SEASON 2 EPISODE 06: ALL ABOUT HONEY BADGERS

DRINK INFORMATION

Every episode we drink a different libation – so what are we drinking this episode?

Tom’s Drink – Johnny Walker Gold Label

– This scotch was just “meh”, but got us through the episode 🙂

Ian’s Drink – Homemade apple Wine

– A decent apple wine to celebrate the Fall season

*Visit our “Tasting Room“

TRANSCRIPT:

Ian Robertson
Hey, Tom, you know, I need you to stop calling me.

Tom Kubiak
You need me to stop calling you?

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I don’t want you to badger me anymore.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, boy, that’s so bad. How much time did you spend thinking about that?

Ian Robertson
Absolutely none. I cannot stress how little I thought about that opening. It literally just came to me as we were starting.

Tom Kubiak
You do have a good way of segueing into our discussion, which today is about a badger.

Ian Robertson
Honey badger.

Tom Kubiak
A honey badger.

Ian Robertson
Which I think honey badger is a funny name. Like, I feel like that’s a nickname you give somebody when you’re in a gang. Be like, yo, man, I’m honey badger.

Tom Kubiak
That’s the nice guy in the gang.

Ian Robertson
Or, like, he’s, like, a World War Two vet. Everybody get down. It’s honey badger. Honeycutt to Giacomo. All good men.

Tom Kubiak
It certainly doesn’t, doesn’t do justice to the animal it describes.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah,

Ian Robertson
Yeah, so this was, this was your idea. And I’m kind of like, okay.

Tom Kubiak
It’s part of our animal series, our amazing animal series.

Ian Robertson
Well, no, and I’m gonna be frank with you, after I got into him, like, oh, I see why Tom likes this animal. And just fair warning to our audience, we’re gonna be talking a lot about anuses, apparently, because they have, apparently, the animal kingdom’s third most interesting anus. Don’t ask me about the first two people.

Tom Kubiak
Or one of them is a wombat, obviously.

Ian Robertson
No, wombats don’t have interesting anuses. They have interesting butts, which is outside. Anyways, what are you drinking tonight, Tom, before our discussion.

Tom Kubiak
So I’m on Scotch tonight, but not a single malt. Tonight I’m doing a blended scotch. This is the king of blended scotches, Johnny Walker, gold label, which is a Centurion blend, which means it’s made up of very, in some cases, very old scotch, but it’s small portions of it, so, but it’s a blended scotch, 18 years old, is part of the blend. And it has the, it doesn’t have the the aroma that comes from, that I like finding in a single malt, but it’s still, it’s still pretty good. It’s better than a like a Dewar’s or something like that. And it’s a little thinner, and it has a little bit of peat.

Ian Robertson
You don’t like peat.

Tom Kubiak
Just a touch of it. I’m not a peat person, yeah, no, but it’s not bad. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s not bad. It’s better than Dewar’s.

Ian Robertson
Well, I mean, that’s not, I’m gonna be frank. It’s not a high bar, you know.

Tom Kubiak
No, that’s not a high bar, but it’s a blended scotch.

Ian Robertson
That’s like saying it’s better than box wine. Dewar’s, if you’re listening to this, Dewar’s actually isn’t that bad.

Tom Kubiak
No. Dewar’s and water is awesome. I love Dewar’s and water, not straight.

Ian Robertson
Listen. Dewar’s and box wine is a nice way to tell your friends. Listen, I’m not an alcoholic yet, but I’m on my way there. I’ve lowered my standards to the point where I could go at any point.

Tom Kubiak
It’s just a slight push is gonna send me over the edge.

Ian Robertson
No, I actually, actually have no problem with Dewar’s, just want to make fun of it. Well, okay, would you give that like a four out of 10? It sounded like maybe.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, probably five out of 10. Yeah. And I probably won’t drink it straight again. I probably would mix it.

Tom Kubiak
it.

