The Joe Rogan Experience - #1105 - Michael Hunter

Episode Date: April 17, 2018

Michael Hunter is the chef and owner of Antler Kitchen in Toronto. http://www.antlerkitchenbar.com/

four three two one hello michael welcome thanks man thanks for doing this thanks for coming in 100 man uh people don't know the story we'll give them the brief synopsis i found out about your story online because there was this viral thing that was going on about a chef who was getting protested by a bunch of animal rights activists and vegans who decided to camp out in front of your business and try to the restaurant called antler in toronto try to i don't know what the fuck they were trying to do but you decided to butcher uh a leg of deer in front of them and it became this horrific thing like how could you do that in a place that serves meat? How could you prepare the meat right in front of them?

Like, how did this all get started? How did it become such a crazy viral story? And why were they mad at you when there's a million other restaurants around you? All right. So it started in about December. About. About. Clue number one. in about December. About. About. Clue number one.

Possibly Canadian. The crazy Canadian. Besides being nice. That's why it went viral, because I wasn't being nice. I wasn't the stereotypical Canadian. Well, you weren't even being mean. You were just doing your job in front of them. I'm doing my thing.

So they started in December, and they really- Try to keep this right in front of your face. They really got pissed off with our- We have a little chalkboard sign out front. I'll give you the – we have a 45-seat restaurant. So we're a small – I have one business partner who's my best friend and family friend. And we had a little chalkboard sign out front that said, Venison is the new kale. And, you know, we get cute with our sign. We tease other restaurants around us.

Like we have fun with the sign. And, you know, we get cute with our sign. We tease other restaurants around us, like we have fun with the sign and it's fun. And the cyclist vegan rode by and took huge offense to our sign. And all of a sudden, one day these protesters just showed up. So originally I was just kind of frustrated because they're totally misguided because we take a lot of pride in where our food comes from. We have vegan and vegetarian dishes on the menu. And I really respect that type of diet. So we were just totally floored with why this was happening. And so this started to go on, they'd started to come every week. And they went from like two or three people being kind of peaceful to being like 10, 15 people, not so peaceful. So, uh, it's when it turned not so peaceful, they were shouting at our, at our guests and shouting in our door and really trying to harm

our business that, uh, I just kind of got fed up last resort, went down, we get a whole deer a couple of times a month and we, and we butcher it ourselves. And I just said, screw it, screw it. I'm going to get these people to get out of here. So I thought that that would make them go away. How did you think that was going to make them go away and not escalate it? I don't know. It was just totally like last resort, totally fed up.

I wanted to defend myself, defend our customers. You know, you could see people walking in visibly upset. You know, they're being shouted at, being screamed at, called a murderer as they're walking in for dinner. Like you're going on a date, you want to have this time. And then people are screaming at you,

you know, just for eating. So I was just fed up and I just kind of thought like, you know, buzz off. And why? So just one sign, medicine is, you know, buzz off. And why? So just one sign. One sign.

Medicine is the new kale. One sign. Set this whole thing off. Yeah. And you're surrounded by restaurants. I mean, I know where you are. So we're surrounded by restaurants. Toronto.

There's an actual butcher shop across the street. And if you go in, there's like whole cattle hanging. That's okay. In their butcher shop. But you're a problem with your comparison to kale you attack their sacred kale god we're promoting uh meat i don't know that's what it is because you're promoting it we were promoting it or on the sign yeah so you just didn't promote anything yeah and they were allowed to cycle by and dream of broccoli yeah without any

interference yeah man i have no idea it's totally bizarre i'm sorry how many times did they protest to cycle by and dream of broccoli without any interference. Yeah, man. I have no idea. It's totally bizarre. I'm sorry. How many times did they protest you? I think it's about eight now. They're coming weekly. They still do?

They still do. There's one this Friday. Oh, Jesus. So they organized them. They organized them. There's like Facebook groups. They're basically giving us an ultimatum. We have to put their slogan in our window and they'll go away.

What? Yeah. What's their slogan? We are cunts? There's like, I can't remember it, you know, word for word, but it's, you know, like killing animals is wrong. They have feelings. Yeah.

Do you have to put that in your window? We don't, we're not going to. There's no way. But that's what they want. That's what they want. Yeah. That's hilarious. So it's like eco-terrorism, extortion, whatever you have to put that in your window? We're not going to. There's no way. But that's what they want. That's what they want. That's hilarious. So it's like eco-terrorism extortion, whatever you want to call it. Wow.

Well, the part of this that drives me the most crazy is the fact that you're surrounded by restaurants. We're surrounded by restaurants. You're surrounded by, like you said, you're across the street from a butcher shop. 97% of the people in the world eat meat it's something something crazy like that i mean i'm sure everyone hasn't really been polled i'm sure it's not that accurate but it's somewhere between 95 and 97 it's big it's big and i think we know we're an easy target you know our name is antler we were i think they're mad because um, their, their thing is that we're promoting ethical farming and their beliefs is there is no such thing as ethical farming, that all meat is murder. And, um, you know, if you look up murder in the dictionary, it hard to make sure that where we get our meat from is from the best possible place we can.

And it's local. So it's supporting our local farmers that are, you know, within hours of our restaurant. Now, when you say that they started out nice, like how many people were there in the beginning? Two, three, four. And they had signs? They had signs and they were just kind of promoting their message, but they weren't really yelling and screaming. What escalated it?

So we would call the police. We kind of got wind of it on their Facebook groups. So we would call the police and have the police there to make sure everyone's safe because one thing, like, customers are scared. Our staff are scared. Like, no one's dealt with this before. I've never dealt with this before. so we would have the police there you know they were the police were amazing um and then you know one time we kind of okay let's not call the police let's see what

happens like maybe they'll just they'll go away and uh so then like a megaphone came out uh our neighbors were coming down and getting in fights with them and it was ugly. So we called the police to come and keep the peace. A megaphone. Yeah. Part of the problem with these kind of things is it becomes a contest. It becomes a battle. You know, trying to see who's

going to win. And they're absolutely on a team. I mean, that's one of the things that happens with veganism. And I things that happens with veganism. And I think it happens with hunters, too. Excuse me. People become very tribal. And it's us versus them.

And they want to win. And then it becomes this thing where, look, the reality is a lot of people are idiots. And they don't have a lot going on in their life. And so when something comes up where it becomes a primary focus of their life, one restaurant as illogical as it might be, that becomes the battleground. And it's an ideological battleground for, you know, don't eat meat ever versus sustainable farming. You know, this, the, look, I'm sure I know you're a hunter. I'm sure you feel a certain amount of remorse when an animal dies. A hundred percent. And that's a big part of sort of my beliefs and my philosophy and why I'm working on this

cookbook right now is because I think that, you know, if you do eat meat, you should be able to kill an animal and experience that. And I think that if people were to actually kill an animal, they would see, you know, what goes into that. And I don't think people would consume as much meat. And I don't think people would definitely, you know, they certainly wouldn't waste as much meat as they do. And it's just really upsetting. And I think it's totally misguided, you know, why we were targeted. Well, I mean, like I said, I think it just becomes a game. Yeah. It becomes the big tribal game.

You know, there's a real argument, a real argument that I support against factory farming. And factory farming is the way most people are getting their meat in terms of like cheeseburgers and fast food and stuff along those lines. I mean, you're not getting it from the most ethical sources. It's just it's not financially sustainable to do it that way. Everything would cost more money. And that's a real problem that we as a society,

it's not obviously not you or I that has set up the system, but that this system is a system that we find ourselves a part of. It's a real problem. I've removed myself from it for the most part, but occasionally I'm on the road and I'm hungry and I'll eat some meat that's just whatever. Totally. It's a necessary evil. Sort of.

Sort of, but it's not really necessary at all. Maybe that's the wrong way to describe it, but it's how the system's been set up and it's actually why I started hunting and doing what I do because I watched these documentaries like food ink and these things that kind of shone a light on, you know, the system and how this stuff is actually being produced. And it's horrible. It's, uh, it's terrifying. Yeah. And I think that's the real number one problem. And, you know, and this vegan activist message to go after, you know, these types of farming types of farming, we support as well. We agree with.

So the fact that we were targeted for this was really, really frustrating. Yeah, I think vegans, I understand where they're coming from. But I don't think that they have seen the big picture. And the big picture is there's some animals that need to be harvested they they're not sustainable wild pigs is the best example yeah there is no way you are going to stop wild pigs without killing them there's no way you're not going to give them birth control you're not going to unless you're going to let loose fucking packs of wolves and i mean packs to deal with like what's going on in texas i mean they they're

forced to shoot them out of helicopters they hire it's crazy they hire people to come in with helicopters and shoot them from the sky it's that bad and this is farmers there's companies called hella hunting where they have it on the side like they have a wild boar and a fucking helicopter blade on their logo it's crazy they have to do it yeah no and i i don't. Like they have a wild boar and a fucking helicopter blade on their logo. It's crazy. They have to do it. Yeah, no, and I don't have a lot of experience with that because where I am, we don't have that wild boar problem. But I hunt with these guys from Mossy Oak, and I've gone down there and done one of these pig hunts. And they've shown me their fields, and like one-third of their cornfield is just destroyed. Destroyed.

And they have to hunt them at night or they hunt them with dogs. And it's a huge problem for farmers trying to make a living. It is a huge problem. And vegans themselves need to understand that's your food supply. Totally. You're not growing your own food. Most people listening to this that are vegan are not growing their own food. You're getting your own food from a farm.

That farm is being attacked by pigs. That's only one animal. Another one is deer. I mean, there's a shitload of deer in North America. What's interesting is California has a very weird way of handling it, and I kind of get it in some ways. The weird way that we handle it in California is we don't hunt mountain lions. Okay. There's no mountain lion hunting.

There's very few deer. Yeah. I mean, I see deer in my neighborhood. I live in a fairly rural area. I see deer, you know, a couple of times a week, but it's nothing like if you go to the East coast, have you ever been in the East coast of California or of, uh, uh, the United States, like New York state, that kind of area, New York city. Yeah. I've been to the East coast. Now the state, if you go upstate like new york state

there's so many fucking deer up there it's one of the reasons why lyme disease is so horrible up there it comes from the ticks that were on the deer yeah and people get these terrible terrible cases of lyme disease and it's fucking everywhere up there man i have several friends that have really bad lyme disease yeah they have to's horrible. Go to Jim Miller's Instagram. Jim Miller is a fighter in the UFC, a high-level fighter who's been competing at the highest level for a long time, and he has serious Lyme disease to the point where it's debilitated. It's scary. He has to take a fat bag of pills, and he held up his pills the other day.

Look at that. This is what he takes while he's in training camp. That's insane. 19 days of medication and supplements. He said, fuckly me. 31 capsules a day. You do the math. Remember they carried a seven, and it just says Lyme disease is one of the hashtags.

Yeah, he's got it really bad. And I mean, what's crazy is the guy could not be healthier, works out constantly, eats right. He's not boozing. His body's just falling apart because of fucking Lyme disease. And it's being carried by these deer. Overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways either you introduce predators or you manage them with hunting um there's a place in ma in maui where they are um the maui has no predators you know and but they also have a bunch of wild game that was brought in for King Kamehameha. I think it was in the 1800s they brought it in.

I'm not sure when, but there's tons of axis deer on Maui and on Lanai and on Molokai, a couple of different islands. And one of the things they've started doing is they were trying to figure out how to eradicate them from this area. So a bunch of hunters got together and they're hunting these axis deer and then giving the meat to poor people, like making it free for them. Yeah. And it's a really cool program, but that's another sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt. Yeah.

There's no other, unless you're just going to poison them or you're going to somehow or another capture them all and neuter and spay a certain amount of them every month. There's really no other way to handle it. Yeah. And I think that's a big misconception. Like people that don't educate themselves about hunting, they're just like hunting is bad. Killing animals is bad. And they get on this bandwagon, but they don't have enough information about it.

Yeah. And I think people confuse trophy hunting, you know, with like they see Cecil the lion and everyone goes after, okay, it's hunting is the problem. But, you know, trophy hunting is the problem, but hunters that hunt for food and that hunt to, you know, help the sort of environmental impacts that they're having. Like people like snow geese. I don't know if you know much about snow geese. Oh, I do.

Yeah. I read that article that you retweeted actually. Yeah. People like snow geese. I don't know if you know much about snow geese. Oh, I do. I read that article that you retweeted, actually. Yeah, like a Nat Geo article that I posted. You know, these birds fly in flocks of like 20,000, 30,000 birds, and they land in a farmer's field, and they eat everything. Everything. And they destroy it. And, you know, like 10, 15 years ago, these populations of birds, they weren't like they are now. Well, large-scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom in the population of deer.

Right. You know, deer in America, particularly like in the Midwest, where all the farms are, what is it, a fucking coincidence that there's all the deer where all the farms are? No, it's not. My good friend Doug Duren, he has a big-ass farm in Wisconsin, beautiful place, in the Driftless area. Do you know what that is? No.

It's where the glaciers didn't pass through. So it's not flat. There's all these hills and it's very beautiful and lakes. It's a phenomenal place. But essentially he's got the deer that he hunts and that he and his friends hunt on his property. They're farm animals. They're eating corn.

They're just eating grains. I mean, he grows corn. He's a farmer. So he grows all this corn. The deer are eating all this corn. And they're fucking delicious, man. They're huge. They're so huge.

And they're so good. But there's a reality to population control. Now, in Wisconsin, they get it because they're around them every day they're hitting them with their cars they see them everywhere they look this this is not like the idealistic view of someone who lives in a city street in toronto and is driving around their bike looking for signs that are criticizing kale or whatever the fuck they're doing they're not in the real natural world that these animals exist in. They don't get it. They don't understand. They live in their bubble. And another thing they

don't understand is hunters actually, we have to buy tags. We have to buy our licenses. There are rules and laws that we have to follow. And those fees actually pay for the wildlife conservation. And I'm pretty sure it's the same in the States as well, from at least talking to my friends. It is. It's the Pickman-Robertson Act. And they don't understand. I think it's 11% of all the proceeds from hunting gear go to wildlife conservation. And that turns out to be billions and billions of dollars. It's far more than any other conservation group, far more than any wildlife conservation group or animal activist group.

No one contributes more to conservation than hunting. No one. Because we want it. We want it to be there for our kids and their kids. And it's nature. It's how the world is supposed to be. It's also this contradictory thing that seems like it doesn't make sense, but we love the wildlife.

We love the animals. Just because you eat them doesn't mean you don't love them. But you recognize them as, this is a weird way to look at it, but it is a renewable resource. Right. And it is also a magical, beautiful thing. Just because of that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it. I mean, it's this disconnect that people have with the wild, I think is a real part of it, a real part of the problem. Good luck finding a vegan in Alaska. There's not a whole lot of them that live out in the bush that are vegans.

They're eating salmon. You can bring in vegetables. I'm sure there are some. I'm just talking shit. But the reality is if you're embedded in that world, you understand it and you appreciate it. It's very humbling. I mean, killing an animal is very humbling and it sounds like to someone who's an animal lover that sounds fucking crazy it's

hard it's also really hard like when i see a deer come out i hunt with a with a bow crossbow and i see a deer come out it's i'm trembling i have the hair on my back is standing up they're these beautiful majestic creatures and i'm gonna kill it and it's it's really really difficult and i don't think that people understand that that don't hunt and that haven't killed an they're these beautiful, majestic creatures and I'm going to kill it. And it's, it's really, really difficult. And I don't think that people understand that, that don't hunt and that haven't killed an animal. They don't understand the respect and the amount of effort that goes into that. No, they definitely don't, but they don't care.

I mean, what they have an idea and the idea is animals should not die, but they're going to die. It's, they're going to die of old age. They're going to die of starvation. They're going to die of starvation. They're going to freeze to death. They're going to- They're going to be eaten alive. They're going to be eaten alive.

And people think that animals, they die peacefully in the wild. It's absolutely incorrect. If you Google anything about how animals die in the wild, and they're being eaten alive, like deer are being taken down and eaten alive by wolves or coyotes or whatever it is. Or bears. Bears. And it's horrific. And to be shot with an arrow, to be shot with a bullet,

it's a way more humane way to go, in my opinion. Oh, it's unquestionably a more humane way to go. I mean, it's one of the reasons why I hunt and I practice so much. I practice every day. One of the reasons why we got this building is so I could put a 45-yard indoor archery range. I saw that. I want to shoot it. You have to practice.

We could shoot afterwards, but you have to fucking practice. You have to be able to make an ethical shot. Now, when I sit down and I cook something for my family, I know where that came from. If we have vegetables that we grew in our garden, there's a great

satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden, there's a great satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some, some kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden. It tastes better when you, when you go out there and you cut that cucumber off the plant and you cut that kale down, it is like half an hour old, you know, and it's like nothing compares to that freshness that you go to the grocery store that may be a couple of days, a week, a month old, you have no idea. And for me as a chef, um, that's why I love hunting and foraging and having a garden in my backyard. Because when you go and pick something, nothing tastes as good as that. Right? Yeah. I mean, I appreciate where vegans and animal rights activists are coming

from, because it's coming from, I think there's a lot of distortion with like really angry ones. But this is my take on a lot of this. If you get a group of 100 people, one of them for sure is a fucking idiot. Just out of just sheer odds, right? Like what are the odds one of them is a fucking idiot? It's pretty strong, right? Well, if you're going to get a group of 100 vegans, you're going to get at least one of them that's a fucking idiot. And they're going to be, some of them are violent. Some of them are super aggressive about it.

I mean, there's a ton of them online that you can go. Their identity is completely wrapped around veganism. They use vegan in their name. It's always I'm the vegan this or the vegan that. That is 100% of their name, 100% of their identity. So they can't separate from it ever. Like that is who they are forever. And there's been some serious problems.

What was the name of that cafe again? Cafe Gratitude. There were some people that were running a vegan restaurant. I think they have a couple of them, right, in LA. And they were having health issues. And some people, the vegan diet just doesn't agree with them. Maybe they were doing it wrong. Maybe they have unique dietary needs. having health issues and some people the vegan diet just doesn't agree with them and maybe they were doing it wrong maybe they have unique dietary needs but they started raising cattle and they

started eating those cattle and the fucking vegans freaked out death threats all this crazy shit coming after them protesting and you know these people were terrified they're older folks they're you know they're elderly there it. Vegan restaurant owners receive death threats over animal slaughter scandal. Yeah. I mean, this is the bad ones, right? And it's not most of them. Most vegans, I think, are vegans for all the right reasons, even if they're misinformed. If you choose to not eat meat and choose that kind of lifestyle, like, power to you.

Power to you. It's amazing. And I think that if it works for you and your body, that's great. And for me, it doesn't work for me. Like I've done vegan cleanses. I've done the juice cleanses. I've gone out as a chef to vegan restaurants

and I'm not full. I'll eat three or four courses. I'll spend tons of money. And half an hour later, I'm starving full. You know, I'll eat three or four courses. I'll spend tons of money. And half an hour later, I'm starving. Starving. And I just need to eat something with protein and lots of protein. And it's meat or fish or, you know, I've made tofu from scratch from soybeans. And it's just, it doesn't, it's not the same. Yeah.

Well, right now people are screaming at their, you're doing it wrong. My vegan food is amazing I love it, it's tasty It's the most delicious But I'm not full Some of it is, some of it's good I mean, I eat vegan all the time There's a vegan restaurant near me I go to all the time

Sometimes I get dirty looks People are like, oh, this motherfucker's here Why are you here? Why are you here? You're not allowed to, you're not one of us You're not allowed to eat our food It's just, it's very unfortunate that I think these ideological groups get tainted by the most extreme members. And I think that's true on the hunting side, too. that they distort the real sort of fascinating and mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting

wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature. It's an almost psychedelic experience to hunt and be in the wild. And that sounds so counterintuitive to someone who's never experienced it. But the world of these animals, when you're away from your cell phone, when you're away from television and all the bullshit and the computer, when you're out there in the wild,

you are almost in another dimension. If you're in complete silence in the forest and your mind goes into a completely different sort of mode that is familiar, but yet alien. It's familiar in a way that your body's like, oh, this is hunting. This is what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years. This is why we became human. I mean, it's literally one of the reasons that scientists believe that our brains grew is because we started eating meat, we started cooking meat, the nutrition became more accessible. And also we started thinking about how to hunt, developing tools to hunt with. I mean, all of this

is the reason why humans are humans today. And I'm sure the vegan argument against that would be, well, that's then and we're past that now. Well, we're not. No, we're not. We're not because of controlling the population of animals. We're certainly not because of controlling the population of predators. And that's another thing that people need to accept and understand. There's a reason why they eradicated all the wolves in North America before they reintroduced them to Yellowstone. And now they're thriving in many parts of the Northwest. It's because they were fucking killing everything. And they don't have any predators. And the only predators that they have are humans. And if we don't keep the populations in check of them and of grizzly bears, of black bears

and all the other predators, they start eating each other. They start tearing each other apart. They start coming after us. They start encroaching on people. Well, we're in their territory. We shouldn't be in their place. Humans, well, look, I'm on team people. So I don't know what the fuck you're saying here. If know if you're saying that we should move out of san francisco

and give it to the wolves you can go fuck yourself all right and this is literally what it boils down to because you have to draw some line in the sand somewhere because if someone doesn't control the population of animals then what's going to happen well you know you can leave them to their own devices and they can sort of sort it out. But you know how they sort it out through disease and starvation? I mean, what happens is there's too many animals and not enough food. So they get horrific diseases. That's where mange comes from.

That's where a lot of like serious diseases that infect wildlife come from. They come from a lack of food or overpopulation. That's how nature sorts it out. overpopulation. That's how nature sorts it out. You know, and that's how nature sorts it out with people too. We're just sneaky. We've used vaccines and shit. We're at the top of the food chain. Yeah, well, we are. We've worked hard to get there. We are. And I think it comes with a certain responsibility. And that responsibility is really, we're really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming. And that's one of the main arguments for veganism.

One of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals, whether it's veganism or whether it's rather factory farming or whether it's large-scale dairy farms where they mistreat their cows or the chicken farms or all these different factory farms where they treat these animals not as a living being, but as a commodity, then it becomes a giant problem. But if you look at guys like, do you know who Joel Salatin is? No.

Joel Salatin is a very fascinating guy. He runs a farm called Polyface Farms. And what he has essentially done is made large-scale animal agriculture possible in a humane and very natural way. He has enormous electric fences that he uses for his pigs, and he just moves them around, moves the fences around. So the pigs wander around. He has a huge rolling chicken coop. I mean, it's fucking huge. And he pushes that thing around.

