MeatEater's Steven Rinella on the Economic History of Hunting

Summary

Odd Lots Podcast Summary

Episode: MeatEater's Steven Rinella on the Economic History of Hunting
Hosts: Joe Weisenthal & Tracy Alloway (Bloomberg)
Guest: Steven Rinella, author and founder of MeatEater
Date: December 15, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores the economic history of hunting in America, revealing how hunting shaped the nation economically, culturally, and politically. Steven Rinella provides an expert’s perspective, connecting colonial-era hunting practices with modern American attitudes toward wildlife, conservation, and even language (“a buck”). The episode covers market hunting, the fur trades, legal changes, and the lasting legacy of hunting on U.S. society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and the Long Hunter Tradition

• Popular Images vs. Reality:
  • Boone’s raccoon cap is a Disney fabrication; he wore a beaver-felt hat instead. Davy Crockett, in contrast, embraced the flamboyant showmanship (06:10).
    • “Boone did not like coonskin caps. That was a thing added on later through Disney. Boone wore a wide-brimmed hat made from beaver wool felt.” — Steven Rinella [06:10]
    • Crockett’s persona was part “showboat” rather than practicality.
• Hunting as Economic Foundation:
  • White-tailed deer skins were the second biggest export (after rice) in the colonial South (09:30).
  • Bear meat and products (grease, bacon) were prized foods and trade goods.

2. The Legal and Economic Structure of Hunting

• Market vs. Sport Hunting:
  • Colonial hunting was both for subsistence and for monetary gain—often against the wishes of the Crown and in trespass on Native land.
  • Formalizing wild game meat trades remains illegal: “If you formalize that arrangement where there is an expected quid pro quo around deer meat for access, you would be in violation of the law…You would be commodifying wild game meat, which is illegal in this country.” — Steven Rinella [08:08]
• Cultural Impacts:
  • Language reflects hunting’s place in the economy—e.g., use of “buck” for a dollar comes from trading in deer skins.

3. The Evolution of American Hunting Practices

• Contrasts with Europe:
  • In Europe, hunting was the privileged reserve of aristocrats or landowners (“the king’s deer”), while America’s wild landscape enabled ordinary colonists to adopt hunting for livelihood, often influenced by Native practices (14:30).
    • “You could be executed for hunting animals that belonged to the aristocracy. Boone’s family did not arrive as hunters; they adopted it in America, often learning from Native Americans.” — Steven Rinella [14:30]

4. Commodity Trades: Deer, Beaver, and Buffalo

• Beaver Fur Trade:
  • Highly formalized, investor-driven; beaver pelts equaled real wages and drove expansion West.
  • “Astor’s first business was the beaver trade…they would run advertisements to hire trappers…” — Steven Rinella [26:10]
  • Market eventually crashed due to over-hunting and changing fashion (silk hats).
• Buffalo Hide Trade:
  • Extreme case of “tragedy of the commons”; in barely a decade, ~15 million buffalo were wiped out to feed industrial demand for leather (belting for factories).
    • “By 1883, 11 years later, that 15 million animals is gone.” — Steven Rinella [36:12]
    • Illustrates how rapid technological and economic changes (railroads, tanneries) can devastate natural resources when unchecked.

5. Early Conservation Awareness

• Surprising Early Regulation:
  • Colonial deer hunting sometimes regulated, motivated more by resource protection than environmentalism (30:23).
• Rise of Environmental Ethic:
  • Figureheads like Theodore Roosevelt (founding Boone and Crockett Club) pushed for regulated “sport hunting” to preserve wildlife for future generations.
    • Irony: The club’s namesakes, Boone & Crockett, embodied the very frontier market-hunting the club aimed to curtail.

6. Modern Hunting Regulations & Culture

• The American System:
  • Wildlife as public property, managed by state/federal agencies—not owned by landowners (44:43).
    • “American wildlife is owned by the American people…That has allowed us the ability to have a governing structure to control harvest for sustainability...” — Steven Rinella [44:43]
  • 11–13% excise tax on guns/ammo goes to conservation; hunting license fees directly fund wildlife management (48:00).
• Economic Impact Today:
  • ~13–14 million hunting licenses annually; the industry generates billions, primarily from gear and experiences rather than meat as currency (46:25).
  • “Gear” has always been central—then as now, hunters debate apparel, rifles, and accessories.

7. Conservation, Private Ownership, and Tricky Questions

• Bison/Buffalo Recovery:
  • Near-extinction reversed mainly by private ownership; today, 94% of U.S. bison are privately owned, and only have wildlife rights within National Parks (42:22).
• Commercial Hunting & Endangered Species:
  • In some African contexts, regulated trophy hunting can incentivize local communities to conserve species (51:40).
• Lessons for Modern Policy:
  • Market solutions alone won’t prevent over-exploitation; long-term, broad-based regulatory and cultural shifts required.

8. Wild Game: Culture, Cuisine, and Recommendations

• Eating Traditions:
  • Bear, mallard duck, and squirrel highlighted as exceptional wild game options.
    • “Squirrel, properly done, would kind of blow your mind... Bear pot roast in classic fashion with root vegetables...I refuse to accept that’s what it is.” — Steven Rinella [54:18]
  • Venison is very lean: best for ragù or mixed in burgers.
  • Importance of trimming fat for freezing and storage (55:30).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “You could gift him access, he could gift you meat. But the minute you formalize that transaction, you would be commodifying wild game meat, which is illegal in this country.” — Steven Rinella [08:28]
• “Hunting is embedded in the way we talk about money” — Tracy Alloway [04:09]
• “There’s an interesting passage where Washington, George Washington, criticizes folks like Boone...he did not feel that they were adequately American.”— Steven Rinella [20:38]
• “Irony: Boone and Crockett—the characters who most embodied the sins that the Boone and Crockett Club was trying to overcome.” — Steven Rinella [32:48]
• “No, the name I have for those people is my buddies...Not a year goes by that I don’t take out friends, family, whoever, people that are interested in hunting, that I don’t take them out and kind of explain the world.” — Steven Rinella, on “gearheads” and new hunters [49:59]
• “You want to enjoy [venison] for the next year, trim the fat away...Once you put it in your freezer, if you leave that tallow on it, it will turn even in your freezer.” — Steven Rinella [55:30]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:32] — Daniel Boone, hunting’s role in colonial America
• [06:10] — Clearing up misconceptions about Boone, coonskin caps
• [08:08] — Laws on game meat trading and informal exchange
• [09:30] — Economic scale of colonial deerskin trade
• [14:30] — European hunting vs. American frontier practices
• [23:26] — Logistics and operations of a long hunt
• [26:10] — Formalization of the beaver trade, Astor & fur industry
• [32:48] — Early regulation, conservation movement, Boone & Crockett Club
• [35:22] — Buffalo hides, Industrial Revolution, and decimation
• [42:22] — Near-extinction and private recovery of bison populations
• [44:43] — The American model: public ownership and regulation of wildlife
• [46:25] — Current economic footprint of hunting and licensing
• [48:00] — Gear & funding conservation through excise taxes
• [51:40] — Commercial hunting as conservation in Africa
• [54:09] — Wild game recommendations, culinary discussion
• [55:30] — Tips on storing and preparing venison

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Tone & Takeaways

Engaging, conversational, and rich with anecdotes and historical context—this episode is accessible even to non-hunters or history buffs. Rinella combines expertise with a welcoming attitude toward newcomers (“the name I have for those people is my buddies”) and advocates for both conservation and the cultural continuity of hunting in American life.

Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of hunting’s pivotal economic and cultural role, the origins of wildlife regulation, and the surprising modern ramifications—from gear buying to conservation funding.

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For further discussion or to explore Rinella’s work, check out his MeatEater audio series on American hunting history.

Transcript

[Steven Rinella]

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[Tracy Alloway]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

[Tracy Alloway]

Joe, I have a pop quiz on American history for you.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Oh, God.

[Steven Rinella]

Are you ready?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Go on.

[Tracy Alloway]

Who was Daniel Boone?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Did he have like a hat that was cool. He was like. I just think it was like someone.

[Tracy Alloway]

A raccoon hat.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yes, a raccoon hat. And he was probably an outdoors guy who probably didn't hang out in cities very much. That's what I think of. Besides the hat and imagining him out in the wilderness somewhere. I have no. I don't know what year he lived in. Anything beyond that. Maybe 1800s. I don't know.

[Tracy Alloway]

So the one fact that you know about Daniel Boone is actually, I think, contested whether or not he actually wore the raccoon cap. But do you know what he was doing when he was outdoors?

[Joe Weisenthal]

No, no, I.

[Tracy Alloway]

He was hunting.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay. I guess I could have guessed that. I would have guessed that he was.

[Tracy Alloway]

Something called a long hunter.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't know what that is.

[Tracy Alloway]

He went on really long expeditions to hunt. Do you know what he was hunting?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Nope. Raccoons?

[Tracy Alloway]

No, apparently not. Deer.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay.

[Tracy Alloway]

White tailed deer. And this is something that I think, you know, everyone has heard the name Daniel Boone, but almost no one can actually remember what he was doing.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

And people also forget that, you know, a lot of American history is built not on manufacturing and farming necessarily, but on hunting.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I don't. Have we ever done a hunting episode?

[Tracy Alloway]

We haven't. And I find this whole part of US History so fascinating, and it actually really is intertwined with even how we think about money. So do you know where the term a buck came from? Lend me a buck. Give me a buck.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Well, now I imagine it's probably from a deer.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

But had it not been for this intro in the context, I actually would have had no idea.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. So hunting is actually embedded in the way we talk about money. So that's what we're going to be talking about.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I can't wait. A whole new avenue for us.

[Tracy Alloway]

And I have to say, just on a personal note, something has happened to me recently, which is I have completely flipped on deer. I used to like them. I used to look out the window and be like, oh, these graceful animals. Aren't they beautiful? But as of a week ago, they ate my entire newly planted garden, and I hate them.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah. I get the impression that a lot of people, their view of deer flips pretty quickly with. When they're actually living in a location where they're prevalent. Like, it's like, oh, they're cute. Maybe you saw a movie about them or something like that. It's like, oh, who wants to hunt the deer? And then you confront them and you're like, maybe we need a little bit of population management, so to speak.

[Tracy Alloway]

That's right.

[Joe Weisenthal]

For the deer community.

[Tracy Alloway]

So my solution to this problem. I don't hunt personally. The only thing I hunt is, like, leftover Thanksgiving pumpkins on my property, which we target shoot. But we have a friend who loves to hunt.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

And so he's gonna be on our property hunting deer. And if you want some fresh venison.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I do.

[Tracy Alloway]

Then let me know.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Have you arranged a deal with him where he can keep as much as you want? Like, does he tithe you 20% or.

[Tracy Alloway]

Whatever it is he pays us in meat?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

Which is actually Great at the moment because beef prices are so insane.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You're so lucky. Your coal and your meat, your.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah, anyway, I'm blessed in natural resources, just like America.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's right.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right, well, I'm happy to say we have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. Someone who I'm very excited to be talking to, actually. We have Stephen Rinella. He is the author and founder of Meat Eater and knows all about hunting and all about this particular aspect of US Economic history. So, Steve, welcome to the show.

[Steven Rinella]

Hey, thank you for having me on. I'm dying to jump in and offer a few clarifications and corrections on our friend Daniel Boone.

[Joe Weisenthal]

When you're ready, why don't we just start. Tell us everything we got wrong in the intro. Just go for it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Boone did not like coonskin caps. That was a thing that was added on later. Through Disney depictions, Boone wore a wide brimmed hat made from beaver wool felt, which is still the material of choice for high end cowboy hats. Raccoons, there was a commodity for a long time in different tallows and greases. They used to hunt raccoons and possums and actually render the oil from them.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, wow.

[Steven Rinella]

Just as an example, I'm holding in my hand right now a one quart jar of rendered coon grease, which I made for a buddy of mine just as a present.

[Tracy Alloway]

What do you actually do?

[Joe Weisenthal]

What do you do with that? Can you make candles?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, I haven't done anything with it. Yeah, yeah, you definitely make soap candles. You can cook with it. In fact, when the English were first strategizing around establishing their first colony in the New World, and they had a sort of a list of, of ways that they might monetize this colony. On that list was, like, animal oils, animal greases. So, yeah, Boone was in the deerskin trade, but he also was in the bear grease trade and the. The animal oil trade, as was Davy Crockett, who wore the coonskin cap but was kind of mocked by his contemporaries. But he was a showboat and he wore it to create this atmosphere of this. Every man's backwoodsman. Yeah. But it wasn't regarded as a practical hat. He was a showboat. Crockett was a showboat. Boone was a professional.

