8EkIKtHQz5Q.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00:01       Four, three, two, one. Hello, Michael. Welcome. Thanks man. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for coming in. One hundred percent, man. People don't know the story. Will 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 a restaurant called antler and Toronto try to. I don't know what the fuck they were trying to do, but you decided to butcher a a leg of deer in front of them and it became this horrific thing like how could you do that and 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? Why were they mad at you when there's a million other restaurants around you? All right, so it started in about December of a clue. Number one, Canadian, the crazy Canadian besides being nice, but that's why

Speaker 2:          00:01:12       viral, because I wasn't being nice. I wasn't the stereotypical Canadian. No, you weren't even being mean. You're just doing your job and doing my thing. So they started in December and they really is right in front of your face. They really got pissed off with our. We have a little chalkboard sign out front. Um, I'll give you the, we have a 45 seat restaurant, so we're a small, uh, have one business partner who's a, 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 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.

Speaker 2:          00:01:56       So I'm originally, I was just kind of frustrated because they're totally misguided because um, 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 they started going, they'd started 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 a is 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 times a month and we, we butchered ourselves. And uh, I just said, screw it, screw it. I'm like, I'm going to get these people to get out of here. So I thought that that would

Speaker 1:          00:02:50       make them go away. How did you think that was going to make them go away and not escalate it?

Speaker 2:          00:02:56       Uh, I don't know. I was, it was just totally like last resort, a totally

Speaker 3:          00:03:00       fed up. Um, I wanted to defend myself, defend our customers, you know, you could see people walking in visibly upset, um, 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, uh, you know, just for eating. So, uh, I was just fed up and I just kinda thought like, you know, buzz off and why. So just one sign once I send 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 until there's an actual butcher shop across the street and if you go in, there's like whole cattle hanging. That's okay. And the butcher shop, you're a problem with your comparison to Kale.

Speaker 3:          00:03:46       You attack their sacred tail. We're promoting a meet. I don't know, that's really bizarre because you are promoting and we were promoting it or uh, yeah. So I just didn't promote anything and they were allowed to cycle by and dream of Broccoli without interference. Yeah. Man, I have no idea. It's totally bizarre. I'm sorry, how many times did they protest you? Um, I think it's about eight now. Eight. They're coming in weekly. They still do. They still do. There's one this Friday. Oh Jesus. So they organize, they organize them. There's like facebook groups, there's a, they're basically giving us an ultimatum. We have to put their slogan in our window and they'll go away. But yeah, what's their slogan? Um, there's, there's like, I can't remember it word for word, but it's, you know, like killing animals is wrong and they have feelings while. Yeah.

Speaker 3:          00:04:40       Do you have to put that in your window? We don't, we're not going to. There's no way they want. That's what they want. Yeah. So eco terrorism, extortion, wherever you want to call it. Wow. Well, the part, the part of this that drives you the most crazy is the fact that you're surrounded by restaurant. We're surrounded by restaurants you're surrounded by, like you said, you're across cross street from a butcher shop. 90 seven percent 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 pulled. 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, her name is antler. We were, I think they're mad because, um, you know, 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.

Speaker 3:          00:05:34       And um, you know, if you look up murder in the dictionary, it has to do with humans, you know, it has nothing to do with animals. And um, there is such a thing as ethical farming and sustainable farming and we work really hard to make sure that where we get our meat from, his, uh, from the best possible place we can and it's local. So it's supporting our local farmers that are 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 and they were just kind of, you know, promoting their message, but they weren't really yelling and screaming and what escalated it. Um, 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 staffers scared.

Speaker 3:          00:06:22       Like, no one's dealt with this before. I've never dealt with this before. Um, so we would have the police there they were, the police were amazing. Um, and then one time we kind of, okay, let's not call the police, let's see what happens. Maybe it'll just, they'll go away. And so then like a megaphone came out, uh, our neighbors were coming down and getting in fights with them. And it was, it was ugly. So we called the police to come and Jesus Christ keeps the peace. Yeah. A megaphone. Yeah. Part of the problem with these kinds of things is it becomes a contest, becomes a battle, you know, trying to see who's gonna win. And they're absolutely on a team. I mean, this, that's one of the things that happens with veganism and I think it happens with hunters to, excuse me, people become very tribal, you know, and you know, it's us versus them and they want to win and then it becomes this thing where, you know, look, the reality is a lot of people are idiots and they don't have a lot going on in their life.

Speaker 3:          00:07:24       And so when something comes up where it becomes a primary focus of their life, one restaurant is a logical is, it might be that becomes the battle ground and it's an ideological battle ground 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. 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, uh, I think that if you do eat meat, you should be able to kill an animal and experience that. And I, 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, meaning I don't think people would definitely, certainly wouldn't waste as much meat as they do and it's just really upsetting.

Speaker 3:          00:08:18       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 a big tribal game. You know, there's, 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 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 not financially sustainable to do it that way. Everything would cost more money. Yep. And, uh, that's a real. That we, as a society, it's not obviously not you or I that 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 you know, I'll eat some meat.

Speaker 3:          00:09:12       That's just whatever. Totally. It's, it's a necessary evil, you know, in sort of sorts. It's not really necessary at all that maybe that's the wrong way to describe it, but it's how the system has been set up and it's, it's actually why I started hunting and doing what I do because I watched these documentaries like food inc and these things that kind of shine a light on, you know, the system and how this stuff is actually being produced. And it's horrible. It's a, it's terrible. Yes. Yeah. And I think that's the real number one problem and you know, and this Vegan activist message to go after these types of farming, you know, we support as well. We agree with. So the fact that we were targeted for this was really, really frustrating. Yeah. I think vegans, um, I understand where they're coming from, but I don't think that they have seen the big picture.

Speaker 3:          00:10:01       And the big picture is there's some animals that need to be harvested. They're not sustainable. Wild pigs is the best example. 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've gotta 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 hot crazy. They hire people to come in with helicopters and shoot them from this guy. 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. They have to do it. Yeah, know. And I, I don't, I don't have a lot of experience with that because where I am, we don't have that wild boar problem.

Speaker 3:          00:10:51       But uh, I, I hunt with these guys from, from Moscow yoke 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 uh, 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. Mostly. Most people listening to this that are Vegan or not growing their own food. You're getting your own food from a farm. That farm is getting attacked by pigs. That's the only one animal. The other one is dear. 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.

Speaker 3:          00:11:35       The weird way that we handle it in California is we don't hunt mountain lions. Okay. There's no mountain lion hunting. This is very few deer. I mean, I see deer in my neighborhood. I've lived in a fairly rural area. Yup. I see deer, you know, 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 the United States? Like New York state, that kind of area, but near New York City. I had 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's comes from the ticks that were on the deer 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.

Speaker 3:          00:12:22       Have to take 'em, 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 debilitating, it's scary. He has to take a fat bag of pills and he held up his pills the other day. What he takes while he's looking at this is what he takes wally's in training camp. That's insane. Nineteen days of medication supplements. He said, he said, fuck Lee. Me Thirty one capsules a day. You do the math. Remember the carry to seven a 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 booze and his body's just falling apart because of fucking lyme disease and it's being carried by these.

Speaker 3:          00:13:19       These deer overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways. Either you introduced predators or you manage them with hunting. Um, there's a place in Maui, in Maui where they are, um, the at 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 18 hundreds. They brought it in, I'm not sure when, but there's tons of access deer on, on Maui and Lanai and on Molokai and 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 access deer. Then giving the meat to poor people. Like making it free for them and it's a, it's a really cool program, but that's another sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt you.

Speaker 3:          00:14:19       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 that people that don't educate themselves about hunting, hunting is bad. Killing animals is bad and they'd get on this bandwagon but they don't have enough information about it know. Um, and I think people confuse trophy hunting with like they see cecil the lion and everyone goes after, okay, it's hunting is the, is the problem, but, you know, trophy hunting is the problem. But the hunters that hunt for food and that hunt to help the, uh, the sort of environmental impacts that they're having. Like people don't like snow geese. I don't know if you know much about snow. You read that article that you retweeted.

Speaker 3:          00:15:04       Actually, yeah. They like a nat Geo article that I posted these birds fly in flocks of 20, 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. So I'm well large scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom and the population of deer, deer and in America, particularly like in the midwest where all the farms are. What is it a fucking coincidence that there's all the deer were all the farms are? No, it's not by my good friend Doug Darren, he has a big ass farm in Wisconsin. Beautiful place in the driftless area. Do you know what that is? It's where the glaciers didn't pass through, so it's not flat. It was 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, that he and his friends hunt on his property.

Speaker 3:          00:16:01       They're farm animals. Totally. Corn 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 good. But there's a reality to a 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. There's, 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 are present. They don't get it. They don't understand, uh, you know, they live in their bubble and you know, another thing they don't understand is that hunter is actually, you know, we have to buy tags. We have to buy our licenses that were rules and laws that we have to follow.

Speaker 3:          00:16:56       And those fees actually pay for the wildlife conservation. And I'm pretty sure it's the same in the states as well from talking to my friends and it is Pitman Robertson Act and they don't understand been percent 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, and no one contributes more to conservation than hunting because we want. We want it to be there for our kids and their kids and it's nature. It's, it's how the world is supposed to be. It's also this contradictory thing that seems. It seems like it doesn't make sense, but we love the wildlife. I 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.

Speaker 3:          00:17:49       Right? And it is also a magical, beautiful thing. Just because of that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it. Yeah, I mean it's this, 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. You know, there's not a whole lot of them that live out in the bush that are vegans, salmon and they're eating and you can, you can bring in vegetables. I mean, I'm sure there are some of them just talking shit, but the reality is if you're, if you're embedded in that world, you understand it and you appreciate it and it's very humbling. I mean, killing an animal is very humbling. I mean, it sounds like somewhat as 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 bow crossbow and I see a deer come out.

Speaker 3:          00:18:36       It's, I'm trembling. The hair on my back is standing up. There are these beautiful, majestic creatures and I'm going to kill it and it's really, really difficult and I don't think that people understand that, that don't hunt and then 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 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 gonna freeze to death. They're gonna, they're gonna 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 dying well and they're being eaten alive, like deer being taken down and eaten alive by wolves or coyotes or whatever it is, there's bears and it's horrific.

Speaker 3:          00:19:24       And to be shot with an Arrow to be shot with a bullet, it's a way more humane way to go, uh, in my, 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 practiced so much. I practice every day. I have one of the reasons why we got this building, so I could put a $45 dollars. I want to shoot it to practice. Well, we could shoot afterwards, but I was have to fucking practice. You have to be, you have to be able to make an ethical shot, but now when I sit down and I cook something for my family, I know where that came from. If we have vegetables that we grow in our garden, there's a great satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some, some Kale or whatever it is that we grow in our garden.

Speaker 3:          00:20:07       It tastes better when you. When you go out there and you cut that cucumber off the planet and you cut that Kale down, it is like half an hour old, 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, 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 were 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 is you get a group of 100 people, one of them for sure is a fucking idiot just out of just sheer odds, right?

Speaker 3:          00:20:54       Like what are the odds? One of them is a fucking gets 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 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. You can go. They. Their identity is completely wrapped around veganism. These vegan in their name, it's always, I'm the Vegan this or the Vegan that that is 100 percent of their name, so a 100 percent of their identity, so they can't. They can't separate from it ever. Like that is who they are forever and they have 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 um, they were 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.

Speaker 3:          00:21:54       Death threats, all this crazy shit coming after them protesting. And, you know, these people were terrified. They're older folks, they're, they're, you know, they're elderly. They're, it is Vegan restaurant owners received 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. You're misinformed if you choose to, to not, uh, to not eat meat and choose that kind of lifestyle like power to. It's amazing. And I think that it, you know, if, if, if it works for you in your body, that's great. And for me it doesn't work for me. Like I've, I've done Vegan cleanses, I've done the juice cleanses, I've, I've done, I've gone out for, as a chef to Vegan restaurants and I'm not full, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll eat three or four courses, I'll spend tons of money and half an hour later I'm starving, starving and I need to eat something with protein and lots of protein and it's meat or fish or I've made tofu from scratch, from soybeans and it's just, it doesn't, it's not the same.

Speaker 3:          00:23:00       Yeah. Well right now people are screaming, you're doing every vegan food is tasty, but I'm not selling of it is. Some of it's good. I mean, I eat vegan raw all the time there. There's a Vegan restaurant near me. I go to all the time. Sometimes you get dirty looks, this motherfucker's here. Why are you here? You're not allowed to. You're not one of us. You're not allowed to eat our food. Um, 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. And you got guys like fucking Ted Nugent, you know, and all the people that I think that they distort the real sort of

Speaker 1:          00:23:46       fascinating in mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature. It said it's an almost psychedelic experience to to, to hunt and be in the wild. 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. When you're out there in the wild, you are almost in another dimension. If you're in complete silence in the forest, in you, 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, this is literally one of the reasons that scientists believed that our brains grew is because we started eating meat.

Speaker 1:          00:24:47       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. While 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 and many parts of the northwest, it's because they were fucking killing everything and there's. They don't have any predators and the predators that they have are humans, and if we don't keep the populations in check of them and have grizzly bears have black bears and all the other predators, they start eating each other.

Speaker 1:          00:25:35       They start tearing each other apart. They start coming after us to start encroaching on p. well, we're in their territory. We shouldn't be in their place. We humans. Incredible. Look, I'm on team people so I don't know what the fuck you're saying here. You're saying that we should move out of San Francisco and give it to the wolves. You can go fuck yourself. 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 sorted 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.

Speaker 1:          00:26:16       That's where a lot of serious diseases that infect wildlife come from. They come from a lack of food or overpopulation. That's how nature sorts it out, you know? And that's how nature sorts of that with people too. Which just sneaky. We've used vaccines and shit and we're at the top of food chain. We've worked hard to get there. We are and I think we it comes with a certain responsibility and that responsibility is really. We were really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming and that's one of the main arguments for veganism that one of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals, whether it's veganism or or or or whether it's rather factory farming or whether it's a large skill, dairy farms where they mistreat their cows or the chicken farms are all these different factory farms with a treat these animals not as a living being but as a commodity.

Speaker 1:          00:27:07       Then it becomes a giant problem. But if you look at guys like, do you know Joel Salitan is Joel South, tends very fascinating guy. He runs a farm called polyface farms and what he is 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. Here's 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 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They do the chicken thing and they go right back into the chicken house and this is where it gets the eggs from. This is how they raised 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. If you do it right, it's not horrific. It's not an evil thing, and that these animals are living the way they've. They're meant to live. Right,

Speaker 2:          00:28:10       and that's why. That's one of the things that we do at Antler is to, is to find those farmers and guys like that. One of the farms that we get our deer from, they have thousand acres. The deer roam as they pleased they're eating, not an apples and acorns and grass and everything they're supposed to eat and then when it's time they're, they're collected and harvested and that. That is where we get our meat from and we try really hard not to buy from these facts. We don't serve chicken, beef or pork. We have bison pheasant duck well bore because these game farms, they don't have these massive large scale operations and I buy direct from the farmer and they can tell me what their diet is, you know, they're good months, they're bad months. We know all about these animals that we're bringing to the restaurant and, and you know, we're really proud of that.

Speaker 2:          00:28:57       I have an, an issue with people that keep saying wild boar. Why did they say wild boar when it's wild pig. So if it's a male, it actually is a different breed. So the pigs that are in these factory farms or even regular regular pigs, there's, there's, there's many different breeds and a lot of them are hybrid. Hybrid breeds. The wild boar breed has long black hair and tusks that actually come out so I can buy whole pigs and they don't have those tusks. And when I buy the well bore breed, the meat is darker, hair is black, but we're, we're getting um, you know, 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 board is a male, right? You definitely eating females too. That's true. Yeah. So why do call it a wild boar?

Speaker 1:          00:29:42       Because it's just. Yeah, it's just the breed. But do you know that they're all the same breed? I did not know that. All [inaudible] is the, the, the, I guess the genus, is that what you say? They're all sort of interchangeable breed with each other. I do know there's, there's tons of different varieties like the Berkshire, there's Tamworth, there's all these different kinds of shorts. Breeds of hogs is variations. Yeah. But they're all the same animal. What's crazy about wild pigs is you took a domestic pig, you know, like babe release babe out into the forest. They morph right a very short amount of time. Now it extends. Their hair becomes darker and thicker. Their tusks lengthen. Interesting. It's very weird. There are weird animal. Pigs are a weird animal because where we're at a weird animal when they're domestic, they're sweethearts. Unless you fall in the cage when they're hungry and they fucking eat you, which is crazy.

Speaker 1:          00:30:35       It's one of the main ways that farmers die falling into cages that eaten by. Some happens all the time. It does. It happens every year. Guy will fuck up and fall into a pig pen and the pigs just fuck him up. That's crazy. Yeah. Especially if you're dealing with those really enormous pigs mean those pigs need a lot of food and they're fucking big and once they start chewing you, that's your ass is just an aside. Have you been pig hunting? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've been hunting. I've shot a couple of pigs. Yeah. The meat is definitely different. It's a lot darker. Darker. Yeah. It's delicious though. And um, 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, of course in wells depiction of him. He was this crazy guy that ran hearst publications in the 19 thirties.

Speaker 1:          00:31:29       He's literally one of the reasons why marijuana is illegal. Right? William Randolph hearst decided that when there was a cover of a believe as popular science magazine that said hemp is the new billion dollar crop, and they were, they had invented a machine called the decorticator and when a decorticator does is it effectively processes hemp fiber. I'm much more efficiently and for the longest time they use slaves to process hemp fiber, but then Eli Whitney came around with the cotton gin and they switch from hemp clothing to cotton. Cotton is easier to produce with the cotton gin, but it's just an inferior cloth. Hamp makes better paper. A hemp makes cloth. You could make houses with it. Henry Ford made the first fenders for the first model t out of hemp. I mean, that'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 forest, that they would cut down the trees and make paper with. They will 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 were smoking

Speaker 3:          00:32:40       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 we start printing these stories. Congress made it illegal. They didn't even thought of people that were voting on it, didn't even know that they were making cannabis or hemp, the, the, the, the textile. And the commodity. Him, 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 is one crazy asshole with Harry anslinger in the fucking 19 thirties. That's when it became illegal. Well, this is the same crazy asshole. Let a bunch of wild pigs loose on his property so he can hunt them because he was a gentlemen 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.

Speaker 3:          00:33:31       And I think a lot of people don't understand is how fast they breed. Um, you know, my, my friends and 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? And they start decimating their crops. Yeah. They're not a native North American species. No. Yeah. And it's, uh, it's one of the most destructive invasive species. And if you, if you've never seen them before, you see them on tv, they look, you know, it's a pig. Pigs are cute. I've seen my friend has a potbelly 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, they go through everything.

Speaker 3:          00:34:18       They will spread across the country. They'll destroy your garden that still eat your dog. I mean, no bullshit. They're fucking dangerous. There's a lot of farmers actually asked 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, you know, stuff like that, that, you know, a lot of these, a lot of regular kind of city people live in the city that don't understand. Yeah. The Turkey population. Some places are exploding too because they've realized that it was just go to the suburbs. I even hunts us. There was one running down the street in Toronto last week at Turkey. People were filming it and sending me the. Wow. See? Yeah, 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.

Speaker 3:          00:35:01       Um, 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 thing as well. Turkey, I thought they were a domesticated bird, like a chicken. So he takes me Turkey hunting and um, I actually, I couldn't believe it. We, you know, we shot a couple of birds, um, 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, this is incredible. And then when I tasted it, I just couldn't believe that this is what Turkey was supposed to taste, like blessed flavor and you grow up, you know, at least I grew up, 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.

Speaker 3:          00:35:46       And then, you know, the wild bird, it's leaner. It's not like super round. It's, it's, it's lean, it's how it's supposed to be in there. 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, that really white meat, Turkey, look at them. Here's the Turkey, Toronto, Toronto running down the street. I'm so thankful to be here because it's still snowing and so it's still snowing and I, I love winter and snowboarding and going out and enjoying the snow, but I'm done. California. 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 and you know, they're about to open up their bear season and he's like, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3:          00:36:29       It's snow's 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 a for California. I've been, I've been coming here since I was a little kid to visit my dad in the summers and I come here two, three times a year and I love it. I love it too. Uh, you know, the mountain lion thing is a weird thing with California because I see their point. What would they be, is 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 fishing game department. Really? Yeah. It's like they don't call it that, call it wildlife, they don't call it like a, like they don't think of it as like you have to hunt them. Like if you say like fishing game or Arizona calls it game and fish because there's more game in Arizona and there are fish desert.

Speaker 3:          00:37:19       Yeah. It's kind of interesting way they've switched it around, but I think the way California calls it, it's fish and wildlife, so we call it the Ministry of natural resources. That's a good way to look at it, but you know, 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 through hanging out with my friends at Mtsu Yolk, I met this guy that lives actually in Orange County is named Jeremiah Dowdy from field to plate. If you don't know, if you know this guy, he's a local, uh, uh, you know, La guy and he hunts all over California.

Speaker 3:          00:38:04       I had no idea that there was so much hunting. California unt, he's a really good friend of mine and I'm saying, well, what's the. He's like, well, there's Turkey. There's wild pig. There's the pronghorn. There's all kinds of stuff that you can hunt. Yeah. Today there's rocky mountain elk near to home ranch, and then there's two Lee elk that are natural on the coast. There's a lot of different animals here, but there's also a lot of motherfucking mountain lions. Whoa. And they still kill it, but the way they kill them now is through government trackers. It's really kind of crazy. What they do is mountain lion

Speaker 1:          00:38:36       starting people's dogs and cats and they get the get scary and then people call one of the, I don't know who you would call that would take care of it. And they hire people and most of the time they use dogs, these dogs to tree the mountain lion and they shoot them and when they empty the contents, their stomachs, when they do an autopsy on them, they find it filled with dogs and cats, which is really kind of crazy.

Speaker 2:          00:38:59       There was one near my where my dad lives. A lady was attacked and they were running a pair. A pair of girls are running a 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 friend. So I think it was about five or six years ago. And that was this summer in Orange County. Someone was attacked, running or cycling or something like that. Yeah. And they had. They had to. They went and found it and shot it. But

Speaker 1:          00:39:24       it's. Well when they get hungry, no wait, we're encroaching because we're encroaching on their land. No, it's just land. Yeah. It's not there as you. Fuck. This is what's crazy about. People were encroaching on their territory. They're dead. And then whatever was there that claim that territory is dead, and then there's a new one that comes along and they take it. There's a fucking constant battle. This idea that like we're in their community, like they have a good 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 will then go fucking live in the forest until then, fuck off and stop saying like, we're encroaching on their leg. Do you go to the supermarket? Yes. Do you buy your Vegan food?

Speaker 1:          00:40:11       A Vegan Deli? Well, that's a place where a deer could have lived. Okay. Do you go to the movie theater you do while you piece of shit that used to be like a Squirrel's house? That was a field at one point. Yeah, I mean the large scale agriculture. This is the other thing that kind of drives me crazy about vegans. It's not, I'm not saying you shouldn't eat grain, 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 and now if you only like mammals and you don't mind when people kill bugs, that seems a little hypocritical to me. Gets a little weird but does get weird and then there's the fact that when you're making these, when you're using a combine, running through the, all the rabbits, all the bunnies, all the hogs 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, especially on Kodiak island where a rifle shots equal. I've heard of this dinner bell, the forebears come running. I've heard of this. This is crazy. Stairs

Speaker 2:          00:41:29       are are carrying like big magnum 45. It's like pistols

Speaker 3:          00:41:34       to defend themselves against these grizzlies. I'll send you a fantastic podcast that. Do you know Steven Rinella is? No. Steven Rinella is a really, really interesting guy and he's a host of a TV show called mediator. He's just. Oh yes, yes, yes. He's an author. He has a podcast that he recorded when they were in a fog neck island, which is like one of those chains of islands near Kodiak, so it has those enormous coastal brown bears just like Kodiak. 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 record 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.

Speaker 3:          00:42:28       Like if they got attack. They had all these preconceived notions of what it would be like. What it would feel like. It was like, throw all that out the window. It was you were in. Your brain isn't not even on a reptilian level. Your brain is so terrified. And this thing was so big. My friend has said that he saw its teeth gnashing literally feet from his head as it ran through the candle. My, the revenant is just like, fuck. I got rushed by a deer one time and uh, I was losing it. I didn't know what to do. It was a, it was before sunrise. It was like five in the morning. I'm walking into my dear setup and I had to cross this little river and it was full of stones and stuff and I'm kinda walking up this river and all I hear is I put it on and I'm like, Whoa, like what the hell is that noise?

Speaker 3:          00:43:14       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 thought it was another buck because it's, you know, it's in the, it's running season for these deer and it 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. Get gored. I'm going to get gored by these antlers. And that's it. It was. So, yeah, that was in Canada. So I have, those are big animals. They're big. We have big white tail and I'm 300 pounds sometimes they're big.

Speaker 3:          00:43:54       We and even our dozer, huge like we got, we got a lot of doe tags where I grew up in a, in Collagen, 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 I got into archery and hunting with a bow. That's interesting. Why is that? Um, you know what, I don't know. I think it's because it's, it's uh, 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 farm, so I think they're a little closer together, letting loose bullets let loose bolts. The main thing is rifles, so a deer season and Turkey season you can use a shotgun and it's really stupid because you can, you can shoot too with,

Speaker 1:          00:44:32       with a rifle or shotgun, but there's no a shotgun, a rifle for deer, which is weird. That is weird. So that. But that's why I got into archery. Um. Um, and yeah, I'm lucky because it's so close to the city I can, I can kind of go and hunt and then come back to work in the morning. Yeah. The Kyle thing is interesting because it's very counterintuitive. The more coyotes you kill, the more coyotes breed. More kyle populations increase. Coyotes are off. There are a big problem, at least in Canada and where I'm from, they've, you know, like you were talking about the mountain lions, that's kind of our version. They don't think there's any mountain lions where I live, but um, the coyotes are problem, their nab and people's dogs and cats everywhere off, off, off the trail. People were walking on their leash and they're coming out and nail in their little dogs out here.

Speaker 1:          00:45:14       I had one kill a chicken of mine two weeks ago. Crazy. Yeah. I've got a video of the dead fucking chicken and my chicken coop. And then the, 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 or eggs and they're like pets. I mean, like there's a video me from my instagram walking in my yard holding my daughter's bunny and the chickens. They're like, they're following me around it. I wrote I'm the motherfucking chicken because it's a crazy video because these chickens just follow me. I mean they literally, they're like pets. So when this chicken died, I was bummed out. It was a sweetheart of a chicken too. And this was a chicken that we used to. We would turn over rocks and she would come and get the worms and so she would follow you around.

Speaker 1:          00:45:58       I'm like, come on sweetie. Here we go. And it's really like a pet. Oh, 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 a lot of farmers and people, a little hobby farms. They use chickens as insect control. Yeah. And their vegetable garden. Oh, they're great for that. They're great for the. They will fuck up some mikes too, man. You ain't never seen nothing like it. No, you never said I did not know that. This is how I found out about it. Um, well one, 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 you, women are always trying to like spruce things up.

Speaker 1:          00:46:40       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 sat, 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 kod, ended up blood coming out of its nose, like literally it was like a UFC fight. It was down and fucked up. So, uh, my daughter's, uh, 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 to and they sell something called pinkies.

Speaker 1:          00:47:32       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. So mostly reptiles that for him too. 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 that my daughter's brought them the pinkies and there was one pinky left, uh, that the hawke didn't eat when we brought the hock to the wildlife rescue place. So they, they fix up the Hawk and they told us the Hawk was, they, 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 leftover and the thing was going to die. It wasn't with its mother, it was too small to drink milk.

Speaker 1:          00:48:12       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're 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. It was like, well, what do you guys, what are you 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. Do I put that fucking thing down and I have never seen those chickens. So voracious attack that mouse and then they were all chasing the one chicken that had the mouse trying to steal it from him. Watch this. Here's the chicken with a mouse right here.

Speaker 1:          00:48:50       Look, they get a mouse and they have fucked that mouse up man, and they try to steal it from each other. I came out tonight, tonight, there's one where a cat is playing with a mouse, a cat. You've seen them one with the cat and the chicken. Jamie. That's the best one because the cat, everybody thinks of cats is being vicious. Cats are pretty vicious. Chickens are fucking dinosaurs, man. The way the chicken attacks the mouse like here it is. See, look at that guy. He's going to eat this shit out of that mouse too. He's got a. she's got to keep her eyes open. Mics or those other constant coming steal her mouth seat. Look at her. They're experts in bobbing and weaving and turning their heads, but so the cat is stocking the mouse and the chickens like, bitch, you don't even know what you're doing.

Speaker 1:          00:49:32       The chicken just runs in and snatches it right in front of the cat. The cat's like, seriously? 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 I'm 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 don't play with it. Yeah, there's chick hanging back. But as soon as the chicken finds it Neema, that mouse does not seem scared of that chat. He's, he's not scared of it that that mouse has talked. So look at the chickens like fuck you. Give me that thing. That is crazy. Crazy. I did not know that about chickens. Oh Dude. They'll fuck up. It's just the way they do it too fast too. And they think of it as purely as food. They're not thinking like the cat, it's sport

Speaker 3:          00:50:28       for the cat. It's kind of fun. Cats probably fully fed and it's a house cat, fat house cat. He's just looking to kill. So that's nature. That's nature. People don't understand that they want to, they want to remove themselves from it and that's great, but I don't want to understand it. They didn'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. 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 like, you support all the people that are on your side and the people that are opposed to you are like apostates. They're like, they're like the negative people that are trying to bring you to the dark side to hell.

Speaker 3:          00:51:17       It gets, 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 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 but all the terrible shit that a lot of people eat that isn't Vegan. But the negative thing is most of them were eating diets that are far too carbohydrate rich. And if they're not getting their blood check, they don't even know how unhealthy they are. They convinced themselves they're doing much better than it feeling much better. But a lack of cholesterol can fuck with your hormone functions. A lot of vegans have low hormones because of that.

Speaker 3:          00:52:07       We, uh, one of our regulars Antler, I 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, uh, I was Vegan for a long time and 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 from eating meat or you have to go back to eating meat because just some people's bodies do better than others. And I said a lot of Asian cultures are more susceptible to to vegetable diets, but he's like, in reality he's like, you know, you're a, you're a northern European descent and you need to eat this stuff to be healthy and that's when he, he went back to eating meat and it, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3:          00:52:55       You know what, what you're trying to. Like, he, he was living on an organic vegetable farm. Like what, what more healthy vegetables could he be eating? So B, 12 is a big one and B, 12 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 and me. And the other thing is iron iron. You know, people say, well, there's iron and vegetables, there is, but it's not very bioavailable, right? A lot of the various vitamins and even protein and vegetables, not very

Speaker 1:          00:53:26       bioavailable in most

Speaker 2:          00:53:27       and is how your body absorbs those nutrients as well. Like it might. It might be written that that, that substance, but your body can't really absorb it.

