Steven Rinella joins Joe Rogan to debate wild game cuisine—elk shank bourbon, Hawaii’s axis deer eradication (30,000+ shot annually), and finning regulations—while critiquing urban wildlife perceptions and shark conservation hypocrisy. They contrast Jimi Hendrix’s genius with personal flaws, Rogan’s pragmatic injury approach, and the spiritual depth of hunting versus shallow podcasting trends, like Conan O’Brien’s overlooked legacy. Rogan rejects political labels, defending nuanced views on guns and marijuana, and praises his own unfiltered, strength-based humor over polished comedy. The episode ends with a fishing shack invite, blending nostalgia, wildlife ethics, and Rogan’s evolving role beyond "Fear Factor" into genuine connection. [Automatically generated summary]
And then it's the thing that I became, I started to proselytize, you know.
I found out about eating it because my brother found out about eating it because he has this old cookbook called the L.L. Bean It's like the Ella Bean Wild Game Cookbook by a guy named Angus.
First name of Angus, if I remember right.
And he's got a shank recipe in his book for antelope shank.
And so we started making it.
That's the funny thing about wild game cooking that you've probably picked up on is that you could have a thing where you could say, like, hey, here's a recipe for a whitetail deer heart, right?
And someone will be like, but do you have one for a mule deer heart?
Like when we did our cookbook, I tried really hard to steer away from things that would be elk recipes, deer recipes, and just take it from a cut basis.
We got away from saying, like, here's an antelope recipe or whatever, because it's just like the cut is more important Especially with all these ungulates, like horned and antlered game.
What it is is more important than what it came from.
So by putting elk shank on that bottle, I'm kind of like going against my own advice.
If I just put shank, people might not know what you're talking about.
I think his wife was explaining to me there's a lot more disposable income around the house now because she's like, I never realized how much boozing takes up.
Yeah, and I don't know if you remember, you probably liked this when you were younger where It was impossible that you'd have leftover booze in your house.
I know that you will have, knowing you and how good you are at what you do, I know you'll have done it, but I don't understand how you could have had a novel thought about the missionary who got killed.
Just to refresh people's memory, there's an island, East Sentinel.
What's funny, by my fish shack, there's an island called Sentinel Island.
Yeah, I'd read quite a few things about it, because there was a guy on Twitter, his name is Respectable Law, at Respectable Law, and he posted a whole series of things.
He'd actually been studying this case, or this place, before, because of this pervert guy.
And so when this man, this missionary, showed up on that island and got murdered, he knew all about the history of this island, so he made a chain of posts on Twitter, which were really interesting and informative.
And the Mikushi and Wapashan are all tribes in Northern and South America who have a long, long history of contact and engagement with the outside world.
But individuals who can still very much, like hanging out with individuals who aren't that old, who in their youth were...
Very much like living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with a mix of native materials and also some western materials.
People that grew up using canoes that were made, like hand-dug dugouts, using plant toxins to kill fish, but also other very modern stuff.
One of these guys that I really appreciate hanging out with, I mean, this guy's got an email address, but...
I might have told you this story before.
He's got an email address, but he also told us about...
We interviewed him on our show, on our podcast, and he's telling me about how their peccaries, their white-lipped peccaries, aren't around right now because there's a shaman in another village who's jealous of their village for being so prosperous and has locked their peccaries up inside of a mountain and that they're training their own shaman to free the peccaries from the mountain And
They hunt fish and also have farms scattered throughout the jungle.
And they'll just come in and ravage farms in groups of, like I said, groups of 100, 200. I should be honest here and say I've never laid eyes on a white-lipped peccary.
There's a third peccary, a chocoan or chocoan peccary that is much more rare than the collared and white-lipped peccary.
It's one thing that's made for bow hunting because I think that with rifle hunting, and people do hunt with rifles, and I've shot them with rifles, but it can feel like a little bit of a gimme because you have to get very close to them before they're concerned but it can feel like a little bit of a gimme because you They're tough.
They got tossed.
They can kill stuff and rip stuff.
You think of the most, I would imagine of all the creatures, like a snapping turtle is least concerned with things that, like a snapping turtle doesn't care about anything until it's within six inches of its face, and javelin is not that exaggerated, but kind of have this like, their world sort of seems to but kind of have this like, their world sort of seems to end at 60 yards, but they don't care what's going on outside of So you can kind of creep up to them?
You know, one of the things, I think it points to a certain amount of sociopathy that I have, but when I hear about someone losing a cat or dog to wild creatures, my initial instinct isn't to be sad.
Well, I went once when I was a kid, but I went once recently with my family, and it was...
Very weird that you could take selfies with elk.
These big herds of elk are so confident that people won't shoot them when they're in the public tourism area that they just go and hang out near the vending machine.
So I'm getting a Diet Coke and there's an elk like 30 yards away from me.
You know, and again, man, I know like my brother has this little dog he just loves and they're inseparable.
If that dog got carried off by a great horned owl and a healthy great horned owl could carry this dog off.
It's like a little shitting dog.
I would feel real bad for him.
So with that said, I do have this thing where you kind of root and I do feel sad when I see like in a place like Yellowstone.
This is where it gets a little bit weird.
When I see wild animals, especially animals that people hunt for, when I see that they've lost their fear of humans, some people would look and be like, oh, this is what naturally they should be like.
So this is animals where they've had to give up their human, where they've lost their human fear because we've given them this wild place.
Because it sort of depends on how fresh your perspective is.
Because, I mean, people have been hunting, you know, people have been hunting in that area.
I mean...
At least 10,000 years.
So then we take like a 100-year break and the animals become very accustomed to people.
It's shocking how quickly they can get it back.
And oftentimes those same elk that live, like the same elk that will spend their summer in that park, will migrate out of there and go into National Forest and on ranch land.
And then they'll be where they can be hunted.
And they know.
They cross that line.
So the same elk that some dude could basically walk up and touch there...
Will, just something in his head switches and they enter into a new mind space when they leave and they're still exposed to human predation.
It's one thing that I've discovered over the last seven years, thanks to you and thanks to you getting me hunting, is that most people have no idea what it's like to be around actual wildlife.
To sneak up to them.
Most people have no idea about their sense of smell.
Like to see an animal wind you and then just fucking bounce.
To see that and to know that you're dealing with some superhuman ability.
Impossible to imagine with the confines of your own biology what these animals can do.
And when you're out amongst them and there's no cell phone service and there's...
It's just footprints and Trekking your way through mountains.
It's amazing.
I mean, it's not Yellowstone.
What Yellowstone is, and anything like that, and zoos is the worst example, right?
But when we think of animals, people always tell me, because I have a famous dog.
I've run with him all the time, and he's on my Instagram.
It's like, everybody loves him.
He's the sweetest dog in the world.
I love that dog.
If you love dogs, how could you hunt animals?
And I'm like, well, he's not an animal.
He's a dog.
He's a pet.
He's a science project.
An animal is a wolf.
An animal is a deer.
That's an animal.
What a dog is, they don't survive outside of us.
If you don't take care of them, they won't know what to do.
They'll hope that the dog catcher comes and gets them and somebody rescues them.
They're not wild animals.
It almost has less to do with how they're raised than And more to do with their ancestors.
Like, their biology has changed.
They've literally been bred to something different.
Yeah, so mostly when they say they love animals, they don't even fucking know any They don't even know what they are.
They see the caged animals at the zoo They see the animals on a rope that they they take to the dog park.
They think they know what an animal is They don't even have any experience with it.
We've been so domesticated and so isolated in cities most people especially most people that have opinions on this shit and You know, people that live in rural areas, I mean, you know that.
You live in Bozeman, and Bozeman is, you know, surrounded by these areas that are just fucking completely wild.
I mean, if you're in Bozeman, you can drive an hour from your house, and then you're around bears and deer and eagles.
I mean, it's a completely wild place.
But people that are in those areas, people around Boise, Idaho, for example, They have a totally different idea.
People in Wyoming.
They have a totally different idea of what wildlife is versus somebody who lives in Santa Monica.
There's a video that somebody sent me today of a guy in Thousand Oaks is on his street and he's filming a fucking enormous mountain lion.
I mean, it is huge.
It's a big boy.
It's like 150 pounds.
And they're in the car and they're looking at it through the window and him and his son, it seems like, are filming this thing going, Holy shit, look at this thing.
It's right there in the street, a big-ass cat.
And he was saying that somebody was feeding it, apparently.
And they're trying to figure out what...
You want me to send it to you?
I'll send it to you.
But that's super rare.
I mean, that's a real wild animal.
It's super, super rare that anybody would have any kind of experience with one of these things.
And most people that are talking about animals just really don't know what that even means.
A buddy of mine who's a biologist with the Forest Service, a guy named Carl Malcolm.
He might have heard on our show.
He just sent me a paper...
That was about kids' attitudes to wildlife, and it was comparing rural people's attitude and knowledge of wildlife, kids, with urban and suburban attitudes about wildlife.
And you can see the input of media when you look at this thing, because people who live in an urban or suburban environment When they tell you the top-of-mind wildlife that they know about, it's non-native stuff.
Yeah, they're likely to know what's an animal, right?
And an animal would be like, oh, it'd be like a giraffe, right?
And people who have a more rural or remote...
Viewpoint are much more likely, when they think of wildlife, to think of things that they interact with.
And not like the things that are on your mobile above your crib when you're a little baby.
And also, there's a slight tendency, I've got to look at this more carefully, but there's a slight tendency to have negative feelings or things that are dangerous or bad the more urban you are in terms of native wildlife.
To more recognize it as like a negative or bad thing.
And what they're pointing to is, again, I want to look at this much more carefully and pardon me to the authors if I'm messing this up.
I was just looking at it this morning.
What they're pointing to is the stirrings of there being a greater acceptance of decreased biodiversity.
Meaning that you're kind of like okay with the bad things having gone and we're focused on like what are animals?
Well, animals would be like a giraffe and hippopotamus and the things that Disney tells me about and not like opossums and raccoons which are kind of gross.
About shooting a deer that's wearing a collar, and I'm with you.
I'm with you 100%.
I don't want to shoot a deer that's wearing a collar.
I don't care if it's wild as fuck.
If they caught it when it was a baby, and they just waited and measured it and then let it go, and it didn't have a collar, and I saw that deer, I wouldn't think twice about shooting it.
But if I saw it and it was wearing a collar, I'm like, I'm out.
I was in my brother's kitchen in Miles City, Montana, beneath this crazy chandelier he bought online.
And I remember everything about it, but I don't remember if I challenged him on the sense of being proud of having not contributed to our scientific understanding of waterfowl migrations and why.
Maybe like a sort of anti-government sentiment, like some black helicopter stuff.
And we had a friend, there's a friend of mine who's a, she's a, does a lot of carnivore research and other research projects named Carmen Van Bianchi, which is a cool name.
But She says that, you know, I'm someone that collars animals.
And I even think that, she's like, when you get one with a collar on it, she said, it was cool, we talked about this the other day, she's like, someone has already got the best of them.
That they become tainted when they've been held by someone else.
And that's a little bit how I view it, where a wild animal, you want to imagine it being the wildest wild animal.
And once it has a collar, it's all sloppy seconds, man.
They're just very in tune to their predator being people.
I imagine that they probably, the same way that we carry with us a sort of natural abhorrence of snakes, a natural abhorrence of spiders, I would imagine that they come from a...
You probably know a little bit better than me because you spent more time with axes deer.
They probably come from a very predator-rich environment, I'm guessing.
And my God, from my very limited perspective, from just a small set of experiences that happened over a couple days, it seemed like the pressure on the males had been extraordinary, where it seemed it seemed like the pressure on the males had been extraordinary, where it seemed like you would Per stag.
Like venison sticks and venison jerky and there's companies that are establishing these conservation efforts where they're going out and they're shooting X amount per year, like 6,000 per year, which doesn't even put a dent on them.
Forgive me, stop me if we spoke about this before, but there's kind of an interesting perspective that someone gave to me about Hawaii, where we have this list, you know, Hawaii is just dominated by non-natives, okay?
I might be wrong about some of these, but I don't think I am.
Bread, fruit, coconut...
All the major fruiting trees are non-native.
And so much of the wildlife is non-native.
I mean, they have surprising shit.
They have wild turkeys, there's wild cattle, pigs, Axis deer, I think there's black buck antelope running around.
But anyways, in Hawaii, right, those islands were colonized by humans like 1,100 years ago.
And so now we have like native Hawaiians or Hawaiians, right?
Yeah.
And I've spoke with some Native Hawaiians who feel that there's this uneasy relationship between what we're regarding and describing as non-Native wildlife, even down to pigs.
Even though their ancestors, you know, 1,100 years ago, brought the pig to the island.
And someone expressed to me very simply, he's like, how can I be Hawaiian?
And he was kind of pissed about this attitude towards, because these are guys that like to hunt and eat a lot of wild game, about this attitude to access deer and this attitude to pigs.
And you hear the same thing out of Australia.
You hear the same thing out of New Zealand, which is guys who have this difficult relationship with...
The things that they've come to hunt, and the things that have sort of been culturally accepted, culturally accepted as wildlife, right?
Where people, you know, I don't want to use environmentalists here in a way that makes it be that the hunters aren't necessarily environmentalists, but in ways where some people with what they would describe as an environmental agenda want to see species eradicated.
The people have been interacting with for 100 years, in some cases, Like in Hawaii, in some cases, perhaps a thousand years.
They've been interacting with it on the landscape.
But then someone wants to come and say, we want to get rid of it because it's not native.
And it causes a ton of tension.
Where it creates a weird situation for people in some of these places is that hunters have long justified their actions to the public as being that we're controlling Right?
We're like controlling non-natives, so we're doing a good thing.
But then someone says like, oh, you know, I got a better idea.
There's a great article about, or a podcast about that from Radiolab, where they kept sending this Judas goat to the Galapagos, and he'd find the other goats and like, da-da-da.
They'd gun them all down.
This Judas goat would be like, where are my friends?
And he'd go to find these other goats, and they'd follow the collar, the GPS on the collar, and find the new group of goats, and they'd gun them down, too.
But anyways, it was funny because I remember driving along and seeing the summer before.
It was like a year before.
And seeing the Twin Towers, you know?
And it was like my first ever view.
And I never saw that place again.
I never saw it again until after.
But there's this thing called Mako Madness.
And it was like a shark tournament.
And traditionally it had been like a contest to get the biggest shark.
And they would bet money on it.
And there was the general registration fee.
So all these captains who had charter boats would join Mako Madness and they would book clients on their boats for Mako Madness.
And you had to pay some amount of money to register your boat To be in the contest.
But the real money was in all these side bets called Calcutta's.
And so there was enough side betting going on around all the various captains that the biggest Mako could win $100,000, a couple hundred thousand dollars to catch the biggest Mako.
But sort of the fatal flaw in this tournament, from a public perception standpoint, would be that there was a category for just biggest shark.
And there was a category for biggest Mako.
So, people going out, like, at a time, this is when shark populations are still, you know, and globally, they're still on a decline.
But there was still a lot of shark bycatch from swordfish, longlining, and other things.
And people were getting very worried about shark stocks and shark numbers.
And at one time, Mako Madness, there was a lot more Makos.
Like, people would be registered Makos.
But there had been some years where Mako Madness had no Makos.
People weren't bringing in a mako.
So everyone would go out and just make damn sure that, like, I don't want to come back empty.
So they would catch a blue shark.
Because if no one caught a mako, you still might get biggest shark from catching a blue shark.
And at the end of this thing, man, they had dumpsters.
Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of people that have eaten them.
But at this Mako Madness thing, I can't remember the point I was getting at.
What the hell was I driving at by talking about Mako Madness?
Oh, in this article, I got into the history of where shark hunting and killing sharks came from.
You're familiar with Jaws, right?
Well, sort of the shark fisherman character in Jaws is based on this very real dude, Frank Mundus.
And Frank Mundus used to fish out of Montauk.
And at a time, Montauk was this premier destination for people catching swordfish and big bluefin tuna.
And as those big pelagic fisheries had collapsed from overfishing, In the 70s, Frank Mundus, he'd go out and he'd just go out and find a, you know, he'd go out famously, he'd go out and find a beached whale, or not a beached whale, but a floating dead whale.
And he'd anchor up on that whale and catch big ass great whites.
And then come in and hang the bloody carcass up on the docks.
And he made necklaces with tooth sharks and shit.
And he became like the monster man or something, or the monster hunter.
And started booking all these crazy trips where tourists would come and be like, holy shit, I want to go kill a big monster.
And he's credited with having created this culture of going out and getting, yeah.
Yeah, so he's got the necklace, the dead shark, and Frank Mundus kind of like spawned this sort of thing where you'd want to go out and catch a big shark and hang it up and then throw it in a dumpster.
And people look at, like, when people look at that history, they look at it being as like, it's like, in some ways, Mundus and shark hunting was symptomatic of declining fisheries.
The idea of shark's fin soup and its lure was driven whole new one time when we were in Berkeley and we were at a boat launch and we'd come off fishing and we'd been out fishing for leopard sharks.
And kicking the sharks off the deck into the water.
It's dark.
But it speaks to something.
I think that seeing live, finless sharks going into the water speaks to something about just your level of care.
Do you know what I mean?
Whether you view something as sacred or not, it's hard to see that the individual engaging in that is viewing it as sacred.
There's a lot of stories about even swordfish captains Burning blue sharks and stuff and effigy because they lose so much of their swordfish to catch the blue sharks.
But to see people kicking them off, it speaks to something about animal suffering.
It speaks to something about what is that person's view of the resource?
How do they respect it?
But it also speaks to a general thing where you don't see things wasted.
My understanding about one of the things that slowed in US waters, one of the things that slowed Finning was just, you used to be able to go out and you could fill your hold full of just sharp parts.
If you were a fishing captain, you could just be like, oh, I'm just going to keep the fins.
And eventually they made it, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong here.
I don't think I am.
They eventually made it that whatever you have for shark materials in your boat on a commercial operation, only a certain percentage can be comprised of fins.
And since when you're on a commercial vessel, your hold, like the area where you keep iced fish is finite, it's limited, it wound up being not worth it.
Because let's say only like 30% of your shark parts could be shark fins and you had to keep the rest.
It wasn't worth it to fill your hold full of like shark meat.
And so it sort of de-incentivized people to go out and fin in U.S. waters.
And I think particularly for a creative person, for a person who writes and comes up with things, you need downtime.
I just had a buddy of mine, we were having this conversation about that, where he was saying that he feels like he's just working too much, just doing too much comedy, he's not taking in enough.
It's almost like you have to think of it as a diet.
What is your mental diet?
Your physical diet is obviously very important if you're an athlete, but if you're a creative person, you have to have an awareness of your mental diet.
If you're just taking in sugar all the time, just nonsense and junk food and bullshit, your brain is filled with uninteresting, uninspiring thoughts.
And, you know, the same sort of typical narrative over and over and over again.
Whereas if you can figure out a way to go to Thailand or something like that, you go, whoa, these people are living a totally different life.
This is a totally different way to live.
And even if it's ever so slightly, it broadens your perspective.
I had a podcast with a guy named Dr. Matthew Walker, who's a sleep expert.