Ian Robertson
That’s usually what that kind of stuff is used for.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
So I am drinking tonight to celebrate the season, because meteorologically, this is fall time.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, it’s true. We’re coming, yeah, we’re taping this episode just before the beginning of fall.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, well, that would be the astronomical one, right? Meteorologically, it’s September, October, November.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, okay, yeah.

Ian Robertson
I don’t know. I’m guessing, either way, there’s pumpkin spice everywhere. So I’m like, let’s do this. But I got apple wine that I made in 2021. So here I’ll take a sip. Okay, so apple wine. I love apple wine. It takes a minimum of two years before it tastes good. And then after that, it can go either way. So it’s always a big risk. But when it’s good, it’s good. This is good, but I had to let it breathe, because when I first opened it, me and my wife just were like, did you pee in a bottle and put a cork in it? I learned from this sommelier up in, she was a really nice lady down to earth. Sommelier makes it sounds like she was hoity toity, but she said, never judge a wine by the first 10 to 20 minutes.

Tom Kubiak
Let it breathe a little bit.

Ian Robertson
Let it breathe. And invariably, I’ve gotten some great wines by not judging it off the bat. And this needed 20 minutes, has a nice apple flavor. It’s really dry, which I like. And you know, apples, apple wine can just go bad at any moment. This is good.

Tom Kubiak
Nice.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, big difference between apple wine and hard cider. A lot of people wonder what that is. It’s usually going to be alcohol content. Apple wine has more alcohol content. Typically it’s going to be more clear, but not always. Apple wine is going to usually be more clear, but not always.

Tom Kubiak
Will it be drier too because the sugar was converted more to alcohol?

Ian Robertson
Not necessarily. I think the one big differentiating factor is just the alcohol content. It’s going to be higher alcohol content than the wine. Hard ciders are usually bubbly, but you can still have a bubbly apple wine. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, they’re both made out of basically cider. You’re just squeezing apples and then make, either making a cider or juice or wine out of it.

Tom Kubiak
Nice. I don’t think I’ve ever had it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, you have to like it, like, I’ve never met somebody be like, I could do with that. They’re either like, this is disgusting, or they’re like, that’s amazing, nothing in between.

Tom Kubiak
Nice. Well, I’m glad you, I’m glad it turned out good for you.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, all right, so let’s talk about the Chuck Norris of the animal kingdom.

Tom Kubiak
Chuck Norris.

Ian Robertson
It really is.

Tom Kubiak
A honey badger has three fists, you know.

Ian Robertson
It does.

Tom Kubiak
We should have listed out Chuck Norris jokes.

Ian Robertson
We should have made all sorts of Chuck Norris comparisons, but we’re gonna stop there, Tom, because this is not 2003. That was a great year, but it’s not 2003.

Tom Kubiak
For Chuck Norris.

Ian Robertson
Dude’s, dude’s like, 90 something or eight, late 80s or something, and he’s working a ranch and looking good.

Tom Kubiak
He’s, yeah, he’s amazing.

Ian Robertson
I feel like it’s a Weekend at Bernie’s kind of thing, though, because..

Tom Kubiak
Somebody’s propping him up.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, like, like, how is he still going? Like, it showed him wrangling a horse. I’m like, I can’t wrangle a horse. I’m like, 40 something.

Tom Kubiak
Well, you wonder how, if you just sat him in a chair and looked at him at 90 years old, what he’s gonna look like. But like, William Shatner is the same way, he comes up to that, that Star Trek museum up in Ticonderoga, which I keep wanting to go up to you. I know you and your family went to it. I want to go up there. I think I just haven’t had the time to do it. But he comes a couple times a year to do little sessions up there, and he actually looks pretty good. He’s like 92 or 93. Guy’s in good shape. And he went to space, yeah, last year or a couple years ago.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, we talked about it on a previous podcast. Boy, we associated all the way into a completely different conversation.

Ian Robertson
This

Tom Kubiak
This is how we got from from honey badgers to William Shatner.

