Hey everyone. Do you think that bears want you to be alive? Well, only on opposite day,

according to today's guest host, today's book is Bears Want to Kill You, Subtitle,

The Authoritative Guide to Survival in the War Between Man and Bear by Ethan Nicole.

And this is The Book Pile, a comedy podcast about the best of books and the worst of books.

I'm Kellanerskin. I'm a comic, a father, and one time I helped write a pancake mix commercial that featured the actual bear from Game of Thrones and The Revenant, and I took my family to the filming of that bear for the ad, and now my six-year-old thinks that all bears are just big, nice animals that do tricks for Oreos.

And if you're wondering why my podcast host, David Vance, is not laughing at me again,

it's because he's actually not here.

He'll be back next week and every other week after that, meaning he'll be alternating one week on, one week off.

And if you want the context for that new change,

check out last week's episode that we did on The Hobbit, which is, by the way, is honestly

one of my favorite episodes we've ever recorded. And in a minute, I'll introduce our guest

for today, the author of this episode's book. As usual, feel free to subscribe to this podcast, so you don't

have to manually download every new episode, and leave a review. It really helps us out. One of our

latest five-star reviews comes from $10 sign rec, who writes,

gonna miss you, Dave. Without you, there's no one to defend Ron

Weasley, so Kellyn wins by default. So a couple things. Dave will still be here just half the time.

Like I said, he'll be back next week and every week after that. Second, yes, of course I win the Ron

Weasley debate, but also I won it way before today because Ron is objectively a self-serving,

ignorant, unempathetic glutton, who is only friends with Harry Potter because they happen to

sit next to each other on their first train ride. And I do fully realize Dave isn't here to defend his side of the argument. Dave's side of

the argument is essentially that, yes, Ron is all of those things, but those awful kids actually do

exist. And then my counter argument is that, yes, I know they exist, but do they have to

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