He's written books on sleeping, and he talks about the vast amount of Americans that are under-rested and what an impact it has on your hormonal production, on your body's ability to recover, on your happiness, your body's ability to produce endorphins, and all these different variables that are extremely important to happiness and to productivity.
And he's like, the vast majority of people are fucking themselves over.
Vast majority.
In great ways.
It increases the possibility of dementia and Alzheimer's and all these different factors.
If you look at guys like Ronald Reagan famously slept like four hours a night.
They've got fucking Alzheimer's.
It's really common with people that have a very small amount of sleep and they take pride in the fact they're always pushing the needle.
Those people, eventually, the bearings start going.
When you refer to how you fill your head up, what you fill your head up, if it's just junk and sugar and how much time you have to process stuff, One of the things I've noticed, and it's begun to startle me a little bit, is I used to find in social situations that I would be very interested in letting people know what I thought about stuff.
Even shit that I had no business talking about.
And I think that you see people, like when you see someone who's older, and we have this idea of an older, wiser person, and they're just taking in everything, and they've learned to be quiet.
People don't really think about the fact that maybe they're just sick of hearing themselves talk.
Like an old racist, an old dummy, an old person who has ridiculous archaic views of women or ridiculous archaic views of society and culture and immigration, all these different things.
Like a person without nuance, an old person who's not learned from the humbling experiences of life and has not looked at himself in his own folly and has a humorous take on it.
I encountered a dude like that not long ago where we decided that we were going to take our kids We're going to take our kids out to eat, and I don't want to have to deal with any kind of added noise.
There's this truck that sells tacos.
It's called El Rodeo or something.
I'm like, let's go to that taco truck and eat, because I don't want to talk to anybody and deal with anybody.
My wife convinced me to go to this brew pub.
So we go down to the brew pub and I'm already pissed off because I'm kind of half mad at my wife for making this be in a potentially social situation.
And I'm sitting there and this old man walks past me on his way out of the restaurant and he's got a do not resuscitate bracelet.
He's got a little, you know those four pegged canes?
He's got a four pegged cane.
There's probably a name for that.
And a do not resuscitate bracelet.
And he walks out with his wife, girlfriend, whatever.
And she wanders off.
And he's just standing outside the restaurant.
And it's just killing me to know what that's all about.
So I grab my older boy.
And we walk out.
And I'm like, you know, I couldn't help but notice you have a bracelet that says do not resuscitate.
What's that all about?
You know?
And I said, do you just feel that if it's your time, it's your time, and you don't want modern shit to interfere in sort of what you imagine to be the way things go?
And he explains to me, he's like, no, he's pissed.
He's already pissed.
He was probably pissed before I talked to him.
He's like, I don't want oxygen, I don't want CPR, I don't want nothing.
And he goes, because I was having a heart attack.
And they resuscitated me and broke two of my ribs.
Therefore, I don't want to be resuscitated.
I remember thinking like, but you were having a heart attack.
Well, one day in the spring, me and my buddy Pete Munich went out looking for blackberries during blackberry season.
And this was when I really thought I had a knee problem.
And we went out, and we didn't hike a long ways.
We hiked maybe six miles.
And I came back and noticed, but it was real mucky.
You know when you're walking and your feet keep sticking in the muck and then your feet build up a layer of muck on your boot bottom and then it comes off and then you're walking cockeyed because your other boot hasn't shed its mud layer?
Whereas if you just are appreciating the fact that, hey, here I am living in America, you know, I'm healthy, I don't have cancer, Like, it could be so many things worse that are wrong with me.
I could have been born with weird birth defects.
I could have been born in, you know, El Salvador with no feet.
I could have been, you know, living in some fucking drug-ravaged community.
I'm lucky.
Just extremely, unbelievably lucky.
Like, if you had given the opportunity to be Steve Rinell, if you were some guy who was living in some terrible third-world country with, you know, awful...
Drug cartel violence all around you.
What would you give to be a regular guy living in Bozeman, Montana in a beautiful place and have a healthy, happy family and a great way to make a living?
Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of places like that anymore because people have fined those places and fucked them up and overpopulated them, but there's a few of them left.
Well, Greenland has so much natural resources, and it's also probably a place that's going to be an awesome spot to live in 100 years when the fucking rest of the world's on fire.
Because, you know, they huddle up to protect themselves against wolves, so they just stay in a spot when they see a threat, which is great for wolves, but not so good for projectiles.
And there, the Chupik Eskimo, and a bunch of people would be like, you can't say Eskimo, but it was funny because I asked the Chupik man who I was staying with.
I'm like, you know, I feel like I'm always told not to use Eskimo.
And he said, what the hell else would you call me?
So, I'm going to say, in deference to what this man prefers to be called, he's Chupik Eskimo, I'm not something else.
Alaska coast along the Bering Sea, a Chupik man was telling me that that is what he prefers to be referred to as Chupik Eskimo.
But the way that we, you know, like we, you know, people consume wild game or talk about meat, we're always like, when we're raiding meats, we tend to talk about tenderness or not tenderness, right?
