ones who are breaking the trail ahead of them. They're making the campsites, they're helping them communicate. And all of these villages they're going through, nobody knows about the panda, and they travel a huge distance. All in all, they travel almost 2,000 miles over the course of six months. This is a long track. So they are going first through rainforests in Myanmar and then into very high 14,000 peaks in the Himalayas and then down through the Tibetan Plateau. I mean, they cover an incredible range as they're searching for the panda, and they end up having to go to this one part of China that they've been warned not to go to. They've been told that the people that live there are savages. They. That this is not a place that's safe. And they make that choice really out of desperation. Because at this point, what they went through on the trail, it is just extreme. How close they came to dying multiple.

[Steven Rinella]

Times from what was almost killing them. Well, first off, like, lay out a little bit about how they organized it and sort of what the planned route was and where they. Where they thought their highest likelihood of finding one would be.

[Nathalia Holt]

So they thought their highest likelihood would be to go where Joseph Milner lived, which was in Western China. And they believed that because he had been able to buy a skin from a marketplace there, they would be able to, if they hunted in the countryside, find the panda. And I think what's really interesting, and I just want to go back to for a minute, is that science and hunting is very linked at this point in history. Scientists are hunters. You see that with Darwin. You see that with all the great scientists of the era. They had to be. And so the Roosevelts, although you may not think of them so much as scientists, they really are bridging that gap. They have that ability to hunt, but then they also have the ability to learn about these animals. And so they've spent a lot of time at the Field Museum in Chicago, really learning about how to prepare these specimens and how to describe them in a way that's useful for scientists. And so they're traveling with an interesting group. They're traveling with a man named Ty Jack Young, who is an NYU student. He was born in Hawaii. His parents are from San Francisco and from China. So he grew up in China. And he's hired as a translator for the trip, but he ends up being sent to the Field Museum and gets all of the training there. And I was fortunate. I was able to get his unpublished autobiography, as well as interviews that were done with him in the 1990s. And it's just fascinating to. He became very close friends with the Roosevelts.

[Steven Rinella]

He was alive in the 1990s.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. He's only 18 at the time of this expedition. And so he was friends with the Roosevelts for years. They were very close friends. And so to be able to get his account was so interesting. And so he's one of the members of this expedition, as well as a man named Sudham Cutting, who's a naturalist from New York who is not particularly well experienced, but is the kind of man who will just happy to do anything, happy to go out, hunt, whatever you need, he's there. And then they have Herbert Stevens, who is this British naturalist, who is really the real biologist of the group. He has the training, and he has had terrible luck, this poor guy. All of these expeditions he's gone on, he's had such a difficult time bringing specimens back because he has a boat crash or there's other problems in transportation. And he's just not very well respected by the scientific community because of that. And so he's pretty desperate to show that he's real, that he can do this.

[Randall]

I got the sense in there, like, especially with him, that in this era of expeditions, it was like. It was almost like. Like we think of athletes today where it's like, you've got a few good years and you end up on the wrong team, and, like, your whole legacy is in question. And so there's some guys that are just desperate to get out there for one last chance at, like, a big discovery. And it's very. There's almost like a sort of gamesmanship to it. And, like, some guys just sort of luck into a good expedition, but other guys are just sort of desperately hanging on, trying to get on an expedition that will make their name for them.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's so true, because this was really a time in history when you could make your name as an explorer. You could really gain fame from doing so. And Herbert Stevens is not necessarily someone that you would ever think of as being famous. Certainly most of the explorers that did these trips and the animals would not be named after them. But this expedition is special because you have the Roosevelts, and. Yeah, I loved writing about Herbert Stevens, especially because he's kind of funny on the trail. He tends to delay the group. The Roosevelts get very annoyed with him. He gets lost the first day on the trail.

[Randall]

He's the one they leave behind, right?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, he's too slow, you know, in.

[Steven Rinella]

Terms of hitting the right expedition. Just an interesting. The thing about that is in our podcast the American west, with the historian Dan Flores, he talks about Jefferson launched two expeditions. He had a northern one, the Corps of Discovery or Lewis and Clark expedition, and he had a southern one, which gets going and they get intercepted by the Spanish and sent home. So if you're thinking, like, who got lucky, who didn't get lucky? No one's even heard of the one in the south.

[Nathalia Holt]

So. True. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's just like, you could have been, like, what's. You know, what one's going to be a greater chance of boosting my career. And you wind up being like, Lewis and Clark or the dude I can't think of or the dude I can't think of who is supposed to do the same thing in the South.

[Randall]

Freeman and Custis.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lost to time, dude. Like, no one cares. No one's heard of the guy, you know?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Certainly nobody would have put money on the Roosevelts for this expedition. In fact, they didn't even tell their close friends that they were going after the pair.

[Steven Rinella]

And how long were they fixing to go for?

[Nathalia Holt]

They were planning to go for six months. That was their plan.

[Steven Rinella]

They thought it'd get done.

[Nathalia Holt]

I mean, they had hoped to do the first leg in six months, and then spend another six months going through Vietnam and going through Laos and collecting more species there.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. And just to be clear, their intent. They want to observe them, watch them, but then their intent is to shoot some.

[Nathalia Holt]

Absolutely. And it's very specific how they need to collect the panda so that it's useful for science.

[Steven Rinella]

So they take off from where?

[Nathalia Holt]

So they take off from. Well, technically, the trip starts, of course, in New York, but they end up going through Myanmar, into the western side of China, into Yunnan. And so they're going through a trail that.

[Steven Rinella]

This is on foot.

[Nathalia Holt]

This is on foot. So they have mules that carry a lot of their supplies. And there's a lot of problems with mules throughout the book, unfortunately. But, yeah, they're going on foot. So these are all places where there are no roads for cars, just trails.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh. So even, like, I just can't. I wish I understood it better that. That I would picture at that point in time. I mean, we're into the 20th century. I would picture at that point in time, like, you'd get trains, and you'd kind of get within striking distance of your objective.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's. It's just too remote. This area they're going to. You know, they're. They're sort of straddling this border between Tibet and China. A lot of times, they don't even know which country they're in. Yeah, there's also a civil war going on. That's kind of a problem for them throughout the book. So in 1927, you have the civil war that started in China between the Nationalist government and the Communist Party. And so that's raging around them at the same time, too.

[Steven Rinella]

And that probably cuts off certain avenues of approach.

[Nathalia Holt]

It does. Although the parts they're going to, there simply are not roads. And so it's interesting throughout the book because as they describe the trail, and by the way, it was so much fun just to go through the Roosevelt's field journals and how they describe things. And they took pictures and videos on the trail as well, which is pretty cool. And some of those pictures are of the other people traveling the trail, and a lot of them are moving these giant, giant packs of tea because there are no roads. There's no other way to bring goods to this part of China except on the backs of people.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Yeah. I wish I had a. I wish I had a map of the planet Earth. Phil, can you pull up a picture of Myanmar and China? Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

There is a little map in the book, too, if you Want to, if that helps. It's kind of right in the front there.

[Steven Rinella]

Myanmar. What was mean?

[Nathalia Holt]

So it's Burma at the time.

[Randall]

So east of. If you're picturing like, the Indian Ocean, it's east of India sort of tucked up there.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, that's right.

[Randall]

Northwest Southeast Asia.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, that's a good way to put it. Northwest Southeast Asia.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you need it super detailed or you want it in context with, like, the surrounding countries? In context with everything else. Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

Like, that little square is that dude.

