Name: Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella
Uploaded: 2015-10-16T03:02:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-10-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-10-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #709 - Steven Rinella

It's a good fucking book, dude.
You did a great job with this thing.
Oh, thanks, man.
It was a lot of work.
I would imagine.
I don't know how the hell you have the time.
Where do you see volume two?
Live.
Live?
So tell me, how the fuck do you have the time to do this?
I'm looking at this book, The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and
Cooking Wild Game.
Steve Rinella is here, ladies and gentlemen.
Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Rinella.
Put on my fucking knee here.
I like that.
I like that, huh?
Sporty.
How do you have the time to do this book?
You know, when I got into doing the book, that was a great opening to the show,
by the way.
Thank you very much.
When I started doing that book, I thought it would take eight months, man.
We just got on this idea.
You know what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a book about field care and butchering
and stuff,
but then someone said it should be bigger.
It should be like The Complete Guide.
Or we started using the word complete.
And what I keep saying now is how I should, for a long time, I really regretted
including the word complete in the proposal.
Because as we sat down, initially I would sit down with Dodie, you know, well,
Dan Dodie.
And we would just start mapping out.
We had like a board, you know, and sticky notes.
And we'd just start mapping out, like, what would complete look like.
And then it grew and grew.
And Dodie, you know, he was working on the show and moved on to some other
things that still was involved.
And other guys came in.
And Giannis, you know, we started working on it and just trying to manage the
idea.
And pretty soon, I mean, a lot of people worked on that book.
But, yeah, I mean, I was in there on the writing process.
And it turned into several, it took several years to do them.
Then when I took it to my publisher, she had me in.
It's published by Spiegel and Grau at Random House.
And she had me into the office, and we had turned it in.
It was going to be 700 and some pages long.
And she said, like, it's just books aren't, like, you just don't really, you
know, you got to understand, like, that's a big book.
You don't really do, yeah, you don't really do illustrated books that big.
So we were going to hack a bunch out, but then we kind of hit on this idea just
to publish it in two things, as volume one and volume two.
But it wasn't just as simple as splitting it down the middle.
So it took probably, I don't know, almost a year, maybe, to turn it into volume
one, big game, volume two, small game.
That's a big effort, man.
I know how much you work and how much you travel and how many hunts you go on.
And I don't just know how the fuck you did this.
I remember being down, we were down in, I was down with my family, just
vacation in Baja.
I remember sitting there, and we were fishing and stuff, and we had two babies
with us, and I'm sitting there trying to, like, work on that book.
I just worked on it all the time.
But the thing is, I don't want to, like, I did a lot of work on it, but
everybody, a lot of the guys you know worked on it a ton, too.
You know, like, all that recipe stuff.
You know, Dodie, like, we did a big shoot.
Dodie kind of organized a shoot with some other folks, and, like, we organized
a week of just cooking and photographing.
But the other thing is, a lot of the stuff in there, too, the images you'd kind
of look at, the images you'd be like, well, how would you go and get all these
images?
Well, you'd never be able to justify getting those images to make a book, but
we had access to so many hours of hunting footage of all this stuff.
So we were able to do something called screen grabs.
So in there is a lot of stuff where we were able to pull images to illustrate
all these different procedures and stuff that you would just never go out and
get those kind of photographs.
You would have to kill a ton of animals just on purpose to do that.
Yeah, it would be, like, really expensive, but we were able to draw back.
And the advantage of filming hunts for so many years now is that anything you
wanted to explain, we'd sit there and be like, oh, you know what, it'd be
perfect.
And we'd just go in and pull stills out of images and put them right in the
books.
It's like, as you look at it, it's kind of, you know, it's beautiful.
Another guy, a lot of the photography, like, the stuff on the cover is by this
guy, John Hafner, who's a hunter and photographer.
We became friends with John working it up, and he opened up his vast library of
wildlife imagery and just gave us kind of, like, the keys to his whole catalog.
And so we had just a pick of some of the best stuff out there.
But I'm real happy with it, man.
I'm proud of it.
And I always tell people, like, if you get it, there's no way you're going to
be disappointed in it.
No, it's excellent.
It's so comprehensive.
And I don't know of any other book like it.
I mean, maybe there's one out there that's like it, but there's so much
involved.
And even if you're not into hunting, it's really fascinating, the tactics and
strategies and why you have to do certain things
and what's involved in the pursuit and tracking the habitat of these animals
and why they live in these certain places.
We put a lot of legal stuff in there.
The next one, that one's out.
The next one, the small game one, comes out in December.
But, yeah, they've been doing well, man, and we've heard great things about
them.
Well, you've expanded so much, you know.
And when I first started talking to you, it was right after you got done doing
The Wild Within.
And then you were starting Meat Eater at the time.
And now, you know, I really think that the show has hit its stride in a crazy
way.
Like, the first episode that I saw of this season was the one where you went
hunting for coos deer,
and you didn't even kill anything.
And it was one of your best episodes.
And it was just because it was so much involved that it's not just a hunting
show, you know.
Like, you were talking about your relationship with your father
and how you would love to bring your father to this place.
You know, your father's dead.
You were talking about how, you know, you have this tumultuous relationship
with him
and how you'd want to bring him to this place to see what this is like because
it's so beautiful.
And there's no music, and you were just out there talking.
And it was like, well, man, this is some really deep, compelling shit.
Yeah, we had no intention of doing that show that way until later when the
editor looked at it
and he wound up doing it.
There's no music.
It's just like the sound of the wind.
It was awesome.
It's my favorite episode.
It's mine, too.
It's my favorite one we've ever done.
And I was nervous at first because, you know, to do a hunting show, I mean,
you're working in a really traditional genre that in many ways doesn't invite a
lot of innovation.
Or one might think it doesn't invite a lot of innovation, you know.
Yeah.
You could get away with thinking that.
But anytime we've done something that really goes against the grain of what you
picture is going to happen
in a hunting show, it's like people that like the show have always liked it.
Like we can run shows where no one gets anything, you know.
When we're out, if we're out filming and no one gets anything, you know, we
call them skunkers.
I get real nervous, you know what I mean?
Like I started getting real nervous from a production standpoint.
Right.
But in the end, man, I think that people, that fans of the show are willing to
go along with you on that
if you're giving them something else instead.
Yeah.
You know?
Well, you definitely did.
We just filmed a dove hunt down in Virginia with my buddy, Ronnie Boehm, who
you met.
You know, the daily bag limit on doves is 15, right?
So it's me and Ronnie, another guy, we all limit out.
That's a tremendous amount of shooting, you know.
So then you're kind of...
It's a kill fest.
Yeah.
So you're sort of thinking, they're five-ounce birds.
But, and then you're sort of thinking like, man, this is going to be a great
show.
But it doesn't, and I hope that it will be, but it doesn't necessarily mean
that.
You know, it's like having, like getting stuff doesn't necessarily mean it's
going to be great
because you kind of, there's always like a, there's always a story hiding
around down in there.
And when we're getting ready to go somewhere to film, I'm always getting
pressure in a friendly way
from Giannis or from Doty, you know, who are like, what's the story?
You know, like what's the, and I just feel like, I understand where they're
coming from.
Like it's their job to wonder about that stuff.
But I always feel like you're just going to wind up responding to something
that happens.
What I think is important about your show, I think there's a lot of things
important about you
and what you represent in this world.
But one of the things that I think is important in your show is if there's a
lot of these shows,
these hunting shows without mocking them or saying anything bad about them, but
they, they're very simple.
They appeal to simple people.
They have like this simple ideology that goes through them.
And I think you get caught in that genre and everybody sort of starts thinking,
well, this is what these shows are about.
These shows are all about like, go sit in a tree stand and, you know, and when,
when you, you shoot this animal that you named early in the spring,
you got trail cam pictures of it.
I mean, a lot of those shows are the same goddamn show every week.
And it gets, you, you get in your head, oh, this is what a hunting show is.
And this is what hunting is.
And I think that's a, it's a problem with the stereotype that people have with
hunting.
They connect hunting to sort of a, like a low vibration of thinking, you know,
that, you know what I mean?
I understand what you're saying.
I don't know if it's you, like you being a comedian, or I noticed you guys
always say comic, you being a comic, I don't know.
I'm guessing you watch other guys.
Yes.
I could see, I could see in that world, you probably would really want to watch
other guys.
I haven't found it helpful to watch hunting shows.
I generally don't watch hunting shows because I don't want to wind up, I don't
want to wind up having the stuff that I do be a response to that.
Right.
You know, I'm always afraid, I'm always afraid of that, of like feeling like
something would get in your head.
And even if you didn't intend to, that you'd wind up responding to it, you know?
So I haven't watched a whole lot.
And I don't like to hack on, I don't like to hack on, like people often invite
me to like hack on hunting shows.
And I just don't, there's some things I see a little bit that trouble me, like
some of the ways that female hunters are portrayed as like little sex dolls,
you know, with the mascara.
And it just doesn't feel like when I think about my daughter growing up and
going hunting, I just don't feel that that will, I don't want that to be how
she finds her way into it as sort of like every man's fantasy.
That stuff bugs me a little bit.
But I haven't found it that helpful to watch.
So I don't think of, I don't do like a reaction to what's going on.
I just try to make things that, to show just like the complex relationship I
had with hunting before I started doing this.
Filming hunts definitely changed the way I think about hunting.
And in a way I try to react against that.
I try to recapture like how I used to feel about going hunting when I wasn't
having this production thing in my head.
About like making a show, you know, be worried about making a show.
Well, I think that it's, it's, it's the elephant in the room.
I mean, how, how do you avoid thinking about it while you're out there and you're
doing it?
You have to consider, it's one of the episodes that you did your podcast
recently.
We were talking about with Casey, Casey Levere.
Where you were talking about all the different aspects of putting together a
show and that you kind of