It was tough.
It was tender.
It was tough.
It was tender.
Tender being good, tough being bad.
I mean, you've been involved in a hundred of these conversations.
This true big man was like, we prefer it to be tough.
You know that tendon that, like, if you look at the spine of an animal, the vertebra above its shoulder will have like a, what's called a thoracic, a longer thoracic process, like that blade that comes up?
There's a tendon that runs from the top of those thoracic processes out to the neck, and it allows like big animals.
It's really exaggerated on moose, bison, muskox, where it's like the size of your wrist.
This giant tendon that's moored to the top of those thoracic processes that allows this thing to hang its head.
I mean, if you find someone who's like a dismissive parent and is not interested, a disinterested parent, it's like one of the most disturbing and disappointing things.
If you love someone, you care about them, and then you find out they're a bad person or a bad parent, you have to reevaluate your perspective on them.
Because to me, being a parent, and my wife is huge on this, it's like it's everything to her.
she will not talk to someone or hang out with someone if she feels like they're a bad parent and she she forms her relationships with her friends based on whether or not they're good parents it's it's everything you know if you're you know you're contributing to this community so when i'm around these parents you know i'm a nice guy so it's all it's all friendly but they all have questions all these poor men that are stuck in cubicle jobs you know men men are tortured you You know, it's like that, who was it?
You know, it's these most people are just living this boring ass fucking life, and I'm living this life where I'm telling jokes in front of thousands of people, and then I'm doing podcasts in front of millions of people, and then I'm hunting, and then occasionally I go off and I do cage fighting commentary.
One of the early things that surprised me about you is...
Man, I don't want to use that word because I don't want it to be insulting.
One of the things that...
One of the things that surprised me about you, but it sounds like asshole-ish, is how serious you take being a parent.
Because I think that someone could look, like, someone could at a glance look, be like, oh, you know, discussion of drugs and, like, dirty humor, and sort of go like, those are not congruous with parenting, but you take parenting, like, extremely seriously.
But you don't, I don't think you, you're not like, you're not so concerned with, uh, People understanding a full package that you need to spend shitloads of time telling everybody about how good of a parent you are.
As a kid who grew up with sort of a deficit of it, And it's very important for me to spread as much of it as I can, whether it's through my friends or through children.
And children, it's like the most important responsibility because my friends, they're fine.
I met them, they're grown-ups, they'll figure it out on their own.
I'll help them when I can, but kids...
It's like, you get one shot at that.
You get one shot at raising kids, man.
You can't redo it.
You can't go, oh, this one sucks, let me rip it up and start from scratch.
You have to do it right.
And you're going to make mistakes, for sure, but you have to spend as much conscious time talking to them and interacting with them.
I find that that creates some difficulty because there's some writers, not some, I mean, so many of them, writers, musicians, actors, who have blessed the world with what they've put out.
But then you look at the destruction they sowed in their immediate vicinity.
I want to think he's that dude who put the bandana on and just played Voodoo Child.
When I worked with Phil Hartman, when Phil Hartman was a kid, I think he was like 17 or 18, Hendrix played at Whiskey, and he was there as like a roadie.
And his job was to keep the speakers from falling over.
So he stood there on the stage, and Hendrix was right there playing guitar in front of him.
And the way he described it, it was like his eyes were alight.
you know so i was trying to figure out a name for this podcast i was like man who the has affected me more in terms of motivation than hendrix because i'd listen to his music when i worked out i'd listen to his music oh that's great driving to gigs you know and plus he just seemed like so different you know just such a crazy anomaly in pop culture this african-american dude is like the greatest guitarist of all time you have all these rock guys and One of the things that eric clapton and said like he thought he knew how to play guitar Then he saw jamie
hendrix.
He's like what the fuck I realized he didn't like what am I doing?
Yeah, because he was just so out there.
He was so out there.
He was so different, you know Just a freak just an anomaly.
It's like hunting with remy warren I'm glad you guys got him doing a podcast.
You hear about guys that fish the Gulf Coast and Florida and shit and You've got to be very careful, because pulling a shark up on the beach, people will get pissed.
If I was a different species, and I was trying to make my plan, my three-year plan, I'd be like, I want to elevate my species up to, I want to look at what the shark's done and get there.
But it's a thing I've learned from my interactions with you and a thing I've seen is you don't parade it around and you don't talk about it too much, but you do talk about that there are some things where you just – you put up some firewalls in your life and the people that you're around.
And I have heard you refer to at times that something got too – In referring to people, it wasn't even like you were condemning them or thought they were bad, but you just referred to times when you've had to just sort of protect...
What you had and what you care about.
And just make some things not part of your life anymore.
Well, some people get completely self-absorbed and they burn everything around them because they're only thinking about themselves.
And even if you love them and care of them or appreciate what they're doing, like some people are amazing at certain things.
Like, you know, we were talking about Hendrix.
I mean, if Hendrix did beat his wife, I don't know if that's true, or beat his girlfriends.