[Steven Rinella]

I went to high school with lives in Myanmar.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

Maybe his little spot will show there. Okay. All right, let me just get my. I gotta get my head straight here. So they're crossing Myanmar.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. So they're going from. There's kind of this. It's called the Baumo route through Burma, and then they're going into Yunnan, and they call it sort of the back door into China.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

And then from there are moving north up through Sichuan and then more into central China. And then they eventually end up coming back around through Vietnam.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So people are picturing there's, like, a large peninsula that contains Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia. They're kind of crossing the top of that peninsula to get into the. Into the mountains of. Of western China.

[Nathalia Holt]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Man, I would never picture that. That's how you would need to do that at that point in time. I don't know why I don't know anything about that area. So what kind. Like, what kind of happens to them along that route then? So, I mean, they may got to be having adventures left and right.

[Nathalia Holt]

They do, yes. So they are able to collect an incredible amount of animals on this trip. First of all, they are able to collect 5,000 bird skins, 2,000 small mammals, 40 large mammals. I mean, that's a damn good hunting trip right there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a huge collection.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. And so they are collecting all of these interesting species. They find 19 new species on the trail. But they're also interacting with a plethora of cultures. And that was fun. Part of the book, too. So they go into these areas that are autonomous regions that are mostly Tibetans that live there, and they're ruled by Tibetan lamas. And so I talk in the book quite a bit about this section of Tibetan Buddhism. And at that time, you had all of these lamaseries that were along the route, and there were men and women who were lamas who were brought there when they're children. And then they grow up in the.

[Steven Rinella]

Lamaseries just to connect that to people today, like. Like, you know, just regular old Americans gonna hear of the Dalai Lama. So when you say llamas.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Stems from that same.

[Randall]

And a llamasery is like a monastery with a llama.

[Nathalia Holt]

Exactly.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. It sounds funny when you put it that way.

[Steven Rinella]

Right, right. And that's like the gov. That's the governing system.

[Nathalia Holt]

It is. And so you have lama rulers of these regions. And so one of the places they go to is called the Kingdom of Mulai. And at that time, it was kind of this mythologized place that had been in National Geographic. And so people knew somewhat about it. And so the Roosevelts go there, and they stay with this man who is kind of the eastern ruler of this region, and they stay in his house, and it's called the House of the Prince because his son is going to be a lama and will one day be the king of Mulai. But because lamas do not marry, they do not have children. It's always passed down through the family.

[Steven Rinella]

These guys aren't like warlords either.

[Nathalia Holt]

Some of them are. Oh, they are, yeah. So there certainly was fighting. Many of these autonomous regions were fighting the Chinese for their independence.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

And so Tibet, at that time, the Dalai Lama had proclaimed independence for the country. I believe it's in 1912. And so certainly many of these regions were very fiercely independent and very keen to protect their lands.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. But they're able to, like, they're not at risk of. They're not at risk of, like, having an interaction that goes wrong.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, they absolutely are.

[Steven Rinella]

They are, yes.

[Nathalia Holt]

And so they bring with them all of these interesting gifts to kind of introduce themselves. So when they go into the Kingdom of Mulai, they have a turquoise bowler hat, they have knives, they have rifles. They have all kinds of interesting things to present because they're just not sure what people are going to like. They don't know how they're going to present themselves. And so they explain to this ruler of Mulai that they are the sons of President Theodore Roosevelt. And he says, who's that? He has no idea.

[Steven Rinella]

They're like, how about a bowler hat? How about a gun? You could pick one or the other. The bowler hat or the rifle.

[Nathalia Holt]

But what I learned when I was reading Ted and Kermit's journals was that this was actually a very freeing experience for them. I mean, imagine that they've found a part of the world where they are not known only by their relation to their father, and they actually become close friends. They enjoy each other's Company. They show pictures of their families. They have the next King of Mulai, who was at that time just a toddler, running around. And it's really interesting to see how those interactions went along and how they got along with people.

[Steven Rinella]

And along the way, here they are on the right continent, kind of in the right general neck of the woods. But as Randall was saying along the way, they'd be like, hey, y' all seen any pandas? And people are like a. That. But it's kind of surprising, but you can almost think. You can think of analogs from here that you. Let's say you were different bear. Let's say you're very curious about. You were very curious about grizzly bears. I mean, you could hit St. Louis, right. A place that people's perception would be at that time, the gateway to the west. And you could say, hey, I'm here for the grizzly bears. And you'd find people in St. Louis that are like, what?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, that's a great analogy at all.

[Steven Rinella]

It'd be earlier. It'd be 50 years earlier, but it'd be like. Of course they'd be like, I don't know.

[Nathalia Holt]

And then you would describe it. You would try to say, hey, this is what they look like. And people just.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. They'd be like, yeah, it kind of rings a bell. But I don't know, you know, whatever. You just. You could picture that or. Or you make it into interior Alaska, and you're like, I'm curious about the polar bears.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then the interior, they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. You're close, but you're not exactly.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot like.

[Steven Rinella]

And that way it's sort of easy to imagine. But it also seemed like it's like a big white and black super cuddly.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Bear. It lives around here.

[Randall]

It is more like describing a unicorn than a grizzly bear.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So where do they get, like, at what point do they start to get some. Some assurance, you know, like some sense that we're on the right track here.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, it just takes forever.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

And there are a lot of struggles on that path. So, you know, at some point, they get robbed by bandits. At another point, they're in the Himalayas and all of their mules just disappear in the night. That actually happens twice. And so they lose all of their food.

[Steven Rinella]

Stolen.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, it's just so cold that the mules decide that they have to leave.

[Steven Rinella]

They're out.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. And then another point, they suffer from horrible Altitude sickness. They are trying to hike at night, and they're caught in this blizzard. And that is the night that they describe as the very worst of their lives, where they came incredibly close to death. It's very lucky that they survived dying from exposure. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

And so it's just one struggle after a next in this book. And so it's really not until very far along on the expedition where they say, okay, we're going to go to this one area that's called the land of the Yi, or other people call it Lolo land. And everyone has told them that this is where the savages are. This is where they're going to be attacked, they're going to be killed. They should not go to this one part of China. But they decide it's worth the risk. They want to try to find the panda there.

[Steven Rinella]

And they don't have any idea. I mentioned, like, Lewis and Clark expedition. Right. They have an idea where they're able to defend themselves.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. I mean, they're armed.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They're military personnel. Like, they have an idea that it might come down to a fight and we'll fight, but these guys that can't be in their back pocket. Right. Like, the idea if they get in trouble, they're just in trouble. Like, they're not holding out hope that they're gonna, like, engage militarily.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, that is absolutely not their hope. And there's some interesting parts along the trail where things do get pretty dicey. There's one great moment with Jack where the expedition has to divide for a while, and he sees that there's a group of bandits ahead on the trail, and he ends up just being really casual, walking by, pretending as if nothing is wrong, and gets away with it is the crazy part. So there are some really kind of interesting moments like that where they're sort of able to bluff their way through and other moments where you have a group of guides who are. Well, another interesting part of this is that half of the guides on the trip were women. There were a number of women who served in this role. It was certainly one that paid well. It was one that gave a lot of independence. And so you can imagine that it was very prized for both men and women. And so there's one point where you have guides that are women that are head on the trail that end up scaring away some bandits as well. So they certainly were able to have some backup from their guides. But what we see is that even when they're in positions where the Roosevelts are really in danger and where they should feel more threatened, they end up always taking the calm route, always trying to give the bowler hats, give the knives, give the gifts, and make friends. And I'm sure that those are skills they learned from their dad.

[Steven Rinella]

So these guys that people tell them, that warn them against, what is their, like, their final act to go to this area, how do these people live? Like, kind of like, sketch out what their sort of lifestyle is.