He moves it to a new space. The chickens go out. They wander around. They do their chicken thing, and they go right back into the chicken house. And this is where he gets the eggs from. This is how they raise chickens. This is how they raise cattle. They do it with all these different animals.

And his perspective on all this is that if you do it right, it's not horrific. It's not an evil thing, and that these animals are living the way they're meant to live. Right. That's one of the things that we do at Antler is to find those farmers and guys like that. One of the farms we get our deer from, they have 1,000 acres. The deer roam as they please. They're eating nuts and apples and acorns and grass and everything they're supposed to eat.

And then when it's time, they're collected and harvested. And that is where we get our meat from. And we try really hard not to buy from these factories. We don't serve chicken, beef, or pork. We have bison, pheasant, duck, wild boar because, you know, these game farms, they don't have these massive large-scale operations and i i buy direct from the farmer and they can tell me what their diet is you know uh with their good months their bad months we we know all about these animals that we're bringing to the restaurant and um and you know we're really proud of that i have an an issue with people that keep saying

wild boar why do they say wild boar when it's wild pig? So it's a male, it actually is a different breed. So the, the, the pigs that are in these, you know, factory farms or even regular, regular pigs, there's, there's, there's many different breeds and a lot of them are hybrid hybrid, um, breeds. The, the wild boar breed has long black hair and tusks that actually come out. So, um, I can buy whole pigs and, and they don't have those tusks. And when I buy the wild boar breed, the meat is darker. The hair is black, but we're getting them. There's no hair by the time we get them.

And they've got the tusks in the jaw. Right, but my point is that a boar is a male. Right. You're definitely eating females too. That's true. Yeah, so why do they call it a wild boar? Because it's a sow. Yeah, it's just a breed.

Yeah, but do you know that they're all the same breed? I did not know that. They're all Suscrafa is the, I guess, the genus. Is that what you say? They're all sort of interchangeable. Right. They all breed with each other. I do know there's tons of different varieties.

There's the Berkshire. There's Tamworth. There's all these different kinds of breeds. Sure. Breeds of hogs. There's variations. Yeah. But they're all the same animal.

What's crazy about wild pigs is if you took a domestic pig, you know, like Babe, release Babe out into the forest, they morph in a very short amount of time. Their snout extends, their hair becomes darker and thicker, their tusks lengthen. Interesting. It's very weird. They're a

weird animal. Pigs are a weird weird. They're a weird animal. Pigs are a weird animal. They're a weird animal. When they're domestic, they're sweethearts. Unless you fall in their cage when they're hungry and they fucking eat you, which is really crazy. It's one of the main ways that farmers die. Fall into cages and get eaten by pigs. That's gruesome. Happens all the time. It does. It happens every year. guy'll fuck up and fall into a pig pen and the pigs just fuck him up that's crazy yeah especially if you're um you know you're dealing with those really enormous pigs i mean those pigs need a lot of food and they're fucking big yeah and once they start chewing you that's your ass and they just decide have you been pig hunting yeah yeah yeah

i've been pig hunting i've shot a. Yeah, I've been pig hunting. I've shot a couple pigs. Yeah. The meat is definitely different. It's a lot darker. Yeah. It's delicious, though. Yeah.

And where I do it, what's really interesting is in California, a lot of the pigs were introduced by William Randolph Hearst, that crazy asshole that ran from the movie Citizen Kane, the Orson Welles depiction of him. This crazy guy that ran Hearst Publications in the 1930s. He's literally one of the reasons why marijuana is illegal. Right. William Randolph Hearst decided that when there was a cover of, I believe it was Popular Science magazine, that said hemp is the new billion-dollar crop.

And they had invented a machine called a decorticator. And what a decorticator does is it effectively processes hemp fiber much more efficiently. And for the longest time, they used slaves to process hemp fiber. But then Eli Whitney came around with the cotton gin, and they switched from hemp clothing to cotton. Cotton is easier to produce with the cotton gin, but it's just an inferior cloth. Hemp makes better paper. Hemp makes cloth. You can make houses with it. Henry Ford made the first fenders for the first Model T out of hemp. I mean, hemp's a crazy thing. William Randolph Hearst read this article, saw what was coming, and realized that he was going

to have to transition all of his paper mills. And he owned forests that they would cut down the trees and make paper with. They would have to transition those to hemp if people were demanding hemp. So instead, he undercut the entire industry by saying that there was a new drug that blacks and Mexicans were smoking, and they were raping white women. And he called this drug marijuana, which was really just the name of them. It was a Mexican slang for wild tobacco. So he started printing these stories. Congress made it illegal. They didn't even,

a lot of people that were voting on it didn't even know that they were making cannabis or like hemp, the textile and the commodity hemp. They didn't know they were making it illegal. They thought they were stopping a drug scourge that was forcing blacks and Mexicans to rape white women. It was all William Randolph Hearst, this one crazy asshole with Harry Anslinger in the fucking 1930s. That's when it

became illegal. Well, this same crazy asshole let a bunch of wild pigs loose on his property so he can hunt them because he was a gentleman hunter. So the pigs that I hunt in California, when I go pig hunting, probably are direct descendants from the pigs that were let loose by this asshole. Yeah. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is how fast they breed. You know, my friends in Mississippi were telling me, you know, a pig can lay a litter three times a year, four times a year, up to 10, 12 piglets per litter, and they have no natural predators. So what are these farmers going to do when they start decimating their crops? Yeah, they're not a native North American species.

No. Yeah, and it's one of the most destructive, invasive species. And if you've never seen them before, you see them on TV, they look, you know, oh, it's a pig. Pigs are cute. I've seen my friend has a pot belly pit. I pet it. That's great. What they are as adults when they're wild boars covered in mud and disease, they're fucking a mammal plague. They're vicious. And they go through everything. They will spread across the country. They'll destroy your garden. They'll eat your dog. I

mean, no bullshit. They're fucking dangerous. It's a crazy animal. A lot of farmers actually ask me if I'll come hunt on their property. A lot of vineyards will ask me to come in and they have a problem with the turkeys. The turkeys are eating all their grapes. Stuff like that. A lot of regular kind of city, people that live in the city, they don't understand. Yeah. Turkey populations in some places are exploding too because they've realized, oh, let's just go to the suburbs. Nobody even hunts us. There was one running down the street in Toronto last week, a turkey. People were filming it and sending me the videos. Wow.

They're delicious too. Yeah. That's actually the first bird I hunted. I didn't actually start hunting until I was in my twenties and I had grown up cooking. I was interested in becoming a chef and a family friend told me he was going turkey hunting. And I said, well, what do you mean you're going turkey hunting? Like, I thought turkeys were, I didn't know there was such a thing as wild turkey. I thought they were, you know, a domesticated bird like a chicken. So he takes me turkey hunting. And I actually, I couldn't believe it.

We, you know, we shot a couple birds. You know, we plucked them out. And then the skin was yellow. And the meat is dark like like the chicken leg meat is like the breast like it's dark and i just thought like wow like this is incredible and then when i tasted it i i just couldn't believe that this is what turkey was supposed to taste like yeah it's a robust flavor and you grow up you know at least i grew up like you know christmas thanksgiving these these important holidays eating turkey and you see it

and it's this big white blob and it's humongous. And then the wild bird, it's leaner. It's not like super round. It's lean. It's how it's supposed to be. And then for me, that was like the light bulb moment that this is what we're supposed to be eating. We're not supposed to be eating that shit. Yeah, that shit, that really white meat turkey.

Look at him. There's the turkey in Toronto. Turkey in Toronto. Running down the street. I'm so thankful to be here because it's still snowing. Is it really? It's still snowing. And I love winter and snowboarding and going out and enjoying the snow

but I'm done. California baby. Come on down. Yeah man. I was talking to a buddy of mine from Montana on the phone yesterday. It was fucking freezing cold up there. Thick snow everywhere. They're about to open up their bear season. And he's like, Jesus Christ, it's snows everywhere. And I'm like, dude, I'm in my underwear right now outside. I love it here, man. I have a soft spot for, uh, for California. I've been, I've been coming here since I was a little kid, uh, to visit my dad in the summers. And, uh, I come here two or three

times a year and I love it. I love it too. it too i you know the mountain lion thing is a weird thing with california because i i see their point what they what they've essentially done is and this is one of the weird things about california is like california is one of the places that doesn't have a fish and game department really yeah it's like they don't call it that they call it wildlife, they don't call it that. They call it wildlife. Okay. They don't call it like, uh, like they don't think of it as like, you have to hunt them. Right. Like if you say like fish and game or Arizona calls it game and fish, because there's more game in Arizona than there are fish desert. Yeah. It's kind of interesting the way they've switched it around. But I think the way California calls it is fish and

wildlife. See, we call it the ministry of natural resources. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. But I can't argue with the effectiveness of their approach because you do not find a lot of deer in California and deer hunters are extremely frustrated by that. And I get it. If you're like a local guy and you want to be able to hunt your own deer, it's hard going, man. It's crazy. I actually didn't know there was hunting here. I had no idea. And through hanging out with my friends at Mossy Oak, I met this guy that lives actually in Orange County.

His name is Jeremiah Dowdy from Field to Plate. I don't know if you know this guy. He's a local L.A. guy. And he hunts all over California. I had no idea that there was so much hunting yeah there's plenty he's a really good friend of mine and i'm saying well what's he's like well there's turkey there's wild pig there's the the the pronghorn um there's all kinds of stuff that uh there's elk yeah too there's rocky mountain elk near to hone ranch and then there's

tule elk that are natural on the coast there's there's a lot of different animals here yeah but uh there's also a lot of motherfucking mountain lions whoa yeah and they still kill them but the way they kill them now is through government trackers that means it's really kind of crazy what they do is mountain lions start eating people's dogs and cats and you know they get they get scary and then people call one of the you know i don't know who you would call that would take care of it and they hire people and most of the, I don't know who you would call that would take care of it, and they hire people. Most of the time they use dogs. They use dogs to tree the mountain lion and they shoot them. And when they empty the contents of their stomachs,

when they do an autopsy on them, they find it filled with dogs and cats, which is really kind of crazy. That is nuts. There was one near where my dad lives. A lady was attacked and they were running. A pair of girls were running uh in the canyon and a mountain lion actually attacked one of them and she was like having a tug of war with the mountain lion like with her friends oh jesus christ and uh i think

it was about five or six years ago where was this uh somewhere in orange county someone was attacked running or cycling or something like that yeah and they had they had to uh they went and found it and shot it but well when they get hungry you, we're encroaching because we're encroaching on their land. No, it's It's just land. Yeah, it's not there as you fuck. This is what's crazy about people. We're encroaching on their territory No, nobody they're dead And then with the whatever was there that claimed that territory is dead and then there's a new one that comes along and they take it. It's a fucking constant battle. This idea that we're in their community.

They have an established gated community that we've entered. And we start putting up houses and pissing off their neighbors. No, that's not what it is. It's just land. And if you hate people and you don't like cities, well, then go fucking live in the forest. Until then, fuck off. And stop saying we're encroaching on their land. Do you go to the supermarket?

Yes. Do you buy your vegan food at a vegan deli? Well, that's a place where a deer could have lived. Okay? Do you go to the movie theater? You do? Well, you piece of shit, that used to be like a squirrel's house. That was a field at one point.

Yeah. I mean, large-scale agriculture. This is the other thing that kind of drives me crazy about vegans. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat grain. I'm not saying you shouldn't eat vegetables, but large scale agriculture in terms of just raising vegetables is responsible for a tremendous amount of death. First of all, there's the pesticides that they use that kill bugs. Now, if you only like mammals and you don't mind when people kill bugs, that seems a little hypocritical to me. It gets a little weird, but it does get weird.

And then there's the fact that when you're making these, when you're using a combine... Running through the field with all the rabbits, all the bunnies, all the groundhogs are being decimated. Decimated. My good buddy lives in Iowa, and, you know, he takes pictures. He's like, look, we just chopped down,

we just cut the field. Look at all the vultures and the vultures just circling overhead and landing in the field right out they know when the combine rolls through they come in dinner time they literally know it's like there's places in Alaska um especially on Kodiak Island where uh rifle shots equal I've heard of this dinner bell yeah the bears come running i've heard of this this is crazy fucking crazy hunters are are carrying like big magnum 45s like pistols to defend themselves against these grizzlies i'll send you a fantastic podcast that do you know steve ranella is no steve ranella is a really interesting guy. And he's a host of a TV show called Meat Eater. He's an author. He has a podcast that he recorded when they were in a

Fognac Island, which is like one of those chains of islands near Kodiak. So it has those enormous coastal brown bears, just like Kodiak. And and they got attacked they got attacked when they shot an elk and they were packing the elk out and they got rushed by a fucking tanker of a bear and it is a crazy podcast because they recorded it right after the fact whenever everyone's freaking out still and you know one guy had a pistol on him but he set it down next to his pack and they had all these ideas of like what it would be like if an animal came in like if they got attacked they had all these preconceived notions what it would be like what it would feel like yeah it was like throw all that out the window it was you were your brain it's not even on a reptilian level

your brain is so terrified and this thing was so big my friend janice said that he saw its teeth gnashing literally feet from his head as it ran through the camp oh my god the revenant is just like i got rushed by a deer one time and uh i was losing it i didn't know what to do it was uh it was before sunrise it was like you know five in the morning i'm walking into my deer setup and i had to cross this little river and it was like full of stones and stuff. And I'm, I'm kind of walking up this river and all I hear is like, and I'm like, Oh, like what the hell is that noise? And then it stopped and it was pawing at the ground and snorting.

And I was like, Holy shit, this is a buck. And like my, my, I got goosebumps right now thinking about this and this is my bows in my bag. And I'm just like, I'm going to get taken down by this deer. And then I think it thought it was another buck because it's in the rut. It's rutting season for these deer. And then it smelt that I was a human. And it did that.

I got blown. It whistled. Did that whistling, blowing kind of sound and took off. But I thought I was fucked. I was like, this is it. Going to get gored. I'm going to get gored by these antlers, and that's it. But it's not a bear.

Were you in Canada? Yeah, I was in Canada. Those are big animals. They're big. We have big whitetail. 300 pounds sometimes. They're big. And even our does are huge.

We get a lot of doe tags. Where I grew up in Caledon, which is about an hour north of the city on a horse farm, we don't have a gun season for deer. So that's how we got into archery and hunting with a bow. That's interesting. Why is that? You know what? I don't know.

I think it's because the farms are kind of closer together. It's sort of like, you know, it's not huge agriculture. They're more kind of hobby farms. So I think they're a little closer together. They don't want people just letting loose bullets. Letting loose bullets. I think the main thing is rifles. So deer season and turkey season, you can use a shotgun.

And it's really stupid because you can shoot coyotes too with a rifle or shotgun, but there's no shotgun or rifle for deer, which is weird. That is weird. But that's why I got into archery. And, yeah, I'm lucky because it's so close to the city. I can kind of go and hunt and then come back to work in the morning. Yeah, the coyote thing is interesting because it's very counterintuitive. The more coyotes you kill, the more coyotes breed, the more coyote populations increase.

Coyotes are a fascinating animal. They're a big problem, at least in Caledon where I'm from. You were talking about the mountain lions. That's kind of our version. I don't think there's any mountain lions where I live but um the coyotes are a problem they're nabbing people's dogs and cats everywhere off the trail people were walking on their leash and they're coming out oh yeah nailing their little it happens out here i had one kill a chicken of mine two weeks ago crazy yeah i've got a video of the dead fucking chicken in my chicken coop and

then uh here's what's really dark i dug a hole and a bird the chicken we don't eat our chickens we just use the eggs for eggs and they're like pets i mean like there's a video of me from my instagram walking uh in my yard holding my daughter's bunny and the chickens they're like they're following me around i wrote i'm the motherfucking chicken whisperer because it's a crazy video because these chickens just follow me. I mean, they literally, they're like pets. Yeah. So when this chicken died, I was bummed out. It was a sweetheart of a chicken too.

And this was a chicken that we would turn over rocks, and she would come and get the worms. And so she would follow you around. I'm like, come on, sweetie, here we go. And it's really like a pet. Here it is. Here's a video of me walking. Like, look at them. That's so cool. They just follow me around, man. I know Here's a video of me walking. Look at them.

That's so cool. They just follow me around, man. I know. And a lot of farmers and people at little hobby farms, they use chickens as insect control in their vegetable gardens. Oh, they're great for that. They're great for they will fuck up some mice too, man. You ain't never seen nothing like it.

No? You never seen it? I did not know that. Dude, this is how I found out about it. Well, one way I found out about it, a mouse got in the chicken coop, and they fucked that thing up. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. But then another thing happened was my daughters found a hawk. My wife decided in all of her – women are always trying to spruce things up.

She decided she was going to change some of these fences to a glass fence. And the hawks didn't get the memo and they suck and they they swan dived into this this glass wall and when we first put up the fence there was like three hawks that got fucked up and one of them died and we found one of them that was just ko'd and had blood coming out of its nose. Like literally, it was like a UFC fight. It was down and fucked up. So my daughters took this in and they put it in a large cardboard box and they had to figure out how to feed it because it was – I think it was on Saturday and the wildlife rescue place was not open on the weekend. And so we had to bring it into a place on Monday.

So over the weekend, we went to this pet store that we go to, and they sell something called pinkies. It's a very cute term for baby mice that can't really see yet. And they're separated from their mother, and they feed them to snakes. It's mostly reptiles they feed them to. But these hawks would fuck these pinkies up. And so to try to give this hawk some food while it was there over the weekend so it didn't starve, my daughters brought them the pinkies. And there was one pinky left that the hawk didn't eat when we brought the hawk to the wildlife rescue place.

So they fixed up the hawk and they told us the hawk was – they took care of its wing and eventually they released it back in the wild so it was a nice story but there's this one pinky left over and the thing was going to die it wasn't with its mother it was too small to drink milk and they were like we want to keep it we want to keep it as a pet i'm like that doesn't make any sense you were just feeding its brothers and sisters to this fucking hawk and now you guys want to keep it so i said listen i think we should feed it to the chickens. And they're like, no. I was like, well, what do you guys, this is crazy. You can't keep it. It's going to die.

Do you understand that? And they said, okay, okay, okay. I go, well, listen, you don't have to watch. I'll just go out and do it. Dude, I put that fucking thing down and I have never seen those chickens so voracious. Attacked that mouse. And then they were all chasing the one chicken that had the mouse trying to steal it from her. Watch this. Here's the chicken with the mouse right here.

Look, they get a mouse and they fuck that mouse up, man. And they try to steal it from each other. They're like, give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me! There's one where a cat is playing with a mouse. You've seen the one with the cat and the chicken, Jamie? That's the best one.

Because the cat, everybody thinks of cats as being vicious. Cats are pretty vicious. Chickens are fucking dinosaurs, man. The way the chicken attacks the mouse, like here he is. See, look at that. He's going to eat the shit out of that mouse, too. She's got to keep her eyes open, make sure those other cunts don't come and steal her mouse. See, look at her.

They're experts in bobbing and weaving and turning their heads. But so the cat is stalking the mouse and the chicken's like, bitch, you don't even know what you're doing. The chicken just runs in and snatches it right in front of the cat. The cat's like, fuck, seriously? It's like, my mouse. They're way more ruthless. I mean, birds are ruthless creatures.

And chickens in particular are just – I think it's just a part of their natural diet. Like when a mouse would get – look at this. See the cat? The cat's like, wow, check out this mouse. I can't believe how lucky I am. So he's like, you know, cats – for a cat, half of it's a game, right? They just want to play with it.

Yeah. There's a chick hanging back. But as soon as the chicken finds it, meanwhile, that mouse does not seem scared of that cat. He's not scared of the mouse. I bet that mouse has toxo. Look at that. Boom. The chicken's like, fuck you.

Give me that thing. That is crazy. Crazy. I did not know that about chickens. Oh, dude. They'll fuck a mouse up. That is crazy. But it's just the way they do it, too.

He's fast, too. And they think of it as purely as food. They're not thinking, like the cat, it's sport. For the cat, it's just the way they do it too he's fast too and they think of it as purely as food they're not thinking like the cat it's it's sport for the cat it's kind of fun yeah cat's probably fully fed and it's a house cat yeah it's a house cat fat house cat he's just looking to kill something that's nature that's nature yeah people don't understand that they want to they want to remove themselves from it and that's great but they don't want to understand it they don't want to understand it they want something that aligns with their ideology and their ideology is love and compassion except for people that eat meat and then death death threats yeah i mean that's really what it

is it's it's an ideological battle and in that sense veganism becomes very much like a religion because you support all the people that are on your side and the people that are opposed to you are like apostates. They're like the negative people that are trying to bring you to the dark side, to hell. It gets really crazy. And there's a lot of evidence on their side in terms of like factory farming and the horrors of factory farming and even the, the really incredibly poor modern American diet that they see. A lot of people, when they go vegan,

what they're doing, one of the best things that they're doing is they're eliminating all the bullshit. They're eliminating all the trans fats and all the fucking, all the terrible shit that a lot of people eat that isn't vegan yeah but the negative thing is most of them are eating diets that are far too carbohydrate rich and if they're not getting their blood checked they don't even know how unhealthy they are they convince themselves they're doing much better and they're feeling much better but a lack of cholesterol can

fuck with your hormone functions a lot of vegans have low hormones because of that. One of our regulars at Antler was talking to me about his experience. He used to have a organic vegetable farm and he's a six foot seven, big, huge, tall Dutch white guy. And he goes to me, he says, you know, I was vegan for a long time. I had this organic vegetable farm and I thought that I was doing my body a service. He said, I thought I was doing something great for my body. And he got really sick. And he went to the doctor and the doctor said, listen, man, you have to take supplements to supplement the things you're not getting from eating meat. Or you have to go back to eating meat because just some people's bodies do better than others. And he said, a lot of Asian cultures are more

susceptible to vegetable diets. But he's like, in reality, he's like, you know, you're a Northern European, you know, descent. And you need to eat, you know, this stuff to be healthy. And that's when he went back to eating meat. And it doesn't matter, you know, what you're trying. Like, he was living on an organic vegetable farm. Like, what more healthy, you know, vegetables could he be eating? Yeah, B12 is a big one. And B12 essentially only comes from things other than vegetables.

You can get some of it from algae. You can get, I mean, you definitely can get it from meat. It's rich in meat. And the other thing is iron. Iron, you know, people say, well, there's iron in vegetables. There is, but it's not very bioavailable. And a lot of the various vitamins and even protein in vegetables is not very bioavailable. And a lot of the various vitamins and even protein in vegetables, not very bioavailable in most sources. And it's how your body absorbs those nutrients as well.

Like it might be rich in that substance, but your body can't really absorb it. Well, it's just everybody's body's different. I mean, that is an absolute fact that there are some people that can eat certain diets and be very healthy, and then other people eat them, and they have a really hard time with them. But the other thing is that most of these people that are talking about how healthy and how great they feel, there's a lot of it is sort of a placebo effect, and they're not getting blood work done. Everyone, regardless of what your diet is, you should get blood work done just to find out if you have any potential problems that are on the horizon.

Because there's a lot of times you'll feel okay, and then you get your blood work done, and the doctor will tell you, hey, man, you're really low in vitamin B and D and A, and you need this and that. And this is the health consequences of not having this stuff in your diet. And if you are committed to a vegan diet, there's ways that you can supplement. And this is my advice to people. If you want to supplement, first of all, algae is a great one. You know, it tastes like shit, but it's very good for your body.

And you just add it to smoothies. You know, just add it with coconut milk or a bunch of other things. You can do it. I mean, you definitely can eat a vegan diet and be healthy. But you've got to be on the ball. You know, and the B12 one is a big one. It's a massive amounts. I was reading some crazy article the other day.

It said something like 90% of all vegans are B12 deficient. I've heard this. I'm not an expert, but I've been reading. It's terrible. There's a guy named Chris Kresser that I've had on my podcast before, who's a brilliant guy who is, he's an expert in diet and nutrition who started out as a macrobiotic vegan and had massive health problems and then switched to eating meat eventually and then really became a connoisseur of organ meat, which is like probably the most nutrient dense food in the world.

I love, I love, that's my favorite thing about hunting is the organ meat. Me too, man. I love liver. Liver and the heart. Um, I, I, I went hunting and I came back and I brought the heart into the restaurant for the guys. Cause I wanted to, you know, share with them like the experience of eating like fresh killed, like the heart was still warm when I brought it to work. And I, the way I like to eat is either tartar, like just mince it up raw or cook it like a steak. So I cut it, you know, horizontally into like it looks like a tenderloin steak. And we all got like this like buzz, like we just like shot a double espresso or something.

It was just like, whoa. And it's like it's so nutrient rich, the organ meat. I had Alexander Gustafson on the podcast yesterday. He's a UFC number one light heavyweight contender. Big Viking motherfucker. But he gets all of his meat from hunting for his training camps and everything like that. He hunts red deer in Sweden. That's where he lives.

And we were both talking about how when you eat really nutrient-dense wild game, it gives you like a stimulated effect. Like your body is like yeah more of this give me more of this it's there's something in it yeah i don't know what and it just tastes it tastes like it's supposed to taste it's you can't explain it the flavor is totally different even when you know we're buying from these really cool game farms it's different than the deer that i go and shoot because you know that deer I just shot could be like six, seven years old versus at the farm, it's maybe one or two. But again, it's eating such a diverse diet.

And it's, you know, my belief is that that's how we're supposed to be eating. Well, it's definitely how we were eating for the longest time. Yeah. And it is entirely possible that if humans, like say if you got an isolated group of humans that stuck to a very, very rigid vegan diet for many, many, many generations, it's entirely possible that our genes would adapt to that diet and lifestyle. It's totally possible. The reality of your current physical form is it's most likely not designed for that and this is just based on genes and on genetics and epigenetics and all the the various things that they've methods that they've devised to try to study what makes you a person and where where your ancestors came from and how did how did your

ancestors develop did they eat mostly fish like there's people that live like in the Northwest, like the extreme, like in Alaska and Inuits and people. Their entire history, they've evolved from eating fish and whale and whale blubber and seal and seal fat. And there's real changes to who they are as people. Like, first of all, one of the big ones is the people that live up there, their hands don't get cold like ours do. Their hands have better circulation. I've heard that when the indigenous communities, there was some program where they were trying to get them to stop hunting whales

or stop killing seals, and the government was supplementing them with beef and cattle. And their argument was, this is not what we're supposed their argument was this is not what we're supposed to eat. This is not what we're designed to eat. You know, we need the fat in the whale blubber to stay warm. Yeah, it's kind of weird. It's weird. Like why would we be forcing these people to eat something that, you know, is foreign to them? And it's not.

The fat content in beef is way different than whale and seal. Like it's like apples and oranges well it's also you're looking at what we were talking about before like white meat from turkey domestic turkey versus the the turkey that's a wild turkey when you see cows but you get these corn-fed cows you have this pale meat that meat is pale because it's not as good for you it's it's more filled with fat which tastes good but it's just it's not as nutrient dense when you have a moose steak you've seen a moose steak before right it's a fucking it's lean yeah but it's almost like like purple like dark dark dark it's fucking dark man that's that's way different it's a way different thing yeah that cow is just some it's like the fattest laziest person you know like if you thought about like take an athlete like lebron

james who's just like this super athlete and compare like the composition of his body to some fucking slob who just drinks soda all day and is tired is on antidepressants and antibiotics because his body's fucking deteriorating rapidly he's got arthritis in all of his joints because he's too fat that literally is a cow that's literally one of these fucking farm raised overstuffed corn fed cows and they grind that fat fuck into a hamburger and it it's just not the same. I'm not endorsing eating LeBron James, but I'm saying there's a difference in what the composition of their body is. It's a different thing.

It's a very different thing. Totally. Yeah, I mean, I think wild things, whether it's wild salmon or even wild vegetables, I think would be probably better for you. So that's a big part of what I do. And it's one of the reasons why I love nature so much is foraging. And I take my kids out to the woods and we go pick mushrooms.

And since they were like, you know, babies, my son's been dragged in the woods since he was one. What kind of mushrooms? So my favorite one to harvest where I live is morels. Oh, yeah. They're really funky looking. They kind of look like a brain or something, something weird. Um, I ordered them online.

I've never seen them in the wild. There's nothing that tastes quite like them that you can, you can buy. They're almost like a meat. They're very meaty. They're very meaty. And there's a couple of different kinds. There's like black ones and,

and kind of white or yellowish ones. Um, and they're just like, it's so fascinating to go out into the wild and, and pick your own food. And when you come home and cook it, like nothing else tastes like that. And like mushrooms from the store and pick your own food. And when you come home and cook it, nothing else tastes like that. Mushrooms from the store, they're totally different.

And it's something really special that you can go and experience in the wild. Yeah, morels are a real weird one. And I've been reading up on them. One of the strange things is when there's fire. Forest fires. Yeah. They pop up. The next season, they're cleansing the earth.

I'm not on my call,, so I don't know. You know, I just enjoy finding them and eating them. But I do know there's a cleansing property to decaying matter. So when trees fall down, like the best place to find morels is I look for trees with no bark on them. So they're really super old. It's called a dead elm tree. And they like the rotting roots of these dead Elm trees. And you know, you're, you're in the bush or in the field and you kind of see this one tree that has no bark on it and it's about to fall over. There'll be like 20 morels at the base and they're, they're kind of,

they're feeding off the root system that's underground. Yeah. I'm absolutely fascinated by mushrooms. I had a Paul Stamets on the podcast. I saw that one. How great is that guy? That's super cool. With his mushroom hat? Yeah. That was amazing. I got one if you want one.

That's awesome. He gave me two mushroom hats. Oh, that's amazing. What am I going to do with two? In case one breaks. Yeah. I'll have an extra mushroom hat. There's a really cool documentary, actually.

It's called Know Your Mushrooms, I think. You better know them. It's by Ron Mann. It's called Know Your Mushrooms, I think. You better know them. It's by Ron Mann. And he travels along with these mushroom hunters. I think a lot of it's in Oregon and up the coast of California down in New Mexico. But they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms.

But they track these foragers. And it's such a cool movie. That's interesting. What I was going to say is you better know mushrooms because they'll fucking kill you if you don't. That's the thing, man. It's like, you know, what my first experiencing foraging for mushrooms, I was like an apprentice chef at this restaurant and the chef comes in and was like, hey, check these out. And I was like, whoa, like, what the hell are these? And he's like, oh, they're morels. Like I found them mountain biking. And there's a stigma, you know, like as a kid, like your parents are like, don't don't eat those. Don't touch those. They're poisonous. They'll kill you. And it's like, OK, well, then you just you just have this idea well mushrooms come from

the grocery store well it's like no they grow they come in the wild and you know that's that's like my thing with meat is i i teach my kids like meat doesn't come from the grocery store it's not it's not a styrofoam package that's not where it comes from it's an animal yeah um and and yeah and it's just like you know mushrooms that grow in the wild and they're just they're crazy they they're just like micro micro uh michael reisel yeah it's yeah michael reiser relationship with the uh animals or with the uh the trees rather um do you know the story of the amanita muscaria i know what they are uh i don't know the story the amanita muscaria is the most fascinating one to me because that's the one that looks like looks like santa claus or the mario red with, because that's the one that looks like Santa Claus. It's red with white.

That is the subject of a book by a guy named John Marco Allegro, who was one of the head scholars for deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. He deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years. He was an ordained minister, but he was also, in his study of theology, became agnostic. When he started realizing that there was all these different religions that had similar stories, and he found all these different connections, and he was trying to figure out what the origins of all these stories were. Well, after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls

for, I think it was 14 years before he wrote this book, he decided that all of Christianity was a massive misunderstanding. And what it was originally about was these stories, this collection of stories that were about fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom use. And he traced the word Jesus back to an ancient Sumerian word that was a mushroom covered in God's semen. And that when God would come on the earth, that's what rain was. Rain was God coming on the earth. And that these mushrooms would rise up out of the ground, they would eat them and trip their fucking balls off, right? That's a crazy story. So you got to think, people that were foraging for food, especially back when there was no

agriculture, right? I mean, it was touch and go. You could easily starve to death. A bad winter, a drought, people would starve to death. It was very, very common. So they would take foraging extremely serious. And they knew what they could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat. Well, they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees. And they knew what they couldn't eat.

Well, they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees. And carnivorous trees would grow these weird-looking, shiny red and white mushrooms under them. That's what carnivorous trees is. Pine trees. That's what we use for Christmas trees. Those red and white packages, they are like the shiny packages underneath a Christmas tree. They are the color of Santa Claus. They're common in Siberia. They're eaten constantly by caribou.

Caribou are reindeer. Reindeer are addicted to these to the point where when people are having psychedelic mushroom rituals and they go outside to take a leak, the caribou will knock them over to get to the Amanita muscaria piss in the sand because they smell the Amanita muscaria in the piss. And one of the ways these guys trip their balls off is they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine. That's crazy.

They have a second process of this. Here's where it gets even crazier. In the times in Siberia where it would become extremely snowy, when the shaman would visit, the way they would get into the house is through the fucking chimney because the door would be snowed in. So they would climb in through the chimney. I mean, there's so many parallels to Santa Claus and to Christianity, to this one mushroom that they think was a massive part of shamanistic rituals. There it is right there. This is this Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Yeah. Oh, that is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I'm sure.

