EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,216 words- 0:00 – 15:00
You know, uh, you…
- 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.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Hmm. Yeah, it's a…
- SRSteven Rinella
don't track what ideas that float up are just very quickly denounced as being complete rubbish.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm. Yeah, it's a weird one.
- SRSteven Rinella
You know, it's, uh, it, it takes time to-
- JRJoe Rogan
There it is.
- SRSteven Rinella
It takes time to follow this stuff.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah, well that thing-
- JRJoe Rogan
... thought Neanderthals looked like.
- SRSteven Rinella
... whatever he's got going on, that thing is not making art.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You don't think so?
- SRSteven Rinella
No, he's making meat, man.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
Come on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty preposterous. But Neanderthals didn't have fangs like that-
- SRSteven Rinella
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
... neither, did they?
- SRSteven Rinella
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- SRSteven Rinella
Oh, that's a... Oh, I got you.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
They, they don't have any idea what they looked like, right?
- SRSteven Rinella
No, I don't think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
They looked like some pinky bones and shit.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah. Uh, yeah, that, that one's not... That one I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hey, man, your cookbook is fucking fantastic. It's really good.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Yeah. …
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whoa. What year?
- SRSteven Rinella
They, they went out in the early 1800s, so they were out in 1804.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yeah. …
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
... 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."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. We're talking about reality show people.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah, for-
- JRJoe Rogan
That's what that people talk about now.
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- 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.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Not all of them.…
- SRSteven Rinella
wanna have men like you."
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
But for that 10%, I'm like, "Hmm." (sniffs)
- SRSteven Rinella
I'm not-
- JRJoe Rogan
"I smell a rat."
- SRSteven Rinella
I'm not unaware of what you're talking about.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) I'm sure you're not.
- SRSteven Rinella
Uh, no, I notice it. Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's weird.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- SRSteven Rinella
... huntress scene, you know?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- SRSteven Rinella
Getting ready for bow season.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, accentuating their butt. Like, that's weird. I don't do any of those exercises. (laughs)
- SRSteven Rinella
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
'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-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs) Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
You, you, you're like, you know, you really, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- SRSteven Rinella
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- SRSteven Rinella
... than when she's crying.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- SRSteven Rinella
Her crying 'cause she's cold, like, made me feel awful.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- 1:15:00 – 1:15:11
Section 6
- SRSteven Rinella
seems to maybe depend on how much, like, open country or alpine or l- you know, if it's, like, densely, densely forested, it's less suitable and becomes a, of, a black bear territory.
Episode duration: 2:46:53
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