Ep. 933: Ask Me Anything with Steven Rinella

“I’d love to have if anybody has it, I would buy it back for what you have into it. Matter of fact I’ll double what you have into it.” That’s Steven Rinella, host of The MeatEater Podcast, offering a reward for a long-lost coffee table he once filled with animal scat—coyote droppings containing deer hooves, grizzly scat loaded with pine nuts, and his dream specimen: a leopard dropping that contained a chimpanzee’s finger, a find he read about from biologist Michael Fay’s Mega Transect across the Congo. The table, painted National Geographic yellow with a glass top, eventually became too hard to maintain and was likely donated to Goodwill during Rinella’s nomadic early years as a writer. That opening story sets the tone for a sprawling, unscripted “Ask Me Anything” episode where Rinella fields listener questions on everything from career regrets and AI’s threat to writing to crossbow controversies, public lands politics, and whether Sasquatch anatomy resembles human or canine reproductive parts.

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