That's such a cool story. Oh, dude, it's fucking crazy. So he wrote this book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that was bought out by the Catholic Church. This I have to verify. But I do know that they stopped production of it. I don't know if it was bought out by the Catholic Church. That's always been what's been told to me. But I do know that they stopped production of it forever.

what's been told to me. But I do know that they stopped production of it forever. He came out with another book called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth, which is still available. Then more recently, like really recently, within the last decade, a guy named Jan Ervin republished the John Marco Allegro books with permission from his family. I think it might have actually been one of those things where when a book is over 25 years old, it becomes like public domain or something like that too. But this book and this story behind it is incredibly fascinating. And what he's basically saying is that, and it makes sense. If you were living thousands of years ago and you stumbled upon these psychedelic mushrooms and you took them, you would experience God. You literally would think that that psychedelic state was you communicating with God. They would want to hide those from the Romans. So they hid them in parables and stories. And he explains what the

original meaning of all these parables and stories are. Because of course, you're going from ancient Hebrew, which is extremely complicated language that also involves numbers. The letters are also numbers. And then that's translated to Latin and to Greek and then eventually to English. So a lot is lost in that translation. So it really takes a linguist and a biblical scholar to kind of understand whether or not what this guy is saying is correct. I'm obviously not one of those, so I'm just talking shit. But there's so many parallels. It's almost like how could it be just coincidental that Santa Claus is red and white, that Santa Claus likes reindeers, that the Christmas tree is something that we use and the presents are under the Christmas tree, that Santa Claus lives in the fucking North Pole, which is Siberia, which is where caribou live,

and which is where these mushrooms are very common. I mean, there's so many parallels. It's really kind of fucking crazy. That's cool. Yeah, it's a great book. I mean, there's so many parallels. It's really kind of fucking crazy. That's cool. Yeah, it's a great book. I really highly recommend it. It's one of those books where you just got to, you read a few chapters and you got to go,

I think I may have to go back over that again. Go over it again. It's so freaky. Very cool. But I've stumbled upon those in the wild, those amethyst carriers. See, I've never found those. And there's like, you have to cook them first.

You can't eat them raw. You have to boil them. Yeah. We made tea out of them. They will make you sick. Apparently if you don't do it right. Um, but yeah,

no, I, I forage more for, uh, morels are my favorite. Uh, chanterelles, obviously awesome,

like awesome culinary mushroom. Uh, what's that yellow one that grows on trees? It's like a thick, uh, chicken of the woods. Yes. That one's real.

And it tastes like chicken. It is unbelievable. That one's amazing. It's really funky. Uh, We found, I was walking with the kids in a park, downtown Toronto. And I look over and there's this massive, it's on my Instagram, massive yellow kind of looks like goo growing on this tree. And it was a premature chicken of the woods and it just looked like this blob. And then if I were to leave it, it would start to kind of shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms. And so I left it for like a week

and went back and harvested it. And it's like tender, juicy chicken flavor. It is bizarre. Oh, that's kind of cool. So you were just like hoping nobody else saw it? Yeah. And it was in like a really public park and I was like, oh man,

like I better get this before someone else finds it. Well, how many people would know in a public park in Toronto? There's a few. There's definitely a few. I've kind of walked up to ladies like picking herbs and stuff, and I was like, hey, like what are you doing? And they just kind of looked at me and kind of went away.

They didn't want to share their knowledge with me. There it is. There it is. Oh, so that's the – It's bizarre, man. Look at you. You look like Zookeeper or Zoo Rander. I was like –

One of those. I was so pumped. I was so excited. The face you make. Here's another. You look like Chris D'Elia there. Doesn't he look a little like D'Elia? That's hilarious.

Oh, that's so cool, man. There's like a little tiny one, you know, below it. Why do they grow on trees? I don't know. I think, well, that one you can see the bark is like deteriorating. So again, it's feeding off the decaying tree. Wow, look how badass that looks. So if you actually go, and I found ones like that too,

if you go and harvest those, they're really woody by that time and they're kind of a little too tough to eat. Oh, really? So yeah, you want to get them when they're kind of younger like that. So is there a color change? I guess when they're older, they get a bit more orange from that kind of yellow premature state. See that one where there's like yellow?

Yeah, those are like perfect. Right there is perfect? Yeah. Oh, wow. That looks almost like cauliflower. Totally. Yeah, it's really, really neat. Wow.

It's fascinating. You know, the mushroom world is super cool. Do you know they breathe air? I did not know that. They breathe air and they breathe out carbon dioxide. They're closer to animals than they are to vegetables. That's really cool. Yeah, they're weird.

Fungus is a weird thing, man. Yeah. Well, and a lot of it's like misunderstood. Well, I guess I was watching the podcast with the mushroom guy. Paul Stamets. Yeah. Shout out to Paul. Love that guy.

Shout out to Paul. But like a lot of it is still being learned today learned today of of of the impact on on the earth and when what they do did you hear a story about how would he take 10 grams of psilocybin mushrooms and climbed a tree and was in a lightning storm and like connected to the fucking universe first time ever doing it yeah he did that ever doing it yeah he did that i think he was in high school right or some somewhere around there very young yeah. Yeah. Crazy. He's awesome. Such a trip, though. Well, and I was reading that the psilocybin is linked to curing depression and things like that, which I don't know a lot about.

But it's fascinating, the effects they have on people. John Hopkins is doing some studies on them. The most fascinating of all the mushroom theories is by the late, great Terence McKenna. And his brother, Dennis McKenna, who's still alive and a scientist, explained it on my first podcast with him. So if anybody's interested, find that and download it. Dennis is a brilliant guy. And the theory is called the stoned ape theory. And this coincides with what we're talking about with hunting and consumption of meat leading to us becoming humans. There's a doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years. It's like apparently one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record.

They do not understand why something so important, like the thing that actually created the theory of i mean that of evolution explained evolution like this very organ doubled over a period of two million years and i don't know why terence believes that the reason coincided with climate change and that as the climate changed these rainforest receded into grasslands and these lower hominids, like our ancestors, came down from the trees and started experimenting with new food sources. And one of the things they experimented with was psychedelic mushrooms and that through psilocybin, which they found by flipping over cow patties, a couple things happened.

One, it increased visual acuity. Mushrooms, especially in low doses, increased visual acuity, which would make them better hunters. They could see better. Made them more intuitive, made them more creative. And also, the way Dennis explains the effect of psilocybin on the brain, he was saying that it could have possibly led to the development of language and that all of this could have come out of the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. It's fucking intense,

man. Terrence called it the stoned ape theory. That's what he, that's how he thinks we became human. That's amazing. Yeah. It sounds stupid. Sounds stupid until you do mushrooms and then you go, Oh, then you go, Oh, okay makes sense. Then you go, Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Why is this illegal? Then you start going, what? Everybody should do this. Oh my God. Everybody should do this. Now, when you first started cooking, um, did you, when, how old were you when you became a chef? Um, well, it's kind of a fluke, funny story. Um, I was a 13 year old kid and I wanted a part-time job, you know, like a newspaper route or something like that. And I went to, I lived in a little town on this horse farm in the country and I rode my bike down to this gas station and I applied to pump gas.

And this guy had a diner on the corner and was like, hey, man, like I don't need anyone to pump gas, but can you cook? And I grew up cooking at home with my mom because she would work late and she would call me on her way home and tell me how to start dinner so she'd be like turn on the oven get the chicken out of the fridge get the shake and bake and you know she would walk me through it and I'd start dinner and she'd get home and finish it so I totally yeah I can you know I'll cook or whatever and I he had had me in there you know like dropping the fry baskets and flipping eggs and you know know, doing the brunch shift on the weekend. And it just stuck. It's one of those things that you just kind of grow up doing.

You know, I wanted money to buy skateboards and pot and stupid shit. And, yeah, it just kind of stuck. And then all through high school, I had a job cooking. And I really started to struggle with it because, you know, I was taking all these world issues courses and learning about the environment and watching these documentaries about food. And I didn't know how being a chef could help change the world. And how am I going to make a difference as a chef? And then I had my daughter when I was 19. And I had all this experience cooking.

And I thought, well, I'm just going to go to chef school and make a go of this. Like I've got all this experience. I'm already this far ahead. And it was having kids at such a young age that really made me focus and was like, okay, like I have a job to do. And I fell in love with food. I, you know, I was a 17 year old kid with a vegetable garden. Like who does that? You know? And, uh, and then I got into hunting and foraging and learning about food. And I just, I totally just fell in love with it. And so how did antler come about? You brought a bunch of these, huh? I brought a bunch of these. Yeah. So this photo, uh, I actually took this photo. It's blown up in the restaurant. Um, all the green on the ground is a wild leeks. So in the spring, and I actually took this turkey hunting. Um, and i looked over and was like

whoa cool that's amazing and it's like a postcard yes postcard this is actually a sketch my friend did of a of a deer skull that i shot oh um so anyway antler came about because um i worked for a celebrity chef uh he gave me his cookbook and i was hunting and foraging doing all the stuff and i thought well you know one of the ways i can make an impact on the world is I can teach people about what I'm doing. And I went and I got a camera. And I would take it with me and shoot photos like this. And I wanted to teach people about hunting and foraging. Because what I was doing is not new.

It's really, really old. But, you know, people seem to have forgotten about it. You know, at least people in the cities anyway. People don't really know much about it. people seem to have forgotten about it. You know, at least people in the cities anyway, people don't really know much about it. So I thought, you know, I'm going to help educate,

you know, modern civilization about hunting and foraging. And I thought this will be like my make a difference in the world. And I ended up hanging out with a really good friend of mine, one of my best friends today. And he's a family friend, documentary filmmaker by the name of Jody Shapiro. And, you know, we had this deal and he said, you know, I'll help you with the photos if you teach me how to cook.

And he was taking some culinary courses at the local college just as a hobby. And, you know, we started hanging out and shooting this cookbook. And we started to kind of get some press about it. You know, Eater Magazine did this article on us and we started doing these game dinners out of his house. And he had this really nice condo. And so I put on this game dinner. We sold tickets. And I knew there were laws about serving game in restaurants.

So in Canada, and I'm pretty sure the U.S. is pretty similar, you can't serve wild game in a restaurant. So there's public health. Excuse me. All meat has to be inspected through a slaughterhouse. Europe is different. You can kind of do whatever in Europe, but so I thought, okay, cool. We'll have this game dinner out of his house and we're in the clear. But with the, with the ministry of natural resources, you can't sell game meat. So for any kind of profit, but we weren't profiting off it. We were just kind of having fun. Um, anyway, do this game dinner, uh, a local paper, uh, a national paper actually wanted to buy a ticket. They came, we thought they're going to write this little blurb about it. We were just kind of having fun. Anyway, do this game dinner, a local paper, a national paper,

actually wanted to buy a ticket. They came, we thought they're going to write this little blurb about it. They did a two page spread in the national newspaper about this game dinner. So we started to get all this press about it. And we just said, Hey, let's, let's open a restaurant. Let's, let's have a home where we can, we can, you know, work on this book, possibly shoot some documentary and really just have fun and explore Canadian cuisine. It's something that I'm really passionate about. Something that really hasn't really been defined. There's a bunch of people trying to define it.

And it was just sort of our home. Now, when you say Canadian cuisine, are these traditional recipes or are they improvised? Well, you know, a lot of it is improvised. A lot of it's my take on it. You know, I definitely want to do some more kind of studying about native and indigenous cooking. You know, traveling across the country is something I want to do and learning from the indigenous communities. But sort of my take on it is, you know there if there wasn't these farmed animals what would be what would we eat and and for me it's it's morels it's it's maple syrup it's the wild leeks in this

photo it's deer and turkey and rabbit and these things we all we serve at antler because that's what's growing around us in canada it's wild fish and thanks again for the maple syrup man i'm gonna have to break my diet to enjoy some of this. Yeah, man. But that is the liquidiest looking, richest looking maple syrup I've ever seen. Yeah, man. That looks amazing. So I was telling you earlier that takes 18 liters of sap boiled down to make one liter of syrup. And the cool part is you can drink the sap. It's full of natural electrolytes and minerals.

