Steven Rinella

High-Level Overview

Outdoorsman, writer and MeatEater host Steven Rinella returns to The Joe Rogan Experience for a long, rambling conversation between two old friends. It opens with Joe Rogan riffing on fame, retirement and politics (Canada's speech laws, the Los Angeles fires, masks and pharmaceutical advertising), then settles into Rinella's home ground: the strange trade-offs of wildlife management, mercury in fish, the slow spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, a haunting 1970s mystery from the Alaskan bush, the true story of the Donner Party, the lost ship the Griffon, the beaver fur trade that built America's first millionaire, and the newest thinking on who the first Americans were and how they arrived.

The tone is loose, funny and often profane, with Rogan supplying strong opinions and Rinella supplying history, field stories and a naturalist's caution about easy answers. The conversation swings from current-events venting to wildlife science to campfire-style storytelling and deep-time archaeology, with Rinella plugging his new History Channel series, Hunting History, along the way.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why neither man believes in retiring, and the strange side of being very famous
• Rogan's views on Canada's speech laws, California's fire response, masks and drug advertising
• How human meddling with lakes and oil rigs can help or hurt fisheries, and why it's rarely clean-cut
• Mercury, arsenic and other contaminants in fish, from sardines to Great Lakes perch
• Chronic wasting disease: how it spreads, why it can't be eradicated, and what it could mean for hunters
• A 1970s Yukon mystery about a drifter called John the Baptist, and what starvation really does to the body
• The Donner Party, the lost Griffon shipwreck, and the beaver trade behind the mountain-man era
• The kelp highway theory of the first Americans, Clovis mammoth hunters, and how archaeology is changing

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Toughness, Retirement and the Weight of Fame

Rinella opens by admitting that it took him a long time to understand the kind of toughness people credited to Donald Trump. He had always pictured toughness as powering through brush or up a mountain, and only later recognized the mental kind that lets someone take sustained attacks without crawling into a hole. That leads into a riff on retirement. Rogan argues that the idea of a golden age of doing nothing is a fantasy: "Human beings need tasks," he says, and without a real, absorbing pursuit people go dull. He plans to be outside and active to the end, and says of the podcast, "This is the easiest thing I do", adding that he only talks to people he genuinely wants to talk to.

Rinella reminds Rogan that years ago, over barbecue, he said he wished he were 10% less famous, and then got 20% more famous. Rogan jokes that he took the Spotify deal partly hoping it would shrink his audience. The two discuss how fame at that level becomes unmanageable, and Rinella makes the sharp point that the people you have to worry about aren't the ones who dislike you. "You got to worry about the people that like you." Because podcast listeners hear a host for hours every week, they feel they know him, and Rogan notes the upside: after hundreds of hours, a smear campaign has a hard time sticking, since listeners actually do know who he is.

Politics, Power and "Contagious" Psychology

Rogan spends a stretch on politics. He argues that Canada, lacking a First Amendment, has let hate speech laws and pronoun rules chill expression, pointing to Jordan Peterson being ordered into what Rogan describes as a re-education process to keep his clinical license. He credits the First and Second Amendments together with keeping American course corrections possible. He also criticizes California's governor for smiling while talking about land-use plans as fires still burned, and cites mismanagement such as uncleared brush and an empty 11-million-gallon reservoir.

Asked whether he'd ever run for governor of Texas, Rogan flatly refuses: he has "the best job in the world", doesn't even like having employees, and sees politics as a creepy business that corrupts idealistic people. He quotes Evan Hafer's line that "psychology is more contagious than the flu": spend time around people who are just trying to have fun and you become more like them, while surrounding yourself with power-climbers makes it hard to keep your sovereignty. Later in the episode, Rogan returns to masks, arguing they didn't work and that face coverings now hide criminals, and to pharmaceutical advertising, which he says the US and New Zealand alone allow and which keeps networks from criticizing drug makers. Rinella shares some of Rogan's post-pandemic skepticism while pushing back that he has also benefited from Western medicine.

The Messy Trade-offs of Managing Waters

Rinella offers several examples of how environmental decisions rarely line up neatly. In the Gulf of Mexico, where he spearfishes, offshore oil rigs act "like a vertical coral reef": swim away from them and you can go miles without seeing fish, but a rig is draped in thousands of them. Programs have alternated between pulling out abandoned rigs (Idle Iron) and toppling them in place (Rigs to Reefs). Shrimpers dislike them as snags, while anglers and spearfishers want them left alone, and Rinella's friends now show up at GPS marks to find their rigs gone.

Rogan describes Lake Austin, where lakefront owners who disliked weeds brought in carp that stripped the vegetation, leaving bass with nowhere to hide except docks, while nearby Lady Bird Lake, spared that treatment, is full of fish. Rinella remembers his first political act as a high schooler: defending an invasive plant, Eurasian milfoil, because it made great fish habitat. The lake was poisoned anyway, and the total biomass of fish dropped. He also laments Michigan shoreline owners spraying Roundup and trucking in beach sand, slowly turning vibrant, weedy shorelines into something like a swimming pool.