Ian Robertson
We should, we should do an episode on ADD. We really should. Yeah, I know, right. Anyways, so why did you pick honey badger, Tom? Why are we talking about honey badgers?

Tom Kubiak
Well, I’m thinking, I guess one of the things I was thinking about is the amazing animals that exist in this world, and some of them just are so unique and interesting that spending a little bit of time to think about them teaches us a lot about how these creatures are and what they do and what makes them so amazing. And honey badgers are a good example that, as was the wombat, which we discussed in our first season, just amazing animal that is unparalleled in certain aspects of its makeup. And I think the honey badger is very similar. If you’re talking about 2003, not long after that, there was a viral video about the honey badger, or the crazy nasty, something, honey badger. And it was narrated hilariously by, I’m not sure the guy’s name, but it became, it was an internet sensation. And so if you, if you Google honey badger, you’ll be able to see the video. I’m not vouching for the language in it, but it tells you a lot about some of what the honey badger is known for, which is its tenacious personality.

Ian Robertson
Is that where the phrase honey badger don’t care comes from?

Tom Kubiak
Yes, exactly. Honey badger don’t care.

Ian Robertson
Honey Badger don’t care. And I’ll be honest with you, honey badger really don’t care.

Tom Kubiak
It really does not care.

Ian Robertson
I saw a picture, and you can’t trust pictures on the internet anymore. I’ll digress again, but like all these pictures and videos and stuff, I watched this guy to prove how easy it is to make fake videos now, He had Elon Musk robbing a Quickie Mart with a lizard on his back. And if you didn’t read beforehand, you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t Elon Musk. He just, he just put it together and made it look like security footage, and he had, like Donald Trump, like waving a gun in his face. This is crazy, anyways, but this looked like an older picture, and I remember seeing it years ago, like in school or something, and honey badger freaking out at a lion, like, back off dude. And a lion who could easily kill the honey badger, as tough as a honey badger is, a lion could take it down. The lion was just like, what..and it just walked away. It’s like, I’m not messing with that thing. But they are, they are known to be one of the bravest, or not brave. How do you put it? Like the angry guy in traffic in Jersey getting out of his car to punch your window.

Ian Robertson
Yes,

Tom Kubiak
Yes, that’s a honey badger.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, not quite drunk, but just a little bit too much and wants to fight.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, yeah. And it’s amazing that they’re really not a whole lot bigger than a house cat, just a little bit bigger, but they they have this personality that can go after things many times its size and scare them off or even take on poisonous snakes and whole hives of bees without, with little to no regard because they don’t care. That’s the bottom line.

Ian Robertson
Well, I wouldn’t care either if I were built like a honey badger. So first of all, the honey badger is actually not a badger. They’re part of the weasel family, so they’re more closely related to otters and ferrets and wolverines. Which are also known for…

Tom Kubiak
The adamantium spikes. You know.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, he still got the claws and the Marvel rights, but, you know..but they can actually withstand snake bites, like venomous snakes.

Tom Kubiak
They just take a nap.

Ian Robertson
They just take a nap. They basically just walk it off, they boot and rally, and off they go. But their skin is six millimeters thick.

Tom Kubiak
I found that also to be amazing, so that, the article that I read said that’s potentially close to a half an inch thick. So they and can even be thicker around their neck.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Tom Kubiak
So in cases where they’re being bitten or being attacked, it doesn’t matter. Plus, another defensive mechanism they have is that the skin fits on them loosely.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Tom Kubiak
So even if they’re attacked, they can swivel inside their skin to attack back whatever’s attacking them, amazing.

Ian Robertson
And that loose skin also makes their skin more durable. So honey badgers are known to be able to, their skin to withstand a direct arrow or spear. So they’re native to like Africa.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, Africa, Asia.