So it's kind of like a coconut water type of beverage. What's crazy to me is how someone figured out to do that. And they've been doing it for hundreds of years, right? Yeah, super cool. And it happens only, you can only make it in the spring when it's freezing at night and it thaws during the day. And what happens is the tree roots are sucking up as much water as it can to feed the buds that it's trying to uh to make to make leaves again how the fuck did anybody figure that out no idea how to figure out how to take the take the sap from the trees like that it's so simple it's really really cool uh when you when you go you know you drill a hole in the tree you put in this little tap

and hang a bucket and it just drips out and wow yeah and how long does it take to drip when it's when it's like kind of perfect conditions i put up these 16 liter buckets a bucket and it just drips out. Wow. And how long does it take to drip? When it's like kind of perfect conditions, I put up these 16 liter buckets and within like three or four days they're full. Oh, wow. So it's cool. It's fun. And it gets me out in the woods. I call it my spring training because I'm lugging around all these buckets, you know? Oh, okay. Yeah. That's great. That's awesome. Getting the winter fat off. So when you were talking about indigenous people, how they would cook their food, have you learned any of those dishes yet? I have. Like I said, I'm not an expert, but it's something we're going to be kind of studying moving forward.

You know, the growth of Antler. You know, where do we go from here? And, you know, I mentioned my business partner is a documentary guy. So we want to travel and travel across the country and learn really what that is. There's so many different indigenous communities in Canada. Like Canada is on three coasts, you know, much like the States with Alaska. You know, you don't really think of the Arctic up there, but, you know, there's three oceans. Oh, yeah, you have an ocean up top?

Yeah. Fuck that ocean, though. Isn't that ocean, can you walk across it? Yeah, it's frozen. Jesus. Yeah, it's something that I definitely want to learn more about um like how would they cook moose do you know um a lot of it would be open fire and a lot of it's raw you know like the the seal meat and whale blubber you know they don't like in the arctic they don't have a lot of wood to burn you know

and they would have like oil lamps from the oil from the blubber. But, you know, a lot of the cooking is raw. Yeah. Steve Rinella went to Nunavut. Is that it? Nunavut. Yeah, yeah. Something like that.

How do you say it? Nunavut. Nunavut. Nunavut. Is that how they say it? I think there's the Northwest Territories and there's Nunavut. And they were eating a lot of fish, frozen fish that was dipped in seal oil. Crazy.

They would dip the fish in seal oil and eat it. They have a tremendous amount of oil and fat in their diet. Yeah. You know, which kind of makes sense. Keto diet. Yeah, super keto. And, I mean, they're up there in the coldest of cold climates. One of the things we do that's kind of cool is I know the indigenous cultures would make

cedar tea and it's full of vitamin C and minerals and nutrients. But we do a cedar sorbet. So we boil cedar leaves and then I just add sugar and make it into like an ice. So it's a frozen kind of sorbet. Wow. Which is really cool. And it's like when you eat it, it's like the forest in your mouth. It's really, really neat.

Where do you get the cedar from? We just go into the woods and cut it down. We bring that into the restaurant. There's all kinds of cool stuff that we do that we, you know, because I go up. I try and be in nature a couple times a week. And I'll go and, you know, forage for all this stuff and bring it into Antler. Another way we use the cedar is in a cocktail. We do a cedar gin sour.

it into antler. Uh, another way we use the cedar is in a cocktail. We do a cedar gin sour. So we infuse, we infuse the gin with, uh, with cedar leaves for like a week. And then, uh, we shake that with some simple syrup. Damn dude, you make me hungry. So when you, um, it's interesting that when you go to the woods to forage for a plant life, it's totally legal. You could sell it. Yeah. But if you forage for animal life, you can't do that. I think that is because of market hunting that really decimated most of the population of North American game animals in the 1800s and early into the 1900s.

Like most people associate that with the death of the buffalo. And it makes sense. And I think if there are ways to do it where it could be controlled, I don't think I could hunt enough meat for the restaurant. Right.

45 seats. 45 seats. But you know what? Every night. I do think that, you know, I think it's people's right to be able to eat wild meat. I think that as a human being,

you have the right to try that. And if you're not a hunter, if you don't know how to go do it, you have the right to at least try it. And I do know, and in actually Newfoundland, they're allowed to serve wild game and the hunter has to go and get a permit to sell. And then he has to bring it to a butcher

that has a permit to process it and expect it. And then that butcher can then sell it to a restaurant. Oh, well, that makes sense. Yeah, and it's controlled. And like, I don't want to decimate the population. I don't want to hurt anything. Is that the way to say it, though? Newfoundland?

Newfoundland? Yeah, I think it's Newfoundland. I think if you call it Newfoundland, it's like calling Chicago Chicago. They'll get pissed at you. Something like that. You're a fucking fake Canadian. I have an aunt from there. Tick off, eh?

Yeah, I don't want market hunting of wild game. No. And it's because I love wild animals. 100%. And again, why do you eat them then? Yeah, how do't want market hunting of wild game. No. And it's because I love wild animals. 100%. Again. What do you eat them then? Yeah, how do you love an animal? How do you love an animal?

You have to. Yeah, well, I just think it's very complex. That's what I think. I think just staying alive, being a human is very complex. And I think we have very simplistic ways of looking at it. I also think that it's entirely possible that plants are communicating with each other and they have a level of intelligence that we don't totally understand. And that's supported by data.

That's supported by more and more research every day. They're finding out that plants have some interconnected network of communication with each other and that they recognize when they're being eaten and they change their flavor profile to make themselves taste terrible to animals that are eating them. There's some communication between them and there is some sort of a primitive life form that many argue are far more complex than things that vegans won't eat, like mollusks. Like mollusks, although we think of them as animals, they're the simplest, dumbest fucking things on earth. Vice just did an article questioning whether mollusks, although we think of them as animals, they're the simplest, dumbest fucking things on earth.

Vice just did an article questioning whether mollusks were vegan. I thought it was kind of funny. Yeah, they should be. I think for health purposes, people that are vegans, like, hey, man, they're sustainable. I mean, you could farm them. You could eat them. And they have a cleaning property, too. I've watched something that they were using mussels to clean up ocean beaches and filter the water.

And mushrooms, too, apparently are very cleansing. They're trying to find ways to use mushrooms to clean kind of oil spills and really screwed up environmental things. People should eat mollusks. They really should. And they should also eat eggs. Eat eggs, folks. Just eat them from ethical animals. And I'm just saying this just as a person who values health and a person who's – I mean I put my body through a lot.

My body has to – it has to perform and it has my whole life. So I'm very, very concerned with nutrition and I'm very aware of the impact nutrition has on physical performance. And I think eggs are gigantic. They're so goddamn good for your health. And this idea that somehow or another you're doing something cruel. My chickens are my friends. You see it from that video. That's proof in the pudding.

They're not scared of me at all. They're running around with you. They're running around with me. And I eat their eggs. And those eggs are good for you. And I know everybody can't do that. But you can get these kind of pasture-raised eggs. And you vote with your dollars that you're spending.

And if you go to the store and you buy organic eggs and you buy the healthier version, yes, you're paying an extra buck or two bucks or whatever it is. But crack open an egg from like the mass produced place and you crack open an egg from the organic place. One is like the organic ones are like bright orange and like super dark. And even the yolk is like really thick. And then the other one, it's like pale and runny and like yellow and you, you crack them and the yolks break sometimes. And they're just like, it's garbage. And who knows what's in them and what conditions those chickens are living in. A lot of times, terrible conditions. I think whoever started off, I mean, I guess it's just

economics, right? And you give people the option to make the most amount of money and not have to account for ethics or cruelty standards or whatever issues were in place that allowed factory farms to materialize. That's one of the worst pieces of evidence about the cruelty of human beings. It's one of the worst. It's horrific. I mean, and it's something that I think we should really collectively do something about. And I think it's one of the things that really ramps up the anger on the side of the animal rights activists and the side of the vegans.

I get it. I get it. But to go after someone like you is, in my opinion, so incredibly misguided. And it's why I asked you to come on because I thought it was so frustrating. And watching you carve that venison up in front of those people, what were they screaming at you? Murderer. Murderer. That's not true. It's like saying, you know, it's just, it's like saying you're a thief because you cut grass. Like it's, no, it's not murder.

It's killing animals. Even the video, someone's walking by and they're like, they're saying they're murderers. And she's like, they're murdering people? And they're like, no, they're murdering animals. They kind of laugh. A lot of those people are sad. Like a lot of what you're dealing with with these animal rights activists, they're so engrossed in this struggle,

and it's the part of their daily existence, and they're angry and sad. There's one crazy video where this lady goes into this restaurant, and she starts yelling in front of everybody about her friend and this this beautiful creature that just wants to live and it's a chicken she's talking about chicken and like my friend the chicken was killed and it's like what whoa and everybody in the restaurant is like what the fuck i've seen these videos and like they'll storm a restaurant there'll be like 50 people they go and like occupy a steakhouse. Here's this crazy lady.

Here we go. I have a little girl. She was very abused for her entire life. She was terrified. She has a very determined look in her eyes wherever she goes. And she was hurt and abused her entire life because of this establishment and because of establishments like it. She was locked away. She was hidden.

She had nobody there for her. She was crying. She was scared every single moment. Look at the maitre d'. And because her usefulness had run out, she was going to be killed. Someone was going to murder her. Someone was going to murder her. And I can see you smiling. And I can see you laughing. But to her, my girl in the background. Someone's gonna murder her. I can see you smiling and laughing. At least I'm not busy.

That's true. That's such a restaurant way of thinking. She's gonna keep it going. Just like her sisters. Where's the chicken part? It comes soon. Where is this? I don't know.

Crazy town? Disrupt speciesism. Uh-oh. It's unfair to those mice. Oh. I'm in the snow. Oh, eggs. She's a mouse murderer

It's not food Now here they sing it together Look at they all get together with signs Look at this It's not food It's violence Please think of her name Okay cut it short

You should see the way your cunt little bird, Snow, fucks up a worm, you crazy bitch. Fucks up mice. Throw a mouse in the cage. No, Snow, only grain. Oh, this guy's amazing. Fuck you. That guy's funny.

This guy's amazing. So, yeah, there's like, you know, I get that there's protesting, and it's our fundamental right to protest and to have freedom of speech and have these things but that's not protesting that's disrupting a business yeah there's not it's not the place for it that's harassment look if you the best place for something like that is really what we just saw a video make make a video about your thoughts yeah you know if you i mean if you they honestly think that what you're doing is wrong like this is what something like youtube is for

yeah make a video where you state your case or come and talk to me and all right they didn't come and talk to me they just showed up my restaurant with signs but at least with the video you leave the comments open and then people debate they decide whether or not they agree or disagree are you fucking crazy asshole let that snow loose watch what she does watch what she does to every fucking bug she finds. She's a murderer. She's not a vegetarian. Your fucking chicken's not a vegetarian. It's just not. People are like,

vegetarian fed? Well, then you got a sick chicken because that's not what they're supposed to eat. It's like cats. Cats need meat. You can't feed a cat a vegan diet. You can. It's one of my bits. I have a bit about it. Do you really? It's fucking hilarious. Something that I found online when someone was angry at me when someone was angry at me i went to her page and one of the things said hashtag vegan cat i went oh jesus and i went down i heard that was illegal

it should animal rights people will come and should be your cat we'll talk about that later i don't want to do my bit i'm doing a comedy special soon but the um the the problem with this is that as we said before it becomes like a contest it becomes like like a battleground yeah that's my concern it's like how does this end yeah how do we bridge the gap how do we get people like how do they stop fucking with you i have no idea that well their their thing is they want us to put a sign in our window that says explain that that uh you know we're mistreating animals and animal lives are their right. And they say this extortion, if we put this sign in our window, they're going to go away. Well, we're not doing anything wrong.

