Joe Rogan Experience #1204 - Steven Rinella

Steven Rinella 0:00 You know, uh, you know what's funny? Oh, I'll tell you later.

Joe Rogan 0:02 Tell me now. Three, two, one. (claps) What's funny?

Steven Rinella 0:09 Uh, I was gonna tell you a funny story about your address, but it, but it-

Joe Rogan 0:12 Oh, don't do that. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 0:13 It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be f- funny for you. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:17 (laughs) We'll talk later about that.

Steven Rinella 0:19 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 0:19 You and I, uh, we share African ancestry.

Steven Rinella 0:21 Yeah?

Joe Rogan 0:22 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 0:22 I was shocked.

Joe Rogan 0:23 Yeah, I'm 1.6%.

Steven Rinella 0:25 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 0:25 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 0:25 See, I have more, uh, I, I have more credential than you-

Joe Rogan 0:28 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 0:28 ... in that department.

Joe Rogan 0:29 You're 2%, right?

Steven Rinella 0:30 Yeah, I know. And it's, it's funny 'cause, uh, you know, you sort of have your, the, the story in your family, kinda like where you came from.

Joe Rogan 0:37 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 0:38 And everything mates, and I always knew I was w- 25%, you know, Italian. Uh, and I knew that my family came from Sicily. In fact, uh, the, the, the Rinellas that came from Sicily all seemed to become kind of established in, in the produce world. Uh, my dad was brought up in the South Side of Chicago. I'm 44 years old, okay? So think about that for a minute. My dad was brought up in the South Side of Chicago, and he was raised by his grandfather, who was Sicilian and had come from Sicily. His grandfather delivered produce with a horse and cart-

Joe Rogan 1:15 Whoa.

Steven Rinella 1:15 ... in Chicago. So, to have lived through that, like, to be brought up in a house where a guy, like, leaves in the morning on a horse and cart to deliver produce, and then to be alive, like, to fight in World War II, to be through the atomic era, the advent of the internet, right? (sighs) But I always knew that we had Sicilians. When I did the, the genetic test, one- some of th- at some point in time, one of those Sicilians (laughs) must have shot southward and crossed the (laughs) Mediterranean and, like, had a hookup down there or something.

Joe Rogan 1:52 Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place.

Steven Rinella 1:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55 You know, that Sicily, it just being Sicilian in the first place, there was so many people that were, uh, impregnated by the Moors and by various people of West Africa and North Africa.

Steven Rinella 2:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:07 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 2:07 It's f- And, yeah, I should have probably, like, always assumed, but it just, I hadn't thought about it. Um, another thing I was reading about this stuff, and you might know more about it than I do, is that when you do those tests, there's missing parts. You know, it does, it, it, like, it captures what's there, but there could be a lot there that's not captured.

Joe Rogan 2:25 Mm.

Steven Rinella 2:25 Just in the way that chromosomes are, you know, inherited and passed down. Like it's n- it's an incomplete picture.

Joe Rogan 2:32 Right.

Steven Rinella 2:33 Right? There could be influences. There could, there could be, in your, in... It doesn't create a full picture of your lineage. There could be lineages that are there that aren't represented in your particular makeup.

Joe Rogan 2:47 How so? Like, what do you mean?

Steven Rinella 2:50 You know. I hate to right off the bat get into something (laughs) that I can't speak about with any level of expertise.

Joe Rogan 2:56 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 2:56 I was just reading a piece, and the piece I was reading had to do, it was kind of a dissection of, like, what happened with Elizabeth Warren, what she claimed.

Joe Rogan 3:05 We've been going off about that on the podcast, and I'm like 100 times more African than the she is Native American. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 3:10 Yeah. Well, that's what I found. I'm 10 times more or whatever.

Joe Rogan 3:13 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 3:13 But it was a piece about... Uh, it was a, it was a piece in The Times explaining, like, how to make sense of... now that everyone's doing these tests, like, how to think about and make sense of these tests. But, but my understanding of it is, um, that you could have a lot of ancestry that just isn't captured in your genetic code in a way that would be detected through the testing. Meaning there could be ancestors that, for what... 'cause you're inheriting half, you know, you're inheriting chromosomes from each parent. And, and somehow you could have, y- it could be an incomplete picture. You could have ancestors that had come from all their... You know, whatever these, these tests break out the world into 100 or some odd regions or zones, that there could be people from those zones who are in your lineage that are not captured in your personal... that are not captured in your genetic code.

Joe Rogan 4:03 That's so bizarre. You'd think it'd all be in there. Is that just a, an incomplete measuring tool? Is that what it is? Or is it just n- actually not in there?

Steven Rinella 4:12 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 4:13 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 4:13 You're gonna have to have a dude on...

Joe Rogan 4:14 Yeah, I'll have to have a dude on.

Steven Rinella 4:15 I'll listen. You need to have a dude on who understands it.

Joe Rogan 4:17 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 4:17 And as I say, I feel like I'm off on a bad start here, man. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:20 How much, uh, Neanderthal did it say you had?

Steven Rinella 4:22 Less than normal.

Joe Rogan 4:23 Really?

Steven Rinella 4:23 Less than average.

Joe Rogan 4:24 What was the, uh, the number, like it said, it gives you... You just, you did 23andMe, right?

Steven Rinella 4:28 Yeah. I can't remember.

Joe Rogan 4:29 Oh, okay.

Steven Rinella 4:29 I can't remember. I just remember it was less than average. And, you know, and those things, like, are refined by how many people do them, you know?

Joe Rogan 4:36 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 4:36 But it was less than average, which bummed me out.

Joe Rogan 4:39 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 4:39 But I'm like as hairy as like a 13-year-old, like, Norwegian girl, you know what I mean? So it's...

Joe Rogan 4:43 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 4:44 That didn't surprise me.

Joe Rogan 4:45 Not shocking? Yeah.

Steven Rinella 4:45 Didn't surprise me too much. Uh, I, I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me.

Joe Rogan 4:50 It's a bizarre heritage, you know? The idea that there was a different type of human that bred with Homo sapiens and that there's, like, little bits and pieces of it floating around in people.

Steven Rinella 5:01 Yeah. And, and people discuss them. People discuss... I was having an argument the other day where they say Neander-tall or Neander-thal, and everyone grows up-

Joe Rogan 5:09 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 5:09 ... saying Neanderthal. It's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it.

Joe Rogan 5:13 Right.

Steven Rinella 5:14 Neander-tall, but I just can't get comfortable with it.

Joe Rogan 5:16 I, I go back and forth.

Steven Rinella 5:18 There's a lot of words that, like, that were... I know you're supposed to do it, but I can't get comfortable with it.

Joe Rogan 5:22 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 5:22 'Cause I feel like it makes you sound pretentious.

Joe Rogan 5:24 It does. It's like rolling your Rs in certain Spanish words.

Steven Rinella 5:27 But we have this idea that the An- we have this idea of the Neanderthals as unsuccessful, right?

Joe Rogan 5:34 Right.

Steven Rinella 5:35 That they are these brutish thugs that died out. But they had a 600,000-year run-

Joe Rogan 5:42 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 5:42 ... in Europe alone.

Joe Rogan 5:44 They've had a-

Steven Rinella 5:44 600,000 years.

Joe Rogan 5:45 ... longer run than Homo sapiens have actually existed.

Steven Rinella 5:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:48 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 5:48 So whatever's next-

Joe Rogan 5:50 Well-

Steven Rinella 5:50 I don't know that we're gonna hit, like... I don't know that we're gonna m- match up and have that run.

Joe Rogan 5:56 Well, we'll probably have a 23andMe for whatever the fuck is after us and then we'll go, "Look, somebody back then fucked a human. Ugh."

Steven Rinella 6:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 6:03 Like, oh, one of those crazy warmonger-

Steven Rinella 6:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:06 ... fucking rapist, thieving humans. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 6:08 That died out. (laughs) That... Turns out they didn't totally die out.

Joe Rogan 6:12 Yeah. Overrun with emotions and lies and they, someone, someone of a superior race infiltrated the humans and banged one of them.

Steven Rinella 6:19 Yeah. It's, it's, it's funny to look at that, uh, that understanding of, of those, that understanding of those people, um, and then to, to have this i- to, to picture in your mind's eye even though you can't picture it, like, what was look- like, when they were hooking up, so when... Our, you know, like, anatomically kind of behaviorally modern humans were hooking up with Neanderthals, was it, was th- was... How was it perceived by their peers?

Joe Rogan 6:50 I bet the people that we think of as people back then, like, you know who George "The Animal" Steele is?

Steven Rinella 6:56 No.

Joe Rogan 6:56 George "The Animal" Steele is a very famous pro wrestler from back in the day. And, uh-

Steven Rinella 7:01 Oh, I thought you were gonna say it was a, a paleontologist or an anthropologist.

Joe Rogan 7:04 No. No.

Steven Rinella 7:04 He's a wrestler. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:05 He's a wrestler-

Steven Rinella 7:06 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:06 ... pro wrestler, very famous guy, who could be a fucking caveman, like legitimately could be a caveman.

Steven Rinella 7:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:13 See if you, uh, you got a good image of him. Now, this is what I think, when I think of people... No, give me a full body one. There you go.

Steven Rinella 7:21 Oh.

Joe Rogan 7:22 When I think of people-

Steven Rinella 7:23 That he's hanging on to something.

Joe Rogan 7:24 ... that are, that are Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens from, you know, 200,000 years ago, I think of George "The Animal" Steele. I think they were something like that. So the idea of George fucking a Neanderthal chick, not that far off. I think our ideas, like, that, like, Dan Rather would be out there banging some monkey lady.

Steven Rinella 7:44 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 7:45 And I just don't think (laughs) , I don't think that's the case. Like, look at George's body. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. He's got the hairiest shoulders I've ever seen on a man.

Steven Rinella 7:55 Is he still alive?

Joe Rogan 7:56 I do not know. I don't believe he is.

Steven Rinella 7:58 I hope he's not listening right now.

Joe Rogan 8:00 No, I don't believe he is. Oh, he's a legend, legend in the world of the pro wrestling.

Steven Rinella 8:04 So it's gonna take more than this to hurt his feelings.

Joe Rogan 8:05 That guy don't give a fuck.

Steven Rinella 8:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:07 He's a legend. But, uh, when I was in... a kid in high school... Oh, he's, he's old as fuck. Yeah. He's, uh, pr-... Well, those guys, they all... That's a hard way to make a living, man.

Steven Rinella 8:17 Oh, he died at s-

Joe Rogan 8:18 Died, died at age 79.

Steven Rinella 8:19 Well, he had a good run.