[Nathalia Holt]

So these are the Yi people, and they live in these remote villages in the mountainous regions of central China. They have a lot of animosity towards the Chinese, and they pretty much tend to keep to themselves. And so first, when they meet the Roosevelts, they're very suspicious because the Roosevelts have these long beards and they're kind of scraggly looking. They don't really look like imperial important men at all. And they're worried that the Roosevelts are Catholic priests that are come to be missionaries. And so they're very upset and they're hostile to that. Yes. And so it sort of takes some convincing. No, they're not here to proselytize.

[Steven Rinella]

We're here to kill these little birds.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's not what you think, but what happens is that the people do not hunt. So they know about the panda. They finally found a group of people that know about the panda, but they do not hunt them. And they try to explain to the Roosevelts, these are gentle creatures. We don't hunt them.

[Steven Rinella]

But they are hunters.

[Nathalia Holt]

But they are hunters, absolutely.

[Steven Rinella]

And they've made like, even though they've come to some kind of cultural taboo system or whatever, where, like, here it is, it would be good to eat. They're available. But we just, like, we don't.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. And the Rosettes are pretty skeptical because they think, well, why wouldn't you? These skins are so rare, you can find them absolutely nowhere. You would make so much money if you sold them. And so they don't really understand it. And I think it's one of those things where if you know what a panda is like, then it makes a little bit more sense. Right. But they don't know. It's hard for them to even comprehend the panda as a gentle creature. And so after a lot of convincing, the Yi people agree to bring the Roosevelts on a hunt with them. And the reason for this is that they really don't think they're going to find a panda, because even for them, it's difficult to find one.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I see.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's very rare for them to even encounter them. I mean they can count on one hand how many times they have seen them and they, you know, they have hunted them previously. But it's always been when a panda has, you know, been in a village or sort of gone after an aviary or something like that where it was or apiary, sorry, not aviary, where the panda was, you know, at some point threatening them. And that has only happened twice before is what they told the Roosevelts. So this is certainly a very rare thing. And so they figure, okay, well it's about to be rainy season, we're not going to be able to be gone long. We'll take them out, we'll find nothing, we'll get some money for our efforts and then this will be done.

[Steven Rinella]

This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Who do you go to in order to solve your life's problems? You go to a group chat. You start over sharing with strangers. You talk to dudes down in the bar. Well, if you've tried those approaches and they haven't been very effective, perhaps you should try talking to a clinically trained and licensed therapist, which might be far more helpful to you and help you get yourself better sorted out. BetterHelp has been helping people find a great match in a therapist for over 10 years and they have a 4.9 rating out of 1.7 million client session reviews. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 10 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of Expertise. Find the one with Better Help our listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.commeater that's Better Help. H E L P.commeater mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre order right now. Meat Eaters American History The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery. How they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with Them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883. Wherever you get your audiobooks. And you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14th. Can we hit a couple biometrics on pandas?

[Nathalia Holt]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

What are we talking about? How many pounds does a panda bear?

[Nathalia Holt]

Man, I know that and I just. It's lost my brain. I can't remember.

[Randall]

You say 500, 800 pounds?

[Steven Rinella]

No, I don't know. I'm going two to three.

[Nathalia Holt]

Okay. This is. Sorry, I can't remember. The National Zoo weighing up to 250 pounds. That sounds about right.

[Steven Rinella]

How could you have gotten more right than me?

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Barely reached 200 without actually saying 250. I said from 2 to 3 is. I think.

[Randall]

I guess I'm just thinking of all the hair.

[Nathalia Holt]

You know, they are very fluffy.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And then they don't den. Or do they den?

[Nathalia Holt]

They don't hibernate. So they, they. It's. You know, even as the Roosevelts are out there, there they are really questioning whether the panda are a bear because they can tell as they're kind of tracking them through the woods that these are not animals that would hibernate.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And then what's their sort of. Do they spend a lot of time with their cubs like a normal. Like other bear species?

[Nathalia Holt]

They do. They spend a long time with their cubs, but after that, they're very solitary animals. So they do not spend time with each other. They kind of have their own territories and they end up communicating with each other through scratches on the bamboo and then through rubbing their glands on the scratches. And so a female will learn of a male that she is going to possibly mate with through that smell. It's really a main way that they communicate with each other.

[Steven Rinella]

And.

[Nathalia Holt]

And when you think about it, they don't really have a lot of other ways to communicate because they don't have a lot of expression in their faces like other bears. And they are so isolated that really, it's only through those scratches, through that rubbing, they get to know each other.

[Steven Rinella]

Do they have any vocalizations? Oh, I'm sorry, Corinne. Go ahead.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, just when you say the scratching, is that a visual thing? Like, they leave a sign and then. Well, it's mostly how they rub their glands on the scratches. Got it, got it. So it's more of a scent thing and not a vision? Yes, it's scent. It's absolutely scent. That's a amazing. If they're like, oh, look, the sign of. You know.

[Steven Rinella]

But I would surprise that because bears use scratch trees, you know, like prominent. Like prominent trees or trees, like, you know, like, whatever. Two canyons come together. Prominent travel ways. They'll mark. They'll physically mark trees. And they rub it too, you know. Huh. And then any kind of calls they make, they don't.

[Nathalia Holt]

They don't make. They're very quiet, unfortunately. No.

[Randall]

Even if they did vocalize, it probably wouldn't sound. It'd be like, man, something really cute.

[Steven Rinella]

Now, as chill as they are. As chill as they are, do the males. Will the males throw down, like, over a female?

[Nathalia Holt]

It has not been observed in the wild whatsoever.

[Steven Rinella]

Always chill.

[Nathalia Holt]

Very chill.

[Steven Rinella]

Like they're doped up.

[Randall]

They like their own.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, yeah. So the Roosevelts end up describing them as a gentleman. That's how they put it. They're gentlemanly, but do they.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. If you roll up on a panda, okay, is isolated. And what elevation are we talking about? Like, where are they at in the Himalaya? How high?

[Nathalia Holt]

So they had been at these very high peaks, but now they've come down. They've come down below the Tibetan plateau, so we're no longer at these, like, snowy high peaks.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so that was on. That was. They were up there because of. They needed to travel through the area. They weren't. They weren't searching.

[Nathalia Holt]

I mean, they were still searching because they weren't sure where the panda was.

[Randall]

I mean, they have, like, no idea where to look. That's. That's what I thought was really fascinating about the whole arc of the journey is the journey's never really going anywhere. I mean, they're. They're. They're just sort of clueless the whole time.

[Steven Rinella]

I know guys like that. I know guys that hunt like that.

[Randall]

I mean, I've been guilty of it myself, but you never, like, get the sense, like, okay, now we're on the trail. Now we're getting warm. Now we're getting warmer. It's like they just all of a Sudden, these guys take them out and it's like.

[Steven Rinella]

It's like, oh, this is our best shot here. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

There's so much desperation and desire in this hunt. You can really feel it when you read through their journals. They want it so much.

[Randall]

And the clock is ticking.

[Nathalia Holt]

And the clock is absolutely ticking.

[Steven Rinella]

And where they are is. So obviously it's a bunch. It's a bamboo forest, but it's, like, rugged, steep country.

[Nathalia Holt]

It is mountainous country. Yeah, so it's mountainous. So it's not high Himalayas peaks, but it is. It's very difficult to hike through.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And so when these guys take them out to look, they take them to, like, some spots, they run into them, but there's not, like, herds of pandas.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, there are no.

[Steven Rinella]

You're looking for onesies.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. So you can imagine that at the moment when they finally see a bear print in the snow.

[Steven Rinella]

What's in the snow?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's very exciting when that happens. And it's a really big moment in the book. And it's a big moment for them because they are so excited. The Roosevelts are finally. We're doing this. We're going to get this panda. And all of the hunters around them are like, oh, no, I don't want to go. I'm not doing this. We can't keep going. And they have to win because they don't want to kill a panda.

[Randall]

They didn't think they'd find one.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Randall, how are you contradicting the author?

[Randall]

Oh, no, sorry. Go ahead, go ahead.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, Randall is right. He knows.

[Randall]

No, no, this is what she was saying earlier, like, the.

[Steven Rinella]

The. The year. I'll tell you what, I put my. In my.

[Randall]

I mean, I. I saw this. I saw this book whenever it was announced in. In January or December, and I. I preordered it because it has everything that I enjoy. Just expeditions, Roosevelts, mountains and bears and.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I'm a big zoo guy, so pandas are objects of incredible fascination for me.

[Steven Rinella]

You're a big zoo guy?

[Randall]

Oh, yeah. I thought we talked about this.

[Steven Rinella]

No, we didn't. I know you're a big estate guy. Randall's really into estate sales.

[Randall]

Sorry, I've got a. Yeah, got a. I'm very. I'm a Renaissance man. I didn't mean to interrupt.

[Steven Rinella]

I knew about the estate sales, but I didn't know about the pandas.

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, you never know what trinkets you're gonna find.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I was at a zoo this weekend. It was great.

[Nathalia Holt]

There's a lot of Shopping.

[Steven Rinella]

In the book, the guys don't. So they hit a track. I like this that it's in the snow, but where a panda lives. What's the deepest snow a panda could deal with? I mean, are they sometimes in serious snow or is it more?

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, yes, absolutely.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, they can get. So at this point, you know, we're getting into spring, so it's sort of. It's rain, it's snow. At this point, it happens to be snow, which is very lucky because they're able to find the tracks. And in fact, the whole time they're following these tracks, the sun starts coming out and they're very anxious that the trail is just going to disappear.

[Steven Rinella]

I gotcha. So. But in peak winter, a panda is not hibernating, but is hanging out in potentially serious snow.

[Nathalia Holt]

Isn't that interesting? Eating. Is bamboo constantly eating?

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, now to get back to my question, and maybe you're both.

[Randall]

I'll stay out of it.

[Steven Rinella]

No, no, I want to hear your take. Maybe you're both right. They see the track, but then some of their guides start getting. They're conflicted or they get reluctant.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Randall says it's because they. What did he say? They want to go home. No, they. They.

[Randall]

I mean, my understanding is that they agreed to take the Roosevelts out, thinking that they would not actually have to go through with the thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

They're like, we'll just march these guys around for a couple days, collect our paychecks, and then these guys will go. Because, like, there's no chance we're actually gonna hit a track.

[Nathalia Holt]

My co author is right.

[Randall]

So when they hit a track, they're.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, oh, maybe we. All right. Yeah. See, they're like, I read the book. We shouldn't have taken them to where they actually are.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's a lot of regret. And so not all of them.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a weird call because they could have just totally BS'd them.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, like the Coronado Expedition, they get these guides who deliberately. They're trying to find these Native American settlements, and they get these guides who are like, I'm not taking you there. And then they'll just tell them some total horseshit and take them somewhere else. Because they're trying to protect other Native Americans.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

So, like, oh, you want to go to where the main settlement is? Oh, it's over that way. You know, they'll go for days. One of these guys, they actually kill him once they realize he's leading them on.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's surprising that these Guides, as conflicted as they are, they actually go.

[Nathalia Holt]

To the spot, and it is surprising. But I think that just goes to show how rare pandas are, that they did not think they would find one even looking in the. Even if they missed the spot.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So they cut a track.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And they trail it.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. They start following it, and they start seeing bits of broken bamboo as they go. So they know they're on the right place. Immediately, some hunting dogs begin to howl. And the Roosevelts are very upset. Hunting dogs are something that they have never liked to use. They've never even allowed it for most of this expedition. They did it this one day just to kind of keep people happy, and they're just beside themselves. They end up dividing where Ted goes on one trail and Kermit goes on another. And so Kermit is.

[Steven Rinella]

Now, can you back up to the hunting dog issue?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What don't they like about it? They feel it's counterproductive.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. They believe that it's just going to scare away the game.

[Steven Rinella]

They're trying to stir everything up.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. And it's been a problem throughout the expedition. And, you know, it's really interesting because for a lot of these scientific expeditions, the hunters that got the game were not the scientists. They were local hunters that were used to get these animals. But the Roosevelts do not believe in that. They believe that they're the ones that should be getting these animals. And, I mean, that really makes sense.

[Steven Rinella]

They're the ones that pull the trigger.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. They're the ones that will really want to do the work.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

And so hunting dogs have been this issue, but they wanted to keep these hunters happy because they know they don't even really want to be there. And they kind of had to convince them to keep going, even through pretty bad conditions.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

And so they were letting these dogs go so that they could hunt some pigs for food.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, so they got dogs out for different reasons.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I also. That makes more sense.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. So they're like, hey, they're here. They want to hunt, they want pigs, they want to eat.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So they're gonna cut their dogs loose.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And then these dogs are raised in hell in the panda's zone.

[Nathalia Holt]

The worst timing ever. Yeah. It could not be worse.

[Steven Rinella]

Understood.

[Nathalia Holt]

Finally, Kermit gets through the bamboo, and they get to this magnificent dragon spruce tree. Dark green needles. It's just beautiful. And Kermit sees the panda stick its head out of the tree.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh.

[Nathalia Holt]

And it's.

[Steven Rinella]

It's up in the tree.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's up in the tree? Yes, it's in a hole in the tree. It's not too far off the ground, and it's kind of looks sleepy. And he immediately says, go get my brother. Because they have made this plan from the beginning that when they see a panda, they're going to shoot it simultaneously so that they both get the credit.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, my God. Really?

[Nathalia Holt]

I know. It's very. It's kind of ridiculous, and many people.

[Steven Rinella]

It's like having little kids around. Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

It kind of is. And I think part of this is.

[Steven Rinella]

That it's so infantile. Good Lord.

[Nathalia Holt]

But it's kind of adorable.

[Steven Rinella]

No, it's not adorable. That's adorable. I want to be Daddy's favorite. You always get to shoot everything, Phil. Thank you. I like to shoot everything.

[Randall]

It's like. It could be, like a firing squad where one of them has a blank and one of them has an actual.

[Steven Rinella]

Viewer told me you had told me that neither of them wanted to have the guilt of killing the panda. And so they had a plan, like you're saying, where there's a blank and a live round, you know, and so they never really know who killed the panda, but that they both want to be the guy that got to say they shot it.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, there's no guilt at this point because they don't know what the panda's like. They think they're going to shoot at this panda and it's going to attack them.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Okay. That reason.

[Randall]

Hey, you gotta get two bullets in it.

[Steven Rinella]

They're like. They're so afraid. They want to make sure it goes down. They want to make sure that it's a humane. There's a hundred ways they could have spun this, but to spin it that they wanted to both be able to say they got it. It's just like. That's kind of pathetic.

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, interestingly, though, Teddy Roosevelt would often take turns on his expedition, and he would get annoyed if people do. He didn't take turns shooting animals because he felt it was only fair. Everyone should get a fair chance at taking these shots.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

So it might be part of that.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's denned up in a tree.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then is it denned up in a tree because the dogs have baited up?

[Nathalia Holt]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Nathalia Holt]

Not at all.

[Steven Rinella]

So they track it. Just. They happen to just find it.

[Nathalia Holt]

They happen to find it, and there.

[Steven Rinella]

It is, all doped up in a tree.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

They. They feel that it's lethargic. Well, because they're not knowing. They're, like, expecting ferocity.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. They're expecting ferocity. Absolutely. And so Ted comes, they get out their Smithfield rifles, and they.

[Steven Rinella]

And they gotta be excited as hell.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Oh, they're very excited. They've been waiting for this moment for months. They've trekked very long to get there. And so finally, Ted gets there, they get their rifles, and they've selected these Smithfield rifles because they're light, they're easy to carry, and it's one that Kermit used in Africa when he was hunting elephants. And so they fire at the bear. And they are very fortunate in that it's coming out of the tree, and so they're able to get a shot on it, and then they trail it. And then finally they're able to track it down and kill the panda. But it's not at all what they expect. This is not a bear that immediately turns on them and is trying to attack. It is clear right from the beginning that the hunters they were going with are right. This is a gentle animal. This is not a polar bear. This is not a grizzly bear. This is something very different. And pretty soon after we see they begin to show regret. In their journals, they talk about how this bear is a gentleman, that this is not an animal that should become a trophy animal. But that's exactly what happens. And what's also happening, was there any.

[Steven Rinella]

Conflict with them to be that? I guess in this collection era, there's no sort of, on one hand, we should observe it, on the other hand, we should collect it. Like, in their mind, like, collection is paramount.

[Nathalia Holt]

Collection is paramount because there is no full specimen in a museum. So they need to do both. And at this point, they've been able to collect some information about the panda, and they're going to get more after they hunt it. But certainly getting the specimen is the most important thing for the museum.

[Steven Rinella]

Do the guys. What is the guides when they kill it? What is the guide's attitude? Do the guides are like, hey, let's cook it up. Or like, what is their sort of demeanor about the whole thing?

[Nathalia Holt]

At first, they do not even want to let the panda back into the village because they feel like this is such a horrible thing that's happened. They don't want it to taint the village. And it's only when they realize that Kermit and Ted will have to prepare the animal in the mud and the snow that they let it come into the village at all. And this is the only animal of the many, many they hunted on the trail that Ted and Kermit do not Eat. I'm sorry. Kind of a tough thing for this podcast, isn't it? I'm sure you're wondering what panda tastes.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, and I feel like they felt bad about it.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, they felt bad about it.

[Steven Rinella]

And the guides. So their taboo system, too, like, the guides are not going to partake.

[Nathalia Holt]

They do not. No. And, in fact, the leader of the village ends up buying a goat for everyone to feast with that night. But you can imagine how it must have felt for Ted and Kermit to be preparing this animal with an audience of people around them that just are absolutely horrified by what they do. I mean, they really see Ted and Kermit as the savages in this situation, because here they are having to go through skinning this animal. They're making diagrams of every muscle, every bone, and then, of course, the preparation for the hide. It's pretty intense for anyone to watch, but you can imagine how the Yi people must have felt watching this happen to an animal that they felt was sacred and gentle and that they didn't hunt.

[Steven Rinella]

Trying to think of a parallel. I don't know.

[Randall]

For us.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. It'd be like if nowadays. Like, if nowadays someone's like, I need to get a bald eagle.

[Randall]

Retriever.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Something that would just be like, the people, like, man, I don't even want to be. Nothing to do with this, man.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. It's hard to think of a parallel. I'm sure there's some.

[Nathalia Holt]

I think people have it.

[Randall]

I think a dog, maybe.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I mean, you just don't want. Don't even want to see it.

[Nathalia Holt]

I mean, you can't imagine anyone doing this to a panda today. Right. Nobody would do this. But immediately after the Roosevelt expedition, as soon as people learn that they have been successful and where the pandas are, suddenly this is the hunting trophy to get all of these expeditions among who? Among big game hunters in the U.S.

[Steven Rinella]

I didn't know that.

[Nathalia Holt]

You can't see that happening. It's rare.

[Steven Rinella]

I could see it happening if they had come back with a different approach, but if they came back, like, no, no. It's like. It's like it eats bamboo. It's real chill. The local people think you're horrible if you mess with it. You're not a he. It's not like there's no, like, sort of, like, hero function, but nobody's listening to. The herders are glad.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, the herders are, like, celebrating that you've gotten rid of this thing that. That gives them pain.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's like rare animal.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, just like it's a little. Yeah, it's a little surprising.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's been so many decades of trying to find this animal, of trying to show that it's real, that as soon as there's evidence, yes, it's real. And this is where you can find it. It's immediate hunters want to go and get this animal. And in addition, you have a number of Americans that want to go and capture live pandas for zoos in the.

[Steven Rinella]

US But I'm curious what the Yi people think of this trend. But let's back up a minute. So they get their specimen, do they go on to have more interactions? Are they able to find more animals, different demographics, or is it kind of a one and done?

[Nathalia Holt]

They're only able to find that one animal. Okay, that's it. But they are able to spend some time in the area and sort of document exactly what diet the panda has, what its territory is. And then of course, they spend a long time being able to prepare the hide, take the bones. They need every part.

[Steven Rinella]

But they don't lay eyes on another one.

[Nathalia Holt]

They do not just the one believe, man.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh? That's it.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. There you go.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So it's just hard to think of other things that you'd go that are other like at other species that you'd go and like really find in one and then spend time in the area and have it not be that you got into like a pocket of them.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Or whatever. Right. You know what I mean?

[Nathalia Holt]

No, that's it.

[Steven Rinella]

If you went and found a gorilla, you're gonna find a troop, you know, or whatever. But yeah, just you'd come, get one, hang around and just. That was it. Just some loner.

[Nathalia Holt]

That was it. Yeah. And it makes sense when we understand panda biology today because they are so isolated. And of course, Ted and Kermit received many offers to go back and hunt panda again.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, they were with recreational hunters.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, with recreational hunters. And even with museums because, you know, Chicago wasn't gonna be the only one. Every museum wanted to have their own group of pandas to show, but they refused. They would not go back. They would not hunt panda again. And in fact, their lives took a very different turn after the panda hunt.

[Steven Rinella]

I want you to tell that. Cause I want you to get to how the one of them kills himself. The other guy died young too.

[Nathalia Holt]

He did. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But. But with. With the. The ye people you spoke about, do they. This core, this habitat area, this. This area they're at, is it sort of like, uncontested. That that is their homeland, that they are the governing. Like the Yi people. Is it. Is it like that they are the governing body there?

[Nathalia Holt]

Absolutely. At that time, yes.

[Steven Rinella]

So if when they come back and all of a sudden it creates kind of a gold rush where people want to go collect this, you know, like a. Like a hunter collector who's not affiliated with a museum wants one for his personal collection. Is it. Is it even possible that you would do it outside of. Outside of the authority of these people? Do you. I mean, like. Like that you can just kind of go to this area and hang out and shoot this thing? They don't want to get shot and not need to worry about what they're. How they're gonna react to that.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, it's a good question, because there is a lot of angst, even when the Roosevelts are there about what they're doing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

But there are no laws. And so you can imagine that it's not that difficult for these hunters and for people who are looking to collect pandas to come in with the right bribes, be able to find people that will help.

[Steven Rinella]

I got it. Yeah. Like some outcast or whatever is like, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it for the right amount of money. Yes, I see. How many. How many. Can you even take a guess, like, in the next couple decades or whatever, how many pandas enter private collections in the US or private collections anywhere?