Ian Robertson
Africa, Asia, things like that. So I can, I can picture all these early tribes, 1000 years ago, shooting this thing with an arrow, and they’re like, dude, you missed it. I didn’t miss it. And everybody’s shooting with arrows, and it’s just standing there, but the loose skin absorbs some of the shock from from bites. It’s kind of like the scruff around a puppy’s neck. Yeah, you can kind of grab it, and it’s loose and, but that looseness is also, like.

Ian Robertson
they’re

Tom Kubiak
They’re still ferocious, even when they’re grabbed there.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, yeah. You pull a sheet tight, you pop that with a knife, and it rips wide open. You loosen it up, and now you have to, like, push a little harder to get through it.

Ian Robertson
Good

Tom Kubiak
Good analogy, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s pretty amazing. And one of the reasons they’re called the honey badgers, they seem to be like, will eat many different things, but one of the things they really enjoy is honey. So you and I are both beekeepers, so we have an affinity for this. But the, I know from my experience, pulling honey is a process that very easily can result in a lot of pain if you’re not careful.

Ian Robertson
Yeah.

Tom Kubiak
But for a honey badger, it doesn’t matter, because the stings of the bees don’t get through to their, don’t get through their skin. So they can go into a hive and tear it apart and eat both the honey and the larva of the bees with little to no cost to them.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. You know, it’s funny, too, when, when we talk about the honey, they actually have a symbiotic relation, not symbiotic. What do they call that? A co habitable, basically animals helping each other, but not necessarily symbiotic. I forget the word for it. Like those alligators have those birds that clean their teeth and the fish that clean the hippopotamus and all that stuff. They have a bird called the honey guide. This bird leads them to beehives, and once the badger cracks it open, both feast on the honey and the larva. Yeah, so you got this honey badger just walking around looking at this bird, and bird’s like, come on, dude, let’s go get some lunch.

Tom Kubiak
Pointing them right to where the where the hive is.

Ian Robertson
And they work together, the bird, the honey guide, waits for the badger, and the badger looks for the bird and the honey badger doesn’t get mad and shoo the bird away like, this is my food. It’s like, here you go.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
That’s crazy, right?

Tom Kubiak
It is. I mean, it shows how nature is designed to work with each other. I also read an interesting article about how in the areas where the honey badger lives, it’s a big problem for beekeepers, because they will tear up hives, hives that are being used, cultivated, so some of the African governments have taught their beekeepers how to protect their hives from the honey badger, which involves putting them at different heights or packaging them differently in order to be able to provide some protection. Otherwise, the honey badger does what bears do to hives here in the northeast, which is just rip them open, basically, and destroy them.

Ian Robertson
Do the honey badgers eat the bees, I wonder. They eat the larva.

Tom Kubiak
They eat the larva.

Ian Robertson
But skunks. Have you ever watched a skunk go after a beehive?

Tom Kubiak
No.

Ian Robertson
They’ll just stand there at the opening, rattle the hive or whatever to get the bees to come out and then just sit there and they pick them like popcorn. They sit there and eat bees, yeah.

Tom Kubiak
Really, they eat the actual bees?

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I had a skunk get into my hives and I, I caught it in a cage and let it go, and it never came back, but he would just sit out there and just pop them in his mouth.

Tom Kubiak
Just eat the bees as they’re coming in, huh? I wonder, they don’t get stung on their tongue. You think that would be pretty painful?

Ian Robertson
Apparently, they don’t care either. I mean, there’s actually some relation biologically in, I don’t think they’re actually related, but there’s some similarities, I should say, between a skunk and a honey badger.

Ian Robertson
Well,

Tom Kubiak
Well, they look similar because the honey badger has that white stripe on it or white area on its back.

Ian Robertson
Well, yeah. Well, and I promised our audience here that, I promised you all that we would talk about anuses. So this may actually be a good time to talk about the amazing anus of the honey badger.

Tom Kubiak
You need to tell me about it, because I don’t think I found anything about the amazing anus.

Ian Robertson
All right, so their anuses are incredible. So first of all, the anus, the anus of the honey badger, is reversible. Can you imagine being able to reverse your anus?

Tom Kubiak
What does that mean?

Ian Robertson
Well, in the case of the honey badger, it says they have a reversible anus that can be turned inside out and release a strong smelling liquid. This liquid is used to mark territory, deter predators, and they also use it to smoke bomb the bees.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, really, so it must have some kind of pheromone in it, or something like that, that messes with the bees ability to communicate.

Ian Robertson
Well, I imagine it’s kind of like when you smoke, when you use actual smoke in a beehive that calms the bees down, or it doesn’t really calm them down, they’re like, oh, fire, let’s all go into the recesses and run away.

Tom Kubiak
And it disturbs their ability to communicate. Smoke does.

Ian Robertson
So I imagine this anus juice that comes out does basically the same thing.

Tom Kubiak
Nice. So this is why you’re relating them to skunks.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, that’s why they kind of have a skunky look to them. But more importantly, they have this gland, and then they reverse their anus, and then out comes this liquid that smoke bombs. They use a lot for beehives, which I thought it was crazy.

Tom Kubiak
I never, I didn’t read that, interesting.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, they also have what’s called an eversible anal pouch, so I don’t know what this means, which is unusual among mustelids, and I really couldn’t find anything else beyond that. But either way, if you know what an eversible anal pouch is, congratulations, you should write a blog on it.

Tom Kubiak
Well, I would recommend not Google searching that.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, no. I mean, even qualifying with honey badger, never mind.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, just leave that out of your internet search.

Ian Robertson
So the difference with the anal stuff that comes out for the honey badger is skunks spray it, but honey badgers basically drop a bomb. So they they’ll just be standing there, like, boom, and then run, where skunks are spraying it, like, as as a projectile.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, yeah, interesting. I did find that the honey badger really does not have many natural predators, so they are pretty much the top of their, of the chain. I mean, obviously lions and leopards and things like that can, can attack them and can eat them, but it doesn’t happen with regularity because they’re so ferocious.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, it’s a hard meal. It’s a hard yeah, it’s a hard meal. It’s easier to get an antelope or something like that, than honey badger.

Ian Robertson
It’s like, the difference between getting a hamburger at McDonald’s and going to the drive thru and meeting that guy I told you about in Jersey and then wrestling a hamburger out of his hand. It’s like, I’d rather just go to get different meals.

Tom Kubiak
I’ll have a number two.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. Speaking of number twos, huge segue, I wasn’t gonna talk about this till later but I’m like, there’s my opening. But they have a weird pooping ritual.

Tom Kubiak
Tell me about it.

Ian Robertson
So honey badgers are built funny. They’re about 20 or 30 pounds, but they have this really intense musculature throughout their body, and even though they spend a lot of time above ground, they do a lot of digging. But interestingly, they go and they dig holes and then poop in them. So they go out in the woods, and they dig a hole, they drop their, they drop their number two, but then they don’t cover it. So it’s a lot like camping with my brother. If you’re listening, you know.

Tom Kubiak
Did you ask for that..

Dave,

Ian Robertson
I do not apologize, so many times camping. I’m just saying there’s some logistics there. But interestingly, they don’t really know 100% why it digs a hole and then drops it in, and they don’t cover it, but they think that they leave it open, so other honey badgers will investigate. So a lot like dogs, you communicate with your, with your poo. You know, it’s like, were you stressed? Is the female in heat? Is there danger?

Ian Robertson
They

Tom Kubiak
They use it as, like, almost marking, like, marking territory.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, marking territory. Or even just general communication, like, I had a great night eating a whole bunch of honey and larva. And they’re like, oh, cool. Well, must be something around here. But, yeah, yeah. They have a funny defecation pattern.

Tom Kubiak
And they say, the articles that I read said, for the most part, they tend to be solitary animals, although once in a while you do see multiples, and they have recorded instances where multiple honey badgers were working together to corner and capture a prey. But for the most part, it’s, their solitary.

Ian Robertson
How did that happen, though? Like, what led up to, like, pack hunting in a solitary animal?

Ian Robertson
I

Tom Kubiak
I don’t know. Yeah, that’s a good question. Maybe it’s opportunistic. You know, they saw that well, honey badger was, was tracking down one animal, and he joined the, joined the fight as he passed by.

Ian Robertson
Well, they’ll take down animals quite a bit larger than them, won’t they?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. They will, yeah, and, and the other interesting thing is, not only will they take the animal down, but they will eat the entire thing, including bones.

Ian Robertson
Really?

Tom Kubiak
Which is really, yeah, the article said that they, they eat the entire animal. There’s nothing left over.

Ian Robertson
How did, so do they like stay there for days if it’s a bigger animal?

Tom Kubiak
I don’t know, maybe, maybe they only go as long as they can with a, with an animal that’s large, but with a smaller animal. I’ve watched a few videos of them eating snakes, and they’re just devouring the entire thing like they’re eating a popsicle.

Ian Robertson
Well, they are highly intelligent, so I’m thinking about what you just told me about the pack hunting. They’ve been even seen..So, for instance, honey badgers can remember routes. So if they got somewhere, they can remember how to get back somewhere, and they’ll go the same exact way that they went. They’ll do problem solving, so kind of like they do with monkeys, and they’ll put them with a problem to solve, and they’ll figure it out. Or dogs, how they have them figure out problems. They adapt quickly to their environment, and they’re just, they’ve also been known to use basically what they call primitive tools. So grab a stick to kind of work something out of somewhere or something like that. So I wouldn’t call it tools as we would consider it.

Tom Kubiak
You mentioned too before that they that they like to dig, and one article that I read said that they are kind of built for digging with real muscular arms, claws. Digging burrows for themselves is not difficult, and they often find what they’re eating by digging, you know, the animals that they come upon. But one article indicated that they can dig an entire burrow in only about 10 minutes due to their, their strength and the way their claws are built. So I would imagine in areas where there are pretty dense populations of honey badgers, the ground gets, gets worked up, similar to probably what you see with Prairie dogs or wombats in Australia, although maybe not with that density.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, so I think you’re not going to have as high a density, a highly dense population of honey badgers because of their solitary way. Like they’re relatively aggressive to even other honey badgers, but I did find the reference that I was talking about. So apparently, talking about honey badgers using tools. So they did a study years ago, and they even have videos that you can watch online, which revealed the use of sticks, rakes, and mud and stones to aid them in what they were doing, crazy, right?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, that’s pretty amazing,

Ian Robertson
Pretty highly intelligent. So here’s some ways that they use tools..escape. So they’ve been seen using sticks and stuff like that to escape. Honey badgers have used tools to open things, claws and other things, smash things and creating bridges. Honey badgers have been seen using rocks or, I’m sorry, honey badgers have been observed rolling logs up to trees or fences to create bridges.

Tom Kubiak
Interesting. That’s pretty smart.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I mean, we talked about the wombat. As cool as the wombat is, I don’t see him building any bridges.

Tom Kubiak
No. And I think of a honey, I think the name probably makes people think, well, this is not that, that ferocious of an animal, but it really is. In fact, I saw a quote that I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that show, Top Gear, with Jeremy Clarkson. He’s a, like, a car guy, and they, it’s very, very popular, these three car guys that drive all kinds of cars and do crazy things with the cars. But that one, in one of their episodes, they were in Africa someplace, during some kind of rally, and they talked about the honey badger, and the the guy says, one of the guys basically says, oh, that’s a, that’s an animal that sounds like a kitten or something like that. But it’s not at all. It’s, it’s improperly named. In fact, I think they might even reference there’s, there’s a fable, I don’t there’s probably little truth to it, but that honey badgers would kill by cutting off the genitalia of their, of their biting off of their prey and then letting it bleed to death. I don’t think that’s probably true, but it does show how ferocious they might be considered.