Nothing we're doing is illegal. We're not infringing on anyone's rights. Have you talked to them at all? Have you gone outside? So, no. We had one of our managers go outside and they just screamed at her. What did they scream? It wasn't the time.

I think just murderer. What about snow? Yeah. What about my little girl? So, you know, we did send an email trying to, we invited them to go foraging with us. And we talked about our different ideologies and how, you know, they're really far apart, but maybe we can come to some kind of understanding. And, you know, at the time they didn't respond.

They didn't respond for a while. understanding. And, and, uh, you know, at the time they didn't respond, they didn't respond for a while. And, you know, now I don't, I don't think, um, uh, you know, I don't, I don't think that anything good would come of that meeting at this point. So, so what do you do? How's business by the way? Um, business has always been good for us. We were very lucky. Um, well, it sounds like you have a great restaurant. I mean, I'm sure that's part of it. Thank you. But we've had some international recognition. I've done a lot of traveling last year. I've been to five continents in the last year, two of them cooking. I went to Abu Dhabi with – there's a company called IMG.

If you know them, they own the UFC now. They have a culinary department, and they run these festivals called Taste. And our first year opening, we, we were part of this taste festival. And, uh, I didn't even know there was a competition going on. These people came by and they were like, Oh, we're judging this competition and we want to try your food. And I was like, well, I think these people are trying to get some free food out of me. They were like, uh, yeah, you can win a trip to Abu Dhabi. And I was like, Oh, okay, whatever. And we actually won. And they sent me to Abu Dhabi to,

uh, to compete against 11 other chefs from around the world. Uh, it was amazing. It was incredible. Um, and then from there, uh, I think six, six or eight months later, there's a festival in Australia. So they brought me to Australia to, uh, to cook, uh, in Western Australia at this, uh, event called the gourmet escapemet Escape. Really, really cool event. And it was down the road from a deer farm. And we were putting on a lunch and dinner for 200 people. So we actually roasted two whole deer asado style over open fire. Whoa.

Where did you do that? Right in the woods. It was incredible. Yeah, there's photos on my Instagram. We're in the antlerkitchenbar. Or at antlerkitchenbar on Instagram. There's photos of this asado deer. It was super, super, super cool.

What does that mean, asado? Asado is, I think it's the Argentinian cooking style. And it's a whole animal that's kind of split down the middle and kind of like flayed across. Yeah, there it is. And it's really cool. So pig is probably the best one to do it with because of the fat content. Deer and lamb and stuff like that,

you kind of have to baste it to keep it moist. How do you regulate temperature when it comes to something like this? Just by stacking up the wood? Stacking up the wood and kind of how far it's leaning on it. How do you know how to do it? Just practice.

Just playing around, having fun. Just low and slow. Have you done this before many times? Yeah. So we do it at the restaurant. I do it in my backyard a lot. I actually did it for my wedding. just playing around having fun it just low and slow have you done this before many times yeah yeah so we do it at the restaurant i do it in my backyard a lot i actually did for my wedding uh we did two pigs for my wedding dude like poking the fire in my suit that's so graphic it's great yeah that got a lot of hate there was a bunch of hate um on that um but it's food you know and like people want to disconnect themselves from where it's coming from um but anyway back to

your question. Business has always been good. And business is business. There's good days and bad days. Right now, there's a lot of attention on Antler, a lot of media attention on Antler. So we're a little bit busier than normal right now. Get ready. After this podcast, it's just going to get crazy.

It's going to be nuts down there. And there's going to be a bunch of people on your side, too. Hopefully, nothing bad happens. People don't get into anything physical or even start shouting at each other yeah but that that the shouting stuff was happening um but uh but yeah hopefully you know this this will kind of all smooth out and people can learn to to get it to get along and live together yeah well it doesn't seem like that's what they want though it seems like what they want is for you to bend their demands i mean that's like what a lot of this is when it comes to change you know when it comes to people wanting what they want is for you to bend to their demands. I mean, that's like what a lot of this is when it comes to change, you know, when it comes to people wanting change. They want you to change.

Yeah. And they want their right and they want you to admit you're wrong. And this is a real problem with something that's complex. Yeah. And the funny thing was, like, we've had vegan and vegetarian items on our menu since 2015 when we opened. vegan and vegetarian items on our menu since 2015 when we opened. And so I think it was like the second or third week they came, we thought, okay, we're going to, we're going to feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign and hopefully like that makes them happy.

And so we feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign. And then we saw from their online posts that they thought that we made their posts where we made them change a meat dish to a vegan dish. We have to keep pushing them. And it was so frustrating. Like, no, you guys just don't know who we are. Well, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It becomes a contest or a battleground, an ideological battleground.

Yeah. That this thought that they're making you change. They want you to change. You know? I mean, I've seen, I saw a video once where people were mad at me too. And they were like, he's listening. So he's open to change. And I mean I've seen I saw a video once where people were mad at me too and they were like he's listening so he's open to change and I was like look no like I'm listening because I want to hear your perspective like you're not right like and I'm not right it's like we have our own perspectives yeah and I'm not gonna change if I change it's because of the

evidence and because of thinking and careful consideration and I've done that I've done a lot of thinking I've done a lot of careful careful consideration and that's what led me to becoming a hunter in the first place yeah what you guys how did you start hunting steve ranella took me out i had been thinking about it for a long time and the main reason i've been thinking about it was because of those pita videos right those fucking horrific factory farming videos i was like i don't want to eat that i don't i don't want to be a part of this. I want to figure out how to not. So I started buying grass-fed mead, and I tried to figure out a way to get around it.

And I really started getting very, very interested in hunting. But I didn't know how to start. I didn't know where to start. And we were filming a Fear Factor episode at Tohon Ranch. It's this 270,000 000 acre ranch in the middle of the country wow middle of the state rather and um they uh were saying that they have wild pigs there and they would teach you how and so that was something that i had considered before i met ranella yeah and when i met ranella he took me on a hunt for his tv show and i shot

a mule deer and we ate it that night over the fire. And I said, that's it. It's amazing. I'm a hunter. I'm like, that's it. The cool, the cool part about hunting is, uh, nothing goes to waste. So I take, I take the hides to a guy to have them tanned. So I've actually made a knife roll out of one of the hides. I have an apron out of one of the hides. My wedding ring has antler in it. Um, yeah, that's pretty cool. I'm proud of that one. That's crazy. Um, and yeah, and I use all the bones to make a stock. And then when I, you know, a lot of the cuts, uh, and one of the reasons I want to write this book is to teach hunters how to use those tough cuts. One of my favorite parts of, uh, of the deer and different animals is the neck and the neck has got all this really super flavorful kind of gelatinous meat kind of in between the cartilage and stuff like that. Uh, and you make

a stew with that stuff and it is unbelievably tasty. Um, and you know, I think, and a lot of guys, when they go hunting, they kind of breast out the birds and they leave the little legs and they don't really know that, you know, how to cook the legs of a Turkey or a duck. And, um, so that's one of the reasons why I want to write this book and to really educate people how to use those tougher cuts that, you know, can be kind of tricky to cook. Rinella has a couple of good books on that. And one of the things that he's really into is making shanks and ossobucco out of them. Yes, so good. Braising things.

So good, yeah. Yeah. And he's also, you know, a big advocate of not wasting anything. That's why he's into organ meat, loves liver. And we ate liver over the fire that night. Oh, so good. I had turkey feathers in my little boutonniere on my wedding day from a turkey. Oh, look at you.

Yeah, it was neat. It was really cool. Well, it's one of the reasons why it's so kind of crazy that you're the guy that they picked on and not the butcher shop across the street or not some burger joint down the street that's getting factory farmed meat. You do have a respect and appreciation for the wildlife. But this ideological battleground on their side, it doesn't leave any room for giving in. There's no room for reason. It's just you're either an animal murderer or you're the most amazing person ever because you're vegan.

Go vegan. It's a new thing in terms of first world problems and first world countries. I mean, people have been eating vegetarian dishes forever, but in terms of like being ideologically rabid about your, you know, your position, this is, this is very new.

It's within the last couple of decades. Yeah. It's a, it's unfortunate because we're getting, you know, we've had a lot of support from our, our community and Canada and the international community. And we're actually getting support from other vegans and vegetarian people writing to us and saying, hey, yeah, the saying like, hey, these aren't our beliefs.

We're really sorry what you're going through. You know, you have our support and it's some of our customers are actually vegan and they come for like vegetarian risotto and like mushroom risotto that they know are like, you know, really cool wild mushrooms that you can't buy in the store. So, you know, it is unfortunate. It is kind of, it's kind of sad, but, uh, you know, we're, we're just going to continue, you know, being who we are and hopefully that, uh, you know, like none of them have actually come in for dinner, you know, like, of course they're not going to, you're carving up deer in the front window, man, you fucking murderer. Um, so there's, you're right in the middle of this right now which is kind of interesting to talk to us about this is not like after the fact it's all going down right still going on there you know they're coming back weekly um but it's it's kind of at this point it's

like dinner and a show like people want to see it people are requesting the window table and well guess what fans of this podcast they going to want a front row seat. There's a lot of freaks out there listening to this that are going to want to be there for the freak show. Well, Toronto, it's only about an hour and a half drive from Buffalo at the border. Make it across, you fucks. Take a flight if you're into the cold.

Is there anything else you'd like to tell people? What is your website? How can people go and check it out? Yeah, so antlerkitchenbar.com is the website. There it is. Pull that. Scroll down, Jamie, so you can see a look at some of that yummy murder. So that deer dish.

Whoa, dude. That is cool, yeah. You put a skull on the table with all that stuff? So that platter, that charcuterie platter is all the meat from that deer. Wow. And, and the terrine on the side, the little square piece was actually meat from that skull.

So I braised that skull, uh, turned the meat into a terrine from the tongue and the cheek and then served. That was actually at the game dinner that the newspaper did. When are you heading back to Toronto? Uh, Friday. So I'm here visiting with family and then I'm back in town.

Do you have access to a freezer? Yes. I have two commercial freezers in the back. I want to give you some elk. Oh, dude, that is amazing. Thank you. From that elk right there. Thank you so much. That's an honor, man. I'll cook it with my dad this week. Please do and take pictures and I'll put it up on Instagram. 100%, man.

Oh, beautiful. I love it. Sweet. So yeah, Antler Kitchen, antlerkitchenbar.com, atthehunterche chef, at antlerkitchenbar, all that kind of stuff. And what is your Instagram? My Instagram is at the hunter chef. At the hunter chef. Okay.

Thanks, man. It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And I hope this all works out. And angry vegans, please. I know where you're coming from, but this is the wrong fight. It really is.

The battle is factory farming. That's the real battleground. And this is the wrong, this is like the most ethical version of what you're opposing. And I think there's a healthy, comfortable middle ground for the 99% that aren't fucking idiots. I really do. And I hope we can find it. Thank you. All right, fuckers.

Be nice to each other. Bye.