[Tracy Alloway]

I love the idea of all these, like, manly, pioneering hunters critiquing each other's outfits.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I also like the idea. I also like the idea of, like, oh, when hunters get together, they argue about, are you a Daniel Boone man or a Davy Crockman? Oh, Your guy was a total showboat. He was a fraud. No one would have ever worn that hat. And the other was like, oh, no, he did this. Yeah, all of these.

[Steven Rinella]

My dear friend, who I'm giving that one of my jars of coon grease to, he is a crocket man, and I'm a boon man, and we have. We fight about this all the time.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'm a boon.

[Steven Rinella]

The other thing is one last comment just to get caught up. Were you to formalize the arrangement with your deer hunter, if you were to formalize that arrangement where there was a expected quid pro quo around deer meat for access, you would be in violation of the law. You need to keep it non formalized.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, okay, that's good to know.

[Steven Rinella]

You can gift him access, he can gift you meat. But the minute you formalize that transaction, you would be commodifying wild game meat, which is illegal in this country.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Tracy just admitted to a crime.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, no, she was.

[Steven Rinella]

I've already reported her.

[Tracy Alloway]

I specifically said we don't have a formal agreement. We're trading informally.

[Joe Weisenthal]

This is. I've already learned so much on this. I'm like, if we ended the episode right here, I would have, like, learned so many more things that I didn't know when I woke up this morning.

[Steven Rinella]

You'd be looking for a new co host, because yours would be locked up.

[Joe Weisenthal]

To be literally imprison for accepting venison.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, well, let's not stop here. Let's keep going. Steve, you know, you mentioned that when England was colonizing the U.S. one of the big draws was animal grease and animal products. Talk to us a little bit more, because I think when people think about the colonization of the new world, a lot of people think about tobacco and farming and agriculture, but hunting and animal products were actually a really big part of it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. In the early colonial period, one of our biggest ports was, you know, coming out of Charleston, out of South Carolina. So at a time in the late colonial period, so prior to the Revolutionary War, deer skins in value and economic value, whitetail deer skins were the second largest commodity coming out of the. Out of the colonies. The first one being rice. Well, so the animal grease thing was a thing, but. But it was dwarfed by the deer skin trade. If you look at these old paintings you see of, like, the king of England around the time of the colonial period, you'll sometimes notice that they're wearing a white breech or a white pant. A seeming white pant. That's buckskin. Buckskin was used as workwear but it was also something that the affluent individuals wore. Those white breeches, those white buckskin pants. It was a preferred material for clothing making. There's a historian, Mac Faragher, and he wrote a piece about the early colonial period, and he remarked that, like, among colonial Americans, so Euro American, Colonial Americans and Native Americans alike, black bear meat was the food of choice.

[Tracy Alloway]

Huh.

[Steven Rinella]

Deer skin was the material of choice. So they were hunting bears. That was the good stuff to eat. Deer were what you made your clothes from.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm surprised about the bear meat. Does bear taste good?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's very beef, like, in texture. It's phenomenal. It's one of those things that there's. In some levels, there's a cultural taboo around it, as you'll see. Like Florida right now is running a very controversial black bear hunt. People get worked up about it, but yeah, it's an excellent food. It was a very prized food at the time. Another business that Daniel Boone was into was producing a product called bear bacon, which was consumed domestically. Yes, smoked bacon. It would be plausible that Ben Franklin, he could have walked down to a market in Philadelphia and he would have been able to purchase bear bacon or smoked black bear hams. It was a very popular food item. Bear can carry trichnosis. Most cases of trichnosis in the US Today do not come from hogs. Mostly comes from black bear. You have to cook it. So for that reason, a lot of people have an idea that it should be avoided. But my family, we eat prodigious amounts of it. Wow.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I. I want to. Can I come by sometime and have some bear bacon or bear steak or whatever?

[Steven Rinella]

Anytime, man. Anytime. Knock on the door, I will cook it. I will cook it for you. And I can fry you some up and bear grease if you'd like, I think.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's do a video series. Let's go. Let's go on the road. I already have, like a million questions. Can we just back up a second? Like, for the listeners? Can you tell us your story a little bit? Why are we talking to you? What's your background?

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, so, yeah, I grew up in Michigan. I was born into a hunting family. That was kind of our identity. My father was a very avid hunter. He came home from World War II and just hunted. And I was brought up around it. I pursued a career first in trapping. Throughout high school, I was convinced I was going to be a fur trapper. I became interested in writing, went to graduate school for writing starting in. In 2000. When I finished school, I became a professional long form magazine writer, started doing books, and all my stuff has always been in the outdoor space. Eventually got into television, started doing a show called Meat Eater, and we turned Meat Eater into a full fledged business. We have a media arm where I spend the bulk of my time, but we also work in. And we have a lot of consumer products. We have four outdoor gear companies which live under the Meat Eater umbrel. And I've intended to make a living in the outdoors when I was a kid, and I mostly succeeded at that. I get to spend a lot of time outdoors and I get to spend a lot of time thinking about issues of how hunting plays into contemporary American culture and how hunting shaped our country and shaped our national experience.

[Tracy Alloway]

I gotta plug Steve's. I think it's an audible series on the history of hunting in the US where there's a whole episode on long hunters that I've been listening to. Also one on buffal in the 1800s. They're really good.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's called Meat Eaters American History, and it's a audio original through Random House Penguin.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And we've done three so far on different commodity trades in American history, all around wildlife.