Mercury, Arsenic and Eating Wild Fish

The conversation turns to contaminants. Rinella tells the story of Ron Spring, a commercial bait fisherman who lived on Great Lakes fish his whole life and was studied by researchers testing old-timers for heavy metals. When they gave him a grocery list memory test, he laughed that he wouldn't have remembered the list if he'd never eaten fish. Rinella explains that mercury, historically released by burning coal and spread evenly around the globe, builds up most in predatory fish that live near the surface, such as marlin eating tuna, because contaminants concentrate up the food chain.

Rogan shares that his doctor once found arsenic in his blood, which he traced to eating four or five cans of sardines a night after comedy shows. After a few months off sardines, it was gone. Rinella adds cases of real mercury poisoning: a coworker who ate a mix of Hawaiian tuna, Alaskan halibut and walleye until his hands went numb, a man who gorged on all-you-can-eat sushi on a cruise, and RFK Jr.'s mercury poisoning from canned tuna. Friends in Hawaii deliberately pace how much big predatory fish they eat. And one flathead catfish angler's philosophy got a laugh: "if I can catch and eat so many big flat heads that it kills me, I win."

Chronic Wasting Disease and the Future of Deer

CWD is the episode's most substantial wildlife topic. It is a prion disease of deer, elk and related animals, always fatal, first identified at a research facility in Colorado around the early 1970s, and found in new states and counties every year. Rinella notes a leading theory in the wildlife world that moving deer and elk into penned operations has helped it jump long distances. He describes two separate fears: that high infection rates (their friend Doug's Wisconsin property has seen close to 50% of bucks test positive) will wipe out older, bigger deer, and that it could one day jump to humans. He stresses that "Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD positive meat" over decades with no confirmed human case, and that alarming early reports, such as a monkey infection and a dementia cluster among deer hunters, didn't hold up under replication or statistics. Still, he wouldn't knowingly eat it or serve it to his kids.

Rinella explains why the disease is so hard to fight. Prions persist on vegetation and can't be cooked out, so states increasingly restrict moving carcasses, heads and bones, and he worries about a future where even venison can't cross county lines. Lowering deer density is the standard strategy, but "You can't go to a county that had infected deer that no longer has infected deer." He contrasts Ted Nugent's view that CWD is overhyped with his own: it's frightening enough that he'd happily spend taxpayer billions to make sure deer meat stays safe, calling it "my kind of pork barrel spending." His deepest worry is cultural: "What happens when we look at deer and we look at them like a disease vector?" The two also touch on moose declines in Maine driven by ticks during mild winters, even as Colorado becomes a premier moose state.

Skepticism, Media and the Limits of AI

After a detour into lab-made disease (Rinella compares researchers to a buffalo hide hunter who kept killing because someone else would anyway), the pair discuss trust in institutions. Rogan recommends RFK Jr.'s book The Real Anthony Fauci. Rinella says he used to accept a lot of official assurances and gained a new skepticism during the pandemic, but his bigger worry is how history will later tell the story. He introduces Gell-Mann amnesia: when you read reporting on something you know well, you notice how wrong it is, then forget that and trust coverage of topics you don't know.

Rogan hopes large language models may eventually give more objective assessments than ideologically driven newspapers, though he admits they can be biased or gamed, citing the Google Gemini image fiasco. Rinella is doubtful. As a writer, he says AI will make some kinds of writing obsolete, but it is "always going to be representative of input", so writers who stay at the cutting edge of real experience will stay ahead of it. He admits he used to fear every new medium, including the internet and podcasting, and has learned to run toward change instead.

John the Baptist, Starvation and the Donner Party

Rinella tells a story from his podcast guest Randy Brown, a fisheries biologist who spent about 15 years living off the land along the Yukon River in Alaska. Around 1978, two men rafted down from Canada; one, who called himself John the Baptist, was abandoned by his partner and became a leech on the local trappers, taking their food, furs and ammunition from a shared reloading station. Told to leave, he stole Brown's snowshoes and headed into the woods with a .22 pistol. The next year Brown found the snowshoes hanging in a tree and the man starved to death in a cabin sleeping bag, "nothing but skin and bones." Brown's firm view: "you cannot survive with a 22 pistol" in that country. Rinella has been asking publicly whether anyone knows who the man was.

Brown also gave Rinella the book Death in the Barren Ground, the journal of a young man who starved with two companions trapping in northern Canada in the 1920s when the caribou never came. They boiled crushed animal bone and hides for nourishment, and the bone fragments formed fatal bowel blockages. That detail reframed the Donner Party for Rinella as he filmed an episode about it. Of roughly 90 people stranded in the Sierra Nevada in 1846 and 1847, "more than half of those were kids", the children survived at a much higher rate than adults, and parents outlived non-parents. Rogan agrees: "No, it's a survival story." Rinella notes the party mostly ate people who had already died, but one man murdered two Native American guides to eat them and never faced consequences, because "It was more illegal to kill someone's cow than it was to kill two Native Americans."