Ian Robertson
So, I’d like to point something out here at this juncture, we hear at Drinking With Tom, reached a new milestone for us. We hit, we’ll be hitting 1000 subscribers here at any moment. We’re about 981 on just YouTube, however many hundreds or whatever on, because our podcast is on Spotify and Apple and like a million other channels, we have people that follow us and all that stuff. So we have hit the pinnacle of what our podcast will ever be, which is, my information about anuses and Tom’s information about genitalia. I think we just gotta drop the mic, Tom, I think we’re done. This is we’ve hit the peak.

Tom Kubiak
This is, this is our final episode.

Ian Robertson
The last words we all want to hear Tom say,

Tom Kubiak
Everyone will leave after this episode.

Ian Robertson
Ladies and gentlemen, if you want to fall asleep tonight and have nightmares, just think of Tom saying genitalia again. I don’t know if that’s true, Tom.

Tom Kubiak
No, I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying there was a fable that people would tell a story about it. But another interesting thing is they, there are some people who call the generation alpha, which is the the generation of kids that were born around 2010 as the honey badger generation.

Ian Robertson
I didn’t know that.

Tom Kubiak
Because, yeah, and this is an interesting personality trait, which I don’t know necessarily, that I buy into, but that some people give an indication that that generation has a little bit more tenacity than the previous generations. I don’t see that necessarily in my empirical, empirical data research.

Ian Robertson
So what year was it born?

Tom Kubiak
2010. Like for 14, 15, year olds.

Ian Robertson
I mean, don’t all 14 and 15 year olds have tenacity?

Tom Kubiak
I don’t know that. I don’t know that they, my argument would be, they don’t, the some of the 14, 13, 14, year olds that I know, or that I that I have seen, either through clients’ kids or things like that, don’t have a lot of tenacity.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, they just kind of sit there like a lump.

Tom Kubiak
They just kind of sit there doing nothing, yeah. So I don’t know really if that honey badger generation is an accurate description of them.

Ian Robertson
I would not describe them as having thick skin like a honey badger.

Tom Kubiak
And that’s another thing. Yeah, I definitely would agree on that one. Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Well, honey badger generation. I guess that sounds better than snowflake, huh?

Tom Kubiak
True.

Ian Robertson
It’s like trying to give yourself a cooler nickname than you have. As a kid, when I was a little kid in school, they called me Peeing Ian, which I’m going to be honest with you, I earned that nickname.

Tom Kubiak
I don’t even want to hear that story.

Ian Robertson
I peed my pants several times, sometimes, sometimes a couple times a day. So then I try to give myself cooler nicknames, and none of them ever stuck. So I feel like the snowflake generation is just like, hey, man call us the honey badger generation..like, no.

Tom Kubiak
It could be their argument to try to get, be a little bit more ferocious sounding. But yeah, I didn’t see it as being an accurate description of that generation. Maybe the greatest generation, you could say was, it would be the honey badger generation, like the generation from World War Two. They would fight through anything, you know, then they would work really hard and two jobs if they needed to do two jobs. I don’t think anything since then has been that, had that much fortitude.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, I guess if you’re forced into it though.

Tom Kubiak
Well, yeah.

Ian Robertson
They were kind of forced into it for surviving.

Tom Kubiak
They were definitely forced into it.

Ian Robertson
Yeah. But anyways, back to honey badgers.

Tom Kubiak
Honey badgers…

Ian Robertson
You can’t even remember all the angles that we’ve come out with this.

Tom Kubiak
It’s gone full circle.

Ian Robertson
It’s not a full circle. It’s more like a plate of spaghetti.

Tom Kubiak
It is.

Ian Robertson
We really got to do an episode on ADD because I’m a child, I’m a child, I came of age in the 90s, a child born in the 80s, came of age in the 90s, when ADD wasn’t really a thing. And I look back, I’m like, oh, man. I had it thick.