Joe Rogan 8:20 Yeah. That's a good run for, for those guys. That's a fucking hard way to make a living, but-

Steven Rinella 8:24 Have, have, have we ever talked about, uh, the, the idea of Neanderthals as like having a c- a confrontational hunting style?

Joe Rogan 8:34 No, I don't think we have.

Steven Rinella 8:35 Because when, when, when anthropologists look at the, the skeletal remains of Neanderthals, they see this sort of suite of th- this pattern of injuries on them. And, uh, uh, a researcher was looking at the types of fractures that they have on their bones and where the fractures occurred and the breaks and, like, cracks in their skulls. He wa- he was looking at all this and wound up working with a doctor who had a lot of exposure to rodeo riders, bull riders. And the doctor was, was, uh, observing the way in which that suite of injuries was very familiar to him from rodeo riders, the types of breaks and the location of breaks. And this guy has this idea that they had a, like, a very confrontational hunting style, um, that they were, like, mixing it up with big animals. And another thing they found is that wh- when you're looking at skeletal remains from early people, you still see that separation in the sexes, right? That, that, that the males would suffer injuries, uh, at a, with a greater prevalence than females. But with Neanderthals, it seems like they didn't have the sort of, like, duplicity of roles.

Joe Rogan 9:53 Mm-hmm. So maybe they're-

Steven Rinella 9:53 And then the females, the females have the same prevalence of, of these types of injuries.

Joe Rogan 10:00 Whoa.

Steven Rinella 10:01 And so maybe they didn't have that d- the... They didn't share that division of labor.

Joe Rogan 10:05 Were the females as large as the males?

Steven Rinella 10:07 Yeah. I don't know the answer to that.

Joe Rogan 10:08 So, th- do... We know that they had stone tools, right? The crude stone tools.

Steven Rinella 10:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 10:13 But we don't know whether or not they had anything that could launch them, like, they didn't have... Did they... Do we know if they had spears?

Steven Rinella 10:19 I don't believe that they've found they had atlatls.

Joe Rogan 10:22 Right.

Steven Rinella 10:22 And I don't know if they were hafting materials, but they were doing, they were doing art. Um, and I think there's a little bit of a debate about whether they're doing representational art, but they were doing art. They were doing... They were probably making jewelry. And this is like... These are all things that as, as we kind of like wake up to what these people were really like, and it paints like a more complicated picture. There's even this theory, and I don't know if this held any water or how long it was fashionable for, but you had this really long history of, this extremely long history of hundreds of thousands of years of Neanderthal, you know, occupation in Europe. And then it seemed to be that... I remember someone putting forth this idea that it seemed to be that there was this flourishing of advancement that was contemporaneous with the arrival of our own ancestors in Europe, as though, uh, they were being exposed to or seeing art and seeing jewelry and, and mimicking this from these new invaders that were coming in. But I don't know where that idea sits right now.

Joe Rogan 11:27 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 11:27 I don't know if it's been dispelled because of other discoveries. But I remember thinking that was an interesting idea that they would... And it kind of paints this really sad picture, right? That they would be sort of in the autumn, you know, of their existence. And here's these adorned people showing up with these amazing tool kits and all these abilities and kind of struggling to start to catch up, you know? It'd be like the country bumpkin, you know, going to the big city and... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 11:51 Yeah. Well, there was also this, uh, idea, I think up until very recently that Neanderthals were not as violent as humans, uh, as Homo sapiens. But now there was an article that was, uh, published just a couple of days ago-... that new evidence shows that Neanderthals, like, inter-Neanderthal violence between each other was just as bad as, uh, homo sapiens.

Steven Rinella 12:11 Yeah. And, and-

Joe Rogan 12:12 See, see if you can find that.

Steven Rinella 12:12 ... and evidence of cannibalism.

Joe Rogan 12:14 Oh, yeah, there was a lot of that, right? Scraping of inside the skulls-

Steven Rinella 12:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 12:17 ... indicative of tools. Oh, ad blocker got busted. (laughs) They get us every time with the fucking ad blocker. Yeah, um- That's the one I clicked on. What does it say? Humans are just as violent as Neanderthals.

Steven Rinella 12:33 Are you familiar with the writer, John Mooallem?

Joe Rogan 12:35 No.

Steven Rinella 12:36 You'd like his stuff.

Joe Rogan 12:37 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 12:37 He wrote a really beautiful piece about, he wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago.

Joe Rogan 12:42 Okay, I fucked it up. The, what they're saying is that modern humans, we're just as prone to violence as Neanderthals.

Steven Rinella 12:49 I don't have a problem with that.

Joe Rogan 12:50 I, I, I think I, I'm c- I'm conflating this with something else that I read about inter, uh, inter-species violence, Neanderthal on Neanderthal violence. The other thing that's weird about them is they had bigger brains than us. They had bigger brains, and they would be like 5'7" and weigh 200 pounds, just jacked, just a little gorilla thing, you know?

Steven Rinella 13:10 Yeah, it'd be great to see it.

Joe Rogan 13:11 There's a really dumb theory that was being bounced around a few years ago, it was really hilarious, about how, uh, we wiped out... We, uh, assumed that Neanderthals, because we don't have any soft tissue samples, we assumed that Neanderthals looked similar to humans. But because of the very different shape of their skull, this guy had, instead of giving them European-looking white skin, turned them into a gorilla, turned them into a, a giant muscle-bound gorilla that preyed on people. And this was like... I, I, I believe this guy was an actually, is actually was a professor. And it seemed almost like a goof at first. Do you remember this, Jamie? We pulled this up a few times. The, uh, like, killer Neanderthal theory, I think you call it, but-

Steven Rinella 13:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:54 ... it was, he had drawn this thing, black like a gorilla with, like, giant muscles all over the place and these big crazy eyes, and that, painting Neanderthals as a predator of humans, and that's why we wiped them out.

Steven Rinella 14:08 Yeah, yeah. The, the, the, my, my limitations as, uh... Let's see. I, I was gonna say my limitations as an, as an anthropologist, and I'm certainly not an anthropologist at all, I'm just a dude who's interested in it. But one of my limitations is I'll hear theories floated, okay? And I don't follow them long enough to see which ones have any traction.

Joe Rogan 14:29 Right.

Steven Rinella 14:30 I'll just read about them, and, and I don't, I don't take it as gospel, but I'll read about it, and I'll be like, "That's interesting," and it'll sort of like shape my understanding of it. But then I don't keep track of it. Like, I, I try to really follow the story of, like, the peopling of the Americas. So when it comes to, to the human history of the Western Hemisphere, I sort of follow, and, like, ideas will get floated and I'll track the idea to see where it lands in terms of scholarly consensus. But on other stuff, like with, with Neanderthals, I'm always a sucker for a Neanderthal story, but I don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish.

Joe Rogan 15:07 Hmm. Yeah, it's a weird one.

Steven Rinella 15:09 You know, it's, uh, it, it takes time to-

Joe Rogan 15:12 There it is.

Steven Rinella 15:12 It takes time to follow this stuff.

Joe Rogan 15:14 Go, go to that other picture. That's what it is, them- Oh. ... them and, and us. Yeah. But look at some of his, some of his images. Look at that image that he has on the cover of the book. Like, there's the idea.

Steven Rinella 15:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:25 But there's some way better ones. There's some way better images- I'll look up that. ... what they drew of, uh, full body ones. They had, uh, d-... Is it in the article? This was a link to the actual- Just- ... website from a different article. Just go, go to that, and then go to images 'cause, uh, there was some really bizarre fucking... Yeah, there it is, upper left-hand corner. It's this one? This is what this guy-

Steven Rinella 15:48 Yeah, well that thing-

Joe Rogan 15:49 ... thought Neanderthals looked like.

Steven Rinella 15:49 ... whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art.

Joe Rogan 15:52 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 15:54 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:54 You don't think so?

Steven Rinella 15:55 No, he's making meat, man.

Joe Rogan 15:59 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 15:59 Come on.

Joe Rogan 16:00 Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty preposterous. But Neanderthals didn't have fangs like that-

Steven Rinella 16:06 No.

Joe Rogan 16:06 ... neither, did they?

Steven Rinella 16:07 No.

Joe Rogan 16:08 What is that? Is he morphing- Yeah. ... a Neanderthal into a gorilla? Is that what he's trying to do? That's a monkey down here and it's like-

Steven Rinella 16:13 Oh, that's a... Oh, I got you.

Joe Rogan 16:14 Okay, monkey, gorilla, Neanderthal. Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah. But yeah, but like how it's got its snarling with its fucking vegetable-eating teeth. Anyway, it's, it's, uh... And then there's the... Do we even know what those Denisovans, Des-... How do you say that word? The one from Russia?

Steven Rinella 16:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:32 They, they don't have any idea what they looked like, right?

Steven Rinella 16:34 No, I don't think so.

Joe Rogan 16:34 They looked like some pinky bones and shit.

Steven Rinella 16:36 Yeah. Uh, yeah, that, that one's not... That one I don't know.

Joe Rogan 16:39 Hey, man, your cookbook is fucking fantastic. It's really good.

Steven Rinella 16:43 (sighs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:44 You put a lot of goddamn work into that thing, huh?

Steven Rinella 16:46 We started collecting images four years ago.

Joe Rogan 16:48 You could tell. It's really good.

Steven Rinella 16:51 'Cause I didn't want it to look like, um... Was it boring, you talking about Neanderthals?

Joe Rogan 16:56 No.

Steven Rinella 16:56 I'm out of stuff to say about them anyway.

Joe Rogan 16:58 No. Uh, I could go on for days.

Steven Rinella 16:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 16:59 That's the problem. (laughs) I'm trying to change gears.

Steven Rinella 17:01 We could spend days talking about things we're not quite sure about.

Joe Rogan 17:04 Yeah, exactly. That's-

Steven Rinella 17:04 I heard.

Joe Rogan 17:05 That's what I do for a living. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 17:07 So... (laughs) Well, I wa- I wanna get back to the cookbook real quick, but, you know, what's funny is, uh, um, how many... (laughs) You probably don't know this, but how many people in the wildlife world listen to your show?

Joe Rogan 17:22 And get angry? (laughs)

Steven Rinella 17:23 I hear about it 'cause I'm like a conduit. I'm like a c- I'm like-

Joe Rogan 17:26 Tell Joe that that's not how it works.

Steven Rinella 17:28 I'm like a conduit where, um, I'm oftentimes getting frantic text messages, as though I would be able to, um, jump in and, you know, clarify, like, how a porcupine quill works or, you know. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:43 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 17:44 ... yeah, it's, it's really funny how many people I hear from when, uh, when I-

Joe Rogan 17:47 Tell-

Steven Rinella 17:48 ... I can tell when you're on the... Uh, I know, like, when you're on the subject of wildlife because I start hearing about- (laughs)

Joe Rogan 17:53 Especially if we're baked. If there's marijuana in the room, we got a real issue.