Hunting History: Lost Ships, Glaciers and Missing Planes

Rinella describes his new History Channel series, made with former Bourdain show runner Mo, which investigates outdoor mysteries. One is the Griffon, the first ship built on the upper Great Lakes by the French explorer La Salle, lost around the time he filled it with beaver pelts to pay off debts; it is "the holy grail of Great Lakes ship wrecks." Rinella dove a site recently claimed as the Griffon and doesn't think it is, noting the lakes hold thousands of wrecks, many unidentified, and that cold fresh water preserves them remarkably. Cheap, sophisticated sonar now lets amateurs find wreck after wreck, but no one will accept a Griffon claim without its French cannons, and France might claim the vessel anyway since it flew their flag.

Another episode looks at the 1972 disappearance of a plane carrying House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (Cokie Roberts's father) and Alaska's only congressman. Searchers long suspected a glacier had swallowed it. Rinella visited a glacier that did swallow a 1952 military transport and began spitting out wreckage and human remains miles downstream decades later, which the military still recovers every summer. Based on how fast glaciers move, the theory that the Boggs plane went into its suspected glacier has largely been put to rest. Rinella also climbed about 30 feet down into a crevasse, describing how ice screws can melt loose and how climbers instead drill V-shaped tunnels through the ice to anchor a rope.

Beavers, Buckskins and America's First Millionaire

Rogan asks about the fur trade, and Rinella explains how John Jacob Astor, a poor German immigrant, became America's first homegrown millionaire by trading beaver fur. While Spain drew gold from the Americas, fur became the northern continent's great commodity. Deerskins came first: Daniel Boone was primarily a deerskin hunter, and a deerskin's value is where "a buck comes from. Beaver pelts were wanted only for the soft underfur used to make felt hats, Like an Ebenezer Scrooge top hat." Whole hides were shipped to Europe to prove they were genuine beaver, and the meat, leather and guard hairs were thrown away.

When Lewis and Clark reported that the Northern Rockies were the last stronghold of beaver, it launched the mountain-man era. The English model of trading posts, where Native trappers brought in furs, failed there because the Plains tribes were equestrian bison hunters with no interest in trapping beaver. So companies hired Americans, including runaways and orphans, to live for years in the Rockies and meet up at an annual summer rendezvous. The era lasted until about 1840, when the market collapsed. This history is the subject of Rinella's upcoming audio series on the mountain men.

The First Americans and a Changing Archaeology

Asked where he'd go with a time machine, Rinella picks the moment the first people entered the Americas. He explains the old model: people crossed a Texas-sized Bering land bridge, were trapped in Alaska by ice, and then poured through an ice-free corridor near Edmonton onto the Great Plains to hunt mammoths. Older sites have made that timeline untenable, including Monte Verde in Chile and the currently oldest widely accepted site in the Columbia River drainage. The fashionable idea now is the kelp highway: a seafaring people who followed rich kelp-bed coastlines south with great speed, then moved inland up salmon rivers and later became mammoth and grassland hunters. Rogan brings up the Sage Wall in Montana, which Rinella thinks is probably natural but may cover in a future episode.

Rinella describes new isotope work on the Anzick child, a Clovis-era burial from Montana, showing a diet that included woolly mammoth, supporting archaeologist David Meltzer's view of Clovis people as real mammoth hunters rather than mostly scavengers and plant gatherers. He took part in an experimental archaeology study at Kent State University, butchering a bison with stone flakes and Clovis points to create a reference set of cut marks, since at old sites "the only thing left is bone and stone." Removing the tongue left none of the jaw marks long assumed to come from tongue extraction, and he wonders whether Clovis points were sometimes knives. He argues that fresh carcasses are rarely just lying around, and that animals that had never seen humans could likely be approached and killed easily, which may explain how fast people spread. The episode closes on sediment DNA, digs that deliberately leave most of a site untouched for future tools, the difficult ethics of repatriating human remains, and John Reeves's Alaskan bone yard.

Conclusion

This episode is Rogan and Rinella at their most relaxed: part political venting, part natural history lesson, part campfire storytelling. The strongest threads are Rinella's: an honest, uncertain look at chronic wasting disease and what it could mean for deer and hunters; a reminder that environmental choices, from oil rigs to lake weeds, rarely have clean answers; a sobering look at starvation that turns the Donner Party from a punchline into a survival story; and a lively tour of the fur trade and the latest science on the first Americans. Listeners who come for the outdoors and history will find plenty to chew on, and the full episode adds the colorful detours and back-and-forth that a summary can only hint at.

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