EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,216 words- 0:00 – 4:20
DNA tests, Sicilian roots, and what ancestry percentages really mean
- SRSteven Rinella
You know, uh, you know what's funny? Oh, I'll tell you later.
- JRJoe Rogan
Tell me now. Three, two, one. (claps) What's funny?
- SRSteven Rinella
Uh, I was gonna tell you a funny story about your address, but it, but it-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, don't do that. (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
It wouldn't be, it wouldn't be f- funny for you. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) We'll talk later about that.
- SRSteven Rinella
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You and I, uh, we share African ancestry.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
I was shocked.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I'm 1.6%.
- SRSteven Rinella
Oh, really?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
See, I have more, uh, I, I have more credential than you-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
... in that department.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're 2%, right?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- SRSteven Rinella
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that was the history of Sicily in the first place.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- 4:20 – 8:24
Neanderthals: heritage, pronunciation debates, and how “unsuccessful” they really were
- JRJoe Rogan
How much, uh, Neanderthal did it say you had?
- SRSteven Rinella
Less than normal.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- SRSteven Rinella
Less than average.
- JRJoe Rogan
What was the, uh, the number, like it said, it gives you... You just, you did 23andMe, right?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. I can't remember.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, okay.
- SRSteven Rinella
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- SRSteven Rinella
But it was less than average, which bummed me out.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
But I'm like as hairy as like a 13-year-old, like, Norwegian girl, you know what I mean? So it's...
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
That didn't surprise me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not shocking? Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
Didn't surprise me too much. Uh, I, I was wishing to have a little more of that floating around in me.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
... saying Neanderthal. It's one of those things you're supposed to switch once you realize how you're supposed to do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
Neander-tall, but I just can't get comfortable with it.
- JRJoe Rogan
I, I go back and forth.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
'Cause I feel like it makes you sound pretentious.
- JRJoe Rogan
It does. It's like rolling your Rs in certain Spanish words.
- SRSteven Rinella
But we have this idea that the An- we have this idea of the Neanderthals as unsuccessful, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
That they are these brutish thugs that died out. But they had a 600,000-year run-
- 8:24 – 16:39
Neanderthal life ways: hunting injuries, gender roles, tools, art, and violence
- SRSteven Rinella
Have, have, have we ever talked about, uh, the, the idea of Neanderthals as like having a c- a confrontational hunting style?
- JRJoe Rogan
No, I don't think we have.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. So maybe they're-
- SRSteven Rinella
And then the females, the females have the same prevalence of, of these types of injuries.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa.
- SRSteven Rinella
And so maybe they didn't have that d- the... They didn't share that division of labor.
- JRJoe Rogan
Were the females as large as the males?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. I don't know the answer to that.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, th- do... We know that they had stone tools, right? The crude stone tools.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- SRSteven Rinella
I don't believe that they've found they had atlatls.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- SRSteven Rinella
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)
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. And, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
See, see if you can find that.
- SRSteven Rinella
... and evidence of cannibalism.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, yeah, there was a lot of that, right? Scraping of inside the skulls-
- SRSteven Rinella
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Are you familiar with the writer, John Mooallem?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- SRSteven Rinella
You'd like his stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
He wrote a really beautiful piece about, he wrote a really beautiful piece about Neanderthals not long ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay, I fucked it up. The, what they're saying is that modern humans, we're just as prone to violence as Neanderthals.
- 16:39 – 22:03
From human evolution to wild food: launching into the MeatEater cookbook project
- JRJoe Rogan
Hey, man, your cookbook is fucking fantastic. It's really good.
- SRSteven Rinella
(sighs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You put a lot of goddamn work into that thing, huh?
- SRSteven Rinella
We started collecting images four years ago.
- JRJoe Rogan
You could tell. It's really good.
- SRSteven Rinella
'Cause I didn't want it to look like, um... Was it boring, you talking about Neanderthals?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- SRSteven Rinella
I'm out of stuff to say about them anyway.
- JRJoe Rogan
No. Uh, I could go on for days.
- SRSteven Rinella
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's the problem. (laughs) I'm trying to change gears.
- SRSteven Rinella
We could spend days talking about things we're not quite sure about.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, exactly. That's-
- SRSteven Rinella
I heard.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's what I do for a living. (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
And get angry? (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
I hear about it 'cause I'm like a conduit. I'm like a c- I'm like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Tell Joe that that's not how it works.
- SRSteven Rinella
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)
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
... yeah, it's, it's really funny how many people I hear from when, uh, when I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Tell-
- SRSteven Rinella
... 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)
- JRJoe Rogan
Especially if we're baked. If there's marijuana in the room, we got a real issue.
- SRSteven Rinella
Like, "That's not what antlers are for. He should really know." Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. That's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Does that agree?
- SRSteven Rinella
... two things that definitely make sense.
- 22:03 – 26:12
Why MeatEater emphasizes cooking: changing minds about hunting through food
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like what?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 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."
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Yeah, you do."