Steven Rinella 17:55 Like, "That's not what antlers are for. He should really know." Um-

Joe Rogan 17:58 Well, who knows what antlers are for other than... Well, they're, they're from two things, right? F- They're for fighting and sexual selection, right?

Steven Rinella 18:04 Yeah. That's-

Joe Rogan 18:05 Does that agree?

Steven Rinella 18:05 ... two things that definitely make sense.

Joe Rogan 18:06 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 18:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:07 We've had 'em-

Steven Rinella 18:07 Battle in the... Like, a sexual display.

Joe Rogan 18:09 We got a bull in, uh, Utah this, uh, this year and, uh, when we were butchering it, th- one of the hindquarters had been punctured by an antler-

Steven Rinella 18:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:17 ... and it got infected. And, uh, when we cut into the hindquarter, just this bucket of pus-

Steven Rinella 18:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:24 ... came out. I mean, it was fucking nasty. We thought it was piss at first, like someone had actually punctured the bladder, and then we realized, when we got deep into it, that there was this, this giant ass... Uh, he had been assed, like literally right in the flank.

Steven Rinella 18:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:38 And it was just so fucking nasty.

Steven Rinella 18:40 You find really high pressure puss pockets in, like, in animals.

Joe Rogan 18:46 Yeah. All over his body, he had holes.

Steven Rinella 18:48 Yes.

Joe Rogan 18:48 Holes in his ribs. He had a big one in his face. He'd been jacked in the face.

Steven Rinella 18:53 I got a Sika deer last year who had lost his eye, completely gone. I mean, like, th- his eyeball had been punctured.

Joe Rogan 19:02 Oof.

Steven Rinella 19:03 And people were asking me, "Well, no wonder you got him." But I was like, "No, his good eye was facing me-"

Joe Rogan 19:08 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 19:08 ... on his line of approach.

Joe Rogan 19:10 Yeah, but he didn't know where you were.

Steven Rinella 19:11 His left-

Joe Rogan 19:11 De- depth perception is all off.

Steven Rinella 19:12 His left eye was facing me. But yeah, with the cookbook, so we started gathering pictures up for it years ago, um, because I wanted to have this, like, really complete idea of how to process everything. So, like, the book includes everything from how to process a bullfrog, you know, to a deer, to a pig, to mahi-mahi. And a problem I run into when I've done books is, I never wind up needing... I, I never wind up needing to, like, pad 'em in the end. I always wind up having, like, very painful cuts.

Joe Rogan 19:48 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 19:48 You know, when I did my book, uh, my book, American Buffalo, I remember I had to lose 100 pages, which was hard to do. When we did The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game, it came out at 700 pages.

Joe Rogan 20:01 Do you ever think of going back and putting those 100 pages back in or do you think it made sense to remove 'em?

Steven Rinella 20:06 No, in hindsight, it had to happen. It had to happen. That's... I- in terms of, like, the narrative stuff I've written, that's the, you know, the, the narrative nonfiction I've written, that's my favorite thing that I've done. And, uh, it, it had to happen, but it was painful. And we did the... When I did those guidebook, the guidebook series that came in at 700 pages and my publisher was, uh... My publisher was like, "You know, you just don't really make 700-page books." And so that's why we wound up doing another volume one and volume two, because I didn't want to get rid of any. But then in doing this, this cookbook, The Meat Eater Fish & Game Cookbook is what it's called, and putting this together, I think early on, we started to get a little bit kind of running a little bit wild about what was gonna fit, but then caught it earlier. But that was the first thing we did was started collecting the pictures because I think a lot of times you look at a book, an illustrated book, and it kinda smells like a photo shoot.

Joe Rogan 20:58 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 20:58 Do you know what I'm saying?

Joe Rogan 20:59 Yeah, yeah.

Steven Rinella 21:00 Where you can tell that they g- they sort of... How they got the images. And I didn't want it to feel like that. I wanted it to sort of feel, like, really representative of all... V- like so many different places and different experiences that are captured in here. And so we just started filming these process shots of how to walk stuff through, like everything, you know? How to, like, turn things... How to take an animal and make it into a variety of usable ingredients. And collecting all those took a long time, and then, and then actually, like, assembling it and putting it t- putting it together was more systematic once we had that underway. But I think it's c- ... Uh, I think it, like, it's cool looking though, you know?

Joe Rogan 21:41 No, it's great.

Steven Rinella 21:42 Like, the book in the end where it's kinda, like, half could almost pass as a coffee table book.

Joe Rogan 21:47 I agree.

Steven Rinella 21:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:48 Yeah, no, it really could. And I think it's a really valuable resource for people that hunt because i- it's just... I mean, there's only so many different ways you can cook backstraps, right? There's so many different ways you can, uh, put ground venison into spaghetti sauce, you know?

Steven Rinella 22:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:03 You're giving people such a wide variety of things to... And including your original books as well, a wide variety of things to... You know, to, to cook and ways to cook 'em. And I... That's one of the things I really enjoyed about your show, you know, um, and still do, but now that it's on Netflix, actually, I enjoy it even more. But that you do a lot of cooking on your show.

Steven Rinella 22:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:23 Like, that's, that's very rare in the, the hunting world, you know? You see these hunting shows, they're very one-dimensional, right? You see someone looking for the animal and then they finally get it and yay, everybody's happy, the end. But you, um, you spend a great deal of time breaking down animals and cooking a bunch of different things, including, like, marrow and shanks and unusual preparations. I think that's really important.

Steven Rinella 22:46 Yeah, that's, that's something that was, that was always there for me growing up. And hunting and fishing are very complicated and, and you do 'em for a bunch of reasons. I think that people, in explaining hunting to audiences or explaining hunting to people who are uninitiated, uninformed about it, maybe adversarial toward it, you sort of... You, you wind up grabbing these things that... You wind up grabbing these things that, um, that you think will resonate with them, right? Uh, I have a friend, Gregg Blaskowitz, who'd even worked on this research piece of taking justifications for hunting and finding test subjects who are skeptical of hunting and explaining various justifications to them and seeing which ones of those they find to be most impactful. So he's actually done research around w- when you take this great, like, th- these, this broad spectrum of reasons people do this...You know? And, and everyone has many of them as part of their story, right? And, and you, you run him by people. He sees these ones that they, that they really resonate, and which ones kind of move the needle in their perception of it. And it's a little bit surprising. There's some, there's some surprises in there of ones that you'd think would be, like, really impactful but in fact are not impactful at all, that people don't care about.

Joe Rogan 24:09 Like what?

Steven Rinella 24:09 Well, population control. People don't care. People... I, I think that people don't... The, the kind of people you're talking about, who are largely unfamiliar with it, but they're looking at it from the outside and they're skeptical of it, they have a hard... They, they don't buy it. I don't think that they're afraid of deer. Generally.

Joe Rogan 24:29 But, but people who live in high population areas, like, uh, I did a gig once in western Massachusetts. Well, yeah, it was in western Massachusetts, and I had to drive. Uh, I was coming from New York, and I had to drive through the most deer-infested place I've ever been to in my life.

Steven Rinella 24:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:46 It was completely insane. Like, when you're driving on the highway, you have to go 25, 30 miles an hour. Things are just jumping in front of your car every 15, 20 seconds. It was fucking nuts, man. And I would, would... I took this side road down to get to wherever the gig was, you know, and I, I'm just watching these animals jump in front of the car, like left and right. I'm like, these people that live here, these things are a goddamn nuisance. Like if this was your-

Steven Rinella 25:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:11 ... everyday reality, and you asked those people, you said, "Hey, um, what do you think about deer population control? We need to hunt to keep the population down," they'd be like, "Fuck yeah, you do."

Steven Rinella 25:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:20 "Yeah, you do."

Steven Rinella 25:21 I'm sure that... I'm, I'm... Yeah, I'm sure that there are, like, quite a lot of people that live in some of these areas that have a great abundance of deer that feel that way. But when he-

Joe Rogan 25:28 The general population.

Steven Rinella 25:29 Yeah, when he was looking at it with just general population thing, and it was full stop too. He didn't gi-... He didn't give a lot of... He didn't go in and give case scenarios and examples, right? It's just a question that you ask, and people... It didn't, like, immediately click with people.

Joe Rogan 25:44 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 25:44 Another thing that didn't immediately click with people, but it's extremely important to me, is issues around heritage and legacy, okay? So meaning that, um, my maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather w- were hunters. My father was a hunter. I was brought up hunting. Um, to a non-hunter, doesn't matter. Your grandparents and parents could have been involved in all kinds of bad shit. I don't think that that means you need to continue doing bad shit.

Joe Rogan 26:11 Right.

Steven Rinella 26:12 Um, one, it's very obvious, is people understand, people understand and respect the idea of food. Like, uh, like, y- your general population look and respect the idea of food. Now, to back up what I was getting at about you mentioned, like, that being a big element of the show, uh, it almost winds up being that it was, like, I was, like, fortunate or lucky or whatever that, that, that early in my career, I started focusing on talking about that aspect of it. But it wasn't something I just made up out of nowhere because it was a huge part of growing up, where, for whatever reason, I happened to be raised by a dad who was just really interested in cooking stuff and sharing it with people, you know? And if he... If you're driving down the road in June and you see a snapping turtle laying eggs on the side of the road that's come up out of a swamp and you need to find some sandy ground, and he finds it on the edge of a dirt road, and there it is laying eggs on the side of the dirt road, we were eating that turtle.

Joe Rogan 27:12 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 27:13 Right? And everything. We ate, you know, all kinds of fish, and we ate a lot of things that other people weren't interested in. We could go out and, and bring back our dad bullfrogs. He would love if we went and, out and got him frogs. We'd take our bows out at night using flashlights, which unbeknownst to me was illegal and remains illegal in the state where I was brought up.

Joe Rogan 27:31 Even for frogs?

Steven Rinella 27:32 To use artificial light for frogs, yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:34 Wow.

Steven Rinella 27:34 I had no i-... Dude, when I found that out later, no idea.

Joe Rogan 27:38 Wow.

Steven Rinella 27:39 Um, that, that you weren't supposed to do that. But we would do it, and we'd come in and bring them, and it was like a big thing, right, to bring our dad the frog legs, and he would cook them. He would cook and eat anything. And then he would do stuff where we would catch salmon when the salmon were running the rivers in October, and he would have people over, and we would have a salmon boil, you know? So I, I was raised around that stuff of, like, of celebrating wild game, having it be very social, having it be a way to connect.

Joe Rogan 28:04 Salmon boil?

Steven Rinella 28:05 Yeah, boiled fish. So you take... You're, you're lit-... You're just... You're literally cubing up salmon and pearl onions and little baby potatoes.

Joe Rogan 28:15 Oh, so you make them like a stew?

Steven Rinella 28:17 It's a fish boil. And then you drain it off, and you have drawn butter, and you drown-

Joe Rogan 28:21 Huh.

Steven Rinella 28:21 ... all that shit in drawn butter. It's good.

Joe Rogan 28:23 Sounds good.

Steven Rinella 28:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:25 But it doesn't sound like the best-

Steven Rinella 28:26 People do fish boils. People do fish boils, but it's not normal to do a salmon boil.

Joe Rogan 28:30 It seems like it's such a flavorful fish, you would lose some of that in the broth.

Steven Rinella 28:34 Yeah, for sure. But it's like when you, it's like when you have the pearl onions and the little baby potatoes and cubed up and you drown all that shit in butter, it's just like a thing people like.

Joe Rogan 28:42 So the taste is really good, but it's not necessarily the taste of salmon.

Steven Rinella 28:45 It isn't what... If you went to great... If you went to the Pacific Northwest and asked, like, a bunch of great chefs in the Pacific Northwest to list their five favorite salmon preparations, boiling them in a pot of water is (laughs) isn't gonna be on-

Joe Rogan 29:01 Right.

Steven Rinella 29:01 ... isn't gonna make their list.

Joe Rogan 29:02 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 29:03 But he... Like, we would do that, you know, and it would be a thing, and you'd invite people over to do it. So I kind of early on, like early on with all the things I enjoyed about hunting, um, like the food aspect was big for me and really informed all of the sort of conversations that I've had around it since. And so then in doing a show about hunting wasn't something I was gonna... It wasn't something that I was gonna lean out. But in all fairness, when I was growing up, I did a lot of fur trapping too and trapped muskrat, beaver, mink, all kinds of stuff. And, um, was doing that to sell the, to sell the furs. And I would use some of the meat, I would use some of the meat for bait. I'd sometimes sell meat to dog sled racers.

Joe Rogan 29:49 When did you realize that beaver were delicious?

Steven Rinella 29:51 Not till after. I, I think I ate ... No, I ate the first one when I was in ... The first one I ever ate when I was in community college.

Joe Rogan 29:58 I still tell people about the beaver that you cooked for us in Wisconsin and-

Steven Rinella 30:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:02 ... how good it is. And they look at you sideways. I'm like, "I'm telling you, man. It was like the most delicious pot roast I've ever had. It was fantastic."

Steven Rinella 30:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:09 It was really good.

Steven Rinella 30:10 There's even stories about early on with the, um ... When early explorers were in this country, they had a difficult time getting fish sometimes, and beaver were approved for the Lenten meal because they were aquatic.

Joe Rogan 30:25 Wow.

Steven Rinella 30:26 So on Fridays, when you had to have like ... When you were supposed to have your meat-free day, you were allowed to eat beaver meat because they were a water animal. It was a very popular food item. Do you follow what I'm saying?

Joe Rogan 30:36 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Yeah.

Steven Rinella 30:38 The first o- w- ... The first ones we ate, I had started reading about. I'd always read narratives, stories about the mountain men. Um, meaning like ... When I say mountain man, like a very specific thing, like a, you know, a, a, a rocky mountain beaver trapper who was sandwiched between... who was sandwiched in time between the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the collapse of the beaver market in the 1840s. So like, it's like a very, like finite period of time is what a mountain man was.

Joe Rogan 31:08 Explain to people how big the beaver market is, 'cause this is gonna blow people's minds.

Steven Rinella 31:14 Well, America's first, you know ... Astor, John Jacob Astor, like the beaver market made America's first millionaires. His fortunes came from being a beaver trader.

Joe Rogan 31:24 The m- The richest men in the country, their money came from beavers?

Steven Rinella 31:28 Yeah. And he was in on the business end of it, he wasn't in on the trapping end of it.

Joe Rogan 31:32 Right. He was in on the hats, right?

Steven Rinella 31:33 But the, the, the fur companies. Yeah, the big fur companies.

Joe Rogan 31:35 Well, it was hats and-

Steven Rinella 31:36 When we bought ... Think about like this, how big it was. For us to do the Louisiana Purchase and to buy that chunk of land ... Uh, when Lewis and Clark came out, part of their mandate was to suss out the potential for the trade in beaver hides.

Joe Rogan 31:56 Wow.

Steven Rinella 31:57 It'd be like buying something now. You'd want to know about oil and gas, right?

Joe Rogan 32:00 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 32:00 You wanna know, like, can we justify this through oil and gas? They were looking to justify it through trade in beaver hides. Now, also, there was also language about that they might find out about whether wooly mammoths were existing out there as well, so there was, like, some confusion about what was going on.

Joe Rogan 32:14 Wow. They really thought that wooly mammoths were still alive?

Steven Rinella 32:17 Jefferson was interested in that stuff 'cause he had, he had been to some areas. Uh, he had some familiarity and been to some areas with these large bones, and he was puzzled about them. He was wondering if this wasn't some ... If it maybe, in fact, was not, uh, an extinct species, but was somehow living in the American West still.

Joe Rogan 32:33 How hard is it to wrap-

Steven Rinella 32:34 People ... Historians, like people ... Not historians.

Joe Rogan 32:37 (coughs)

Steven Rinella 32:37 Popular historians really love to make a big deal out of that 'cause it's so weird, but it wasn't like, "Hey, let's buy the ... Let's do the Louisiana Purchase transaction because of the possibility of locating mammoths." I think it was, like, an idea that was floated around. People see it, and they ... Uh, they, th- ... S- people such as me see it and perhaps overemphasize what it meant, but it was an idea that was out there. The beaver trade stuff was certainly a big factor. Another thing I was reading about recently that I should point out to your, to your, uh ... That you (sighs) might think is interesting is that we ha- ... Uh, people have this idea of Lewis and Clark going into this unspoiled, uncontacted landscape. I was recently reading a piece by a historian who was talking about at the time Lewis and Clark headed out into the Great Plains, there were Native Americans living on the Great Plains who had been to Europe and met the King of France and returned back to the Great Plains.

Joe Rogan 33:32 Whoa. What year?

Steven Rinella 33:35 They, they went out in the early 1800s, so they were out in 1804.

Joe Rogan 33:41 Wow.

Steven Rinella 33:43 Y- you gotta ... If you imagine the time, from the time, um, in the 1500s, when the Spanish, right, were poking around and come ... Like, Coronado, right, coming up from Mexico into the Great Plains, Cabeza de Vaca being shipwrecked along the Gulf Coast and people pushing up into these areas. That was hundreds of years prior. Like, the distance that separates ... Imagine the distance that separated Lewis and Clark from the first Europeans who were doing activities in and around the Great Plains is like the distance in time that separates us from Lewis and Clark.

Joe Rogan 34:25 More so, right?

Steven Rinella 34:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:27 It's the distance in time that separates us from the Declaration of Independence.

Steven Rinella 34:31 It was, like, a long history of people messing around.

Joe Rogan 34:33 That's crazy.

Steven Rinella 34:33 However ... So, yeah, but think about it too. Like, Lewis and Clark were encountering people who had horses, right?

Joe Rogan 34:38 Right. They had to get them.

Steven Rinella 34:39 And those horses had been ... Yeah. Those horses had been traded up. So, that's just a, a side note of this idea of eating beavers. So-

Joe Rogan 34:45 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 34:46 I got ... From reading about the mountain men, I got interested in this idea. 'Cause you always see, like ... Any time you're reading about mountain men, you're always gonna find the part where the author talks about how much mountain men liked beaver tail. Um, and the first people that tried eating beaver tail, and this was around when I was in ... Uh, I was, I was in community college at the time. And, uh, my brothers, I remember, stuck a beaver tail in the oven for a while and cooked it. And they reported back to me that, like, whatever it is they're talking about, uh, isn't that.

Joe Rogan 35:16 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 35:17 Like, there must be some other explanation.

Joe Rogan 35:19 Didn't we eat beaver tail?

Steven Rinella 35:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:21 Yeah. We ate it in Wisconsin.

Steven Rinella 35:22 Yeah. We have a r- ... There's a, there's a how to ... Like, there's, like, pictures and an explanation of how to prepare, how to actually prepare beaver tail mountain-man style in The Meat Eater Fish And Game Cookbook. Um-

Joe Rogan 35:33 It wasn't bad.

Steven Rinella 35:34 No.

Joe Rogan 35:34 It was just bland.

Steven Rinella 35:36 It's just fat. It's fat.

Joe Rogan 35:37 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 35:37 So, after that, we started thinking that when they say the mountain men liked beaver tail, we thought it must have meant they liked rump. Basically, like, the hindquarters.

Joe Rogan 35:46 Oh.

Steven Rinella 35:46 So we started ... When we'd ... When I would catch beavers, um, I'd be careful when skinning them to not get the castor.... the, the beavers have two large glands on the inside of their legs. They're, like, tucked in their, what looks like ... If you lay a beaver on its back, tucked kind of on either side of its, of, of its ... Like, if it's a male, like, tucked to either side of its penis or either side of its cloaca, you'll, you'll see a, uh -- not cloaca, but, like, vent -- you'll see these, these glands that are the size of ... I don't know. If you make like a ... If you take your index finger and your thumb and make a circle, there's, like, a gland on each side called a castor gland. There's an oil gland in there. They used to use it for perfume. It still has value today. It's used for a wide variety of things. It smells beautiful. If you're ever walking on a stream bank and you smell, like, a strange perfume smell, it's usually beaver castor.

Joe Rogan 36:31 Wow.

Steven Rinella 36:31 Um, smells great, tastes like shit. Tastes like you're eating ... Like you rubbed roses or something all over your food. So, started figuring out, like, to, to skin them and be very careful not to get the castor on your knife or get the castor on your hands. And then we would just take the meat and put it in Crock-Pots with potatoes and onions and stuff, and just cook 'em down in a Crock-Pot till you could pick 'em. And it was like roast beef. So then I started eating that, but I still ... Then later, I realized that- they- they read other accounts of how people prepared beaver tail. And if you take the tail, like, the scaly-ass tail ... And it really should be from a fall beaver, 'cause the tail will be twice as thick in the fall than it is in the spring. They're emaciated in the spring. Um, take the tail and just skewer it on a stick and put it next to a fire where the skin starts to bubble and boil away. And pretty soon, you can just peel all that skin away, and what's hiding under there is ... The, the, the best equivalent, like ... The best equivalent or point of comparison that I can think of would be this. I- it's like if you had a really ... Like, imagine you're eating a grass-fed steak, right, but still has that fatty gristle on it. It's just made up of that gristle. Like, what a lot of people trim away from a steak and not eat, that's what's inside that beaver tail. But people eat ... The, the ... These individuals that were doing this were fat-starved-

Joe Rogan 37:55 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 37:55 ... eating such lean meat all the time. I think they loved it because here's, like, a chunk of fat.

Joe Rogan 38:00 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 38:02 And they had ready access to it because they were catching them to make a living. And if you're just eating the meat, there's no fat on the meat, and so they would complement it with just eating the beaver tail fat. And I'll often tell people about it, and I even gave some to ... Like, there's, like, a, a culinary arts institute, and I gave some chefs that stuff. And everyone that eats it points out that it's not that it tastes so fantastic, but it's just, like, really interesting to try and eat it, the fat from the tail. And it's like, you got to put yourself in position. You've probably been in this too, where if you're ... You know, especially if you're out hunting and eating, you know, like, freeze-dried food or not eating great, and you're just exerting yourself all day, all the time, how you're d- what you want to eat changes a lot.

Joe Rogan 38:43 Yeah. And yeah, the level of appetite you have is off the charts.

Steven Rinella 38:48 Yeah. And so just, like, to eat-

Joe Rogan 38:49 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 38:49 ... like, a big slab of fat-

Joe Rogan 38:51 You'd be very excited about that.

Steven Rinella 38:51 ... was appealing to people.

Joe Rogan 38:52 Yeah. Yeah, your, your body starts craving things it absolutely needs. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense, in m- in particularly when you think about these people that, that are hiking across the West, traveling massive amounts of distance, and, you know, probably very physically strenuous-

Steven Rinella 39:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:08 ... dragging all their shit with them. And they get a- across some big-ass piece of fat from a tail, it's probably a huge treat.

Steven Rinella 39:15 Yeah. And then our, our understanding of people ... Like, we used to have this idea of like, especially of early Native Americans as like they're, like, just eating, you know, nothing but m- mammoth meat all the time. Like, as our understanding of people grows, we see, like, how much they were utilizing plant resources and probably had, like, pretty plant-rich diets. But with the ... When, when ... With the equestrian bison hunters on the Great Plains, those guys were, like ... They weren't cultivating. Like, at that era, like, especially the era when Lewis and Clark came in, these people were not cultivating crops. A lot of the people who had been farming along the Mississippi and Missouri valleys, once they got horses, they just gave up on that shit and just started roaming the landscape eating meat. And the mountain men certainly weren't doing that. And they were just eating, like ... You're eating meat 365 days out of the year. And you see that they really, probably to make up for a lot of nutrient deficiencies, ate shitloads of organs.

Joe Rogan 40:14 Your guy, the one-

Steven Rinella 40:15 Putting gall, putting gall on your food.

Joe Rogan 40:17 Gall bladder.

Steven Rinella 40:18 Squeezing, taking the gall-

Joe Rogan 40:20 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 40:20 B- the, yeah, putting, squeezing the bile from gall bladder on your food.

Joe Rogan 40:26 You did that once.

Steven Rinella 40:27 Yeah, it's horrific.

Joe Rogan 40:28 Yeah, what did-

Steven Rinella 40:28 It's like putting a nine-volt battery on your tongue.

Joe Rogan 40:31 And you think they were doing it just because they were just nutrient-starved?

Steven Rinella 40:34 Yeah. It seems like they, they would just eat ... They put a high emphasis on eating just, like, all these, like, just organ meats.

Joe Rogan 40:39 Blood meat makes sense.

Steven Rinella 40:40 Blood, organ meats, milk from, milk from mammary glands.

Joe Rogan 40:44 Really?

Steven Rinella 40:44 Yeah, 'cause you can't just eat that lean-ass game meat every day.

Joe Rogan 40:47 Right. You were talking to a guy from Alaska. What's that guy's name? Buck something?

Steven Rinella 40:51 Buck Boden.

Joe Rogan 40:52 Buck Boden.

Steven Rinella 40:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:53 Yeah, on your show. And, uh, he was talking about, um, you know, essentially, he was subsistence hunting in, in certain stages.

Steven Rinella 41:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:01 And, you know, he ate nothing but moose.

Steven Rinella 41:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:04 Like, he ate ... Shot a moose and ate nothing but that moose for months.

Steven Rinella 41:07 And picking wolverine meat off the skulls and stuff.

Joe Rogan 41:10 Yeah, like, whoa.

Steven Rinella 41:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:12 You know, and you're ... You know, so fucking modern-day human who's alive right now talking about only surviving on the leanest of lean meat.

Steven Rinella 41:21 Yep. Again-

Joe Rogan 41:22 That guy had to be skinny as fuck when that was all over.

Steven Rinella 41:24 Yeah, and I wouldn't mess with that guy. He's tough as shit, too, you know?

Joe Rogan 41:28 I bet. (laughs) Yeah.

Steven Rinella 41:28 He, he lived a life, he lived a life that seems like ... He had parts of his life that seem like he was 100 years.

Joe Rogan 41:34 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 41:35 Could have occurred 100 years earlier.

Joe Rogan 41:36 He, uh ... The, the episode of the podcast is, like, You're a Good Man, Buck. Is that what it's called?

Steven Rinella 41:40 You're a Cool Dude, Buck.

Joe Rogan 41:41 You're a Cool Dude, Buck.

Steven Rinella 41:42 Which is what, what a buddy of mine says to him-

Joe Rogan 41:44 Uh-huh. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 41:44 ... in the, in the show, you know?

Joe Rogan 41:45 (laughs) He's a cool dude. It's, it's a, a treat to get a chance to talk to a guy that you think probably never even fucking heard of a podcast, uh, and, and certainly comes from a completely different era.

Steven Rinella 41:57 Yeah. The, the reason he was living on ... Had to live off the land is an interesting story where-... he was working for... He was just getting in the guiding world, so guiding moose hunters. And they were wanting to find some ways to be able to hunt some very remote areas, and they hidden us the idea that they would just bring horses in. Because if you don't have landing strips and stuff, it's just really hard to operate out of these areas.

Joe Rogan 42:17 (coughs)

Steven Rinella 42:17 So they thought, "Well, if we can get horses in there, we'll have them in there. We'll hunt for the season, then we'll ride the horses out." But getting the horses in there was so difficult and took far longer, and the route they wanted to use was n- impassable. By the time they got the horses in there, they realized that they're never gonna get these horses back out of here, and they realized that someone needs to stay over winter to take care of the horses, and he just volunteered to do it. So he started spending... They would go in and hunt in September, and then he would just start hanging out and just stay there to agree to care for the horses until spring.

Joe Rogan 42:56 (exhales)

Steven Rinella 42:56 So that's how he found himself living out by himself. And they would bring some food in, but it would be never enough and he would be eating, you know, wolverine, beaver, moose-

Joe Rogan 43:05 Wow.

Steven Rinella 43:05 ... whatever he could come up with. But he was just, um... He was just open to it and, and didn't care, you know, and is really comfortable with solitude. When I spend time with him, he's very gracious, but, um, when you spend time with him, you see him just engage in conversation. Like you see a, a, a, a, a, a, a sort of weariness kick in-

Joe Rogan 43:31 Ah.

Steven Rinella 43:32 ... where you're talking to someone who's very comfortable going months without human interaction.

Joe Rogan 43:38 Right. So him talking to people is like, "Okay, that's enough."

Steven Rinella 43:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:41 "Let me get the fuck outta here."

Steven Rinella 43:42 And all of a sudden you realize, like when I've stayed at his place, his cabin, um, he's got, he's got a remote cabin still. When I stayed out there, he kinda like will sort of drift off and vanish for good spells of time (laughs) , you know?

Joe Rogan 43:52 Oh, sure.

Steven Rinella 43:53 Even when he's, even when he's like entertaining, you know?

Joe Rogan 43:55 And he sells bowls, like wooden bowls for a living?

Steven Rinella 43:58 Well, it's one of the things that he does, uh-

Joe Rogan 44:01 Do you have one of those bowls?

Steven Rinella 44:02 I have one in my home, yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:04 I need to get one of those bowls.

Steven Rinella 44:05 It's a birch, but yeah, it's like a, you know, it's a-

Joe Rogan 44:07 Like a salad bowl?

Steven Rinella 44:08 Sort of like a growth on the side of a birch tree that you cut off with a chainsaw and hollow out. Yeah, they call them birch, you know, birch bark or burl bowls.

Joe Rogan 44:17 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 44:17 You know? I have a beautiful one. And he sells them. They go into tourist shops. I think it's a shame.

Joe Rogan 44:23 That they go into tourist shops?

Steven Rinella 44:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:24 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 44:25 I think he should be... It should be all be direct to consumer-

Joe Rogan 44:27 Well-

Steven Rinella 44:28 ... from him.

Joe Rogan 44:28 ... why don't you hook it up? Get some of them-

Steven Rinella 44:30 I'll tell you about-

Joe Rogan 44:30 ... 0.0 people on the case.

Steven Rinella 44:32 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:32 Get some of your meat, meat-eater folks.

Steven Rinella 44:34 Yeah. He had a great many that he lost in a fire, too.

Joe Rogan 44:37 Yeah. That was-

Steven Rinella 44:38 Um-

Joe Rogan 44:38 That was a sad story.

Steven Rinella 44:39 But besides... Yeah, so he still guides and, um, does that and, and makes his, uh, you know, takes those burls and makes bowls out of them.

Joe Rogan 44:47 Just talking to a guy like that, listening to you talk to a guy like that is so fascinating because he lives a life that I can barely comprehend.

Steven Rinella 44:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:54 Like it just, everything about it from... And just to think that what, what he does is almost impossible to comprehend. Now think about Lewis and Clark making their way across the country and not really knowing what was out there.

Steven Rinella 45:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:09 Really not knowing, like c- guessing, having some, you know, people gave some reports. "This is what we saw here. This is what we saw there." They didn't even have a good account of all the different animals.

Steven Rinella 45:19 No. And they, they had wanderlust. And, and that's the thing, we were talking about at this point the other day because we were talking about like what people... Now you'll hear people say like, "Oh, he's a real mountain man," you know? And oftentimes when people hear that they imagine this like old hermit-

Joe Rogan 45:33 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 45:33 ... you know, who's like living in his cabin, um, him being a mountain man. But if you think about what the mountain men were, they were, for the time, the most well-traveled people, right? And the least xenophobic people-

Joe Rogan 45:48 Right.

Steven Rinella 45:49 ... alive. The equivalent today, to be a mountain man today, the equivalent would be the... I think you'd have to go to, um, Brazil and ascend the Amazon and follow tributary after tributary and get into like the borderlands around Venezuela and then go in and, um, despite the language barrier, you'd have to go in and travel amongst and live amongst people who, um, tribes who had not had a lot of outside contact, but had a, a, a familiarity, had a familiarity with outside peoples. And you'd live their foods, y- you'd eat their foods and live with them and, and take their ways that they dress themselves and adopt it as your own. The kind of guy that would do that is not the kind of guy we're talking about nowadays when we talk about, "He's a real mountain man."

Joe Rogan 46:50 Right. We're talking about reality show people.

Steven Rinella 46:52 Yeah, for-

Joe Rogan 46:52 That's what that people talk about now.

Steven Rinella 46:54 But these people were like insatiably curious explorers. They're the people now that y- yeah, the people that do like go to really crazy war zones or like decide to go backpack up in the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan, you know, just to see what happens. Um, yeah, d- very different kinds of people.

Joe Rogan 47:16 Your episodes that you did, what, where, where was that in, uh, with the, uh, the most recent series, um, where you're s- uh, bow fishing with these people down-

Steven Rinella 47:27 Yeah, in, in Guyana, yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:28 In Guyana, yeah. That's a... That's gotta be a trip. How long were you down there for?

Steven Rinella 47:34 Oh, l- you know, long weeks.

Joe Rogan 47:36 A couple of weeks?

Steven Rinella 47:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:37 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 47:37 Yeah. I mean, but there's a lot of travel. There's a lot of like stuff needs to happen to get out on the river.

Joe Rogan 47:41 When you're around these people and they're all walking around barefoot and they're making cassava, which we, we talked about the other day, that is, could, could easily kill you if you do it wrong.

Steven Rinella 47:51 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:51 The water has all this cyanide in it. Like, you're, you're about as close as you can get to that kind of environment, right?

Steven Rinella 48:00 Yeah. What you're s- Yeah. In a situation like that, you're with people who are very familiar with, like, Western culture.

Joe Rogan 48:05 Very familiar with the modern world-

Steven Rinella 48:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:07 Like a great awareness of it.

Steven Rinella 48:08 But-... like, when the- when the sort of (laughs) rubber meets the road of daily existence, they're still really connected to life patterns and- and skill sets that were ... that- that their grandparents used-

Joe Rogan 48:23 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 48:23 ... and still fishing, like, in very similar ways, right? So where you might've had, when you were a boy ... even if someone now is in their 30s, when they were a boy, they probably used a 12-pound handmade wooden paddle, and maybe now they have a different paddle. Or maybe somehow they've come into, you know, a- a- a plastic paddle, say, and they use that for their boat. Or they have a- they still have a dugout canoe, but they also have an aluminum boat. So there's major differences. But just the general sort of approach and the fact that you're deriving all of your protein from the river and that you hunt and fish 250, 300 days a year, um, in the places where your ancestors have always done it, you're still- y- you're still getting this, like, really beautiful glimpse at how people lived, even though they've had enormous changes in their own lifetime and are very much modern, you know, very modern. But you can still, like, glimpse it more. You don't ... I don't think you really get that as much ... You don't get that as much here. You know, hunting is- is ancestral, right? There's this- the- this kind of continuation that goes on. But when Europeans came here, when- when Europeans came to the New World, they weren't coming in as hunters, right? E- e- e- e- even if you go look at, like, Daniel Boone's family, Daniel Boone's family came from England. They- they didn't come here as hunters because you couldn't ... Like, the- the peasantry, you couldn't hunt there. They came here and learned hunting. So hunting in America, for Euro-Americans, hunting in America is like an invention. It's a thing that people kind of got, learned, and took from the Indians. So it doesn't have, um ... It doesn't have that, like, that deep, deep thread that you'd find with indigenous communities, where there's this continuation that's gone on, um, for forever unbroken, but on this continent, unbroken for, whatever, 15, 16 ... whatever the fashionable number is, thousands of years. Right? And so it's like our understanding is just different 'cause our ... Like, my ancestors came here and, like, got into it. It- it wasn't a c- it wasn't a cultural continuation for them.

Joe Rogan 50:41 Right.

Steven Rinella 50:41 And then you ... When you ... And you look at, like, for- for food and wild game, an interesting thing is my, uh, my use and understanding of wild game is really influenced by, like, contemporary food, right? Like m- ... Like, restaurant food, things that chefs do. Like, how do you take wild game and do these, like, cool, exciting, modern, innovative kinds of things with- with wild game and cook it? You go talk to, like, a dude, even a dude like Buck or particularly people in, you know ... people in South America who ha- who've hunted for more of a, like, a subsistence, literally subsistence purposes, their whole attitude's different about it. People ... Like, people in South America will eat the ... like, the- the Tsimane or the Macushi. It's like they'll eat the same thing every day for lunch, every day. Boiled fish with a dried pepper on it and then a grain made from cassava.

Joe Rogan 51:41 Boiled as well? Well, why-

Steven Rinella 51:42 I shouldn't say a grain, but, like, a dish made from cassava.

Joe Rogan 51:44 Why are they boiling it? Why don't- why don't they just grill it?

Steven Rinella 51:47 They ... Well, they- they sometimes do, but for lunch, it's like you'd take leftover ... You might ... You'd probably, like, smoke with ... Like, what they would have called barbecue fish, where you bake a big rack. You have a fire, make a big rack high above it, it kicks off a bunch of smoke. You split fish, salt them, and lay them on that rack, and smoke them, dry them out. And then you take that fish and break it apart and pour river water over cassava, um, and then put fish in there with river water and kind of stir it up. Or you just take fish and throw it in a pot and boil it and put that on there. But to eat that same thing every day, and then you come and talk about, uh ... There's no recipe, right? There's no, like, written preparation.

Joe Rogan 52:27 Right.

Steven Rinella 52:27 And then you come and talk about, like, wild game cooking, as I understand it, where you make a book and it's got 100 different recipes in it and all these ways to approach stuff. It's just like it's- it's very particular to us. Like, other people aren't really perceiving it that way. Like, they don't use wild game in recipes. They have like a ... There's like, "Here's how you cook this." And we don't really deviate from cooking it this way, where it's like fish on a rack over the fire or fish in a pot of water and very limited diet.

Joe Rogan 52:59 Does it weird you out when you're around people like that? Because you have options, right? You can- you can eat any way you like. You can go to a restaurant, you get a burger from fast food.

Steven Rinella 53:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:09 You choose to go hunting. With these people, it's literally how they survive.

Steven Rinella 53:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 53:14 And they-

Steven Rinella 53:14 There's no- there's no option for them.

Joe Rogan 53:15 There's no options, and they've been doing it that way forever. Like, is it ... Do you feel like a- a weird recreational sort of person around them? Like, uh, is it ... does it feel strange?

Steven Rinella 53:26 That's a great question, man. Um, no. There- there's definitely ... There's definitely, like, an- an envious part to how, like, to live that deliberately. Like, I'm- I'm a little bit envious of it, but really, the thing that I feel most is I feel, um, m- more than separated. I- I- I s- tend to feel more the areas in which I'd be, like, aligned.

Joe Rogan 53:55 Mm.

Steven Rinella 53:55 You know?

Joe Rogan 53:56 Right.

Steven Rinella 53:56 Where I, like, appreciate the perspective and I appreciate the skill set, but never feeling, um ... yeah, never feeling, like- like, uh, bashful or ashamed or something that- that this would be something that I would, like, choose to engage in, and this is something that they were-

Joe Rogan 54:12 Right.

Steven Rinella 54:12 ... engaged in. And I think that one of the things that helps make it that way is how much they love to do it.... right, that when you go out, like the infectious excitement of heading out in the morning, the fact that they still feel it. Like, they're as giddy as anybody about going out and doing it, like very excited to go out and do it. It is not like going out to get your, like, to get your, to check your mailbox.

Joe Rogan 54:38 My, uh, my youngest daughter has become enamored with fishing.

Steven Rinella 54:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 54:41 And I love it 'cause, uh, I get to, whenever we go on trips, I take her fishing. She fucking loves it, man. And, uh, we were in Florida and we were gonna get to go bass fishing. I set it up, had a guy who was gonna take us out. I woke her up, five o'clock in the morning in the hotel. I'm carrying her. She's stiff as a board 'cause she just woke up. She's like, "I'm so excited."

Steven Rinella 55:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:02 She was so exci- she wasn't like, "Daddy, I'm tired. Can we just go back to bed?" No, it was dark out, five in the morning. She's just going, "I'm so excited."

Steven Rinella 55:10 Did she wind up having fun?

Joe Rogan 55:11 She caught a six-pound bass.

Steven Rinella 55:12 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 55:13 Then she's hooked.

Steven Rinella 55:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:14 I mean, she caught quite a few bass. It was a great lake in, uh, in Florida. In Florida, obviously, a lot of great bass fishing there. But we caught a ton of largemouth bass. And she caught a fat boy. It was like a six-pounder. She was-

Steven Rinella 55:26 She was hooked.

Joe Rogan 55:26 ... freaking it. It bit her finger. She was showing everybody, "Look, it bit my finger."

Steven Rinella 55:30 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:30 She was so excited. She fucking loves fishing. But that feeling in the morning when yo- I'm looking at her little face and, like, we're on the water, like, it's a genetic thing. It seems like it's just in the DNA.

Steven Rinella 55:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:42 The fishing is, it's not like, "Hey, we're gonna go play soccer," which she likes too, but there's not that kind of excitement. No, there's a like, "Oh, this is gonna be so fun." There's like, it's triggering something that is, it's deep inside, uh, human beings.

Steven Rinella 55:59 I see it, and I see it in, uh, I see it in varying degrees in, in different people. Like some kids seem to come out of the box with more of it.

Joe Rogan 56:09 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 56:10 You know?

Joe Rogan 56:11 Yeah, my own life-

Steven Rinella 56:11 I don't mean that as a euphemism.

Joe Rogan 56:12 No, my, my, my 10- (laughs)

Steven Rinella 56:14 Come out-

Joe Rogan 56:14 My 10-year-old daughter doesn't... She's like, "Yeah, we can go fishing." Like, she's gone fishing and caught stuff.

Steven Rinella 56:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:19 It's okay. It's okay.

Steven Rinella 56:21 When I, when, when I, we had a daughter, uh, my wife was adamant, you know, early on, as soon as she found out that it was gonna be a daughter, like, that, "You will not exclude our daughter in this world that you're in." And I was like, "Oh, of course not." You know? And I, and I don't, but, uh, having, in my mind, I don't feel like I've messed this up. I feel like I've put the same emphasis, right, on my... I have three kids, but my older two, um, the, the little one's just a little bit too little yet to really know what's going on. But the older two, I feel like I put the same emphasis on it. And my daughter just isn't demonstrating the same enthusiasm that her older brother does. And you tr- and you try to suss out, like, the nature-nurture question.

Joe Rogan 57:07 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 57:07 Because I feel like I'm doing the same inputs.

Joe Rogan 57:09 Right.

Steven Rinella 57:11 But I'm getting different results. And it leads you to wonder, um, you know, it's a very small sample size, but when I talk to other parents, like con- you know, parents who are parenting right now with young kids, I just keep encountering other dads who are having the same experience.

Joe Rogan 57:29 Hm.

Steven Rinella 57:30 And you r- i- it really leaves you to wonder s- sort of, like, what sort of, like, cultural influences are going on there where it's like the enthusiasms oftentimes among young girls are not as high-

Joe Rogan 57:44 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 57:44 ... as the enthusiasms among boys. And it's hard to unpack.

Joe Rogan 57:47 Is it cultural?

Steven Rinella 57:48 I don't know. It's hard to unpack everything.

Joe Rogan 57:49 Yeah, that's m- that's my question is like-

Steven Rinella 57:51 I'll never know. I, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 57:52 ... if you're kids' age. What's, how old are your kids?

Steven Rinella 57:54 Well, the two I'm talking about are eight and five.

Joe Rogan 57:57 Yeah, man, I don't know how much culture plays a part in that.

Steven Rinella 57:59 I know.

Joe Rogan 57:59 I really think that it's... And it's obviously, in my small sample group, an eight-year-old and a 10-year-old for the youngest kids, the, uh, the eight-year-old fucking loves it. They're both girls. The 10-year-old, she's like, "Whatever."

Steven Rinella 58:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:12 You know, if I try to wake her up to take her fishing, she'd be like, "Leave me alone."

Steven Rinella 58:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:15 "I'm going back to sleep."

Steven Rinella 58:17 I'm sure there are parents out there who, you know, I haven't met them yet. Maybe they're out there, where they have, like, a boy and a girl, and the girl's into it.

Joe Rogan 58:25 And the girl's super fired up and the boy's not, maybe it happens.

Steven Rinella 58:27 I guarantee you, I guarantee it's a-

Joe Rogan 58:28 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 58:28 There's, Jamie and I were just talking about this yesterday because I was watching this video of these, th- There's, uh, I wanna try to put this in a respectful way. Um, I think there, uh, and I'm sure you're aware of this, there's people that are in the hunting world, the outdoor industry, that I think are in it because it's a good avenue to get attention if you're like, a hot chick.

Joe Rogan 58:54 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 58:54 If you're a hot chick and y- you know, you wear pink and y- you go out and shoot things, you take all these grip and grins with deer and like, there's, you're gonna get a lot of likes.

Joe Rogan 59:03 Yeah, because it's, it's like, uh-

Steven Rinella 59:04 Sponsorships.

Joe Rogan 59:05 Imagine the, the, the male perspective on it- Yeah.

Steven Rinella 59:08 ... is like, here's the woman who has everything.

Joe Rogan 59:10 Exactly.

Steven Rinella 59:11 And she likes to hunt.

Joe Rogan 59:12 Yeah, she's hot.

Steven Rinella 59:13 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 59:13 And she likes to hunt. And, uh, there's quite a few of them. And it's, uh, I was telling Jamie, it's a weird world because part of me, I don't wanna be a sexist. I don't wanna look at these girls and then be... I don't, I don't look at a guy who hunts and who wants to be a part of the outdoor industry and go, "Oh, this guy is just doing this because he thinks this is his avenue for fame and success." I think, "Well, here's a guy who really likes to hunt and he realizes there's people like Steve Rinella and John Dudley out there and these famous hunters. Man, I wanna be a famous hunter. How do I do it? You know, how do I go... Well, I'm gonna just start taking Instagram pictures and say a lot of the same shit that they say and sort of, you know, put myself into the cultural norm." I, I don't think like that with girls 'cause-

Steven Rinella 59:59 You're like, "You just wanna have men like you."

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 Not all of them. Not all of them. A lot of them I think are super legit. A lot of them are s- But there's unquestionably this added element in that world. And it, with it, let's be super generous and say it's only 10% of them.

Steven Rinella 1:00:13 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:00:13 But for that 10%, I'm like, "Hmm." (sniffs)

Steven Rinella 1:00:17 I'm not-

Joe Rogan 1:00:17 "I smell a rat."

Steven Rinella 1:00:18 I'm not unaware of what you're talking about.

Joe Rogan 1:00:20 (laughs) I'm sure you're not.

Steven Rinella 1:00:21 Uh, no, I notice it. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:22 It's weird.

Steven Rinella 1:00:22 I even, yeah, I even had like a, yeah. I remember it was...Yeah, it is kinda like a, yeah, like a, like a, like a, like a sex pot kind of-

Joe Rogan 1:00:33 Yes.

Steven Rinella 1:00:33 ... huntress scene, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:00:34 Oh, yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:00:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:35 Super made up, full war paint, fake eyelashes, hot as fuck, skin-tight clothes, out there shooting shit, taking pictures. Yeah, it's weird. And then you go to their Instagram page and it's like, there's pictures of that, and then there's a lot of pictures with their butt up in the air where they're doing some strange exercise.

Steven Rinella 1:00:53 Getting ready for bow season.

Joe Rogan 1:00:54 Yeah, accentuating their butt. Like, that's weird. I don't do any of those exercises. (laughs)

Steven Rinella 1:00:59 I would really like to... Yeah, no, I would really like my, to... 'Cause I'm gonna continue leaning on my, uh, I'm gonna continue leaning on my daughter, uh, 'cause I would really like her... I'm gonna keep leaning on her until I feel like she's in the, at a age where she can legitimately say she doesn't wanna go.

Joe Rogan 1:01:17 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:01:18 'Cause right now, if I asked her every day, "Hey, you wanna go to school?" she'd be having a real delinquency problem. So you-

Joe Rogan 1:01:24 (laughs) Right.

Steven Rinella 1:01:24 You, you, you're like, you know, you really, like-

Joe Rogan 1:01:25 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:01:26 Uh, you make kids do stuff. I took her duck hunting a couple weekends ago. It was a cold morning and we get out there, and before it's even legal light, she's, like, felt terrible. She's laying there crying about how cold her feet are. If my boy was doing that, I would have a very different attitude about it-

Joe Rogan 1:01:47 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:01:48 ... than when she's crying.

Joe Rogan 1:01:50 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:01:50 Her crying 'cause she's cold, like, made me feel awful.

Joe Rogan 1:01:55 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:01:55 With my boy, I'd have been like, "Shh."

Joe Rogan 1:01:58 (laughs) Suck it up.

Steven Rinella 1:01:59 But with her, I'm like, "Oh, man."

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:02:01 "She's all cold now?"

Joe Rogan 1:02:03 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:02:04 And then it made, and, and so you really, there, there really is a difference. Yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a difference there. And it's not, you know, uh, the people that buy a hunting license in this country, 90% of the people that buy hunting, u- 90% are males.

Joe Rogan 1:02:19 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:02:19 Right? So one in 10 license holders is a woman.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 But then-

Steven Rinella 1:02:23 But then there's, there's more women than men in the, you know, slightly more men, women than men in the country. And there's a ton of ways of explaining it. We talked about it earlier with Neanderthals, where maybe Neanderthals didn't have these, like, divided roles. But in all the hunter, like, in hunter-gatherer cultures, it's very normal to see a division of labor here and to have, like, that men were out hunting and women were not. There's bunch of explanations for that, like people were tied to being home to care for small children and, you know, couldn't afford that risk, right?

Joe Rogan 1:02:53 Do some, do they vary? There, are there some women that go out with the hunting parties?

Steven Rinella 1:02:58 You know, if it is a, you know, the minute you say no, someone's gonna point out to some, right, variation, but-

Joe Rogan 1:03:06 In your experience. You've, you've done several of these trips to these remote jungles.

Steven Rinella 1:03:11 Oh, yeah, but that's just w- that's just such a small thing. I mean, you get a, rather than looking at personal experience, just like from kind of exploring the literature and reading about, you know, historic accounts and what people found and what people do, uh, it is very much the norm, it is very much the norm that hunting was, you know, patrilineal descent activity in all these cultures you go to, like the cult of the hunter is like a male sort of cult. But the factors that made it that way, okay, the sort of the, you, you have to assume it comes from some kind of practical factor, right? The factors that made it that way aren't there anymore. Um, and like I said, it's a difficult thing to unpack. If it winds up being that if I, I have two boys and one girl, if it winds up being that, uh, both boys become avid hunters and fishermen, and somehow my daughter does not, I'll probably view it as some bit of a personal failure, though I'll never know what really was going on. Like I said-

Joe Rogan 1:04:12 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:04:12 ... it's hard, it's hard to, like, unload it. I wish I could have 100 children, like 50 girls and 50 boys and have a bigger sample size.

Joe Rogan 1:04:18 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 1:04:19 (laughs) But I, you know, I do wonder about it. And what, what's funny too is there's no, like, uh, at our home, you know, our kids, like, our, our kids eat tons of wild game at our home to the point where they don't have any... You could give them anything to eat, they would eat it and it would not register to them as unusual. They've eaten everything, right? They've even eaten, like, breakfast sausage made out of fox and beaver meat. They've eaten-

Joe Rogan 1:04:48 Fox?

Steven Rinella 1:04:48 Yeah, they've eaten everything.

Joe Rogan 1:04:50 Wait a minute.

Steven Rinella 1:04:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:51 You eat fox?

Steven Rinella 1:04:52 I have. I made a batch of breakfast sausage 'cause I had a arctic fox one time and I made breakfast sausage out of it.

Joe Rogan 1:04:58 What was that like?

Steven Rinella 1:04:59 I just cut it in with beaver meat and a little bit of deer meat and a little bit of pork fat and my kids ate it and it had free r- winked, li- literally.

Joe Rogan 1:05:05 Did you try any of the fox on its own?

Steven Rinella 1:05:07 Nope, didn't try the fox on its own. I've eaten a ton of things, but I haven't eaten, I didn't eat just a straight old-

Joe Rogan 1:05:13 What possessed you to stuff that fox into that sausage?

Steven Rinella 1:05:15 I heard that they were good.

Joe Rogan 1:05:17 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:05:17 And I had a arctic fox and I wanted to get a thing made for my wife from it, so I had a, a hat, a arctic fox hat made for her, and then I retained the meat, and then we just ate the meat in breakfast sausage. And then, like, if I told them, you know, if they were to ask like what meat it is and I would say, "Oh, it's, you know, this, this, and this," it wouldn't-

Joe Rogan 1:05:37 Freak them out.

