A man in the American outdoors

His wanderlust for tracking, hunting, cooking, and storytelling has generated a multiplatform empire that includes his reality show, MeatEater. In it, Rinella travels to far-off places to track and hunt animals, typically followed by painstakingly prepared and often exotic meals.

The latest season, his 10th, dropped at the end of September. Then, there are the wildly popular “MeatEater” podcasts with a variety of hosts as well as several cookbooks and wilderness skills-themed books, which, in total, have sold well over a million copies. There is also First Lite, a clothing line of serious outdoors and hunting gear, and a collection of campfire story audiobooks, which served as my compelling companions as I traveled across the wilds of America to get to Montana.

In his wanderings, Rinella says, he ponders who was there before him — not yesterday, or last year, but as long ago as the Ice Age. “I often look at some of my favorite periods in deep history that involve these nomadic hunters,” he explained. “People who did move around a lot and cover a lot of ground. Even in our understanding of surviving on the Great Plains, they would cover this enormous amount of ground. I imagine these people’s base skill set, it would be adaptable to so many different places, and so I admire that,” he said.

It is a notion that conflicts with his love and respect for the person who was born of, and remains in, a certain spot. “And they know it inside and out, they know everything, they know every lead, and if something is different, they know. They know what the weather’s like every year, where the wind blows from on such and such day. I love all that,” he said of the more rooted hunters across the country whose experience spans dozens of generations.

“These are two very different ways of going about your life. I could be happy in each, but I’m happier as the person who can just go anywhere and hack my way through it because I’ve accumulated enough knowledge to be adaptable,” he said. “I’m happier at this age in that nomadic space.”

Rinella and his team have spawned a cultural movement of sorts through their multiple platforms, one that has nothing to do with politics or tribalism and everything to do with freedom, responsibility, giving back, and the great outdoors. The Instagram posts alone are worth carving out a portion of your day to follow.

It is a movement that may not be on the radar screens of Madison Avenue or Wall Street executives. Yet for many of the young, up-and-coming set behind them, their imaginations have been captivated; they are watching, listening, buying, and getting out there.

So have a lot of other young professionals across the socioeconomic spectrum who may not have come from that generational tradition of hunting or fishing but who are finding themselves wanting to escape their hyperconnected, constantly online world. Those who want to step outside of that and do the most primitive, basic thing imaginable: hunting.

“It definitely was not a stated goal of mine to intentionally reach people who had never considered hunting before. But there is certainly an inevitability to it, that if there’s something that you love and you are able to capture in a media product,” Rinella explained.

Rinella said whether it is a television show, a podcast, an essay, or a book, if people see someone love something and why they love it and how they love it, that inevitably is infectious. “Imagine that you’re speaking to a person, and you don’t like dogs. But you’re speaking to a person who really knows dogs well, and they’ve experienced many, and they’ve come to love them, and they understand the other person that doesn’t like them. These two people sit down and talk. What are the odds that first person is going to come away from it liking dogs even less?” he explained by way of analogy.

Rinella says that type of persuasion proves to be naturally seductive to people; there is an irresistible quality to it. “I think that had I gone in and said to myself, ‘I am going to go and do whatever’s in my power to change people’s minds about hunting,’ I probably would have wound up doing some really goofy, ineffectual thing like, ‘If we don’t hunt deer, deer will be overpopulated.’ Well, that doesn’t mean anything to people.”

According to Rinella, that kind of approach doesn’t inspire and speak to people. Instead, he continued, “I think just by saying, ‘Here’s this thing, here’s how I understand it, here’s what appeals to me about it,’ that works for people.” Which explains why a large segment of the MeatEater audience might never hunt but at least understands why people do it. It’s no longer thought of in the Disney caricature way, in which a shadowy man with a gun kills Bambi’s mother.

A natural-born storyteller, Rinella earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Montana. When he discusses the importance of the relationship he has with nature, his words are intoxicating. You want to experience smelling and feeling and contributing actively in the outdoors, and you want to do it responsibly because of him.

Rinella’s approach is simple: He does not advise. He does not tell people what they need to do to be happy. What he does do is open minds.