But it's like some people are so good at what they do that that's all they're thinking about.
And they didn't develop these interpersonal skills or relationship skills or whatever.
They didn't develop a sense of nuance in terms of their perspective of the world or a sense of introspective thinking when they're looking at themselves and being objective about how they interface with the people around them and life.
Those people that are just like wholly focused on the self, especially pure narcissists, which you run into a lot of them in show business, and some of them it's not their fault.
You talk to them.
If you believe in determinism and you believe that they're a product of all the things that have happened to them and then you run down The list of all the things that have happened to them, it's fucking bone chilling.
I mean, so many people that I know, particularly in show business, are there because of just a giant hole that they developed in their self-esteem and who they are as a child.
They didn't get enough love.
They got too much abuse and hate and bullying and all these varying factors that made them push so hard to achieve success, to let everybody know, hey, I am special.
Hey, I am something.
You were all wrong.
But along the way, they burn everything around them.
And I don't...
I don't want to...
It's possible to get there without that.
That's what I want to say.
It's possible to get there without being a piece of shit.
And some people think you have to be a piece of shit to be successful.
Remember earlier I mentioned the collateral damage?
Some people think you could develop such an inflated sense of what you're bringing to the world that you personally come to accept the idea that there is a price to pay.
This is a trap that a lot of people get stuck into.
It's codependency.
It happens in a lot of relationships.
There's a lot of people that get involved in relationships, boy and girl, that they find that the person who is their soulmate is also the source of all their fucking problems.
And they're the curator of this person's life.
They're supposed to be helping this person along because this person has deemed them the person who's most important to them.
And it's like you gotta find out what's the boundary where you won't cross, where you realize someone is becoming an impediment to your own happiness and success.
Well, it would prevent me from taking myself, you know, if I want to pretend I'm some sort of moody artist that has always followed the path of creativity and artistic expression.
Well, you were really good as a guest, and I was like, man, this guy has so much unusual knowledge in his head, and you're so good at articulating thoughts, and you have a background in journalism, you're so eloquent.
Like, why wouldn't you do it?
And there's like this market for it.
For people that enjoy hunting and enjoy the outdoors, there's, you know, and I don't mean any disrespect to anybody who's making podcasts, do your best.
But there's a lot of clunky...
Poorly articulated thoughts that are being put out in podcast form.
One of the things that I really appreciate about you is this idea of no shooting collared deer speaks to it.
It's like there's something about this that's not just about shooting an animal and eating it.
It's about the difficulty of their pursuit, what it means, and what you're getting out of it as a human being, and then also the recognition of what you're eating When you're eating this animal, this is a wild, beautiful creature that you respect and that there's a certain amount of a feeling of loss and sadness when that animal dies.
This is recognized and this is real.
It's hard for people to articulate that.
And I think it's very important that there's people like you out there that are articulating this.
And that the people can digest this in a podcast form and get it over and over again.
And they also get, because you always do these big groups of people, they get a sense of camaraderie too.
And where people are talking.
And there's also like a pride of hard work.
There's a pride that comes through that, which I think is very contagious.
Like the feeling of appreciating and respecting hard work.
The way that you were talking about Jason Phelps.
It's like that kind of appreciation for ingenuity and hard work.
I think it's very important for people.
It's very important for people to hear.
It gives you something that I don't...
In terms of outdoor, the outdoor world, whether it's hunting and fishing and just appreciation for wildlife, it's not publicly articulated on a broad scale.
There has to be one person that's sort of aware that we're all shooting the shit, but sort of gently guiding it.
Opie and Anthony was the same thing for me.
When I started doing Opie and Anthony in the early 2000s, I realized, wow, what is this?
This is crazy.
People don't...
People that weren't fans of it back then, it doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately.
It was an amazing hangout for comedians.
We would all go there, and I would show up, and Ricky Gervais would be there, and Jim Norton would be there, and all these guys would be there, and Louis C.K. would be there, Bill Burr would be there.
We'd just be talking shit, and Ari Shafir.
We'd all be just laughing and chiming in, and even though it was 6 o'clock in the morning, you went and did it, man.
You had a cup of coffee, you showed up, and everybody was happy to see you, and it was a hang.
And it was a really loosely structured hang that they put together, and that inspired me to kind of do my podcast in a similar way.
I don't know how comfortable you are pulling back the curtain or showing how the sauce is just made, but I was talking to someone recently about you and sort of how you do your deal.
And like if someone like Richard Dawkins, we're talking about doing a podcast soon, if I have him on, I will...
Devour his material for like a week or two beforehand.
I will read his books.
I will listen to recordings and conversations and debates that he's had.
And I already am a big fan of the guy, so I'll get a good understanding of where I'm at.
When we lead into the conversation, but then I won't have an agenda.
I would just, like, let the conversation flow.
And if there's a moment in time where I want to ask him, like, you said this thing about Islam once.
Like, do you mean this in terms of, like, a general understanding of the religion itself?