[Tracy Alloway]

So one thing that I did learn from the audible series on long hunters is the American hunting system in the sort of 1600s, 1700s, when colonials started coming over to what would become the United States, was very different to how hunting was done in Europe. Right. In Europe, hunting was like the purview of land owners and rich people. But in America, I guess, there were no rules and everyone could hunt animals.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you know, good way to think about it. I often remind people to think back to certain details of the Robin Hood story where you have the king's deer. Okay. And part of Robin Hood's gig, right, is he'll go hunt on the king's estate to get venison, which you would then distribute to the poor. It's part of the Robin Hood narrative. So, yeah, in. In England and in Western Europe, by that point, things were heavily developed. Most the. The woods, the wilderness was gone. Having access to wild landscapes was something that was relegated only to the most wealthy. You could be have your eyes gouged out. You could be executed for hunting animals that belong to the aristocracy. So when American colonists started showing up, like Boone's family came from England, they did not arrive here as hunters. They did not arrive with a hunting background. They adopted it. The colonists, like Boone's family, for instance, they were Quakers. His people were. But the American colonists were as impacted by. By native Americans as Native Americans were impacted by American colonists. You could see it in Boone's dress. He would plate his hair, he would braid his hair. He would grease his hair with bear grease. He would wear buckskin. He would hunt the animals that Native Americans taught him to hunt. He would cook them in that way. He would make his clothes in that way. So they adopted hunting as a way to make a living on the American landscape. Some of them were farmers through and through. Some became hunters through and through. And they were at odds. These hunting people, these kind of wild men like Boone in the colonial period would always be hovering at the western edge of colonial expansion. England would try to rein in these American colonists. They would feel that they were kind of drifting too far out of colonial influence. And these American colonists like Boone, who were hunting for a living would cause a lot of tension with Native Americans. And so the colonial powers didn't like these guys living this frontier, wild existence because again, they were drifting away from the crown and they were causing animosity with Native Americans who had then blamed the English for these incursions onto their landscape. So it was like a rich kind of area of adoption of a wilderness aesthetic while still trying to live, you know, under colonial rule. In Boone's early days. Silicon Valley is selling you a future where you're obsolete or worse, identical. At Palantir, they're witnessing something different and revolutionary. From re industrializing the nation's defense base to shipyard workers building faster and frontline workers, boosting productivity. AI is transforming work across the nation. AI is not replacing American workers or flattening them into conformity. It's unleashing what makes each one irreplaceable. Their judgment, their craft, their creativity. When American workers become more powerfully themselves, they own the future. Palantir making Americans irreplaceable.

[Joe Weisenthal]

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[Joe Weisenthal]

Are you watching the new Ken Burns documentary at all?

[Tracy Alloway]

No, but everyone else is. It seems like I'm going to.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I've watched the first episode so far and it's just interesting because obviously, you know, the version of independence that we learned about in school was just incredibly simplified. And this idea that there really were all different kinds of tensions between the colonists and the sort of norms and the laws and the rules of the old country are really striking. I hadn't really appreciated this dimension before about the hunting, but I think it, you know, it really shows how I guess from day one there was a certain, I don't know if egalitarian was democratic element of colonial society that sounds very distinctly different from where they were coming from.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, there's an interesting passage where Washington, George Washington, criticizes folks like Boone. He criticizes these frontier individuals that are living off the land, out on the frontier and market hunting. He criticizes them because he feels like a tip of the hat would push them over to the Spanish or whoever, like whatever, what other colonial entity was out there. He did not feel that they were adequately American. And then as much as Boone has been adopted, there's one. One guy joked that Boone has become an honorary Founding father. As much as Boone has been adopted as this American icon, Boone and his contemporaries. So, again, speaking of these long hunters, these colonial whitetail deer skin hunters, they would not have identified as American loosely, but they would identify it in family clans. And they were not what you would call. If you look at around the Revolutionary period, you would not refer to these guys as patriots. They were opportunists, and they were mostly beholden to small villages made up of people. They were related to these networks. That was their allegiance.

[Tracy Alloway]

Didn't Boone actually end up striking a deal with the Spanish for land? That's one thing I learned from the series.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, again, like the same way, like he's an honorary founding father. Boone, in some ways is the father of Kentucky. He was not the first, but one of the first people to go through this thing called the Cumberland Gap and start hunting in what is now Kentucky. He got fed up with the government there. He got fed up with America. When Spain had the Louisiana territory, Spain was trying to fill the place up. He struck a deal with Boone and his people where they would become subjects of the Spanish crown in exchange for money. And so Boone moved out and he moved west of the Missouri river and became a Spanish subject. He swore that he would never step foot back in Kentucky again when Boone died. So Boone lived through the Louisiana Purchase and became again an American just through the fact that America bought the Louisiana Purchase. He died and was buried in Missouri and was later exhumed and brought back to Kentucky, even though in his lifetime he said, I'll never step foot back there. So people like to say Missouri has his heart, meaning his soft tissues, Kentucky has his bones. And there's like this little ongoing dispute about whether or not they really dug up the right guy and reburied him. But yeah, Boone willfully left American rule to go live under a different crown. He was married to the hunt and he was married to his family clan. That was how he identified.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's super interesting. Tell me about a long hunt. What are the logistics? Sounds difficult. What are the logistics of a long hunt?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, the logistics of a long hunt, it was very decentralized, Unlike if we have time and we get into the beaver skin trade of these American icons like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, John Colter, these guys that were engaged in the Rocky Mountain beaver trade, which was very formalized, very top down, the long hunter area. So this colonial deer skin hunting area was very decentralized. A group of long hunters were probably mostly family networks. So it'd be maybe a patriarch, his kids, his sons in law. Okay, his cousins, and they would embark on these very long trips. They would leave these frontier colonial establishments, let's say the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina. A ton of long hunters came out of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina. They would travel over the Appalachian range and they would drop down into Kentucky, portions of Tennessee and they would hunt deer skins. They might be gone six months. I think Boone's longest long hunt was two years. It was all based off pack trains. So they would. Everything was based off of using horses to carry stuff. And they would build up a year's worth of deer skins. In the winter, the deer skins weren't as valuable, so they'd switch their efforts to beaver and otter trapping. They would transport all those deer skins back across the Appalachian divide and sell them a good price. A way to think about it again is they were worth about a dollar, which was a lot of money back then. And some would go to tanneries in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, but the bulk would be shipped to tanneries in England to be turned into leather for making breeches and gloves and other high end items. And that was the economy. And they had. These were farming people, but this was their only access to cash. Much of what they did was black market, to be honest with you, in two ways. When they would cross the Appalachians to go hunt, they were doing it against the wishes of the crown, which again, did not want to antagonize Native Americans because it caused warfare and trouble. They were also doing it in violation of Native American claims to the land. So when they would go into Kentucky, they were hunting on, say, Shawnee land. So they were sort of doubly trespassing. But that's how they made their living. And it allowed them to live very isolated existences. And it gave them a cash economy so they could buy guns and other things that they couldn't trade corn for.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'm going to take the bait on the beaver trade that you just mentioned. So talk to us. How is that formalized and how does it contrast with the long hunters?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, the beaver skin trade had been going for a long, long time. So, you know, when the Dutch first came to Manhattan, one of the primary things they were after is beaver skins. Beavers. It's surprisingly easy to wipe them out. So if you look at American history from the colonial period on, we kind of have. We had a way because of unregulated trapping. We had a way that we would. That ahead of civilization would mark a depopulation of beavers. So if we fast forward up to the Lewis and Clark expedition here we do the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas Jefferson dispatches the Lewis and Clark expedition to go find a mostly water route to the Pacific and also to look at natural resource abundance. Right? Lewis and Clark come back and they report mind boggling numbers of beavers in the, in the inner mountain west. All right, right away, right on their heels, goes a bunch of American trappers out to explore this land and trade in beavers. A beaver pelt was, you know, going for maybe three bucks. That's more than you'd make in a day as a laborer. It was real money, but guys got onto it and they formalized it. And people would go out and get investors. Okay, a group would go out and get investors. Well, for instance, Astor, if you go to Astor Place in New York, Astor was America's first homemade millionaire. Astor's first business was the beaver trade. So guys would get investors. They would run advertisements to hire trappers. If you look at these really famous mountain men, like for instance, Jim Bridger, these guys answered an ad in a newspaper. They ran an ad that Sundays, looking for 100 enterprising young men. And these young guys, some of them escaped indentured servants, people running away from apprenticeships, would go higher on as a fur brigade, and they would hire on as a day rate, and they would be backed by financial backers, and they would send these young men out to the inner mountain west to trap beaver as a day laborer. In time, some of these guys would spin off and do their own thing and go independent. But it was a very formalized structure that was sending these young men out to catch beaver in order to bring them back. And they would be exported and turned into wool felt. If you look back to, like Abe Lincoln's hat, okay, Abe Lincoln didn't wear a beaver wool felt hat. He wore a silk hat, which we'll get to. But that style of hat was the rage in Europe. All sophisticated men, many poor people who aspired to look more affluent would wear one of these top hats. They were made from beaver wool felt. So that was a huge export industry coming out of it. And again, it became formalized. And what killed it is they were too effective. Two things killed the trade. One, they were running out of beaver anyway. And then a fashion change crashed the industry. And it was probably a good thing that it did because they may have pretty much exterminated the animals from the landscape. I probably got a little ahead of you there, but that's.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, that's great.