Tom Kubiak
We should, we should do an episode on multitasking, because that, and that would fit in perfectly with ADD, because some people, they need to have stimulus and have multiple things going on at the same time, but it’s really not a good way to get things done. So I’ll put that on our list.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, we’ll put it on the list. But going back to honey badgers again, there’s not a lot in captivity, I guess, because they’re really hard to keep because they’re always escaping, figuring ways out, getting really cranky with the keepers and all that stuff. But they’re not endangered, right?

Tom Kubiak
No, yeah. Interestingly, I did read in the article that they’re that they, in several articles, that they view them as at very low risk to extinction, so one of the lower risks of mammals. But the interesting thing is, that is, they’re not confident that that is a clear true response. And part of the problem is they really don’t have good statistics, because honey badgers are so hard to nail down. So they’re really making it based upon educated guesses, rather than, like saying there’s this many honey badgers in the wild, but I would think based upon their tenacity and based upon the personality that these animals have, I think their risk of being put to extinction is probably pretty low. They seem to be the type of animal that would adapt to its surroundings better than most others.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, they seem to like warmer climates, but they tend to be all over. Really hard to kill. Yeah, some say that they could be threatened. But like you said, it’s really hard number to measure. It’s not like you’re walking around. You’re like, oh, hey, look, there’s a honey badger in the wild. It’s exactly, oh, crud, there’s a honey badger. Get out of here.

Tom Kubiak
Probably the biggest risk to honey badger is the encroachment upon their, their living area by humans. You know, which I think is, realistically, is, is one of the problems that most species have. As humans expand where they live, they push out these native species. And, you know, it’s a problem, unfortunately.

Ian Robertson
I’d like to see honey badger versus wombat.

Tom Kubiak
I think the honey badger would win.

Ian Robertson
I don’t know.

Tom Kubiak
Although the wombat’s got the butt, the big butt too.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly. I think they’d make, I think they’d make a good fight. But, uh, so here’s a fun fact, honey badgers have been mythologized in African folklore for centuries, often seen as symbols of tenacity and courage. So if you’re called a honey badger in African cultures or in certain South Asian cultures and things like that, it’s compliments, like, dude, you’re tough. It’s kind of like calling somebody like, man, that guy’s a bulldog. It’s like tenacity and courage.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah.

Ian Robertson
Also too, they have concealed ears. So honey badgers have a thick skin behind their heads that conceal their ears, which helps prevent them from being bitten or scraped during fights.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, I saw that too. Yeah, they’re well designed for close combat.

Ian Robertson
Yeah, exactly, and that’s why I say they are the Chuck Norris of the animal kingdom. Don’t mess with them.

Tom Kubiak
Don’t mess with them. Yeah, and you’re not even gonna give us a Chuck Norris joke?

Ian Robertson
There’s so many, I can’t, I can’t go back that far, Tom, that’s 20 plus years ago. That’s, I don’t know. I can’t go back that far. I tell you what, to end our honey badger episode, do you have a joke?

Tom Kubiak
I do. I wish I had thought about the Chuck Norris, uh, connection, because I used to love reading Chuck Norris jokes, but I have a honey badger joke. So, do you know what the honey badger said when he walked into the bar?

Ian Robertson
No.

Tom Kubiak
Ouch.

Ian Robertson
Oh, dude, that’s not a honey badger. You can say that about anything.

Tom Kubiak
I don’t care. It’s still a honey badger joke.

Ian Robertson
There’s a honey badger in the joke. It’s not a honey badger joke. How do you sleep at night? I like how hard you’re laughing at your own joke.

Tom Kubiak
I love my own jokes.

Ian Robertson
All right. Well, thank you everybody for listening to our train wreck. I mean our episode of Drinking With Tom. Listen in on the next episode, and we’ll all see you then. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Kubiak
Great to see you, Ian. Have a good night.

Ian Robertson
You too.

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