Speaker 1:          00:53:33       Well, it's just everybody's body's different. I mean it's just that as 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 at 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 and vitamin B and d and a and you know you need this and that and you know this is this.

Speaker 1:          00:54:17       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, a algae is a great one. 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 got to be on the ball, you know, and the [inaudible] one is a big one. It's a massive amounts. I was reading some crazy article the other day, said something like 90 percent of all vegans or B, 12 deficient. I've heard this. I'm not an expert, but I've been terrible. 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 a, he's an expert in diet 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.

Speaker 2:          00:55:24       I love. That's my favorite thing about hunting as the organ meat. Me Too, man. I love liver, liver and the heart. Um, I, I went hunting and I came back and I brought the heart into the restaurant for the guys because I wanted to share with them like the experience of eating, like fresh killed, like the heart was still warm when I brought it to work. And the way I like to use either tar tar, like just mince it up raw or cooked like a steak. So I cut it, you know, horizontally in, into like, it looks like a tenderloin steak and we all got like this, like buzz, like we shot a double espresso or something. It was just like, whoa. And it's like, it's so nutrient rich, uh, the organ meat.

Speaker 1:          00:56:01       I had Alexander Gustafson, the podcast yesterday is a UFC number one lightweight content 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'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. I don't know what. And it just tastes. It tastes like it's supposed to taste. You can't explain it. The flavor is totally different. Even when we were buying from these really cool game farms, it's different than the deer that I go and shoot and shoot because you know, that deer I just shot. It could be like six, seven years old versus at the farm, it's maybe one or two.

Speaker 1:          00:56:49       Um, 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 and it is entirely possible that if humans, like say if you've 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 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 developed? Did they eat mostly fish?

Speaker 1:          00:57:43       Like there's people that live like in, in the northwest, like the extreme, like in Alaska and a inuits and people there, their entire history, they've evolved from eating fish and wail 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 that people that live up there, their hands don't get cold like ours do their hands doing. I've heard that when, when, uh, the indigenous communities, um, there was some program where they were trying to get them to stop hunting whales are and stop killing seals. And the government was supplementing with them with uh, with, with beef and cattle. And 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.

Speaker 1:          00:58:32       Yeah. It's Kinda weird. It's weird. Like why would we be forcing these people to eat something that was foreign to them? And it's not. The fat content in beef is way different than whale and seal. 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 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 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 fucking. Yeah, but it's almost like like purple dark, dark. Yeah. It's fucking dark, man. That's, that's way different. It's way different thing. That cow is just some.

Speaker 1:          00:59:26       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 and 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. 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 you know, even wild vegetables I think would be probably

Speaker 2:          01:00:23       better for you. So that's a big part of what I do is one of the reasons why I love nature so much as foraging and I take my kids out to the woods and we'd go pick mushrooms and since there were like, you know, babies, my son has been dragged in the woods since he was one. What kind of mushrooms? Uh, so my favorite one to harvest where I live is morals. Oh yeah. They're really funky looking to kind of look like a brain or something. Something weird them online. I've never seen him in the wild. There is nothing that tastes quite like them that you can, you can buy like a meat. They're very needy, they're very media and there's a couple different kinds. There's like black ones and white or yellowish ones. Um, and they're just like, it's so fascinating to go out into the wild 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, the totally different. And it's just something really special that you can go and experience in the wild. Yeah. Morels are a real weird

Speaker 1:          01:01:14       one and I've been reading up on them. One of the strange things is when there's fire forest fires, they pop up like the neck the next season.

Speaker 2:          01:01:21       They're like cleansing their, their cleansing the earth. I don't, I'm not a my call just so I don't know. Uh, you know, I just enjoy finding them and eating them. But I do know there's a cleansing property to decaying a decaying matter. So when trees fall down, like the best place to find Morales is a. I look for trees with no bark on them. So they're, 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 and are 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.

Speaker 1:          01:02:00       Yeah. I'm absolutely fascinated by mushrooms. I had a Paul stamets on the podcast, so I saw that one. How great is that? Super Cool. It was mushroom hat. Yeah, that's awesome. I got to, gave me too much. Am I going to do it too in case one breaks an extra mushroom hat

Speaker 2:          01:02:17       was a really cool documentary. Um,

Speaker 3:          01:02:20       uh, it's called know your mushrooms. I think it's by Ron, by Ron man. And he, he, he, he travels along with these mushroom hunters a up, I think a lot of it's in Oregon and up the coast of California down into Mexico, but they're, they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms. Uh, but they track these forgers and it's such a cool movie. That's interesting. Um, well I was going to say is you better know mushrooms because they'll fucking kill you if you don't have that. 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, their, like, I found them mountain biking and there's this stigma, you know, like as, as a kid, like your parents were like, don't, don't eat those, don't touch those.

Speaker 3:          01:03:02       They're poisonous, they'll kill you. And it's like, okay, well then you just, you just have this idea. Well, mushrooms come from the grocery store will take. No, they grow, they come in the wild and you know, that's my thing with me is 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 like Michael Micro cycle rises. Yeah. Michael Riser, relationship with the animals or with the trees rather. Um, do you know the story of the laminated Ms Dot area? I know what they are. Uh, I don't know the story. The to miscarry is the most fascinating one to me because that's the one that looks like it looks like Santa Claus or the marks card with washroom.

Speaker 3:          01:03:45       Yeah. 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 and these sort of when you started realizing that there was all these different religions that had similar stories and he was found all these different connections and he was trying, trying to figure out what the origins of all these stories where. 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, these 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 they're fucking balls off. That's a crazy story. So maybe you got to think people that were foraging for food, especially back when there was no agriculture, right? I mean it was, it was touch and go. You could easily starve to death. You mean you're a bad winter. You know, a drought. People would starve to death. It was very, very common. So they would take foraging extremely serious,

Speaker 1:          01:05:18       and they knew what they could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat. While they knew that there was a relationship between coniferous trees and coniferous trees would grow these weird looking shiny red and white mushrooms under him. That's what coniferous trees, pine trees. That's what we use for Christmas trees. Those red and white packages, they. They are like the shiny packages underneath the Christmas tree. They are the color of Santa Claus. There are common inside barrier. There are 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 Karabal will knock them over to get to the Amany to miscarry a piss in the sand because they smell the Amanita Mascara in the pis and one of the ways these guys trip their balls off as they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine, has a second process of this.

Speaker 1:          01:06:16       Here's where it gets even crazier in the times in Siberia where it become extremely snowy. When this 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 nose reindeer. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that is such a cool story. Oh Dude. It's fucking crazy. So he wrote this book called the Sacred Mushroom in 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.

Speaker 1:          01:07:03       Um, he came out with another book called the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Christian myth, which is still available. Then more recently, like really recently, within the last decade, uh, a guy named Yon Irvin republished the John Marco Allegro books with permission from his family. I think it might've actually been one of those things where when a book is over 25 years old, it becomes public domain or something like that too, but this, this book and this story behind it is incredibly fascinating and what he's basically saying is that it makes sense if you were living thousands of years ago when 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 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

Speaker 2:          01:08:16       or not what this guy is saying is correct. I'm obviously not one of those, so I'm just talking shit, but it's uh, there's so many parallels. It's almost like, how could it be just coincidental that Santa Claus is red and white at Santa Claus legs reindeers, that the Christmas tree is something that we used in the presence or under the Christmas tree that Santa Claus lives the fucking North Pole, which is Siberia, which is where Caribou live in, 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. Anybody I really highly recommend it because it's one of those books. We just got to read a few chapters and you got to go. Okay. I think I may have to go back over that again. We'll go over and again. So it's, it's so freaky.

Speaker 2:          01:08:56       Very cool. But I've stumbled upon those in the wild. Those never found those. There's like, you have to cook them first. You can eat them raw. You have to boil them. We will make you sick apparently if you don't do it right. Um, but yeah, no, I, I forge more for Merelda my favorite. Uh, Shannon Charles, obviously like awesome culinary mushrooms. Uh, what's that yellow one that grows on trees? It's like a thick, a 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. We found I was walking with the kids and a park downtown Toronto and I look over and there's this massive, it's on my instagram, a massive yellow kinda 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 a shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms.

Speaker 2:          01:09:46       And so I left it for like a week and went back and harvested and it's like, it's like tender, juicy chicken flavor. It is bizarre. Oh that's Kinda cool. So you were just hoping nobody else saw and thing and it wasn't like a really public park and I was like, Oh man, like I better get this before someone else finds it. Wow. How many people would know in a public park in Toronto? Uh, there's a few. There's, there's Wsu. I've, I've kind of walked up to ladies like picking herbs and stuff and I was like, Hey, like what do you do? And then they kind of looked at me and kind of went away. They didn't want to share their knowledge with me. Here it is, there it is. So that's the bizarre man zoo. Zookeeper. And I was like, I was so pumped. I was so excited.

Speaker 2:          01:10:24       Face you make you look like Krista Leah there. But that's hilarious. Oh that's so cool. It's like a little tiny one below it on trees. I don't know. I think. Well that one you can see the bark is deteriorating. So again, it's, it's a, it's feeding off the decaying a treat. So look how bad asset. So if that, if you actually go. And I found ones like that too. If you go in and harvest those, they're really woody by that time and they're, they're kind of a little too tough. Oh really? Um, so yeah, you wanna you wanna get them when they're younger like that. So is there a color change? Um, I, I get, I guess when, when they're older they get a bit more orange from that kind of yellow premature stacy, that one where there's like yellow, yellow. Those are like perfect. Yeah, right there. Perfect. Yeah. Oh Wow. That looks like almost like cauliflower. Totally. Yeah. It's really, really neat. Wow.

Speaker 1:          01:11:14       It's fascinating. You know, the, the, the mushroom world is, is a super cool. Do you know they breathe air. I did not know that. They breathe air, they breathe out carbon dioxide, you're closer to animals and they are the vegetables. That's really cool. And they're weird. Fungus is a weird thing. Then one, a lot of it's like I'm misunderstood. Well, I, I guess I was, I was watching the podcast with them, with the mushroom guy. Yeah. Shout out to Paul Depaul. Um, but like a lot of it is, is still being 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 was in a lightning storm and like connected to the fucking universe, first time ever doing it. Right. And he just don't ever do it.

Speaker 1:          01:11:58       Yeah, he did that. I think he was in high school, right? Or some. Somewhere around that. Very young. Yeah. Crazy. He's awesome. Such a trip though, and I was reading the filicides is linked to your and curing depression and things like that, which, which I don't know a lot about, but it's fascinating the effects they have on, on, uh, 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 in downloaded. It's Dennis is a brilliant guy and this theory is called the stoned ape theory. And this coincides what we were talking about about hunting and con con, consumption of meat. I'm leading to us becoming humans. There's a doubling of the human brain size over a period of 2 million years.

Speaker 1:          01:12:55       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 evolution, explained evolution like this very Oregon doubled over a period of 2 million years and you don't know why. Terrence believes that the reason coincided with climate change and that as the climate changed, these rain forest 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 with 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.

Speaker 1:          01:13:59       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 stoned ape theory. That's what he, that's how he thinks we became human. That's amazing. Yeah, it sounds stupid. It sounds stupid until you do mushrooms. Yeah, that makes sense. Then you go, oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I 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 when, how old were you when you became a chef?

Speaker 2:          01:14:38       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, 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.

Speaker 2:          01:15:17       So I totally, yeah, I can cook or whatever. And he had had me in there, you know, like dropping the fry baskets and flipping eggs and you know, doing the brunch shift on the weekend and it just stuck. It's one of those things that uh, you just kind of grow up doing. I, you know, I wanted money to buy skateboards and pot and stupid shit. And um, yeah, just, it just kind of stuck. And then, uh, all through high school I had a job cooking and I really started to struggle with it because, uh, 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, you know, how being a chef could help change the world and how am I going to make a difference as a chef. Um, and then, uh, and then I had, I had my daughter when I was 19 and I had all this experience cooking and I thought, well, you know, I'm just gonna go to chef school and uh, and make a go of this.

Speaker 2:          01:16:05       Like I've got all this experience. I'm already this far ahead. And uh, it was, 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 uh, I fell in love with food. Uh, I, you know, it 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? He brought a bunch. A bunch of these. Yeah. So this photo, uh, I actually took this photo. It's blown up in the restaurant. 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, well, cool, that's amazing.

Speaker 2:          01:16:46       And just took the photo postcard. This is actually a sketch. My friend did have a, have a deer skull that I shot. Um, so anyway, lyric 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 in the world that I can teach people about what I'm doing. And, uh, I went and got a, 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, uh, 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.

Speaker 2:          01:17:24       So I thought, you know, I'm going to help educate, you know, a modern civilization about hunting and foraging and this'll be like my make a difference in the world. And, uh, I ended up hanging out with a really good friend of mine, um, one of my best friends today. And he's a family friend, a documentary film maker by the name of Jody Shapiro. Um, and, you know, we had this deal and you said, you know, I'll, I'll help you with the photos if you teach me how to cook. And he was, he was taking some culinary courses at the local college just as a hobby. And, uh, you know, we started hanging out and shooting this cookbook. And um, we started to kind of get some press about it, um, 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, I sold tickets and I knew there were laws about serving game and restaurant.

Speaker 2:          01:18:16       So in Canada, and I appreciate the, u. s is pretty similar. You can't serve wild game in a restaurant. So there's public health. Excuse me, I'm amit 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 just going to have some fun. Um, and we do this game dinner, a local paper, a national paper actually wanting 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.

Speaker 2:          01:18:55       And um, 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 a 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. Um, you know, and, and, uh, and it was just sort of our home. Now when you say Canadian cuisine or these traditional recipes, or are they improvise? Well, I, you know, a lot of it is improvised. It's a lot of, it's my take on it. Um, you know, I, I definitely want to do some more kind of studying about native and indigenous cooking. Um, you know, traveling across the country, something that I want to do and learning from the indigenous communities. Um, but sort of my take on it is, you know, if there, if there wasn't these farmed animals, what would be, what would we eat?

Speaker 2:          01:19:47       And for me, it's, it's morals, it's maple syrup, it's the wild leeks in this photo, it's deer and Turkey and rabbit and these things we all serve at antler because that's what's growing around us in Canada. It's wild fish. And thanks again for the map. I'm going to have to break my diet to enjoy some of this liquid ious looking richest looking. Ever seen that, 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 a natural, uh, it's full of a lot of natural electrolytes and minerals. So it's Kinda like a coconut water, a 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 was during the day.

Speaker 2:          01:20:39       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. Take the sap from the trees like that. So simple. It's, it's really, really cool to when, 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. 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 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.

Speaker 2:          01:21:18       Oh, okay. That's great. So that's awesome. That winter fat off. So when you were talking about indigenous people, how they would cook their food, what have you learned? Any of those dishes yet? Um, I have, um, like I said, I'm not an expert, but it's something I'm, we're, we're going to be kind of studying, moving forward are, you know, the growth of Antler, you know, where do we go from here? Um, and you know, as I mentioned, my, my business partner is a documentary guy, so we, we, we want to travel and travel across the country and learn really what that is. Um, there's so many different indigenous communities in Canada. Canada is on three coasts, uh, you know, much like the states with Alaska, you know, you don't really think of the Arctic up there, but uh, you know, there's three ocean that ocean, so it's not an ocean to walk across it.

Speaker 2:          01:22:02       It's frozen. But uh, yeah, it's uh, it's something that I definitely want to learn more about. Um, like how would they cook Moose, you know? Um, a lot of it would be open fire in a lot of it's raw 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 a oil lamps from the oil, from the blubber. But uh, you know, a lot of the cooking is raw. Yeah. Steven Rinella went to new Nevada. Is that a new event? Yeah, yeah, something like that. I think it's been, I think there's, yeah, the North Northwest Territories and there's new boot and they were eating a lot of fish, frozen fish that was dipped in seal oil, dip the fish and seal oil, eat it. They have a tremendous amount of oil and fat in their diet, you know, which kind of makes sense. Got It. Yeah. I mean they're, they're up there in the coldest of cold climates. One of the things we do this kind of cool is uh, uh, I know the native in the indigenous cultures

Speaker 3:          01:23:06       would, would make cedar tea and it's full of vitamin C and minerals and nutrients. But we do a cedar a 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 survey, which is really cool. And it's, it's like, uh, when you eat it, it's like the forest and your mouth, it's really, really easy. And then you get the cedar from. We just go into the woods and cut it down and we'll 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, um, and I'll go and forage for all this stuff and bring it into antler. Uh, another way we use the cedar isn't a cocktail. We do a cedar gin sour, so we infuse, infuse the gin with a, with cedar leaves for like a week.

Speaker 3:          01:23:50       And then we shake that with some simple syrup and make me hungry. So when you, um, it's interesting that when you go to the woods to forage for plant life, it's totally legal. Yeah. You could sell it. Yeah. But if you forge 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 18 hundreds and early into the 19 hundreds. Like mo. Most people associate that with the death of the buffalo, the, uh, it makes sense. And I think, I think if there, there are ways to do it where it could be controlled. I don't think I could hunt enough Meat for the, for the restaurant, but five seats, 45 seats. But you know what I, I do think I do think that, you know, I think it's people's right to be able to eat wild meat.

Speaker 3:          01:24:38       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. Um, and I do know in 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 not butcher can then sell to a restaurant. Oh, well that makes sense. Yeah. And it's, it's controlled and like I don't want to decimate the population. I don't want to hurt a anything. Is that the way to say it though? New found land, newfoundland. Yeah, I think it's definitely not. Call it new found land. It's like calling chicago chicago. Get pissed at you. Like fake canadian. I have an aunt from there.

Speaker 3:          01:25:20       Yeah. I don't want market hunting of wild game. It's Because I love wild animals and hundred percent again. What do you, how do you love an animal? 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 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 and

Speaker 1:          01:26:04       they changed their flavor profile to make themselves tastes terrible to animals that are eating them. There's some communication between them and there are some sort of a primitive life form that many are. You are far more complex than things that vegans won't eat like mollusks mollusks, although we think of them as animals, they're the simplest, dumbest fucking thing on earth vice. Just an article that a questioning whether mollusks we're vegan. I thought it was funny. They shouldn't be. I think for health purposes, people that are vegans like, hey man, they're. They're sustainable. I mean you could farm them. You could have anything property to have something that they were using muscles to clean up. Ocean beaches, filter the water and a fast and mushrooms to apparently are very cleansing there. They're trying to find ways to use mushrooms to clean kind of oil spills and yes, screwed up environmental things.

Speaker 1:          01:26:54       People should eat mandalas, they really should and they should also eat eggs, eat eggs, folks. Just from An ethical animals, and I'm just saying this just as a person who values health in a person who's. I mean I, 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 attrition has on physical performance and I think eggs are gigantic. They're so goddamn good for your health and this idea that somehow know that you're doing something cruel. My chickens are my friends. You see it from that video that's proven in the pudding, that scared of me at all. That runnIng around with their running around with me and I eat their eggs and those eggs are good for. And I know everybody can't do that, but you can get these toilets.

Speaker 1:          01:27:39       It's eggs and you vote with your dollars that you're spending. You know, 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 yellow and 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 then you give people the option to make the most amount of money and not have to account for ethics or cruelty standards or whatever.

Speaker 1:          01:28:29       You know, whatever issues were in place that allowed factory farms to materialize. That's one of the worst, worst pieces of evidence about the cruelty of human beings. It's one of the worst. It's horrific. I mean, and it's, it's something that I think we should really collectively do something about and absolutely, it's one of the things that really ramps up the, 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 carved that venice and up in front of those people. What were they screaming at you? Murderer murder. That's not true. It's like saying, you know, it's just like saying you're a thief because you cut grass. It's no, it's not. It's not murder. It's, it's kIlling animals. We even, 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 like, no, they're murdering animals. The kind of laugh.

Speaker 1:          01:29:43       A lot of those people are sad, like a lot of like what you're dealing with with these animal rights activists that they're, they're so engrossed in this struggle and it's the part of their, their daily existence and they're, 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 just be this beautiful creature that just wants to live and it's a chicken. She's talking about chicken and like my friend, that chicken was killed and it's like, what? Whoa. And everybody in the restaurant, it's like, what the fuck? I've seen these videos and they're like, they'll storm a restaurant. There'll be like 50 people that go and occupy a steakhouse. Here's this crazy lady.

Speaker 4:          01:30:26       Oh god, here we go,

Speaker 5:          01:30:30       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 with hidden. She got nobody there for her. She was crying. She was scared every single moment

Speaker 4:          01:30:58       we have a maitre d because they're useful, had run out. Someone's going to hear and I can see you laughing, smiling. At least at least we're not busy. Yeah, that's true. That's such a restaurant way of taking you with me right now. She wouldn't be gone just like, where's the chicken part? All of those other girls. But where is this crazy town? Disrupt. It's unfair to those mice. Oh, eating somebody else's eggs. Remember her name, her name, a beautiful little girl. She's a mouse. Murder. violence. They sing it together. They all get together with science. Think of this.

Speaker 3:          01:32:22       Okay. Cut it short. See the way your little bird snow fucks up a warm you crazy bitch. Fucks up. Mice, throat, mouse in the cage. No snow. Only grain. That guy's funny. It's kind of amazing. So yeah, there's, there's, there's protesting and it's like it's, it's our fundamental right to protest and 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 the best place for something like that is really what we just saw a video. Make a video about your thoughts. Yeah. You know if you mean if they honestly think that we're doing is wrong. Like this is what something like youtuBe is for. Make a video where you state your case. I'll come and talk to me and didn't even come and talk to me.

Speaker 3:          01:33:10       we'll just start at my restaurant with science, but at least wIth the video you'll 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 buck she finds she's a murderer. She's not. She's not a vegetarian. You fucking chickens out a vegetarian. It's just not. You know, people lIke vegetarian fed. Well then you got a sick chicken because that's not what they're supposed to eat. It seemed like cats. Cats need meat. You can't feed a cat. A vegan dIet like you can see. One of my bits, I have a bit about it. do you really fucking hilarious because it's something that I found online when someone's angry at me, when someone was angry at me, I went to her page and it's one of the things said hashtag vegan cat.

Speaker 3:          01:33:51       I went, oh jesus. I went down. That was illegal in animal rights. People will come and should tinker. Cat. We'll talk about that later. I don't want to do my bit. I'm doing it on a comedy special zone, but the, the, the problem with this is that as we said before, it becomes like a contest. It becomes like a, like a battle ground. yeah. That's my concern is like, how does this end? 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's explained that, that you know, we're mistreating animals and animal lives or their right and they say, you know, this extortion, if we put this sign in our window, they're going to go away. Well, we're not doing anything wrong. You know, nothing we're doing is illegal. We're not infringing on anyone's rights. Have you talked to them at all if you gone outside? So, no, we had one of our managers go outside and there, they just screamed at her. They were, this isn't the time. I think just murderer. What about snow girl? So, you know, we, we did send an email trying to, we invited them to go foraging with us. Uh, and we talked about our different ideologies, ideologies and how, you know, they're, they're really far

Speaker 2:          01:34:58       apart, but maybe we can come to some kind of understanding and, and uh, you know, at the, at the time they didn't respond, they didn't respond for awhile and now I don't, I don't think I'm a, you know, I don't, I don't think that anything good would come with that meeting at this point. So, so what do you do? How's business? By the way? Business has always been good for us. We were very lucky. I'm like, you have a great restaurant. I mean, I'm sure that's part of it. Thank you. but we, we've, we've had some international recognition. Um, we've, I've done a lot of traveling last year, I've been to five continents in the last year or two of them cooking. Uh, I went to abu dhabi with a, there's a company called img and if you know them, they own the ufc, now they run, they have a culinary department and they run these festivals called taste.

Speaker 2:          01:35:42       Um, and our first year opening 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, 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, and it was amazing. It was incredible. Um, and then from there, uh, I think six slash six or eight months later, there was a festival in Australia. So they brought me to Australia to, uh, to cook in western Australia, this a event called the gourmet escape, a really, really cool event and it was down the road from a deer farm and we were putting out a lunch and dinner for 200 people.

Speaker 2:          01:36:31       So we actually roasted to hold dear sato style over open fire, uh, and you do that. Uh, rAn the woods. it was incredible photos on my instagram or the antler kitchen borrowed up to or at antler kitchen bar on instagram. There's photos of this, uh, this uh, sato. It was super, super, super cool. So sato sato is a, I think it's the argentinian cooking style and it's, it's a whole, uh, animal that's a kind of split down the middle and kind of like cross across. Yeah, there is. It's really cool. So pig is probably the best one to do it with because of the fat content, a deer and lamb and stuff like that. You kind of have to base it to keep it moist. How do you regulate temperature when it comes to something like that? It's just stacking up the wood and kind of how far leaning on it and some of that to do it.

Speaker 2:          01:37:19       It just practice, just playing around. Um, fun. It just lay low and slow. Was kind of ready to go for many times. Yeah. Yeah. So we do at the restaurant, I do it in my backyard a lot. I actually did for my wedding, we did two pigs from my wedding. I'm like poking the fire and my suit. That's so graphic. It's great. Yeah. That got a lot of hate. There's hate on that. Um, but it's food, you know, and people want to disconnect themselves from where it's coming from. Um, but he went back to your question, you know, business has always been good in businesses, businesses, good days and bad days. You know, right now there's a lot of attention on antler, lot of media attention on antler. So, uh, we're, you know, we're a little bit busier than normal right now. Get ready, just

Speaker 1:          01:37:56       get crazy. It's gonna be nuts down there and there's going to be a bunch of people on your side to hopefully nothing bad happens. Like, people don't get into anything physical or you can start shouting at each other, but that

Speaker 2:          01:38:08       shouting stuff was happening. But uh, but yeah, hopefully this will kind of smooth out and people can learn to get it to get along and lifting

Speaker 1:          01:38:16       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 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 and they want their right and they want you to admit you're wrong. And this is, this is a real problem. The real problem with something that's complex.

Speaker 2:          01:38:37       Yeah. And the funny thing was like we've had 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 that makes them happy. And so we feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign. And then we saw from their online post that they thought that we made the 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 don't know who we are.

Speaker 1:          01:39:09       Well that's exactly what I'm talking about. It, it becomes a contest or a battle ground and Ideological battle ground. Yeah. This, 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 was like, 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 and I'm not going to 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 kale for careful consideration. And that's what led me to becoming a hunter in the first place. yeah. What, how did you start hunting?

Speaker 1:          01:39:52       Stephen? Noah took her. I had been thinking about it for a long time and the main reason I've been thinking about it was because of those pet videos, those fucking horrific factory farming videos. I was like, I don't want to eat that. I don't want. I want him to be a part of this. I want to figure out how to not. So I started buying grass fed meat 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're filming a fear factor episode at tone ranch says 270,000 acre ranch in the middle of the country while middle of the state rather. And they were saying that they have a wild pigs there and they would teach you how they. That was something that I had considered before I met rinella and when I met rinella 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. That's it. The quote, the cool part about hunting is a, nothing goes to waste. So I take, I take the hides to a guide to have them stand. So I've actually made a knife roll

Speaker 2:          01:40:54       out of one of the highlights. I have an apron out of one of the hides. My wedding ring has antler in it. 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 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 as the neck and the neck has got all this really super flavorful kind of gelatinous meet kind of in between the cartilage and stuff like that. Uh, and you make a stew with that stuff and it is unbelievably tasty. And, you know, I think in 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.

Speaker 2:          01:41:35       And um, so that's one of the reasons why I want to write this book and really educate people how to use those tougher cuts that you can be kind of tricky to cook with. Nela has a couple of good books on that and one of the things that he's really into his making shanks and also gluco good brazing. 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. Liver. And we had a fire that night. Oh, so good. I had a Turkey feathers in my little boot near, on my wedding day from a Turkey. Yeah, it was neat. It was really cool. 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 is you do have a respect and appreciation for the wildlife, but that this ideological battle, ground battle ground on their side, it doesn't leave any room for forgiving in.

Speaker 2:          01:42:29       there's no room for reasons just you're either an animal murderer or a year that the most amazing person ever because you're vegan, go vegan. You know, it's, it's, it's a really. It's a new thing in terms of first world problems, first world countries. I mean people have been needing 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 uh, it's unfortunate because we're getting, you know, we've had a lot of support from our community and Canada and the international community and we're actually getting support from other vegans and vegetarian people writing to us and say, hey. Yeah. The same like, hey, these aren't our beliefs, we're really sorry what you're going through. Um, you know, you have our support and it's a, some of our customers are actually vegan and they come for like vegetarian risotto and like mushroom risotto that they know or like, you know, really cool wild mushrooms that you can't buy in the store. So it's a, you know, it is unfortunate. It is kinda, it's kinda sad. But uh, you know, we're, we're just gonna 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, of course they're not going to your up here in the front window, man, a 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 us. It's not like after fact it's all going

Speaker 3:          01:43:52       down right now going on there. They're, 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 window table. Well guess what, fans, this podcast, you're going to want a front row seat and it's going to be. These are just 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, uh, from buffalo at the border. So it's a negative cross. He fucks take a flight if you're into the cold, is there anything else you'd like to tell people? Like what is your website? How can people go and check it out? So antler kitchen, bar.com is his website. There it is. Pull that, scroll down jimmy.

Speaker 3:          01:44:34       So you could see a look at some of that yummy murder that. So that deer dish does. Cool. Yeah, you put a skull on the table with all that. So that, that platter, that shukui potters, all the meat from that deer and the terrain on the side, the little square piece was actually meet from that skull. So I braise that skull a, turn the meat into a terrain from the tongue in the cheek and then serve. That was actually at the game dinner that a newspaper did. When are you heading back to toronto? Friday. So I'm hearing visiting with family and then um, did 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 for that. Thank you so much. It's an honor man. I'll cook it with my dad this week.

Speaker 3:          01:45:15       Please do take pictures and I'll put it up on instagram. One hundred percent. Awesome. Before I love. We love it, right? So yeah. And their kitchen and the kitchen bar.com at 100 staff at [inaudible] kitchen bar, all that kind of stuff you can find. What is your instagram? My instagram is at the hunter. Chef. Chef. Okay. Thanks man. There's a lot of fun. I, you so much. I hope this all works out and all angry vegans. Please just, I, I know where you're coming from, but you really. This is the wrong fight. It really is. There's the battle is factory farming. That's the real battle ground and this is the wrong. This is like the most ethical version of what you're opposing and I think there's, there's a, there's a healthy comfortable middle ground for the 99 percent that aren't fucking idiots. I really do and I hope we can find it. Thank you. Alright fuckers. Be nice to each other by.