Steven Rinella 1:05:38 It wouldn't r- it wouldn't even, no, it wouldn't even register as like a, a thing that might seem unusual to some people.

Joe Rogan 1:05:44 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:05:45 So they eat squirrel, rabbit, all manner of stuff, right? They eat just anything. And so I know there's no element of, there's no influence like that with them. There's no influence of, "Ew, that's gross."

Joe Rogan 1:05:57 Right, right.

Steven Rinella 1:05:58 Or, "Ew, that's weird." You know?

Joe Rogan 1:06:00 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:06:00 The other day we were hunting, the other day we went out and we were hunting street pigeons, you know, and they'll eat pigeon meat and-

Joe Rogan 1:06:05 Where were you doing this?

Steven Rinella 1:06:06 In Montana.

Joe Rogan 1:06:08 Oh, okay.

Steven Rinella 1:06:08 Yeah. Uh, there's, like, a, a guy had a grain silo that was, like, infested with pigeons.

Joe Rogan 1:06:14 Folks don't know that, uh, many people listening to this, that pigeons were actually brought over here as food, and when you get, like, fancy squab on the menu, that's what a pigeon is.

Steven Rinella 1:06:24 Yeah, flightless pigeon. Pigeon that hasn't flown yet.

Joe Rogan 1:06:27 That's what a squab is?

Steven Rinella 1:06:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:28 So smaller and younger?

Steven Rinella 1:06:29 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 That's the idea?

Steven Rinella 1:06:30 Yeah, the meat's pinkish on, the meat's pinkish on the squab. If you wanna get squab, we used to go out and catch squabs where...We had a lo- we had, like, a little, almost like the equivalent of a little trapline where they would, uh, you know, nest in various places around town, and we would just know all the places to go check to get squabs. And yeah, it's one that hasn't flown yet. So, but, you know, people that commercially produce squab, you can just keep them from flying. But if you want squab from the wild, you'd need to go out and, you know, you just go and collect 'em. 'Cause-

Joe Rogan 1:07:01 And what's the difference between pigeon and squab in terms of the way it tastes?

Steven Rinella 1:07:04 Pigeon meat is tougher, grayer, uh, has a more livery quality, and squab is, like, very tender, pinkish. Like, i- i- it's, like, lean. It's not like quail, but it's leaning way more in the direction of quail.

Joe Rogan 1:07:24 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:07:24 Like, it'd be like if a pigeon and a quail had a baby, squab's more like that.

Joe Rogan 1:07:31 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:07:32 It's, it's... One of the biggest surprises I had in... Tha- that was one of the biggest surprises that I've ever had in, in game, wh- if we can count that as wild game, would be what a squab tasted like. 'Cause I had been eating... I had, for a long time, eaten street pigeons. Because, you know, street pigeons, they'd be, you know, they're around. Even up in the Missouri Breaks, you got street pigeons that nest up in the, in the cliffs, and, you know, you can, you can... There's many places you can hunt street pigeons and they become a agricultural pest, and they're not regulated, so there's no closed season, no bag limit, right? They're treated like... Th- they have no more... They're regulated like rats. If, if you could talk to wildlife managers and ask 'em if they could wave a magic wand and make street pigeons go away, most everybody would wave it because they're so costly. They're costly to cities. They're costly to agriculture. Um, so I'd always eaten pigeons, but the, the minute of discovering, like, discovering, like, what a squab was like, which is well-known to people in the, you know, fine dining, but I had never had it. It was shocking how good it is.

Joe Rogan 1:08:35 That's interesting. I've never, uh, picked it off the menu, but now I'm tempted.

Steven Rinella 1:08:40 Yeah, you should do it.

Joe Rogan 1:08:41 But street pigeon, should I avoid that?

Steven Rinella 1:08:43 No, I would eat some first.

Joe Rogan 1:08:44 Just to test it?

Steven Rinella 1:08:45 Yeah. Make pates from it.

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 Okay, but it's not something that you would go, "This is one of my favorite things to eat"?

Steven Rinella 1:08:50 No, definitely not.

Joe Rogan 1:08:50 Is there a way to do it where you could really... Like, is there a preparation, maybe, that you've missed?

Steven Rinella 1:08:57 It's not bad to, to put it in a marinade, and you can grill it.

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:09:05 Um, you wanna... You wanna take the little breasts and you poke it a whole bunch, like poke it with a fork and tenderize it a little bit, and also make some, like, avenues of a- of approach for the marinade, and then-

Joe Rogan 1:09:15 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:09:15 ... you know, grill 'em over a very hot flame. Um, but what was good is, like, to use it, like, similar to, like, stuff with ptarmigan or whatever is, like, to make pates and terrines. W-

Joe Rogan 1:09:25 Ptarmigan is something that you would cook that way as well?

Steven Rinella 1:09:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:28 I've o- I've only seen people do ptarmigan on that, uh... What's that show called? Life Below Zero.

Steven Rinella 1:09:33 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:09:34 There's a lady who lives... She's been on the show before. She lives, like, fuckin'... How... What does she live, like, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle? Something crazy like that. And she hunts ptarmigans-

Steven Rinella 1:09:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:45 ... up there.

Steven Rinella 1:09:46 The best ptarmigan I've ever eaten, and this is... We, we... This is in the... In our new cookbook, too. But the... I, I mention using ptarmigan for it, but it's just a, a dish that's great for regular, like, any, any kind of meat, and particularly game birds. It's like, you have, you've had hot pot?

Joe Rogan 1:10:02 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:10:03 Yeah. Where you, like, wh- where you have the... You know, you have, like, the simmering broth and you have all these raw, like, raw sliced meats that you dip in there.

Joe Rogan 1:10:11 Mm-hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:10:12 Um, the best ptarmigan I've ever had is just like that.

Joe Rogan 1:10:16 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:10:17 It's, it's otherworldly, you know. It's just kinda like, kinda like when you slice it thin and cook it that way, it just kind of vanishes on your tongue.

Joe Rogan 1:10:24 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:10:24 It's a very, very tender meat. You can almost kind of mash it up. People o-... Like, a thing you hear with a lot of game birds is people describe ptarmigan and tre- street pigeon. A lot of game birds, people describe as livery. Diving ducks being livery. 'Cause there's like a texture thing to it, and then a strength of flavor and a darkness of color. Um, and those... A- and, you know, people make a lot of pates with liver, right? So those birds that have that quality, oftentimes, they just f- they could find their way into pates. So we also have recipes for that. Like, h- how to do pates from using all, all manner of meat.

Joe Rogan 1:10:58 Do you have any recipes in that book for brown bear?

Steven Rinella 1:11:01 No, but we have bear recipes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 Is there a difference?

Steven Rinella 1:11:05 You know, brown bear... Black bears are... A- among people who know black bears are widely accepted as being good to eat. If you go into... If you go to... Earlier I mentioned Daniel Boone. So if you go into that, like, the, the, the, the frontier era of American history, right, which preceded... Just these little lingo terms. The frontier era of American history preceded the mountain man era of American history with like the, the Eastern settlements, right? Um, if you read a, like, about Daniel Boone's area, you know, early 1700s up into, uh, you know, up into the Revolutionary War, bear meat was the most popular meat on the frontier. Black bears.

Joe Rogan 1:11:49 The most popular as in preferred?

Steven Rinella 1:11:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:51 Interesting.

Steven Rinella 1:11:51 Preferred over venison.

Joe Rogan 1:11:52 Really?

Steven Rinella 1:11:53 Yeah. People hunted deer to sell deer hides, and they would eat the deer meat. People hunted bear so that that's what they liked to eat.

Joe Rogan 1:11:59 Hmm.

Steven Rinella 1:11:59 Yeah, it's just like... It's just more beef-like, you know?

Joe Rogan 1:12:02 Right.

Steven Rinella 1:12:02 In... You know, when cooked, right? People love bear meat. Uh, brown bears, grizzly bears just don't enjoy the same reputation. Um, different diets. The, the thing you run into with brown... Like when we use it... When we use the term brown... Like brown bear is kind of almost like a, like a... It's used am- amongst hunters a lot, but it, it is all... It's all one species. So whether you got a grizzly bear in Wyoming or a brown bear on Kodiak, it's... Taxonomically, it's regarded as a, as a single species. People call brown bear... A brown bear is a grizzly-... you'll get all kinds of people writing you to say, "Uh, uh, uh," about various points of this, but, like, debating various aspects of this. A brown bear is a grizzly with access to marine resources, where marine resources make up a major component of its diet. And then the question you bring up is then, like, if you go to the North Slope, so if you go to the Arctic Coast, and you saw a grizzly there, you'd be like, "Well, he has access to marine resources. He could eat a beached whale, whatever. But he's a grizzly." So, like, brown bears kind of extend, right, from (laughs) , you know, northern BC up around and, and, and hook around into the Bering Sea, but at some point, they're just not brown bears anymore, and they're hu- they tend to be big, m- n- and oftentimes because of the name, like, they tend to have, like, a darker coloration. They have a horrible reputation as food. You'll always find people who will point it out, right? Where nowadays, 'cause people are so aware, like in the social media world, nowadays, you'll have people who will kill a brown bear, and here you are, you've got 400 or 500 pounds of meat, and they'll talk about how they're gonna eat it, but, like, dude, you're in for a pound a day-

Joe Rogan 1:13:49 (laughs)

Steven Rinella 1:13:50 ... this year. Really?

Joe Rogan 1:13:52 Yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:13:52 Is that really what happened?

Joe Rogan 1:13:53 For a whole year, yeah.

Steven Rinella 1:13:53 Is that really what happened?

Joe Rogan 1:13:55 That's true, right?

Steven Rinella 1:13:56 And then there's no salvage requirement on it.

Joe Rogan 1:13:58 Oh.

Steven Rinella 1:13:59 There's no salvage requirement on it.

Joe Rogan 1:14:00 Don't you have to, in Alaska, don't you have to pack it out?

Steven Rinella 1:14:03 T- it depends. There's some areas that have zero, some areas, y- you know, typically, typically, no, but there are areas that do have salvage requirements. Where I have a cabin, there's a salvage requirement on bear meat in the spring 'cause spr- in, in areas where bears s- that's a black bear area.

Joe Rogan 1:14:20 But your, yeah, your cabin is, there's no brown bears?

Steven Rinella 1:14:23 Is n- n- n- no, that, there it's island by island.

Joe Rogan 1:14:25 So some islands have brown bears?

Steven Rinella 1:14:26 So you go, like, to ABC Islands, like, like, you know, you go to Admiralty Island and Admiralty Island is, is all brown bears. So it winds up being that if the island