What about the individuals that are just trying to be good people that are born into this environment and this sort of a, you know, I will have some places to go to if we get stuck?
But I won't force those things in.
But I think it's like, with the risk of sounding pretentious, I think that podcasting is in a weird way an art form.
The art is in the people listening.
I know sometimes I talk over people or interject too much.
There's no way you can have a perfect conversation because I don't know when the person's going to stop talking or I don't want to lose a thought and I want to jump in with it, but I'm way better at it now than I was five years ago and certainly way better at it now than I was ten years ago.
And then I think that there's an art to the way the things you're saying sound and how they sound to people.
And there's an art to expressing...
Genuine open-mindedness and genuine curiosity and just a purity of thought.
You're not trying to make people feel about you a certain way.
You're just trying to explore ideas.
And there's a smoothness to the way that's devoured by people when people are listening, the way they're consuming it.
It's easy.
And the easier you can make it on people listening, the more they'll like you.
So like if they know, like, hey – That Steve Rinella guy, he loves his kids.
He's a nice guy.
His friends love him.
I like that guy.
Listen to what he says when he talks to John Norris.
What is John saying about this and about that?
It adds to it.
Is there someone who's...
Clunky and loud and they're just trying to toot their own horn and all that comes through, especially in this long-form podcast genre.
It's like, this is the fucking mirror, man.
With long-form podcasts, you find out who the fuck everybody is.
There's a lot of people that, like, the fucking comments were insanely positive.
They're like, I thought that guy was crazy.
Like, I thought he was a nut.
I would see him in these little interviews, and I'm like, he just wants to give away everybody's money.
Like, there's a picture with Bernie with my dog, and one of the fucking hilarious comments, like, he just wants to give your dog treats to other dogs.
That's the caricature.
I mean, everyone has a caricature, right?
The caricature of that guy is, he just wants to take money from successful people and give it to lazy people.
That's the worst view of Bernie Sanders.
And you get to see, instead of this narrative that gets established through these little short sound bites, these panel talk shows, there's three people talking over each other, or debates, or whatever it is.
All those are ineffective.
And what's interesting about it is all those are fueling podcasts.
All those things that have for so long been thought of as mainstream venues for getting your ideas out, now they highlight all the problems with those and they highlight all the strengths of podcasts.
I do not have a problem with giving up more of my money as a person who's made a lot of money if I know that it's going to benefit the greater good of mankind in a real way.
That they just want to take everybody's money and then do what they will with it and take long lunch breaks.
This is the problem with a lot of what we think of in terms of government.
Government is filled.
It's bloated.
It's filled with assholes.
It's filled with people that just got government jobs and they're not good at it.
No one else wants that job, so they take that job and they do a shitty job with it and they squander resources.
That's what drives people crazy and especially hardworking people that know how hard it is to make a living.
If you're a fucking logger, you're giving away a certain percentage of your money, and you're tired of all these splinters in your hands, and you're exhausted, and some asshole is going to take away your money and allocate a certain amount of it to nonsense, gender research, and all sorts of stupid shit that you think is just fruitless.
It's infuriating for people, for hard-working people with dirt under their fingernails.
They don't want to think about anybody squandering their money.
But the right, but I need them to move back my, when I say back my direction, because historically, I don't know, the right and left is confusing, but yeah, I need them to come my way on conservation.
Well, I like the way you've described yourself in the past, that you're politically sort of alone, that you're kind of without a party, because the left wants to take your guns away, and the right wants to take your land away.
And this is what we see fiscally, that the most disturbing aspects of...
Right-wing administration says they want to sell off public land.
They want to figure out a way, just a little bit, just a little bit.
We're going to take a little bit.
We're going to use it for mining.
Just take a little bit.
Well, we might lose this salmon river, but who the fuck is paying attention to that?
Dude, we've gotten hit hard for that kind of stuff, for pointing out that it's just not...
You know, we as a company, like at Meteor, we've been hit hard for pointing out that it's unfortunate that someone's not speaking wholly for our concerns.
I don't think about you either if it makes you feel comfortable.
But I think we need more people like that.
Most people would think that I'm conservative, that I'm a Republican or an alt-right or something like that.
I vote left on almost everything except gun control.
I just don't think that people understand what they're talking about when they're talking about gun control.
I don't think they understand the nuances of the Second Amendment.
The nuances of taking away people's ability to defend themselves or to hunt or to own something that may or may not be used against someone else, but they never would use it.
You don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't have just because some people abuse things.
This is a very complex conversation that people on the left want to boil down to guns equal bad.
It was a beautiful, it was like, because we're like in the mix of it, man.
We have three kids that are under 10. It's hard.
Everything's hard.
And we went to see you, and it was just like, we went to see you, we watched your shit, and it was just for, you know, for this like glorious whatever, I don't know, 60 minutes, 45 minutes.
Turkey, but if you remember, I proposed to you not long ago, I was asking you about your availability to hunt elk in September, but it kind of petered out.