[Steven Rinella]

That's great.

[Tracy Alloway]

And actually, the thing about the fashion Change reminds me of one of my all time favorite bubbles, market bubbles, which was the ostrich feather bubble in the 1800s where women would want ostrich feathers for their hats and they became really, really expensive. And then the bubble burst and all these ostrich farmers, mostly in Africa, I think, went bust.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that was. Yeah, they called the plenary trade and all kinds of shorebirds and it's hard to picture now, but you could just, without regulation in coastal areas of the country, go hunt herons, egrets, to sell the feathers to adorn hats.

[Joe Weisenthal]

You know, it's funny, when you think about like conservation efforts or you think about endangered species, all these ideas feel very modern to me. Like, you know, maybe they started thinking about this stuff in the 1970s or whatever, but obviously that's not the case. How early on in the process of the hunting or hunting history did people start becoming aware of the fact that without some sort of regulation or laws or curbs, that this natural resources could be irreversibly depleted?

[Steven Rinella]

Surprisingly early. And I'll get to some of the earliest examples, but I want to clarify what I think motivations might have been. Some of the earliest examples we see of a conservation effort would even be in the colonial period. And that was trying to put some parameters around deer hunting because again, these were valuable animals for people to use for material. So when we see people trying to get to put in hunting seasons, like not to kill them on their fawning when they're dropping their fawns, or put in restrictions about outsiders coming in to hunt, they probably weren't motivated by some sort of environmental ethic. They were motivated by guarding and protecting a resource. When you start to see an emergence of a real, more emotional, spiritual, environmental movement is in the late 1800s and its birth is this. Its birth is gentlemen hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt. Okay, you have these gentlemen hunters that want to connect to this piece of American history or American culture, but they're recognizing that unregulated hunting, this unregulated market hunting that we've been discussing, is going to make hunting impossible because these unregulated commodity hunters are going to drive everything to extinction. So in order to save wildlife and save hunting, which they recognize as a very important piece of American culture, they needed to sort of bifurcate American hunting efforts into sport hunting, which was regulated and had an environmental ethic or a conservation ethic, and unregulated market hunting, which is what we've been discussing. One of the great ironies is this one of the earliest Conservation organizations that Theodore Roosevelt was involved in, involved in founding, involved in running is called the Boone and Crockett Club. And they're still a major player in American conservation today. What's ironic is the names Boone and Crockett, which Americans today hear, and they think of hunting. But these were just the kind of individuals that the Boone and Crockett Club needed to stop in order to save American hunting was these market hunters who were out there doing nothing to compensate the American people for the wildlife they were taking. And they would kill it all. And once they killed it all, they'd move a little bit west and kill all of that and they about undid American wildlife.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah. So there's a tragedy of the commons dynamic going on here where you have this public resource, which is animals, and if too many people tap into it, the public resource ceases to exist. Can you talk a little bit about the buffalo trade? Because I think this is probably the biggest example of that dynamic actually happening.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's the biggest, most regrettable example. And when I say it's regrettable, it's because by this point we knew. We, meaning news, reading, engaged, educated Americans, knew where this was headed. Okay, and I'll back up a little bit. So if we get to the time of European contact in the New World, there were maybe the fashionable number today is somewhere around 30 to 40 million American bison or buffalo. Those words are the same thing. 40 million to 30 million Buffalo on the American landscape by the end of the Civil War, they've been removed from the eastern part of the country. So, you know, at a time there would have been buffalo New Orleans, there would have been buffalo in present day Washington, D.C. there would have been buffalo in present day Nashville. All those had been wiped out by hunters at the end of the Civil War. There's probably about 15 million of them on the Great Plains, which has always been the nexus of the population. That was always the. That's where the bulk of the animals were. The country really turned westward after the Civil War. Once the south, you know, the Union was saved, we sent our army out to pacify hostile tribes in the west and to protect economic interests in the West. And with that shift westward, we started looking for leather resources out West. And they identified this 15 million buffalo. There was nothing special about buffalo leather. We had an insatiable appetite for leather. What became is we needed it to produce industrial belting. Okay. Leather prices shot up. We were producing industrial belting to drive the Industrial Revolution. And the animals were just yet another source of leather. But they could be gotten for no investment. Okay, a buffalo hide, let's say it's worth $3.50, $4. Where the foreman at a tannery would make $350 a day, but a buffalo hide hunter could kill 20 or 30 buffalo a day and sell the hides at $3.50 apiece, and he didn't have to put any money into it. You're not raising them, you're not feeding them. It's totally different than cattle. They're just out there.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, yeah. Is it true that, like, the buffalo just stood there while the hunters shot at them like they didn't really understand?

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, it's not true. They were just so good at what they did. They knew how to make that happen. Okay, this is a complicated thing. You get into where you want to look at what they did and you want to look at the atrocity of what they did, and what it causes people to miss is. This is going to sound weird. It causes people to miss the professionalism and skill set that goes into this. Like, a big part of my career is reconciling the skill set, the dedication, the bravery against the atrocity. Right. But no, they wouldn't just stand there. These guys were masters. They were experts at what they did, and they knew how to get that outcome. You would not go out and get that same outcome. You would go out and not get any. I don't mean to hack on you.

[Tracy Alloway]

No, I have no doubt I would be unable to shoot a buffalo. That's fine.

[Steven Rinella]

Not even. I don't even mean you wouldn't be able to get one because of emotional or constraints. It's just like, they were so good. They were trained their whole life to do this. They were too good. And this is one of the most astounding things, is when they start really getting after them. Around 1872, the market really opens up in American tanneries. The appetite for these buffalo hides really opens up to where they're like, we'll take as many as we can get. That hits in 1872. And it coincides. Not coincides. It's. It's subject to the fact that the railroad hits Dodge City, Kansas. Okay, so now you can load these things on a train and send them to tanneries. By 1883, 11 years later, that 15 million animals is gone. It compressed everything. It took forever to almost wipe out beaver. It took hundreds of years to almost wipe out whitetail deer with the buffalo. They were so good at it. And the country was so primed industrially. We were so primed with railroads, with big tanneries, tannery buildings that were, you know, a thousand yards long that we could just, bam, burn through a resource with astonishing quickness. And the crazy part about it is once they shot them out, it didn't even affect leather prices. Like a buffalo hide at the peak would be worth five bucks. So you would think once they kill them all, the market should spike, right? Like there's scarcity. The last ones were selling at the same price as the first ones because in the end it didn't matter. They could buy cattle in South America, they could get leather from anywhere. So we killed them all and it wasn't like we needed them. It was a drop in the bucket for leather production.

[Joe Weisenthal]

So there was no market mechanism because there was just so much abundant leather from multiple sources. There was no market mechanism curbing the hunters.

[Steven Rinella]

No, it was just, it's interesting. They were worth what they were worth. They were worth what a cowhide was worth. It was just that they could get them for free. And when they got them, it didn't affect anything. The Industrial Revolution and leather belting was still produced. And still produced and still produced. So it almost makes it seem more shameful in the end that it would be like we would have, like the country would have accomplished what we accomplished with the Industrial revolution had we never even exploited.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That's crazy. At fault also I never really thought about, I never thought about any of this. I certainly never thought about the connection between the Industrial revolution. I just imagine these ancient factories with a bunch of wheels and these belts that are pulling the wheels and how that is connected to. I guess something had to be turning the wheels. I just never really thought about, I never thought about what it was.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, there's a great photo. It was later, you know, it was later, but it was a great photo. And it's in a Ford manufacturing plant and it's these lathing machines. And the photo explains that overhead of the workers are 50 miles of leather belting. And these are 16 inch belts. Wow. Make their holiday unforgettable with a gift that says it all from Pandora Jewelry. A gift that tells a story and shows you know, theirs that doesn't just sparkle, but speaks. From new festive charms to forever rings and personal engravings. This season give a gift that's perfectly theirs. Whether you're shopping for a shiny surprise for your significant other, matching bracelets to celebrate your friendship, or a heartfelt gift for a family member. Say more this holiday season with Pandora. I always look forward to the holidays because I live to give all the women in my life jewelry with a little something special engraved on it just to show them I care with something personalized. You know, I love to get some gifts myself and a man wearing jewelry is quite cool if you ask me. Shop [e-mail] or visit your closest Pandora store.

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[Joe Weisenthal]

What happened such that ultimately we still have bison because the population eventually right. They didn't quite kill them all. And now we've rebuilt the bison stock in the country. What happened such that we didn't quite go all the way and completely make this animal extinct.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm a little bit hesitant to say this because it's when it comes to the conservation history of America it's a little bit of an anomaly. But what happened to save him is private ownership. We shot them all down to the point where there was just a couple scattered animals here and there.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Even at one time a guy named William T. Hornaday who is a taxidermist and mammal expert, he wrote letters around the country trying to see who had a few and there was a handful of of eccentrics around the country that had managed to go out and rope some and save them, maybe even feed them off domestic cows when they were calves. And these kind of slowly got brought into little herds. Interestingly, some got brought to the Bronx Zoo when they started trying to repopulate little protected populations in the West. Another great irony is they were moving animals from the Bronx Zoo out to Oklahoma to turn them loose. Like that's how bad it got. And even today, like we, we really haven't recovered the. We've saved them from genetic extinction.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So there's about a half million in existence. 94% of them are privately owned. What we haven't saved them from is ecological extinction of all American wildlife, of all native American wildlife. Grizzly bears, black bears, elk, bighorn sheep, on and on and on. The buffalo, the bison is the only animal that does not have the rights of a wild animal. If a buffalo walks off of national park and comes into Montana, he becomes livestock, he becomes the author. Under the authority of the Department of Livestock, we do not accept them as wild animals anymore, which in my view is a great sin.

[Joe Weisenthal]

We could go for like three or.

[Tracy Alloway]

Four hours of this conversation easy, but we can't. So I'm going to take us up to, I guess, modern times. So when we were talking earlier about the long hunters, we discussed there's clearly this element of democracy and independence embedded in that particular system. And if you look at the way the modern hunting world, I guess, or system is structured, it feels like we're trying to resolve that tension between people's rights to hunt animals and the conservation, public resource aspect. Is that right?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. We live under. Now when I say we in this case, I mean American hunters, American fishermen. We live under a very complex regulatory structure which is self made. Our community, modern American sportsmen have built the system that we live under. A very, very tightly regulated pursuit. We've come up with this, this system earlier. We talked about how things were in Europe in colonial period. We now refer to that with some disdain as the European model, where a landowner owns the wildlife on their land, they control the wildlife on their land. We came up with a system where American wildlife is owned by the American people, administered on your behalf by fish and game agencies and by governmental entities. But American wildlife is American property. It doesn't matter whose land it's on. That has allowed us the ability to have a governing structure to control harvest for sustainability because the state and in some cases the federal government has authority over the animals. Meaning you could have A big property, and it has deer on it. But those deer are not yours to decide what you want to do with the deer belong to the people. You own the land.

[Tracy Alloway]

You have to get permits.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Talk to us a little bit about the contemporary market. My guess is it's booming. I don't mean literally the volume of hunting that's going on, although I bet that's. But like, in your industry, in your world, outdoorsman, media, people buying gear for all this stuff, my gut says that this is a hot area of the economy.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. I mean, we have a huge economic impact. I mean, you know, you have. You know, any given year, 13 or 14 million Americans will buy a hunting license to go hunt. Over twice as many people will buy a fishing license to go fish. It generates billions of dollars in economic activity. But most of that economic activity is around gear and experiences. Right. It's not economic activity about trading in. Trading in deer.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And it's also growing really fast, I take it, or, like, what kind of growth?

[Steven Rinella]

Have you seen it really see spiked? No, it's remarkably stable.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

It really spiked during the pandemic. You know, obviously, as people turned, you know, making sourdough bread and cooking venison back to the land, there was spikes. It's. It's remarkably stable over the years.

[Joe Weisenthal]

There are two types of Americans. There are sour. Sourdome Americans, and they live in cities. And then venison Americans.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tracy Alloway]

So actually, that reminds me. So one of the things that I took from the Long Hunter series is that gear is really important because you guys talk so much about the gear that the colonists and pioneers actually had. So I feel like there's an element of consumerism in the hunting community, where people just collect guns and knives and things.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, for sure.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like me and my buddies. I mean, to be honest with you, when we're sitting around, you know, and I hang out, a lot of people involved in the conservation movement, me and my buddies, and we're sitting around, we mostly argue about gear. Yeah, I came up immediate. But our company, we have a hunting apparel brand. We have a game call brand. We have a hunting decoy brand. We have a hunting accessory brand. So, yeah, I mean, like, gear is. It can't be separated out in the same way. Boone was adamant about what kind of hat he wore. I'm pretty adamant about what I wear. And. And that is, like, the economic activity today, you know, is in large measure, equipment and gear. And what's beautiful about. And I want to throw this in. What's beautiful about it is. That's how we fund conservation. So our industry in the 30s, we put ourselves under a 13% excise tax. So when you buy guns or ammunition, any gun, purchase guns, ammunition, sporting equipment, there's a anywhere from 11 to 13% excise tax which goes right into conservation spending. You go find me another industry that has anything comparable to that. It does not exist. And then our agencies that manage wildlife In America, all 50 states have a fish and wildlife agency. Their funding comes from licenses, permits and stamps paid by hunters and anglers. We're a self funded group of Americans.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, it's a rare. It makes sense, right? Most industries don't voluntarily want to be taxed on everything. But when you think about the fact that there needs to be some resources to sustain the possibility of hunting for generations to come, it is sort of makes sense that this would be an industry in which you want there to be some sort of price of entry. If I became a hunter this winter, would you make fun of me? Like, would I be one of like those guys who it's like, okay, it's my first season hunting. I'm going to buy the most expensive rifle, I'm going to buy the most expensive hat, I'm going to buy the most expensive shoes. You must have a name like those types. And they like show up on the hunt with you and it's clear they like went through all the lists and just like bought the Crockett. Yeah, like this sort of like wannabes, it's like their first thing and they just go down the line and buy them, deck themselves out in the top of the line gear.

[Steven Rinella]

The name I have for those people is my buddies. Not. I'm telling you, not a year goes by, man. Not a year goes by that I don't take out friends, family, whoever, people that are interested in hunting, curious about hunting, even sometimes uneasy with hunting, that I don't take them out and kind of explain the world. I have three young kids, I've been lucky to turn them all into, you know, avid hunters. And we share that. So no, I like, I like sharing this world. It's a world I care a lot about. I care about how it's perceived. Most Americans don't hunt. In some states, like California, New Jersey, 1% of the population hunts. So in some ways we live and exist with the blessing of the American public in general. So it's important to me for people to understand what we're up to, how we think, and that we're willing to recognize the sins of our forefathers and have gone out of our way to correct those sins.

[Tracy Alloway]

This is a slight tangent, but since we're on the subject of conservation, I'd be curious to get your thoughts. But what do you think about commercial hunting of endangered animals? So things like lions or, I don't know, buffalo of some sort in Africa? Because one argument I've heard is that these animals at the moment basically have negative value, right? Because they're living on land that you can't use for anything else because you have to conserve it, because you need to protect the animals. But if you allow commercial hunting in a controlled way, you basically put an economic value on that animal such that, you know, it becomes something that people want to maintain and preserve and stick around.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I would first want to just clarify. I don't mean to be a difficult guess, but be careful using the word endangered, because it can be. When I say that, like in the US we have the Endangered Species act, we have a way that we formally declare things to be endangered. I think in the American imagination, Africa's far away. We hear the word endangered, and it's not really open to certain levels of nuance about where and what. For instance, elk. Right here in the United States, we have robust populations of elk. Across the American west, we have hunting seasons for elk. We have open hunting seasons for elk. But elk have only been restored across about 20% of their native range. Michigan was elk country. Wisconsin was elk country. Virginia was elk country. Elk had been wiped out of those places and not restored. So you might say, well, elk are endangered because they're not in Michigan and Wisconsin in appreciable numbers. Yet in the American west, in some places, we have a problem with too many elk. So you got to be careful with words like that. But to get to the core of your question, yes, it is possible there are places in Africa, and I'm not a subject matter expert on Africa like I am. I'm a subject matter expert on these issues in the United States. But in Africa, there are situations where money like value to hunters is able to put so much value on wildlife that the wildlife becomes worth protecting. Meaning people that are on the landscape will recognize the presence of wildlife generates so much economic activity that it's best not to kill it all off for use as bushmeat or other applications or because it's a crop pest or because it's dangerous to livestock. They'll recognize that, hey, that lion, that thing's worth 60,000 bucks. Half that money's coming to our village. Don't mess with that lion, I mean, that just happens. Whether you, however you feel emotionally about the killing of lions, that's an economic reality in some places.

[Tracy Alloway]

I feel like don't mess with lions is just good advice generally. Yeah.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I just have one last question. You mentioned bear meat. I haven't had that much wild game in my life. I've had, you know, sausage with venison and pork and like when I was out in Jackson Hole, I went to some restaurant and you know, tried a few different, like mini steaks.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. But that wasn't even wild game, that's just farm raised animals.

[Joe Weisenthal]

What should I try that I've probably never tried before? I like meat a lot, so what would I like out out there?

[Steven Rinella]

Some of my favorites really. You know, mallard duck. So if you're in a park, you see that duck where the male has the, the iridescent green head. When you get those that have been in one place a while and have it migrated lately and they're getting on crops, they're getting in grain fields. One of my all time favorite things. This is going to sound weird, but true. Squirrel, properly done, would kind of blow your mind. And it's partly the fun of it, like because you have a preconceived notion of what it would be like. And then when you taste it, you'd think, I cannot believe that's that. That would kind of blow you away. And I think that you would be very, very surprised if you had a bare pot roast in a classic fashion with root vegetables, you know, and a good broth. I think you would also say, like, I refuse to accept that that's what it is. And I wouldn't accept it had I not seen it happen.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I'd love, I, I want a bear pot roast right now.

[Tracy Alloway]

I'll bring you some venison ragu. That's what I've been making so far. Although one thing I learned is that the fat content of venison is actually really low. So it's not very good for making things like burgers.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Yeah, you gotta mix it with something.

[Steven Rinella]

It's very waxy.

[Tracy Alloway]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It melts differently than beef fat. So it sets up in the inside of your mouth and it doesn't freeze well. So if you want to freeze when you get your venison from your hunter and you want to enjoy it for the next year, trim the fat away, trim the tallow way. And if you do that, it's basically archival. Once you put it in your freezer, if you leave that tallow on it, it's not that tallow will turn even in your freezer.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Interesting.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, my last question is, what would you recommend I make with venison?

[Steven Rinella]

I would start out by making the things that you like the most that are easiest to make. Like you mentioned a ragu. Making hamburgers. Making things that you're comfortable making, that aren't overly complex. Don't have too many steps just so you can go and find these kind of, like, points of comparison. If you. If you and your family. If in the summer, you like to grill burgers, like you like to grill up beef burgers, grill up a venison burger, follow the same basic steps and just kind of get comfortable with the way it's a little different. And when you do that enough, you'll come to prefer it. My wife, like, my wife doesn't hunt, man. My wife doesn't like domestic meat. She doesn't like the taste of domestic meat because for the last 20 years, she's eaten nothing but game meat. She's gotten to where she don't like it. She doesn't want to eat it.

[Tracy Alloway]

We're gonna have to wrap this conversation up, even though, as we mentioned before, we could go on for hours. I have to say, I hope my husband isn't listening to this, because I am planning on getting one of Steve's cookbooks for venison for Christmas. That'll be.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I would love to sign a form. If you want to reach out, I will send you.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, that'd be amazing.

[Steven Rinella]

I'll send him a whole box of stuff if you reach out.

[Tracy Alloway]

Oh, okay. I might. Well. Of nominal value.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Of nominal value.

[Tracy Alloway]

A book would be nice, for sure.

[Steven Rinella]

I know a lot of journalists, but not the kind like that.

[Tracy Alloway]

So, Steve Rella, thank you so much for coming on. OD Lots. That was a blast.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That was really fun.

[Tracy Alloway]

A blast.

[Steven Rinella]

Hey, thank you for having me.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Good one.

[Steven Rinella]

Appreciate it. Thank you.

[Tracy Alloway]

Joe. That was so fun.

[Joe Weisenthal]

That was so fun. I don't know anything about that, but, like, we could have talked for three hours. There's so many things I'm curious about now.

[Tracy Alloway]

It is underappreciated, I think, the role of hunting in America's economic development, and it's intertwining. I didn't even know this. With the Industrial Revolution.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I didn't know about that either. It's exactly what I was gonna say. I would have had no idea. And it's always sort of fascinating to think, like, you can't run a big factory if you don't have belts. Now, granted, according to Steven. There were other sources of leather, but it's so interesting to think about. Like, here is this thing that if you don't have an access to like one commodity or whatever, you know, there's a new book by the way out about rope that I want to have, and it's like a similar story about how crucial rope was. Anyway, that was so. It was so fascinating.

[Tracy Alloway]

You know, he mentioned squirrel meat at the end. So again, I'm just throwing out tidbits that I learned from his series. But, you know, you can't really shoot a squirrel if you're gonna eat it because they're so small. The bullet like rips off all the meat. So the way the pioneers used to do it, apparently, is they would shoot at the tree that the squirrel was on and sort of like shock the squirrel to death and it would fall out of the tree and then you can eat it.

[Joe Weisenthal]

Wait, Tracy, can I ask you a question? It's sort of non politically correct. Is it true that Germans can't pronounce the word squirrel?

[Tracy Alloway]

Yes. Yes. Okay.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I've heard this before.

[Tracy Alloway]

My personal experience, when I was a kid, I used to ask my uncle to say squirrel all the time just for laughs. And the way he says it is skvurl. And yeah, he struggles with it.

[Joe Weisenthal]

I just want an excuse to see if this was confirmed or denied.

[Tracy Alloway]

Okay, now that we're talking about skverls, shall we leave it there?

[Joe Weisenthal]

Let's leave it there.

[Tracy Alloway]

All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me, Tracy Alloway.

[Joe Weisenthal]

And I'm Jill Wiesenthal. You can follow me at thesl Stalwart. Follow our guest, Steven Rinella. He's at Steven Rinella. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, Armen Erman, Dashiell Bennett at dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kel Brooks. For more odd lots content, go to bloomberg.com oddlots where the daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all of these topics 24. 7 in our Discord Discord, GG Oddlauts.

[Tracy Alloway]

And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we look into the economic history history of the US Then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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[Tracy Alloway]

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