Steven Rinella — Outdoorsman, hunter, and author who founded the MeatEater brand. He hosts outdoor shows and podcasts and produces history-focused audio originals and TV series.
The gist
Joe Rogan and Steven Rinella open on fame, politics, and the loss of trust in institutions after the pandemic, then settle into Rinella's wheelhouse of the outdoors. They dig deep into chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, heavy-metal and mercury contamination in fish, and the real biology of starvation. Rinella shares vivid survival and cannibalism stories, from a mysterious 'John the Baptist' who starved in the Alaskan bush to the Donner Party, which he covers on his new show. The back half becomes a sweeping tour of frontier and prehistoric history: the beaver-fur trade, the lost ship Griffin, glacier-swallowed plane wrecks, and competing theories about how and when the first humans reached the Americas.
Big reveals
- Rogan reveals a doctor found arsenic in his blood from eating four or five cans of sardines a night.
- Rinella says RFK Jr. told him on the podcast that he got mercury poisoning from eating too much canned tuna.
- Rinella claims a friend's land in Wisconsin had close to 50% of bucks testing CWD-positive last year.
- Rinella states hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD-positive meat over decades, yet no human case has been confirmed.
- Rinella recounts the 'John the Baptist' story: a 1978 drifter who starved to death in the Alaskan bush after stealing gear.
- On the Donner Party, a man murdered two Native American guides to eat them and faced no repercussions.
- More than half of the roughly 90 people stranded in the Donner Party were children, who survived at higher rates than adults.
- Rogan says he recently changed his answer for which moment in history he'd visit: the first humans laying eyes on the Americas.
Things worth remembering
- Offshore oil rigs in the Gulf accidentally create rich artificial reefs draped in thousands of fish, sparking debate over removing them.
- Mercury from coal combustion was distributed globally and accumulates up the food chain in fish that eat fish that eat fish.
- CWD is a prion disease; you can't cook deer meat hot enough to destroy the prion without incinerating it.
- No one has ever eradicated CWD from a deer population once it appears in a county.
- 'Gell-Mann Amnesia': you spot errors when reading about a topic you know, then trust the next article on a topic you don't.
- Many of the earliest printed books after the printing press were guides on how to spot witches and witchcraft.
- John Jacob Astor became America's first homegrown millionaire by building a fortune on the beaver-fur trade.
- Mountain men only wanted the beaver's soft underfur for felt hats; the meat, leather, and guard hairs were discarded.
- The 'Kelp Highway' theory holds the first Americans were a seafaring people who moved fast down the Pacific coast, not through an inland ice-free corridor.
- The Anzick-1 Clovis child found in Montana was shown by isotope analysis to have had a diet that included woolly mammoth.