[Nathalia Holt]

It's hard for me to assess exactly what that number is. Certainly for museum collections, we know that there are dozens that came back for museums and that museums were really intent on getting as many animals of as many different ages as they could. And part of that is because the exhibits themselves were popular, but also because they wanted to do comparative biology to be able to really look at what the history of the panda was and how it fit in with other bears. And certainly the track record for bringing live animals to zoos in the United States is just atrocious. During that era, you have all of these cubs that were brought back, and none of them survived very long because people just didn't know how to take care of them.

[Steven Rinella]

Presumably, the way to get the cubs is they'd go and just shoot a female and take the cubs.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, absolutely. Which then provided the benefit of also getting a skin that you could bring back. And they needed the cubs because that's really the only way you could smuggle it back to the US they were bringing this through the Chinese government, but not declaring that they actually had Pandas.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so they're. Even though they're in Tibet and there's like hostilities between the Tibetans in China. The kind of flow winds up being through. Yes, the flow winds up being a. Like a Chinese market.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. Because they have to. As they take a boat back home, they have to do so through China.

[Steven Rinella]

And what is the if. If there's like a little bit of a taboo with the people that live there? If you get down into mainland. If you get down that mainland. If you get down into, like places where there's Chinese authority, what is the attitude there to the panda? Because now it's funny that. It's funny that our perception is that it's this symbol of China. You know, like, like you get up to like Nixon and he like, negotiates for like. Right. They bring this panda for the thing. It's like a symbol of China, but at that time, it would have been a symbol of Tibetan.

[Nathalia Holt]

At the time, it was just this brand new animal that had been described for many people or a symbol of.

[Steven Rinella]

No one or whatever. Exactly. I got you. It wasn't like a national. It wasn't like a point of national pride.

[Nathalia Holt]

It was not yet. So it's interesting how that came to be. I mean, it's weird to think of the Roosevelts as being part of creating that, isn't it? But certainly China had some regulations about what animals you could take. And while there weren't any laws about panda cubs yet, the people that were smuggling the panda cubs out were declaring them as dogs that they were taking home.

[Steven Rinella]

Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre order right now. Meat Eaters American history the Hidehunters, 1865-1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove North America's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the Civil War. You'll learn all about these guys. Guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson and Charles Squirrel Eye Emery. How they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession. And what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our meat Eaters American history projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and Bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre order Meat Eaters, American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865-1883. Wherever you get your audiobooks. And you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14th.

[Randall]

And it's fascinating too to just think about. So their expedition is in 1928. 28 to 29. And when you're talking about Nixon, I mean that's just a couple decades later that's gripped the imagination is like, this is China's. I mean, I think a lot of Americans would just assume the panda is China's national animal. And it's like if you were to go back in Chinese history, you'd see documentation of this. But it's. It's so recent.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's 40. Yeah. In 40 years it became that like, it became like sort of the mascot of, of normalizing relations with China. And they didn't even in 1930, they didn't know about him. And in 1970 it's like, look, China, it's a panda bear. Yeah. Like it really blew up.

[Nathalia Holt]

It really did. As soon as the Roosevelts come back and people can see this exhibit for themselves, there is this pandemonium. People get really excited.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that dead up or is that been made up?

[Nathalia Holt]

No, it's me.

[Steven Rinella]

I wish big panda probably came up.

[Randall]

That a long time ago.

[Steven Rinella]

It's kind of amazing, man.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. People were so excited about this animal that they really didn't even know existed before. And how could you not? Pandas are very cute.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's that little rush. Because here's the other thing is, I know there were never many, but that little flurry of activity must have a. From a conservation perspective, it must be pretty destructive. Pretty immediately.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. Immediately.

[Steven Rinella]

They're so rare anyways. And now you're whittling away at something that's. That lives at such low abundance.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. And that's why Ted and Kermit became so passionate about protecting pandas afterwards, is because they knew how rare these bears really were.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. If there's only 2000 of them in like 200 museums want one and a few hundred collectors want one. You're talking about, you're like you're removing a significant percentage of the global population.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, yeah. So it's. For them, it became very disturbing what happened. They did not expect that it would blow up quite so big and that you would have so many people going out to kill pandas and to steal Cubs. And so that's why they ended up making some big changes, especially with Kermit. You see him taking these roles and leadership in wildlife conservation that, you know, obviously Teddy Roosevelt is such a leader in conservation and what he did. So certainly the brothers were following in his footsteps. But you see Kermit doing some interesting things. For instance, he went on an expedition to the Galapagos, where instead of going out and taking animals as they had before, they now were trying to study them, create a breeding program for Galapagos tortoises. So he really changes his perspective of how he goes out and does expeditions. From then on, it's no longer the same. And in addition, he ends up becoming very passionate about creating laws to protect pandas. So he becomes vice president with the New York Zoological Society and then becomes president of the Audubon Society, where he works very well closely with Chinese officials to create laws to protect pandas. And we see even Ted as well becomes pretty upset with what's happened. It just. It becomes so atrocious how many cubs are being stolen from China and that die shortly after.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, in our world. You know what they call this spot burning? It's a spot burner.

[Randall]

Well, I sort of had the thought when they're talking about the Yi people coming out, it's like your buddy wants to go hunting with you, and he really wants you to take him to one of your spots, and you go to one of the bad spots and then a big buck walks up.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

And you're like, it really was. Now I imagine this happening.

[Steven Rinella]

Really. Turn around and go back. He has. He has the guilt. He comes in the conservation movement. But what. What age are these guys when they do the. What age are they in? 1930. And what. How long do they live, the brothers?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. So they are in their 40s during this expedition, and then they both died during World War II. So Ted was 56 years old when he was the only general to land with the first wave of troops on D Day in Normandy. And he's very famous for getting up on that beach and saying, we'll start the war right from here. He was this real hero of that moment. Many people did not think that he would survive that day. And he was hiding a heart condition, and so he ends up dying just a few days later from that.

[Steven Rinella]

He lands on day one. D Day.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. Yeah. The only man dies of a heart.

[Steven Rinella]

Condition a couple days later at 50 something years old.

[Nathalia Holt]

56. Yeah. And receives the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions on D Day.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, shit. I didn't know that.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Both brothers served in both World War I and World War II, and both got involved in World War II very early, before the US got involved.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, how. Okay, how is he at the time of this expedition? He's not in the military.

[Nathalia Holt]

No, he's not. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So he enrolls somehow in his 40s, advances to a generalship.

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, I mean, he had a few connections to get there.

[Randall]

It's a different model of military command.

[Steven Rinella]

He's in the command position by 1944.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, he is. Yeah. I mean, he had also served in World War I, and so he was certainly involved.

[Steven Rinella]

This was kind of sandwiched between the two experiences.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes. And he had a big role in Operation Torch, so he did have quite a few years of leadership during World War II before he died.

[Steven Rinella]

Dies of a heart condition.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, yeah. He'd been hiding it from his doctors. He didn't want anyone to know because.

[Steven Rinella]

He thought he would pull. They'd pull him from service.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, exactly.

[Steven Rinella]

You'd almost think that he'd been pulled from doing anything risky just from a PR standpoint. Do you know what I mean?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like there'd be like a high profile. Right? Like a high profile fatality that. That the army wouldn't want.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, I mean, you might.

[Steven Rinella]

Army might not want in some way.

[Nathalia Holt]

You know, I can see why you would think that, but the Roosevelts were certainly very passionate about serving in the military. It was really part of their heritage. And even During World War I, you have their younger brother Quentin, who died.

[Steven Rinella]

So the one dies from the heart condition toward the end of World War II.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And then the other brother, what comes to him?

[Nathalia Holt]

So he had died earlier in 1943. So he was also involved in World War II. He. He served in several different places in the Middle east and in Europe, but he was struggling. He had become an alcoholic, and he was not receiving great treatment for that. And so they sent him to a fort in Alaska, Fort Richardson. And he ended up killing himself there.

[Steven Rinella]

That's where.

[Nathalia Holt]

Mm.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. He was talking to a buddy of his, and he said, this buddy was like, oh, what are you doing tonight? And they were chatting a little bit, and his buddy said, oh, I'm gonna go to sleep. And Kermit says, I wish I could sleep.

[Steven Rinella]

He killed himself in Fort Richardson, Alaska?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yes, he did. Yeah. It's such a sad story.

[Steven Rinella]

How'd he kill himself?

[Nathalia Holt]

He. Gunshot.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you know what kind of gun?

[Nathalia Holt]

I don't. I'm sorry.

[Steven Rinella]

Where did he shoot himself?

[Nathalia Holt]

You know, I Know it was in the head.

[Steven Rinella]

It was.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Son of a bitch. In Fort Richardson, dude. I had no idea. This is, like, such a huge blank spot for me, man. You know, like, these two, the pandas, it's like somehow I just have missed all this. Like.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, it's an interesting brother's history. They haven't been written about much. And I do feel like it's important to give these brothers their due because they. They really did. They. You know, they really furthered their father's. Their father's mission of combining conservation and hunting. It was something they were very passionate about, and this expedition was incredibly successful at the time. And certainly the after effects were not what they expected. The consequences are not what they thought would happen. But what you really see is both brothers who felt passionate about protecting the panda and were always, always cared about conservation.

[Steven Rinella]

What year did their old man die?

[Nathalia Holt]

He died in 1919.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And they were what age then?

[Nathalia Holt]

So let me think about that. Yeah, they would. They were both in World War I when they received a telegram that said, the old lion has died was how the telegram put it to let them know their dad had died.

[Steven Rinella]

And they had to be like, that must be referring to our father. I have a terrible feeling this refers to our father, but I can't confirm the. The old lion.

[Randall]

I'm trying to make a joke about that in the. The bear hunt game that they played, but.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, be like, dude, are they talking about dad? Yeah, if so. That's terrible. The old lion.

[Randall]

I didn't realize dad got a lion.

[Nathalia Holt]

They had known it was coming. He was definitely weaker ever since the river of Doubt. That just weakened him. He was never the same after that expedition.

[Randall]

He must have been 70 something then.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Yeah. He was getting older.

[Randall]

He was born in the 50s.

[Steven Rinella]

Now. What did these brothers. Did these brothers have kids?

[Nathalia Holt]

They did, yeah. And actually, I've been in contact with a number of members of the family because there's a Kermit, right?

[Steven Rinella]

Like one of the kids.

[Nathalia Holt]

I mean, they all have the same name. They're all Ted, they're all Kermit, they're all Eleanor. Just the same names over and over again. But it's been interesting to talk to family members today because they still have photographs and artifacts from this trip.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's pretty cool, man.

[Steven Rinella]

What a wild story. Yeah. I just can't believe how, you know, like, Theodore Roosevelt. He's inescapable.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you know what I mean? All the exploits and the timelines, and then just like these boys it's just hadn't heard about this stuff.

[Randall]

One of the sort of strange things that occurred to me when I was doing my. When I was in grad school because all the Boone Crockett Club records are at the University of Montana. So I was reading a little bit about the Boone Crockett Club in the post war era. And I mean there's like a real crisis of confidence it seems, just when you're reading things because all of the founding generation dies in, you know, like in the teens and 20s and 30s. And then they have these sons and there's a lot of, A lot of members of the club are sons, like Charles Sheldon's son, Billy Sheldon. It's like sons carrying on their father's legacies and also wondering how they push things forward and make, make names for themselves. And, and, and yeah, it's really fascinating when you think about. Because I feel like oftentimes we think about conservation especially as like these moments. Like there's this moment of the Boone and Crockett Club and the sort of progressive movement, this early conservation model, and then there's this, you know, like the 1930s, right. Or 1920s, 1930s, when you have like. But there's continuity between all those. And as we know today, just from people that we interact with, like in the conservation world, like it often is a family tradition. And yeah, like this filled in a lot of blank spots for me because like you hear about Teddy Jr. And Kermit, but it's really. I've never had someone sort of put a face on them for me. So it was really, that's what I found, really fascinating.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, they're interesting men. And it's just fascinating to me the friendships they continued after the expedition and how they supported Jack and his dreams. He wanted to become a scient. He wanted to do an expedition of his own and they both helped to fund that. And it's, you know, it's just they were very different than I expected them to be. And that's always fun when you find a story in history like this.

[Steven Rinella]

Have you ever personally been able to see a panda on native ground in native range?

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, I wish. Yeah. It's not easy to do. You know, even if you, you go to China and you go to one of the research reserves, you're really seeing them in an artificial environment compared to what it's like to see them in the wild. And I spoke with several different panda researchers for this book and they told me the most difficult part of doing this research is finding a panda. Even Today, even with all the technology we have, even with the tagging we have, we don't have to go out and shoot animals as much these days. We have other, other ways that I'm sure future historians and scientists will find barbaric. And, you know, they'll probably say, ugh, we used tranquilizer guns and took collars.

[Steven Rinella]

On them, put drugs on them.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. I'm sure it'll be judged in decades to come. But it's incredible to me how difficult it is even today for these researchers to go out and find panda in the wild.

[Steven Rinella]

How many are in the wild now?

[Nathalia Holt]

It's interesting because today there are about 2,000, but that is coming back from a low of a thousand in the 1970s. So there was a time period where it was really difficult for pandas. And it's really thanks to sort of that continuity that you're talking about, about these protections that have been given to them to protect their habitats, which have just become more fragmented now. And it's. What's. What's fascinating is that the protections that have been given to pandas are also helping other species. In China, I would have.

[Steven Rinella]

Like I said earlier when I was surprised that there was only 2,000, somehow in my head, I had the bottleneck being much tighter.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So they went through a 50% decline.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Which is big.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, it is because the pure numbers are so low.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But like you normally, normally these imperiled species, the bottleneck is much tighter than a 50 reduction. But you're usually talking about like a million animals. Yeah. You know. Yeah. But to take. You only got 2000 and you whittle it down to a thousand. I just would. If you said it at one point, there was 40 of them, you know, I'd have been like, that sounds like my perception, my completely uneducated, ignorant idea of what happened. I would have guessed it was less.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, it's nice. I can make up numbers here. I like that.

[Randall]

It's just funny to me because they're, you know, it's. When you're. When you're a little kid in the 80s or early 90s and you, like, hear about endangered animals. Right. Like, the panda's one of the poster children for that. But I've, you know, spent most of my life thinking about animals and I. Panda's just one that's always sort of out here is like an other. Like, I can't picture them in the wild. I can't. Like you don't have. You don't see footage on a nature documentary of A panda doing things for whatever reason, they're very unique. Just sort of in my imagination and I guess in sort of the cultural imagination. It's a very strange animal when you just think about, what do you know about pandas? What do you associate with pandas?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I don't know. And then it starts to make sense when you realize how rare they are and how recently they were discovered.

[Steven Rinella]

You want to know the biggest problem for them from a PR standpoint is if they were, like, bad mofos and always scratching people up.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Then people would know about them. I think the chillness works against them for pr. Do you follow me? Yeah. I mean, like. Like, I'm kind of on leopard kick right now. I've never seen. Well, I did see a leopard. Saw a leopard in the wild. I'm on, like, a little bit of a leopard kick. One of the things that fuels a leopard kick is a leopard kick is learning about just how, like, effortlessly they dust people off when they put their mind to it. And so it creates that, like, that ferocity is respected from far. Do you know what I mean? Like, going. A lot of people, like, name a jellyfish, they'll be like, the box jelly. Well, why is that? Because it kills people. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, the snakes, the bad killing snakes are the snakes that people have a high level of awareness about. Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. I think you might be right. Because even when it comes to breeding, they're just too chill.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Nathalia Holt]

They would do so much better if there's just a little fire in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. It was like. I'm not trying to advise them or anything, but just like people. The word would have. Yeah. Your perception of it would be different.

[Randall]

There's one Animal that in 1929, could have just taken one swipe and changed the whole trajectory of the species.

[Steven Rinella]

If he'd have been like. If he'd have thought, I'm gonna come down out of this tree and I'm killing these two Roosevelt boys.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. Then you would have heard of this way sooner. The story would not have been buried for as long.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but they just killed, like, a little teddy bear, man. You know, the teddy bear story. Is that in the book?

[Nathalia Holt]

It is in the book. Yeah. It's a good story.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a hard one not to tell. So what's your next book gonna be about? You know yet?

[Nathalia Holt]

I don't know yet, but I. I really enjoyed getting to talk about animals and nature and expeditions like this. It's. It. It's fun.

[Steven Rinella]

I got a Hot tip for you?

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, tell me.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know if I should tell you it now.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, come on.

[Steven Rinella]

What have other people learn about the hot tip? Okay, I'll tell you.

[Randall]

How quick are you at turning out a book?

[Nathalia Holt]

Not very quick because a lot of.

[Randall]

People are going to hear this tip.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's a hot tip. Here's a hot tip. Bradbury. That's good. Yeah. So there's this botanist, okay. And right around 1811, 1810, there's this botanist. He wants to go explore the American west and take botany samples. He's actually start. He's like one of his observations is about honeybees aren't native. So looking at how honeybees moved across the country. But he goes out, has all these crazy adventures collecting plants and he's got this assistant with him. They get to the end of their expedition and Bradbury, he's going to do some other little side tricks. But he sends his, his lackey home with all the samples. He then delays his timing a little bit and gets kind of rolled up in the New Madrid, you know. You know the New Madrid earthquake when the, when the, when the rivers ran backwards. No, like the Mississippi ran backward.

[Nathalia Holt]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

It was all tied into like Tecumseh.

[Nathalia Holt]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a huge, huge isostatic rebound earthquake causes all this decimation is tied up in all this crazy. Then he's still trying to get home in The War of 1812 breaks out. He's delayed so damn long, by the time he makes it back to England, his assistant has like written him off or whatever and has published the material. Has published the material on his own.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, that's tough.

[Steven Rinella]

But if you like expeditions and everything, there's no like really good book that I'm aware of. There's no big full like balls out book on the Bradbury expedition and his whole crazy story.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, it sounds really interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we should probably cut that out. Yeah, yeah.

[Randall]

No, I mean, I think it's fascinating too that like.

[Steven Rinella]

So you're gonna write it?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, I'll get on it right now.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Randall]

Going back, I mean, like the age of expeditions, like oftentimes I think about them being so long ago, but the idea that this is taking place in the 20s and 30s, obviously like the river of doubt is one thing, but then the 20s, late 20s, and you also think about this sort of. There's a lot of stuff going on in Asia at the time where with mountaineering and all that kind of stuff, it's a really fascinating period in geography.

[Nathalia Holt]

It is. Because at this point, nobody knows what the tallest mountain in the world is. Nobody knows the deepest part of the ocean. There's so much exploration still to come.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

It's fascinating.

[Steven Rinella]

Congratulations.

[Nathalia Holt]

Thank you.

[Steven Rinella]

It's hard writing books.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's not easy. This was pretty fun, though. I had such a good time going through all. All these letters and journals, and it's just so interesting. And there are just so many weird parts, too. Like, the Roosevelts had such interesting reading material on the trail. They read Jane Austen and Jane Eyre. Yeah. All kinds of interesting novels. You wouldn't necessarily expect them to be pulling out on the snowy Himalayas.

[Steven Rinella]

How many. How long did it take you to do the whole thing?

[Nathalia Holt]

About 5 years from start to finish. For this one, it was, you know, it takes a long time to. To find the material. And I was fortunate with this book because I was able to get journals from every member of the expedition. And that was great to just help compare. Really helped me create these scenes in a lot of detail. And that's important, I think, in nonfiction. Cause you want it to feel like you're there, like you're on the trail, and all those details are part of it.

[Steven Rinella]

And you were doing magazine work during that time?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, yeah. And I do some ghost writing too, so I kind of.

[Steven Rinella]

For who wouldn't be very dull. Really?

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah. It's fun. I like ghost writing because it's, you know, there's no ego involved. You're just trying to write the best book you can. So it's kind of a fun thing to do. I read that you studied Chinese for a number of years too, with some of the source material and Mandarin that you were translating or it was more oral with any interview? Yes. No. I studied Mandarin in college, and my grandfather lived in China for about a decade, and so I've traveled quite a bit in China with him. And so it was fun for me because I've always felt a connection with the country. And so to be able to see it through a really different lens of history, a completely different time period, into places that just. They just don't exist. Like this trail that I describe is.

[Steven Rinella]

It.

[Nathalia Holt]

It's not there today. You cannot find that trail. And so to be able to travel it, to really feel like you're there during that time period was just so fascinating.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, thanks for coming on.

[Nathalia Holt]

Thank you. I so appreciate it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Again, Nathalia. Everybody calls her Nat.

[Nathalia Holt]

That's me.

[Steven Rinella]

Nat Holt. Nathalia Holt. The beast in the Clouds. The Roosevelt brothers deadly quest to find the mythical giant panda is There like a lesser panda is there?

[Nathalia Holt]

Well, there's the red panda.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, okay. I've seen one of those.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Not in the wild. In one of Randall zoos. The beast in the clouds. Check it out and learn about all the subtle details that we didn't include today.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, there's plenty in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Because you really kind of like, shot yourself in the foot on that one. Because, you know, you should have said, you got to read it to find out if they get one.

[Nathalia Holt]

I kind of gave away the ending. I would have ended up spoilers.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, they shot together out the end of your thing at like, crack, crack. And then be like, you have to read the book to find out what happened.

[Nathalia Holt]

Let's go back. Yeah, yeah.

[Randall]

Another cut here, Phil.

[Steven Rinella]

Thanks, man. Appreciate you coming on.

[Nathalia Holt]

Yeah, thank you.

[Steven Rinella]

When you finish that Bradbury book, come back.

[Nathalia Holt]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I got a lot of questions about that. I told you everything I know. There's, like some holes. There's some holes in my understanding. All right, thank you.

[Nathalia Holt]

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

[Steven Rinella]

Foreign Navigator hoodie was built and tested where plans fall apart and weather doesn't ask permission. It's built to perform, built to last. Breathable insulation that dumps heat fast on the hike in stretch fabric that stays silent for close encounters. Moisture control that wicks away sweat on the pack up. Because in the field, the plan shifts, the wind changes. The moment comes sooner or later than you thought. When it does, you adapt without hesitation. First Lights Navigator delivers on versatility no matter the situation. It happens to be my favorite piece of gear they make right now. I live in it. Check it out@first light.com. that's F I R-S-T-L-I-T E.com.

[Nathalia Holt]

This is an I heart podcast.