Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfhCYolzXN4
the jurogan experience tell me what you got there and you know talking about bear grease and trying to connect it to a podcast i mean at some point i'll have to explain the metaphor of bear grease what's explaining now well so bear greece at one time was this highly valued commodity i mean used as a a unit of currency on the american frontier and and bear bear grease bare oil would be the rendered fat of a bear that would turn into liquid like this right here this is this is for you thank you have you ever have you ever had i mean i know you've bear hunted but yeah you had bear grease before no i've only i've eaten bear i've never rendered bare fat or cooked anything in bare fat i've only just taken the meat and cooked it yeah usually slow cooking so what you would do with that is you would cook with it you would fry with it you could make pastries with it you can use it to condition leather you can supposed to be able to condition pastries yep and so there was a time when bear greece bear lard was super valuable on the frontier before refrigeration because bear fat stayed didn't go rancid as quickly as pork lard so like on it you would have pork and bear would be essentially the places where you would get it this lasted longer that'll last on the shelf at your house unrefrigerated for over a year why is it why does it last so much just whatever the constituency of bear lard is it just stays good for that long so going back to this metaphor the name of bear grease in our podcast we're we're exploring things and even in the in the in the in the you know the the tagline of the podcast we say that we're exploring things or things that are forgotten but relevant and we're searching for insight in unlikely places and so like this bear bear grease i
brought you some stuff that you can do with bear grease this is uh this is some bear fat lye soap if you've if you ever used animal tallow soap no like just for like bathing washing your hands man that's incredible stuff yeah it really is 100 all natural i mean it's it's it's a it's a ancient process of using lye and animal talos what is lie exactly lie is uh gone if you hadn't asked me it's it's i mean it's a it's a chemical it's a caustic chemical that you can buy just about anywhere but uh shoot how does that look like h2 something something that they used to use ash they use they they got the lie from ash and uh it's a metal hydroxide traditionally obtained by leaching wood ashes yeah or a strong alkali which is highly soluble in water producing caustic naoh solutions sodium sodium hydroxide that's what it is so they would get it from like burning wood yeah so they they're the real primitive method for making soap from from animal tallow and you could use you could make animal talos soap out of beef towel anything but bear fat lie soap is uh is is our specialty not it but it um it's supposed to be real good for your skin it's what you know but you can sell this no you say our special you never sell it just give it to you no no no this is not not for sale just uh but did you make this yeah yeah and so what are the what's the ingredients so just lie and four four ingredients bare fat sodium hydroxide lye water and then just essential oils we just smell yeah the wood smells smells good yeah what are the essential oils we had a bunch of different kind of oils that we added in like peppermint whatever i don't know sometimes i'm amazed at how you know
kind of like hygiene conscious us bear hunters are like making soap and stuff because the other thing i brought you joe and i know you don't you don't you don't run a beard but uh this is some bear grease beard oil that i made and so that is a combination of three things so it's it's cheating just a little bit but it's it's it's one part bare oil one part almond oil one part jojoba oil and then essential oils and i mean you can drip it out put it on your hands and that smells good yeah interesting and then the last one here and then i'll start talking about my metaphor again if you're if you want but this is a bear grease hand salve and so bare oil has all kind of folklore around it and i'm in the process of like an anecdotal research very serious project of exploring all these folk tales of bear grease and bare oil so it's healing properties yeah yeah they they say i mean back in the day bare oil would have been used to relieve arthritis pain um they say and you can find this all over the internet that bare oil cures baldness which obviously is like a big piece of folklore right but it's still just fun but going back to the idea that bear grease has all these uses is that this is thing that at one time was the currency and if you polled the united states 330 million americans and you said what is bear grease i mean like what percentage of people would even know what it was probably one percent of one percent yeah so it's been forgotten and so there was a time when so there's an archaic unit of measure of a barrel they used to take the tanned neck height of a deer which would have been a part of the the buckskin that wasn't usable the neck hide and they would have sewed it together and they would have used it to have
stored bare oil and they called it an eel and i so they would make a container out of it like make a container almost an eel of bear oil and it's just a wonder spell it like eel well it it you know it's been probably 10 years since i've actually seen it written it's i think it's e-l-l-e like um an eel of of bare oil would have been a unit of measurement so like you could have gone to the store and you're like well i got two ills bare oil you know i'd like some flour i'd like some whatever and you know it's just it's a wonder that we don't call the u.s dollar you know an eel you see you know because the buck is essentially connected to the value of a white-tailed deerskin that was tanned out and ready for tanning and that became equivalent to a buck for one dollar for one dollar wow and so so again this idea that there's some pretty amazing stuff that's forgotten and then as hunters we're very interested in using as much as we can from these animals that we're taking very interested in that and so a bear offers a whole nother market of commodity that really no other big game offers in that you know of the big game that we hunt like like let's say an elk i mean like you know you're gonna you're gonna keep the meat obviously that's number one thing you're gonna keep his horns but very few people would even keep the hide of that animal and certainly they're not rendering down elk tallow white-tailed deer would have the same sequence of usable commodities man a black bear we have incredible meat we i would i would venture to say that 90 percent maybe 80 percent of black bears that are killed in north america their hides are tanned they have usually especially in the fall will have an incredible amount of fat which can be rendered down into all these incredible healthy
usable products and uh and so i mean like we have we use my point is we use more of a of a bear than we do almost any other big game animal that we hunt catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background by using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience