Nat Geo Wild

Hallelujah.

Sometimes when I can squeeze a little time, I just sit in the living room and I'm watching Nat Geo Wild, the National Geographic channel.

And sometimes I watch with shock and wonder as animals act out the truth of scripture.

So I find out that one animal can suffer, go through the, the rigor and the labor of patiently waiting, say, for antelopes or some animals in their groups.

And it's something that I personally feel very passionate about, this idea of, like, local ecology and and all of us you know again making small changes in our life that will make a difference and make the world a better place and so that's kind of a little snapshot of of what my passions are and what i do with the national wildlife federation so as a naturalist it's my job to help people understand nature and you know naturalists usually work in places like nature centers or national parks or even zoos I do my work as a naturalist largely in the media.

So I've hosted series on Animal Planet and Nat Geo Wild.

I do lots and lots of podcasts like this one and lots of radio and everything else.

If there's a media opportunity, I'm going to take advantage of it to hopefully get people inspired to care about animals and nature.

So I'd get to do these sort of one-off shows.

And then throughout my career, as I sort of made my way through crime programming and real estate and all those things, I got such a great opportunity with a new network that was starting called Nat Geo Wild that, um, was going to do all the animal programming.

And from there, I got to work on, uh, television shows.

I got to create television shows.

Um, [chuckles] the amazing, um, you are obviously talking about, uh, Dr. Michelle Oakley, who is incredible, is one of the sharpest, smartest, most amazing veterinarians I, or just humans I've ever worked with.

Uh, she's so cool.

Um, yeah, and, uh, I got to work with her, you know, she practiced in Haines Junction, Whitehorse area, but also would come over to Haines and, you know, had me in the Anchorage, Wasilla, Palmer [chuckles] greater metro area on many occasions, uh, working on that show for Nat Geo Wild.

Um, uh, Yukon Vet, um, I believe is the official title of the series.

I am joined today by Casey Anderson.

Casey is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, an adventurer and explorer who has appeared on Nat Geo Wild, BBC, PBS, Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, and has been a regular contributor to Conan and Oprah.

He has made it his mission to bring his love of the wild to the hearts of the world, instilling a drive to conserve untamed and untouched wild places.

In this episode, we're gonna chat with Casey about grizzly bears.

I didn't want to do something somebody else was doing.

So at the time, this is around 2010 plus or minus, there was a tremendous surge of really sensational programming on things like NatGeo Wild and Animal Planet and Discovery Channel and things like that, and what was passing for nature and science programming.

was really this over sensationalized fictionalized view of of animals and where that intersected with the harp world is especially in connection with venomous reptiles both the animals and the people that they work with that work with them were they were portrayed in in a way that just didn't really connect with reality So the thesis behind the film, if there was one, was that this subject is interesting all by itself.

You don't have to fictionalize it.

Oh, and so after a few years of doing just, you know, m- many different kind of follow vérité documentaries, um, I eventually made my way across the country and became based in the Washington, DC area, where, uh, National Geographic is based.

And, uh, around 2014, I began producing- Animal-related reality content for a new network that had just come on, uh, called Nat Geo Wild, and it was a, it was a channel that was just dedicated to just giving the people all of the animal, compelling animal content that they, uh, could handle.

And I began that, um, stretch of TV programming, uh, with a show called Bandit Patrol.

Um, and it was...