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
The general population.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 26:12 – 29:49
Growing up eating ‘everything’: frog legs, snapping turtles, and salmon boils
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Even for frogs?
- SRSteven Rinella
To use artificial light for frogs, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- SRSteven Rinella
I had no i-... Dude, when I found that out later, no idea.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Salmon boil?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, so you make them like a stew?
- SRSteven Rinella
It's a fish boil. And then you drain it off, and you have drawn butter, and you drown-
- JRJoe Rogan
Huh.
- SRSteven Rinella
... all that shit in drawn butter. It's good.
- JRJoe Rogan
Sounds good.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it doesn't sound like the best-
- SRSteven Rinella
People do fish boils. People do fish boils, but it's not normal to do a salmon boil.
- JRJoe Rogan
It seems like it's such a flavorful fish, you would lose some of that in the broth.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So the taste is really good, but it's not necessarily the taste of salmon.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
... isn't gonna make their list.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- 29:49 – 40:47
Beaver as frontier staple: mountain men, the beaver trade, and beaver tail fat
- JRJoe Rogan
When did you realize that beaver were delicious?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
I still tell people about the beaver that you cooked for us in Wisconsin and-
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 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."
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was really good.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- SRSteven Rinella
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Explain to people how big the beaver market is, 'cause this is gonna blow people's minds.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
The m- The richest men in the country, their money came from beavers?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. And he was in on the business end of it, he wasn't in on the trapping end of it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. He was in on the hats, right?
- SRSteven Rinella
But the, the, the fur companies. Yeah, the big fur companies.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it was hats and-
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- SRSteven Rinella
It'd be like buying something now. You'd want to know about oil and gas, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow. They really thought that wooly mammoths were still alive?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
How hard is it to wrap-
- SRSteven Rinella
People ... Historians, like people ... Not historians.
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- 40:47 – 47:16
Living off the land: Buck Bodin’s solitude, subsistence reality, and extreme nutrition
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. You were talking to a guy from Alaska. What's that guy's name? Buck something?
- SRSteven Rinella
Buck Boden.
- JRJoe Rogan
Buck Boden.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, on your show. And, uh, he was talking about, um, you know, essentially, he was subsistence hunting in, in certain stages.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, you know, he ate nothing but moose.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, he ate ... Shot a moose and ate nothing but that moose for months.
- SRSteven Rinella
And picking wolverine meat off the skulls and stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, like, whoa.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yep. Again-
- JRJoe Rogan
That guy had to be skinny as fuck when that was all over.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah, and I wouldn't mess with that guy. He's tough as shit, too, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
I bet. (laughs) Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
Could have occurred 100 years earlier.
- JRJoe Rogan
He, uh ... The, the episode of the podcast is, like, You're a Good Man, Buck. Is that what it's called?
- SRSteven Rinella
You're a Cool Dude, Buck.
- JRJoe Rogan
You're a Cool Dude, Buck.
- SRSteven Rinella
Which is what, what a buddy of mine says to him-
- JRJoe Rogan
Uh-huh. (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
... in the, in the show, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
(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.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
(coughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- 47:16 – 54:38
Hunting with indigenous communities: Guyana, cassava danger, and “no-recipe” cooking
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah, in, in Guyana, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
In Guyana, yeah. That's a... That's gotta be a trip. How long were you down there for?
- SRSteven Rinella
Oh, l- you know, long weeks.
- JRJoe Rogan
A couple of weeks?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. What you're s- Yeah. In a situation like that, you're with people who are very familiar with, like, Western culture.
- JRJoe Rogan
Very familiar with the modern world-
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like a great awareness of it.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Boiled as well? Well, why-
- SRSteven Rinella
I shouldn't say a grain, but, like, a dish made from cassava.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why are they boiling it? Why don't- why don't they just grill it?
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You choose to go hunting. With these people, it's literally how they survive.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- 54:38 – 1:17:09
Kids, hunting interest, and the ‘nature vs nurture’ question—plus hunting influencer culture
- JRJoe Rogan
My, uh, my youngest daughter has become enamored with fishing.
- SRSteven Rinella
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
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."
- SRSteven Rinella
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
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."
- SRSteven Rinella
Did she wind up having fun?
- JRJoe Rogan
She caught a six-pound bass.
- SRSteven Rinella
Oh, really?
- JRJoe Rogan
Then she's hooked.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- SRSteven Rinella
She was hooked.
- JRJoe Rogan
... freaking it. It bit her finger. She was showing everybody, "Look, it bit my finger."
- SRSteven Rinella
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
You know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, my own life-
- SRSteven Rinella
I don't mean that as a euphemism.
- JRJoe Rogan
No, my, my, my 10- (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
Come out-
- JRJoe Rogan
My 10-year-old daughter doesn't... She's like, "Yeah, we can go fishing." Like, she's gone fishing and caught stuff.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's okay. It's okay.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- SRSteven Rinella
Because I feel like I'm doing the same inputs.
Episode duration: 2:46:53
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode j7r7E0DNjaw