The outdoors has always had an outsize role in his life, Rinella says, noting his first career goal was to be a trapper. But that dream ended at the age of 12 when wearing furs went out of favor. “I went to Muskegon Community College, then Michigan Grand Valley State University with a degree in English, and I eventually went for my master’s here in Montana,” he said.

In his free time, he fished and hunted and later landed his first big writing assignment as a freelancer for Outside magazine. “My love for storytelling comes from my family and my father’s friends, who all served in World War II. They would sit around and tell these great, detailed stories about their time ‘over there,’” he explained.

Steve’s first book proposal caught the attention of Miramax, which Rinella says tanked when it was published. That resulted in his first stab at an outdoors show, which also flopped. The show was reworked to be less reality TV and more tailored to authenticity, and thus was born MeatEater.

Rinella explained they started on the Sportsman Channel in 2011 and were picked up by Netflix in 2015, which made them the streaming service’s first sportsman show. The rest of the MeatEater world launched three years later and is still growing with new podcasts, cooking shows, and characters — not the scripted kind, but real, authentic characters such as Ryan “Cal” Callaghan, who took me fly-fishing on the Yellowstone River while here in Montana — joining and developing all the time.

Hunting and fishing numbers over the last year and a half have exploded, and it would not be a stretch to say Rinella and his network have played a role in attracting new people wanting to take refuge in outdoor sports. They provide an active example of the skills, creativity, and camaraderie that can develop when hunting and foraging for food, as well as the reward when one has a hand in putting food on the dinner table. The spiking popularity of hunting and fishing reverses what was a steep, yearslong decline that many feared would lead to the near-extinction of the sports.

While Rinella is an integral part of this awakening, he is, in truth, a reluctant evangelist for the movement. For him, it isn’t just about hunting; it is about tracking the animals and understanding our role in the food chain. He admits he takes a lot of pride in how he communicates about conservation and about the ethics of hunting, as well as in demonstrating the thrill and skills of tracking an animal and preparing the feast afterward.

Being outdoors is great for all people, Rinella says, but he also doesn’t want everybody hunting, nor does he think hunting is for everybody. “But I do think everybody can learn something by understanding hunting. And we all become closer to our food and to nature.” It is something that is profound and powerful.

The Michigan native, who started hunting squirrels at age 7, has a very real commitment to storytelling as a way of conveying that message. “That approach has attracted an expansive audience,” he explained. This focus is likely why MeatEater has reached parts of the country that are not traditionally known for hunting cultures. Rinella says he recognized years ago that there’s a desire out there among people who’ve never picked up a gun in their life. “There is also this yearning for great storytelling and writing that is tied to a sense of place and wonder about wild places.”

When you watch an episode of MeatEater, you’re taken on this journey that is about exploring and being in places that are unexplored, or if they were explored, they were thousands of years ago by the first Americans. Ever the wanderer, Rinella says if he was given the chance to pick a moment in time he could go back to and experience, it would be the Ice Age: ”Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago, when the first Americans step foot on present-day American soil. To travel with the first Ice Age hunters who all of a sudden were like, ‘Huh? I haven’t seen anybody in days. I haven’t seen anybody in years,’” he said of the seemingly endless, wide-open spaces of this continent.

That sense of struggle is part of the allure for Rinella. And perhaps it is because we are so comfortable, where we can order anything, watch anything, at the drop of a hat, that MeatEater has proved there are a lot of people out there who are yearning for a struggle as well. Not the kind that involves a Twitter spat, but real struggle, a struggle with a map, a struggle with what it’s like to be without everything we want and where we have to rely on ourselves. And beyond that, actually hunting our own meals. That type of freedom and self-sufficiency and detachment from the tethers of the modern world is a life-changing experience for a lot of people.

Finishing up our talk at his cabin, Rinella says he has to go fish for dinner and finish a new book. But he makes it clear he gives a lot of careful thought to his role in this cultural movement. “I know a lot of great people that don’t hunt. But if you feel that that’s the thing that’s going to be of impact to you, you’re probably onto something.” His role, he says, is to offer those people a place to start, to tell them, “Here’s the things you might want to know if you start down this journey.”

Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner.