Michael Hunter

00:01four three two one hello michael welcome thanks man thanks for doing this thanks for coming in 100 man uh people don't know the story we'll give them the brief synopsis i found out about your story online because there was this viral thing that was going on about a chef who was getting protested by a bunch of animal rights activists and vegans who decided to camp out in front of your business and try to the restaurant called antler in toronto try to i don't know what the fuck they were trying to do but you decided to butcher uh a leg of deer in front of them and it became this horrific thing like how could you do that in a place that serves meat how could you prepare the meat right in front of them like how did this all get started how did it become such a crazy viral story and why why were they mad at you when there's a million other restaurants around you

01:00all right so it started in about december about clue number one possibly canadian the crazy canadian besides being nice well that's why it went viral because i wasn't being nice i wasn't the stereotypical canadian no well you weren't even being mean you were just doing your job in front of my thing so they started in december and they really keep this right in front of your face they they really got pissed off with our we have a little chalkboard sign out front um i'll give you the count 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 um 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 we tease other restaurants around us like we have fun with the sign and it's fun and uh the cyclist vegan uh rode by and took huge offense to our sign

01:53and all of a sudden one day these protesters just showed up so um 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 uh and i really respect that type of diet so we were just totally floored with why this was happening and um so this started to go on they started to come every week and they went from like two or three people being kind of peaceful to being like 10 15 people not so peaceful so uh it's when it turned not so peaceful they were shouting at our at our guests and shouting in our door and really trying to harm our business that uh i just kind of got fed up last resort went down we get a whole deer a couple times a month and we we butchered ourselves and uh i just

02:46said screw it screw it i'm like i'm gonna get these people to get out of here so i thought that that would make them go away how did you think that was gonna make them go away not escalate it uh i don't know i was it was just totally like last resort uh totally 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 kind of thought like you know buzz off and why so just one sign one sign 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 there's an actual butcher shop across

03:38the street and if you go in there's like whole cattle hanging that's okay in their butcher shop but you're a problem with your comparison to kale you attack their sacred kale god we're promoting uh meat i don't know that's totally bizarre because you were promoting it we were promoting it or on the sign yeah so you just didn't promote anything yeah and they were allowed to cycle by and dream of broccoli yeah without any interference yeah man i have no idea it's totally bizarre i'm sorry how many times did they protest you um i think it's about eight now eight they're coming weekly they still do they still do there's one this friday oh jesus so they organized them they organize them there's like facebook groups there's uh they're they're basically giving us an ultimatum we have to put their slogan in our window and they'll go away what yeah what's their slogan we are cunts

04:33there's there's like i can't remember it you know word for word but it's you know like killing animals is wrong they have feelings what yeah do you have to put that in your window we don't we're not going to there's no way but that's what they want that's what they want yeah so it's like eco terrorism extortion whatever 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 restaurants we're surrounded by restaurants you're surrounded by like you said you're across the street from a butcher shop 97 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 polled i'm sure it's not that accurate but it's somewhere between 95 and 97 it's big it's big and i think we know we're an easy target you know our name is antler we were i

05:23think 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 and um you know if you look at 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 is uh from the best possible place we can and it's local so it's supporting our local farmers that are you know within hours of our restaurant now when you say that they started out nice like how many people were there in the beginning two three four and they had signs they had signs and they were just kind of 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

06:13kind of got wind of it on their facebook groups so we would call the police and have the police there to make sure everyone's safe because one thing like customers are scared our staff are scared like no one's dealt with this before i've never dealt with this before um um so we would have the police there you know they were the police were amazing um and then you know one time we kind of okay let's not call the police let's see what happens like maybe they'll just they'll go away and uh so then like a megaphone came out uh our neighbors were coming down and getting in fights with them and it was it was ugly so we called the police to come and jesus christ keep the peace yeah a megaphone yeah part of the problem with these kind of things is it becomes a contest becomes a battle you know trying to see who's going to win and they're absolutely on a team

07:01i mean this that's one of the things that happens with veganism and i think it happens with hunters too 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 and so when something comes up where it becomes a primary focus of their life one restaurant as illogical as it might be that becomes the battleground and it's an ideological battleground for you know don't eat meat ever versus sustainable farming you know this the look i'm sure i know you're a hunter i'm sure you feel a certain amount of remorse when an animal dies 100 and you know that's a big part of sort of my beliefs and my philosophy and why i'm working on

07:55this cookbook right now is because uh i think that you know if you do eat meat you should be able to kill an animal and experience that and i i think that if if people were to actually kill an animal they would see you know what goes into that and i don't think people would consume as much meat and i don't think people would definitely you know they certainly wouldn't waste as much meat as they do and it's it's just really upsetting and i think it's totally misguided you know why we were targeted well i mean like i said i think it just becomes a game yeah it becomes a the 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

08:46ethical sources it's just it's not financially sustainable to do it that way everything would cost more money yeah and uh that's a real problem that we as a society it's not obviously not you or i that have set up this 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 that's just whatever totally it's it's a necessary evil you know and sort of sort of but really necessary it's not really necessary at all that maybe that's the wrong way to describe it but it's how the system's been set up and it's it's actually why i started hunting and and doing what i do because i watched these documentaries like food ink and these things that kind of shone a light on you know the system and how this stuff is actually

09:33being produced and it's horrible it's uh it's terrifying yeah and i think that's the real number one problem and you know and this vegan activist message to go after you know these types of farming you know we support as well we agree with so the fact that we were targeted for this um 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 and the big picture is there's some animals that need to be harvested they they're not sustainable wild pigs is the best example yeah there is no way you are going to stop wild pigs without killing them no there's no way you're not going to give them birth control you're not going to unless you're going to let loose fucking packs of wolves and i mean packs to deal with like what's going on in texas there's the i mean they

10:26they're forced to shoot them out of helicopters they hire crazy they hire people to come in with helicopters and shoot them from the sky it's that bad and this is farmers there's companies called hella hunting where they have it on the side like they have a wild boar and a fucking helicopter blade on their logo it's crazy they have to do it yeah no and i i don't i don't have a lot of experience with that because where i am we don't have that wild boar problem but uh i hunt with these guys from from mossy oak and i've gone down there and done one of these pig hunts and they've shown me their fields and like one third of their cornfield is just destroyed destroyed and they have to hunt them at night or they hunt them uh 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

11:15you're not growing your own food mostly most people listening to this that are vegan are not growing their own food you're getting your own food from a farm that farm is being attacked by pigs that's only one animal another one is deer i mean there's a shitload of deer in north america what's interesting is california has a very weird way of handling it and i kind of get it in some ways the weird way that we handle it in california is we don't hunt mountain lions okay there's no mountain lion hunting this is very few deer yeah i mean i see deer in my neighborhood you know i live in a fairly rural area yeah i see deer you know a couple times a week but it's nothing like if you go to the east coast have you ever been in the east coast of california or of uh uh the united states like new york state that kind of area i've been in new york city yeah i've been to the the east coast now

12:02the state if you go upstate like new york state there's so many fucking deer up there it's one of the reasons why lyme disease is so horrible up there it comes from the ticks that were on the deer yeah and people get these terrible terrible cases of lyme disease and it's fucking everywhere up there man i have several friends that have really bad lyme disease yeah but they have to take um go to jim miller's instagram jim miller is a fighter in the ufc uh 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 like debilitated 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 look at that this is what he takes while he's in training camp that's insane 19 days of medication supplements he said he said fuckly me 31 capsules a day you do the math remember the

13:00carry to seven uh and it just says lyme disease um 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 these deer overpopulation of wild animals is handled in one of two ways either you introduce predators or you manage them with hunting um there's a place in maui where they are um the maui has no predators you know and but they also have a bunch of wild game that was brought in for king kamehameha i think it was in the 1800s they brought it in um i'm not sure when but there's tons of axis deer on on maui and on lanai and on molokai a couple of different islands and uh 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

14:03hunters got together and they're hunting these axis deer and then giving the meat to poor people like making it free for them yeah and it's a it's a really cool program but that's another sort of situation where you kind of have to hunt yeah there's no other unless you're just going to poison them or you're going to somehow or another capture them all and neuter and spay a certain amount of them every month there's really no other way to handle it yeah and i think that's it's a big misconception like people that don't educate themselves about hunting they're just like hunting is bad killing animals is bad and they get on this bandwagon but they don't have enough information about it yeah um and i think people confuse trophy hunting you know with like they see cecil the lion and everyone goes after okay it's hunting is the is the problem but you know

14:50trophy hunting is the problem but hunters that that hunt for food um and that hunt to you know help the uh the sort of environmental impacts that they're having like people like snow geese i don't know if you know much about snow geese yeah i read that article that you retweeted actually yeah they like a nat geo article that i that i posted you know these birds fly in flocks of like 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 um well large-scale agriculture is also responsible for the boom in the population of of deer right you know deer in in america particularly like in the midwest where all the farms are it's what is it a fucking coincidence that

15:34there's all the deer where all the farms are no it's not my my good friend doug durin he has a big ass farm in wisconsin beautiful place in the driftless area do you know what that is no it's where the the glaciers didn't pass through so it's not flat there's all these hills and it's very beautiful 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 they're farm animals they're eating corn they're just eating grains they mean he grows corn he's a farmer so he grows all this corn the deer are eating all this corn and they're fucking delicious man they're huge they're so huge and they're so they're so good but there's a reality to uh population control now in wisconsin they get it because they're around them every day they're hitting them with their cars they see them everywhere they look this is not like

16:31the 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 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 hunters actually you know we have to buy tags we have to buy our licenses there are rules and laws that we have to follow and those fees actually pay for the wildlife conservation and i'm pretty sure it's the same in the states as well from at least talking to my friends and it is you know pickman robertson act and they don't understand 11 percent of all the 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

17:21far more than any wildlife conservation group or animal activist group no one contributes more to conservation than hunting no one because we want it we want it to be there for our kids and their kids and it's 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 we love the animals just because you eat them doesn't mean you don't love them but you recognize them as this is a weird way to look at it but it is a renewable resource right and it is also a magical beautiful thing just because of that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat it 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 i mean they're

18:10eating salmon and they're eating and you can you can bring in vegetables i mean i'm sure there are some i'm just talking shit but the reality is if you're if you're embedded in that world you understand it and you appreciate it it's very humbling i mean killing an animal is very humbling and it sounds like just 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 with a bow crossbow and i see a deer come out it's i'm trembling i have the hair on my back is standing up they're these beautiful majestic creatures and i'm gonna kill it and it's it's really really difficult and i don't think that people understand that that don't hunt and that haven't killed an 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

18:58they have an idea and the idea is animals should not die yeah but they're going to die it's they're going to die of old age they're going to die of starvation they're going to freeze to death they're gonna they're gonna be eaten alive they're gonna be eaten alive and people think that animals they die peacefully in the wild it's it's absolutely incorrect um if you you know google anything um about how animals die in the wild and they're being eaten alive like deer are being taken down and eaten alive by wolves or coyotes or whatever it is bears bears and it's it's horrific and to be shot with an arrow to be shot with a bullet it's a way more humane way to go uh in my in my opinion oh it's it's unquestionably a more humane way to go i mean it's one of the reasons why you know i hunt um and i practice so much i practice every day i have one of the reasons why we got this building so i could put

19:42a 45 yard indoor archery range i want to shoot you have to practice well we can shoot afterwards but awesome have to fucking practice yeah 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 grew in our garden there's a great satisfaction for serving up some cucumbers or some some kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden it tastes better when you when you go out there and you cut that cucumber off the plant and you cut that kale down it is like half an hour old you know and it's like nothing compares to that freshness that you go to the grocery store that maybe a couple 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

20:30nothing tastes as good as that right yeah i mean i appreciate where vegans and animal rights activists are coming from because it's coming from i think there's a lot of distortion um with like really angry ones and but this is my take on a lot of this if you get a group of 100 people one of them for sure is a fucking idiot just out of just sheer odds right like what are the odds one of them is a fucking it's pretty strong right well if you're going to get a group of 100 vegans you're going to get at least one of them that's a fucking idiot and they're going to be some of them are violent some of them are super aggressive about it i mean there's a ton of them online they can go they their identity is completely wrapped around veganism they use vegan in their name it's always i'm the vegan this or the vegan that that is 100 of their name so 100 of their identity so they can't they can't separate

21:21from it ever like that is who they are forever and they've there's been some serious problems what was the name of that cafe again cafe gratitude um 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 maybe they were doing it wrong maybe they have unique dietary needs but they started raising cattle and they started eating those cattle and the fucking vegans freaked out death threats all this crazy shit coming after them protesting and you know these people were terrified they're older folks they're they're you know they're elderly there it is vegan restaurant owners receive death threats over animal slaughter scandal yeah i mean this is the bad ones right and it's not most of them most vegans i think are vegans for

22:15all the right reasons yeah they're misinformed if you choose to to not uh to not eat meat and and choose that kind of lifestyle like power to you that's it's amazing and i think that it you know if if it works for you and your body that's great and for me it doesn't work for me like i i've i've done vegan cleanses i've done the juice cleanses i've i've done you know i've gone out for as a chef to vegan restaurants and i'm not full you know 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 it's i just i need to eat something with protein and lots of protein and it's it's meat or fish or you know i've made tofu from scratch from soybeans and it's just it doesn't it's not the same yeah well right now people are screaming at their you're doing it wrong my vegan food is amazing i love it it's tasty delicious but i'm not some of it is

23:10yeah some of it's good i mean i eat vegan all the time i eat there's a vegan restaurant near me i go to all the time sometimes i get dirty looks people are like oh this motherfucker's here why are you here why are you here you're not allowed 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 uh 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 nugget you know and all the people that i think that they distort the the real sort of fascinating and mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature it's a it's an almost psychedelic experience 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

24:07when you're away from your cell phone when you're away from you know 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 and 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 believe that our brains grew is because we started eating meat we started cooking meat the nutrition became more accessible and also we started thinking about how to hunt developing tools to hunt with i mean all of this is the reason why humans are humans today

24:58and i'm sure the vegan argument against that would be well that's then and we're past that now well we're not no we're not we're not because of controlling the population of animals we're certainly not because of controlling the population of predators and that's another thing that people need to accept and understand there's a reason why they eradicated all the wolves in north america before they reintroduced them to yellowstone and now they're thriving in many parts of the northwest it's because they were fucking killing everything and there's they don't have any predators and the only predators that they have are humans and if we don't keep the populations in check of them and of grizzly bears of black bears and all the other predators they start eating each other they start tearing each other apart they start coming

25:37after us they start encroaching on people well we're in their territory we shouldn't be in their place we humans and well look i'm on team people so i don't know what the fuck you're saying here yeah you know if you're saying that we should move out of san francisco and give it to the wolves you can go fuck yourself all right and this is literally what it boils down to because it you have to draw some line in the sand somewhere because if someone doesn't control the population of animals then what's going to happen well you know you can leave them to their own devices and they can sort of sort it out but you know how they sort it out through disease and starvation i mean what happens is there's too many animals and not enough food so they get horrific diseases that's where mange comes from that's where a lot of like serious diseases that infect wildlife come from they come from a lack of food or

26:23overpopulation that's how nature sorts it out you know and that's how nature sorts it out with people too we're just sneaky we've used vaccines and shit we're at the top of the food chain yeah well we are we've worked hard to get there we are and i think we it comes with a certain responsibility and that responsibility is really we we're really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming and that's one of the main arguments for veganism the one of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals whether it's veganism or or or whether it's rather factory farming or whether it's uh large-scale uh dairy farms where they mistreat their cows or the chicken farms or all these different factory farms where they treat these animals not as a living being but as a commodity

27:06then it becomes a giant problem but if you look at guys like do you know joel salton is no joel salton is a very fascinating guy he runs a farm called polyface farms and what he has essentially done is made large-scale animal agriculture possible in a humane and very natural way he has enormous electric fences that he uses for his pigs and he just moves them around moves the fences around so the pigs wander around he has a huge rolling chicken coop i mean it's fucking huge and he pushes that thing around he moves it to a new space the chickens go out they wander around they do the chicken thing and they go right back into the chicken house and this is where he gets the eggs from this is how they raise chickens this is how they raise cattle they do it with all these different animals and his perspective on all

27:59this 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 that's one that's one of the things that we do at antler is is to find those farmers and guys like that one of the farms we get our deer from they have a thousand acres the deer roam as they please they're eating nuts and apples and acorns and grass and everything they're supposed to eat uh 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 factories we don't serve chicken beef or pork we have bison pheasant duck uh wild boar because you know these game farms they don't have these massive large-scale operations and i i buy direct from the farmer and they can tell me what their diet is you know uh with their good months their bad months

28:51we we know all about these animals that we're bringing to the restaurant and um and you know we're really proud of that i have an issue with people that keep saying wild boar why do they say wild boar when it's wild pig so it's a male it actually is a different breed so the the the pigs that are in these you know factory farms or even regular regular pigs there's there's there's many different breeds and a lot of them are hybrid hybrid um breeds the the wild boar breed has long black hair and tusks that actually come out so um i can buy whole pigs and they they don't have those tusks and when i buy the wild boar breed the meat is darker uh the the hair is black but we're getting them you know there's no hair by the time we get them um and they've got the tusks uh in the jaw right but my point is that a boar is a male right you're you're definitely eating females too

29:39that's true yeah so why they call it a wild boar because it's just it's just a breed yeah it's just the breed yeah but there do you know that they're all the same breed i did not know that they're all sus scrofa is the the the i guess the genus is that what you say um they're all sort of interchangeable right well there's like breed with each other i do know there's there's tons of different varieties like there's the berkshire there's tamworth there's all these different kinds of breeds of hogs there's variations yeah but they're all the same animal what's crazy about wild pigs is if you took a domestic pig you know like babe yeah release babe out into the forest they morph right with a very short amount of time their snout extends their hair becomes darker and thicker their tusks lengthen interesting it's very weird they're a weird animal pigs are a

30:25weird animal because they're weird animal when they're domestic they're sweethearts yeah unless you fall in their cage when they're hungry and they fucking eat you which is really crazy it's one of the main ways that farmers die fall into cages that get eaten by pigs that's gruesome 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 um you know you're dealing with those really enormous pigs i mean those pigs need a lot of food and they're fucking big yeah and once they start chewing you that's your ass and they just decide have you been pig hunting yeah yeah yeah i've been pig hunting i've shot a couple pigs yeah the meat is definitely different it's a lot darker darker yeah it's delicious though yeah and um where i do it what's really interesting is uh in california a lot of the

31:17pigs were introduced by william randolph hearst that crazy asshole that uh ran you know from the movie citizen kane orson wells depiction of him yeah this crazy guy that ran hearst publications in the 1930s he's literally one of the reasons why marijuana is illegal right william randolph hearst decided that when there was a cover of uh i believe it was popular science magazine that said hemp is the new billion dollar crop and they were they had invented a machine called a decorticator and what a decorticator does is it effectively processes hemp fiber um 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 switched from hemp clothing to cotton cotton is easier to produce with the cotton gin but it's just an

32:05inferior cloth hemp makes better paper uh hemp makes cloth you can make houses with it henry ford made the first fenders for the first model t out of hemp i mean hemp's a crazy thing william randolph hearst read this article saw what was coming and realized that he was going to have to transition all of his paper mills and he owned forests that they would cut down the trees and make paper with they would have to transition those to hemp if people were demanding hemp so instead he undercut the entire industry by saying that there was a new drug that blacks and mexicans were smoking and they were raping white women and he called this drug marijuana which was really just the name of them it was a mexican slang for wild tobacco so he started printing these stories congress made it illegal they didn't even a lot of people

32:52that were voting on it didn't even know that they were making cannabis or like hemp the the the the textile and the commodity hemp they didn't know they were making it illegal they thought they were stopping a drug scourge that was forcing blacks and mexicans to rape white women it was all william randolph hearst it's one crazy asshole with harry anslinger in the fucking 1930s that's when it became illegal well this same crazy asshole let a bunch of wild pigs loose on his property so he can hunt them because he was a gentleman hunter so the pigs that i hunt in california when i go pig hunting probably are direct descendants from the pigs that were let loose by this asshole yeah and i think what a understand is how fast they breed um you know my my friends in mississippi were telling me you know a pig

33:39can lay a litter three times a year four times a year up to 10 12 piglets per litter and they have no natural predators so what are these farmers going to do when they start decimating their crops yeah they're not a native north american species no yeah and it's 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 oh it's a pig pigs are cute i've seen my friend has a pot belly pit i pet it that's 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 they will spread across the country they'll destroy your garden they'll still eat your dog i mean no bullshit they're fucking dangerous it's a crazy animal a lot of farmers actually ask me if i'll come hunt on their property

34:29uh 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 um you know stuff like that that you know a lot of these a lot of regular kind of city people live in the city they don't understand yeah the turkey populations in some places are exploding too because they've realized oh let's just go to the suburbs no one even hunts us there was one running down the street in toronto uh last week a turkey people were filming it and sending me the videos yeah they're delicious too yeah that's actually the the first bird i hunted i didn't actually start hunting until i was in my 20s and um i had grown up cooking 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

35:11thing as wild turkey i thought they were you know 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 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 like this is incredible and then when i tasted it i i just couldn't believe that this is what turkey was supposed to taste like yeah it's a robust flavor and you grow up you know at least i grew up but you know christmas thanksgiving these these important holidays eating turkey and you see it and it's this big white blob and it's humongous and then you know the wild bird it's leaner it's not like super round it's it's it's lean it's it's how it's supposed to be and then for me that was like the light bulb moment that

35:55this 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 there's the turkey in toronto running down the street i'm so thankful to be here because it's still snowing is it really it's still snowing and i i love winter and snowboarding and going out and enjoying the snow but i'm done california baby come on down yeah man i was talking to a buddy of mine from montana on the phone yesterday it was fucking freezing cold up there thick snow everywhere and you know they're uh about to open up their bear season and he's like jesus christ it's snows everywhere and i'm like dude i'm in my underwear right now outside i love it here man i have a soft spot for uh for california i've been i've been coming here since i was a little kid uh to visit my dad in the summers and i come here two or three times a

36:42year and i love it i love it too i you know the mountain lion thing is a weird thing with california because i i see their point what the what they've essentially done is and this is one of the weird things about california is like california is one of the places that doesn't have a fish and game department really yeah it's like they don't call it that they call it wildlife okay they don't call it like uh like they don't think of it as like you have to hunt them right like if you say like fish and game or arizona calls it game and fish okay because there's more game in arizona than there are fish desert yeah it's kind of interesting the way they've switched it around but i think the way california calls it is fish and wildlife see we we call it the ministry of natural resources damn that's a good way to look at it but i can't argue with the effectiveness of their approach

37:34because you do not find a lot of deer in california right 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 uh with my friends at mossy oak i met this guy that lives actually in orange county his name is jeremiah dowdy uh from field to plate if you i don't know if you know this guy he's a local uh you know la guy and he hunts all over california i had no idea that there was so much hunting yeah there's plenty hunting he's a really good friend of mine and i'm saying well what's he's like well there's turkey there's wild pig there's the the the pronghorn um there's all kinds of stuff that uh there's elk yeah two there's rocky mountain elk near to hone ranch and then there's

38:20tule elk that are natural on the coast there's there's a lot of different animals here yeah but uh there's also a lot of motherfucking mountain lions whoa yeah and they still kill them but the way they kill them now is through government trackers that it's really kind of crazy what they do is mountain lions start eating people's dogs and cats and you know they get they get scary and then people call one of the you know i don't know who you would call that would take care of it and they hire people and most of the time they use dogs these dogs to tree the mountain lion and they shoot them and when they empty the contents of their stomachs when they do an autopsy on them they find it filled with dogs and cats which is really kind of crazy that that is not there was one um near my where my dad lives

39:01a lady was attacked and they were running uh a pair a pair of girls were running uh in the canyon and a mountain lion actually attacked one of them and she was like having a tug of war with the mountain lion like with her friends oh jesus christ and uh i think it was about five or six years ago where was this uh somewhere in orange county someone was attacked running or cycling or something like that yeah and they had they had to uh they went and found it and shot it but uh well when they get hungry you know people we are encroaching because we're encroaching on their land no it's it's just it's just land yeah it's not there as you fuck this is what's crazy about people we're encroaching on their territory no no they're dead and then whatever was there that claimed that territory is dead and then

39:43there's a new one that comes along and they take it it's a fucking constant battle this idea that like we're in their community like they have an established gated community that we've entered and we start putting up houses and pissing off their neighbors no that's not what it is it's just land and if you hate people and you don't like cities well then go fucking live in the forest until then fuck off and stop saying like we're encroaching on their land do you go to the supermarket yes do you buy your vegan food at a vegan deli well that's a place where a deer could have lived okay do you go to the movie theater you do well you piece of shit that used to be like a squirrel's house that was a field at one point yeah i mean large-scale agriculture this is the other thing that kind of drives me crazy about vegans it's not i'm not saying you shouldn't eat grain i'm not saying you

40:29shouldn'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 it gets a little weird but it does get weird and then there's the fact that when you're making these uh when you're using a combine running through the field all the rabbits all the bunnies all the groundhogs are being decimated decimated my good buddy lives in iowa and you know he takes pictures he's like look we just chopped down um 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

41:18especially on kodiak island where uh rifle shots equal i've heard of this dinner bell yeah the bears come running i've heard of this this is crazy fucking crazy hunters are are are carrying like big magnum 45s like pistols to defend themselves against these grizzlies i'll send you a fantastic podcast that do you know steve rinella is no steve rinella is a really really interesting guy and he's a host of a tv show called meat eater he's yes oh yes yes he's an author he has a podcast yeah that he uh recorded when they were in a fognak 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

42:12is a crazy podcast because they recorded it right after the fact whenever everyone's freaking out still and you know one guy had a pistol on him but he set it down next to his pack and they had all these ideas of like what it would be like if an animal came in like if they got attacked they had all these preconceived notions of what it would be like what it would feel like yeah it was like throw all that out the window it was you were your brain it's not even on a reptilian level your brain is so terrified and this thing was so big my friend janice said that he saw its teeth gnashing literally feet from his head as it ran through the camp oh my god the revenant is just like fuck dude i got rushed by a deer one time and uh i was losing it i didn't know what to do it was uh it was before sunrise it was like

43:00you know five in the morning i'm walking into my deer setup and i had to cross this little river and it was like full of stones and stuff and i'm kind of walking up this river and all i hear is like and i'm like oh like what the hell is that noise and then it stopped and it was pawing at the ground and snorting and i was like holy shit this is a buck and like i 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 gonna get taken down by this deer and then i think it thought it was another buck because it's you know it's in the right it's it's rutting 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 gonna get gored by these antlers and that's it well but it's not a

43:48bear so yeah that was in canada so i hunt those are big animals they're big we have big white tail and um 300 pounds sometimes they're big we and even our does are huge like we get we get a lot of doe tags um where i grew up in uh in caledon which is about an hour north of the city on a horse farm um we don't have a gun season for deer so that's how i got into archery and 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 it's sort of like you know it's not huge agriculture they're more kind of hobby farms so i think they're a little closer together they don't want people just letting loose bullets letting loose bullets i think the main thing is rifles so deer season and turkey season you can use a shotgun uh and it's really stupid because you can you can

44:30shoot coyotes too with with a rifle or shotgun but there's no uh shotgun or 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 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 coyote thing is interesting because it's very counterintuitive the more coyotes you kill the more coyotes breed the more coyote populations increase coyotes are a fascinating they're a big problem uh at least in calden where i'm from they've you know like you were talking about the mountain lions that's kind of our version uh i don't think there's any mountain lions where i live but um the coyotes are a problem they're nabbing people's dogs and cats everywhere off the trail people will be walking on their leash and they're coming out and oh yeah

45:13nailing their little it happens out here i had one kill a chicken of mine two weeks ago crazy yeah i've got a video of the dead fucking chicken in my chicken coop and then uh here's what's really dark i dug a hole and it buried the chicken we don't eat our chickens we just use the eggs for eggs and they're like pets i mean like there's a video of me from my instagram walking uh in my yard holding my daughter's bunny and the chickens they're like they're following me around i wrote i'm the motherfucking chicken whisperer because it's a crazy video because these chickens just follow me yeah i mean they literally they're like pets yeah so when um 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 i'm like come on sweetie

45:59here 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 and a lot of farmers and people little hobby farms they use chickens as insect control yes in their vegetable garden oh they're great for that they're great for they they will fuck up some mice too man yeah you never seen nothing like it no you never i did not know that dude 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 um daughters found a hawk my wife decided in all of her uh you know women are always trying to like spruce things up she decided she was going to change some of these fences to a glass fence and the hawks didn't get the memo and they suck and they swan dived into this

46:51this 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 k-o'd and that blood coming out of its nose like literally it was like a ufc fight it was down and fucked up so uh my daughters 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 go to and they sell something called pinkies it's a very cute term for baby mice that can't really see yet and they're separated from their mother and they feed them to snakes it's mostly reptiles they feed them too but these um hawks would fuck these pinkies up and so to try to give this hawk some food while it was

47:49there over the weekend so it didn't starve that my daughters brought them the pinkies and there was one pinky left uh that the hawk didn't eat when we brought the hawk to the wildlife rescue place so they they fixed 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 left over and the thing was going to die it wasn't with its mother it was too small to drink milk and they were like we want to keep it we want to keep it as a pet i'm like that doesn't make any sense you were just feeding its brothers and sisters to this fucking hawk and now you guys want to keep it so i said listen i think we should feed it to the chickens and they're like no i was like well what do you guys what are you gonna do crazy you can't keep it it's gonna die do you understand that and they said okay

48:31okay okay i go well listen you don't have to watch i'll just go out and do it dude i put that fucking thing down and i have never seen those chickens so voracious attack that mouse and then they were all chasing the one chicken that had the mouse trying to steal it from her watch this i didn't know here's the chicken with a mouse right here look they get a mouse and they they fucked that mouse up man and they try to steal it from each other they're like give it to me give it to me give it to me there's a one where a cat is playing with a mouse a cat you've seen the one with the cat and the chicken jamie that's the best one because the cat everybody thinks of cats as being vicious cats are pretty vicious chickens are fucking dinosaurs man the way the chicken attacks the mouse like here he is see look at that he's got he's gonna eat the shit out of that mouse too he's gotta

49:18she's got to keep her eyes open make sure those other cunts don't come and steal her mouse see look at her they're experts in bobbing and weaving and turning their heads but so the cat is stalking the mouse and the chicken's like bitch you don't even know what you're doing the chicken just runs in and snatches it right in front of the cat the cat's like fuck seriously it's like my mouse they're way more ruthless i mean birds are ruthless creatures and chickens in particular are just i think it's just a part of their natural diet like when a mouse would get look at this see the cat the cat's like wow check out this mouse i can't believe how lucky i am so he's like you know cats for a cat half of it's a game right they just want to play with it yeah there's chick hanging back but as soon as the chicken finds it meanwhile that mouse does not seem scared of that chat he's not he's not scared i bet

50:11that mouse has toxo look at the chicken's like fuck you give me that thing that is crazy crazy i did not know that about chickens oh dude they'll fuck a mouse up but it's just the way they do it too he's fast too and they think of it as purely as food they're not thinking like the cat it's it's sport for the cat it's kind of fun yeah cat's probably fully fed and it's a house cat yeah it's a house cat it's a fat house cat he's just looking to kill something that's nature that's nature yeah people don't understand that they want to they want to remove themselves from it and that's great but they don't want to understand it they don't want to understand it they want something that aligns with their ideology and their ideology is love and compassion except for people that eat meat and then death death threats

50:53yeah 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 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 the really incredibly poor modern american diet that they see a lot of people when they go vegan what they're doing one of the best things that they're doing is they're eliminating all the bullshit they're eliminating all the trans fats and all the fucking all the terrible shit that a lot of people eat that isn't vegan yeah but the negative thing is most of them are eating diets that are far

51:51too carbohydrate rich and if they're not getting their blood checked they don't even know how unhealthy they are they convince themselves they're doing much better and they're feeling much better but a lack of cholesterol can fuck with your hormone functions a lot of vegans have low hormones because of that we uh one of our regulars at antler was talking to me about about his experience he used to have a organic vegetable farm uh 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 i had this organic vegetable farm and i thought that i was doing my body a service he said i thought i was doing something great for my body and he got really sick and he went to the doctor and the doctor said listen man you have to take supplements to supplement the

52:33the 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 he 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 you know descent and you need to eat you know this stuff to be healthy and that's when he he went back to eating meat and it doesn't matter you know what what you're trying like he he was living on an organic vegetable farm like what what more healthy you know vegetables could he be eating so yeah b12 is a big one and b12 essentially only comes from things other than vegetables you can get some of it from algae you can get i mean you definitely can get it from meat it's rich in meat and the other thing is iron iron you know people say well there's iron in vegetables there is but it's not very bio

53:20available right a lot of the various vitamins and even protein in vegetables not very bio available in most sources and it's how your body absorbs those nutrients as well like it might it might be rich in that that that substance but your body can't really absorb it well it's just everybody's body's different i mean it's just that is an absolute fact that there are some people that can eat certain diets and be very healthy and then other people eat them and they have a really hard time with them yeah but the other thing is that most of these people that are talking about how healthy and how great they feel there's a lot of it is sort of a placebo effect and they're not getting blood work done everyone regardless of what your diet is you should get blood work done just to find out if you have any potential problems that are on the horizon because there's a lot of times you'll

54:06feel okay and then you get your blood work done and the doctor will tell you hey man you're really low in vitamin b and d and a and you know you need this and that and you know this is this 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 uh algae is a great one you know it tastes like shit but it's very good for your body and you just add it to smoothies you know just add it with coconut milk or a bunch of other things you can do it i mean you definitely can eat a vegan diet and be healthy but you got to be on the ball you know and the the b12 one is a big one it's a massive amounts i was reading some crazy article the other day it said something like 90 of all vegans are b12 deficient i've heard this i'm not an expert but i've been

54:56reading it's terrible it's terrible um there's a guy named chris kresher that i've had on my podcast before who's a brilliant guy who um is uh 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 i love that's my favorite thing about hunting is the organ meat me too man i love liver liver and the heart um i i i went hunting and i came back and i brought the heart into the restaurant for the guys because i wanted to you know share with them like the experience of eating like fresh killed like the heart was still warm when i brought it to work and i the way i like to eat is either tartar

55:44like just mince it up raw uh or cook it like a steak so i cut it uh you know horizontally and into like it looks like a tenderloin steak and we all got like this like buzz like we just like shot a double espresso or something it was just like whoa and it's like it's so nutrient rich uh the organ meat i had alexander gustafs on the podcast yesterday is the ufc number one lightweight and 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 in sweden that's where he lives and we were both talking about how when you eat really nutrient dense wild game it gives you like a stimulated effect like your body is like yeah more of this give me more of this it's there's something in it yeah i don't know what

56:32and it just tastes it tastes like it's supposed to taste it's you can't explain it the flavor is totally different even when you know we're buying from these really cool game farms it's different than the deer that i go and and shoot because you know that deer i i just shot could be like six seven years old versus at the farm it's maybe one or two right um but again it's it's eating such a diverse diet and it's you know my belief is that that's how we're supposed to be eating well it's definitely how we were eating for the longest time yeah and it is entirely possible that if humans like say if you got an isolated group of humans that stuck to a very very rigid vegan diet for many many many generations it's entirely possible that our genes would adapt to that diet and lifestyle it's totally possible the reality of your current physical form is it's most likely not designed for that and this

57:23is just based on genes and on genetics and epigenetics and all the the various things that they've methods that they've devised to try to study what makes you a person and where where your ancestors came from and how did how did your ancestors develop did they eat mostly fish like there's people that live like in the in the northwest like the extreme like in alaska and inuits and people their their entire history they've evolved from eating fish and whale and whale blubber and seal and seal fat and there's real changes to who they are as people like that first of all one of the big ones is the people that live up there their hands don't get cold like ours do their hands have better circulation i've heard that when when uh the indigenous communities um there was some program where they were trying to get them to stop

58:18hunting whales or 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 yeah it's kind of weird it's weird like why would we be forcing these people to eat something that you know is foreign to them and it's it's it's not the the fat content in in beef is way different than whale and seal like it's like apples and oranges well it's also you're looking at what we were talking about before like white meat from turkey domestic turkey versus the the turkey that's a wild turkey when you see cows that you get these corn fed cows you have this pale meat that meat is pale because it's not as good for you it's it's

59:02more filled with fat which tastes good but it's just it's not as nutrient dense when you have a moose steak you've seen a moose steak before right it's a fucking it's lean yeah but it's almost like like purple like dark dark dark yeah it's fucking dark man that's that's way different it's a way different thing yeah that cow is just some it's like the fattest laziest person you know like if you thought about like take an athlete like lebron james who's just like this super athlete and compare like the composition of his body to some fucking slob who just drinks soda all day and is tired he's on antidepressants and antibiotics because his body's fucking deteriorating rapidly he's got arthritis in all of his joints because he's too fat that literally is a cow that's literally one of these fucking farm raised over stuffed corn fed cows and they grind that fat fuck into a hamburger

60:02and it's just not the same i'm not you know i'm not endorsing eating lebron james but i'm saying there's a difference in what the 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 better for you so that's that's a big part of what i do is is and it's why one of the reasons why i love nature so much is is foraging and i take my kids out to the woods and we go pick mushrooms and since they were like you know babies my son's been dragged in the woods since he was one what kind of mushrooms uh so my favorite one to harvest where i live is morels oh yeah they're really funky looking they kind of look like a brain or something something weird

60:45um i wear them online i've never seen them in the wild there's nothing that tastes quite like them that you can you can buy they're almost like a meat they're very meaty they're very meaty and there's a couple different kinds there's like black ones and kind of white or yellowish ones um and they're just like it's so fascinating to go out into the wild and and pick your own food and when you come home and cook it like nothing else tastes like that and like mushrooms from the store they're totally different and it's just it's something really special that you can go and experience in the wild yeah morels are a real weird one and i've been reading up on them one of the strange things is when there's fire forest fires yeah they pop up like the next season they're like cleansing they're they're cleansing the earth i don't i'm not a mycologist so i don't know uh you know i just

61:28enjoy finding them and eating them but i do know there's a cleansing property to decaying uh to decaying uh matter so when when trees fall down like the the best place to find morels is i look for trees with no bark on them so they're they're really super old uh that'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 or in the field and you kind of see this one tree that has no bark on it and it's about to fall over there'll be like 20 morels at the base and they're kind of they're feeding off the root system that's underground yeah i'm absolutely fascinated by mushrooms i had uh paul stamets on the podcast i saw i saw that one how great is that guy super cool with his mushroom hat yeah that was amazing i got one if you want one that's awesome i got he gave me two mushroom that's amazing what am i going to do with two

62:14case one breaks yeah i have an extra mushroom hat but there's a really cool documentary actually um it's called know your mushrooms i think it's by ron by ron mann and he he he he travels along with these mushroom hunters uh i think a lot a lot of it's in oregon and up the coast of california down in new mexico but they're they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms but they track these foragers and it's such a cool movie that's interesting um the what i was going to say is you you better know mushrooms because they'll fucking kill you if you don't 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 they're morels like i found them mountain

62:57biking and there's this stigma you know like as as a kid like your parents are like don't don't eat those don't touch those they're poisonous they'll kill you and it's like okay well then you just you just have this idea well mushrooms come from the grocery store well it's like no they grow they come in the wild and you know that's that's like my thing with meat is i i teach my kids like meat doesn't come from the grocery store it's not it's not a styrofoam package that's not where it comes from it's an animal yeah um and and yeah and it's just like you know mushrooms that grow in the wild and they're just they're crazy they they're this like michael micro uh michael risel yeah it's yeah michael riser relationship with the uh animals or with the uh the trees rather um do you know the story of the amanita muscaria i know what they are uh i don't know the story the amanita muscaria is the

63:40most fascinating one to me because that's the one that looks like looks like santa claus or the mario card with white yeah that is the subject of a book by a guy named john marco allegro who was one of the head scholars uh 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 he sort of when he started realizing that there was all these different religions that had similar stories and he was you know found all these uh different connections and he was trying trying to like figure out what the origins of all these stories were well after studying the dead sea scrolls for i think it was 14 years before he wrote this book he decided that all of christianity was a massive misunderstanding

64:27and what it was originally about was these stories this collection of stories that were about fertility rituals and psychedelic mushroom use and he traced the word jesus back to an ancient sumerian word that was a mushroom covered in god's semen and that when god would come on the earth that's what rain was rain was god coming on the earth and that these mushrooms would rise up out of the ground they would eat them and trip their balls off right that's a crazy story so maybe you got to think yeah 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 a bad winter you know a drought people would starve to death it was very very common so they would take foraging extremely serious and they knew what they

65:19could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat well they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees and carnivorous trees would grow these weird looking shiny red and white mushrooms under them that's what carnivorous trees is pine trees that's what we use for christmas trees yeah those red and white packages they they are like the shiny packages underneath the christmas tree they are the color of santa claus yeah they're common in siberia they're eaten constantly by caribou caribou are reindeer reindeer are addicted to these to the point where when people are having psychedelic mushroom rituals and they go outside to take a leak the caribou will knock them over to get to the amanita muscaria piss in the sand because they smell the amanita muscaria in the piss and one of the ways

66:09these guys trip their balls off is they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine they have a second process of this here's where it gets even crazier in the times in siberia where it would become extremely snowy when this the shaman would visit the way they would get into the house is through the fucking chimney because the door would be snowed in so they would climb in through the chimney i mean there's so many parallels to santa claus and to christianity to this one mushroom that they think was a massive part of shamanistic rituals there it is right there this is this rudolph the red-nosed reindeer yeah yeah oh that is so crazy i'm sure 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

66:53to verify um 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 um he came out with another book called the dead sea scrolls and the christian myth which is still available then more recently like really recently within the last decade uh a guy named jan ervin republished um the john marco allegro books with permission from his family i think it might have actually been one of those things where when a book is over 25 years old it becomes like public domain or something like that too but this this book and this this story behind it is incredibly fascinating and what he's basically saying is that and it makes sense if you were living thousands of years ago and you stumbled upon these psychedelic mushrooms and you took them

67:41you would experience god you literally would think that that psychedelic state was you communicating with god they would want to hide those from the romans so they hid them in parables and stories and he explains what the original meaning of all these parables and stories are because of course you're going from ancient hebrew which is extremely complicated language that also involves numbers the letters are also numbers and then that's translated to latin and to greek and then eventually to english so a lot is lost in that translation so it really takes a linguist and a biblical scholar to kind of understand whether or not what this guy is saying is correct i'm obviously not one of those so i'm just talking shit but it's a there's so many parallels it's almost like how could it be just coincidental that santa claus is red and white that santa claus likes reindeers that the christmas tree is

68:31something that we use and the presents are under the christmas tree that santa claus lives in the fucking north pole which is siberia which is where caribou live and which is where these mushrooms are very common i mean there's so many parallels it's really kind of fucking crazy that's cool yeah it's a great book anybody i really highly recommend it because it's one of those books we just gotta you read a few chapters you gotta go i think i may have to go back over that again yeah go over it again because it's so it's it's so freaky very cool but i've stumbled upon those in the wild those amaneeta miscarriers i've never found those and there's like those there's like you have to cook them first you can't eat them wrong you have to boil them yeah we made tea out of them they will make you sick apparently if you don't do it right um but yeah no i i forage more for uh morels are my

69:11favorite uh chanterelle is obviously awesome like awesome culinary mushroom uh what's that yellow one that grows on trees it's like a thick uh chicken of the woods yes that one's and it tastes like chicken it is unbelievable that one's amazing it's really funky uh we found i was walking with the kids in a park downtown toronto and i look over and there's this massive it's on my instagram uh massive yellow kind of looks like goo growing on this tree and it was a premature chicken of the woods and it just looked like this blob and then if if i were to leave it it would start to kind of shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms um and so i i left it for like a week and went back and harvested it and it's like it's like tender juicy chicken flavor it is bizarre oh that's kind of cool so you were just like hoping nobody else saw it yeah and it was like it was in like a really public

69:57uh park and i was like oh man like i better get this before someone else finds it well how many people would know in a public park in toronto yeah uh there's a few there's there's definitely a few 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 just kind of looked at me and kind of went away they didn't want to share their knowledge with me there it is there it is so that's the it's bizarre man look at you like zoo zookeeper or zoo rander i was like i was so pumped i was so excited the face you're making there's another you look like chris d'alea there doesn't he look a little like d'alea that's hilarious oh that's so cool yeah oh so there's like a little tiny one uh you know below it but why do they grow on trees i don't know i think well that one you can see the bark is like

70:39deteriorating so again it's it's uh it's feeding off the decaying uh tree wow look how badass that looks so if that if you actually go and i found ones like that too if you go and and harvest those they're really woody by that time and they're they're kind of a little too tough to eat oh really um so yeah you want to you want to get them when they're kind of younger like that so is there a color change um i i guess i guess when they when they're older they get a bit more orange yeah from that kind of yellow premature see see that one where there's like yellow yeah those are like perfect yeah right there it's perfect yeah oh wow that looks like almost like cauliflower totally yeah it's really really neat wow it's fascinating you know the the mushroom world is is uh super cool do you know they breathe air i did not know that they breathe air and they breathe out carbon dioxide

71:23yeah they're closer to animals than they are to vegetables that's really cool yeah they're weird fungus is a weird thing man yeah well a lot of it's like um misunderstood well i i guess i was i was watching the podcast with the with the mushroom guy paul stamets yeah shout out to paul um but like a lot of it is 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 and was in a lightning storm and like connected to the fucking universe first time ever doing it yeah he did that ever doing it yeah he did that i think he was in high school right or something somewhere around that very young yeah crazy he's awesome such a trip though well and i was reading that like the the philocybin is linked to your incurring depression and things like that

72:12which which i don't know a lot about but um it's fascinating the effects they have on on uh on people john hopkins is doing some studies on him the most fascinating of all the mushroom theories is by the late great terence mckenna and his brother dennis mckenna who's uh still alive and a scientist explained it on my first podcast with him so if anybody's interested find that and download it it's dennis is a brilliant guy and this the theory is called the stoned ape theory and this coincides what we're talking about about with hunting and consumption of meat um leading to uh us becoming humans there's a doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years it's like apparently one of the biggest mysteries in the fossil record they do not understand why something so important like the thing that actually created the theory of i mean that of evolution explained

73:10evolution like this very organ doubled over a period of two million years and i don't know why terence believes that the reason coincided with climate change and that as the climate changed these rainforests receded into grasslands and these lower hominids like our ancestors came down from the trees and started experimenting with new food sources and one of the things they experimented with was psychedelic mushrooms and that through psilocybin which they found by flipping over cow patties a couple things happened one um it increased visual acuity mushrooms especially in low doses increased visual acuity which would make them better hunters they could see better made them more intuitive made them more creative and also the way dennis explains the effect of psilocybin on the brain he was saying that

74:00it 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 that's crazy terence called it the stoned ape theory that's what he that's how he thinks we became human that's amazing yeah it sounds stupid sounds stupid until you do mushrooms yeah and then you go that makes sense and you go oh okay okay okay okay maybe yeah maybe yeah why is this illegal then you start going what everybody should do this oh my god everybody should do this now when you first started cooking um did you went how old were you when you became a chef um well it's kind of a fluke funny story um i was a 13 year old kid and i i wanted a part-time job you know like a newspaper route or something like that and i went to i lived in a

74:48little town uh on this horse farm in the country and i rode my bike uh down to this gas station and i applied to pump gas and this guy had a diner on the corner and was like hey man like i don't need anyone to pump gas but can you cook and i grew up cooking at home with my mom because she would work late and she would call me on her way home and tell me how to start dinner so she'd be like turn on the oven get the chicken out of the fridge get the shake and bake and you know she would walk me through it and i'd start dinner and she'd get home and finish it so i totally yeah i can you know cook or whatever and i 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 um and it just stuck it's one of those things that uh you just kind of

75:29grow up doing i you know i wanted money to buy skateboards and pot and stupid shit and um yeah i just it just kind of stuck and then uh all through high school i had a job cooking and i really i 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 uh experience cooking and i thought well you know i'm just gonna go to chef school and uh and make a go of this 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 i fell in love with food uh i you

76:19know i was a 17 year old kid with a vegetable garden like who does that you know and uh and then i got into hunting and foraging and learning about food and i just i totally just fell in love with it and so how did antler come about you brought a bunch of these i brought a bunch of these yeah so this photo uh i actually took this photo it's blown up in the restaurant um all the green on the ground is uh wild leeks so in the spring and i actually took this turkey hunting um and i looked over and was like whoa cool that's amazing and so it's like a postcard yes postcard this is actually a sketch my friend did of a of a deer skull that i shot oh um so anyway antler came about because um i worked for a celebrity chef uh he gave me his cookbook and i was hunting and foraging doing all the stuff and i thought well you know one of the ways i can make an impact on the world is i can teach people

77:05about what i'm doing and i went i 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 so i thought you know i'm going to help educate you know uh modern civilization about hunting and foraging and i thought this will be like my my make a difference in the world and uh i ended up uh hanging out with a really good friend of mine um one of my best friends today and he's a family friend uh documentary filmmaker by the name of jody shapiro um and you know we had this deal and he said you know i'll help you with the photos if uh you teach me how to cook and uh he was he was taking some culinary courses at the local college

77:54just 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 out of he had this really nice condo and uh so i put on this game dinner i we sold tickets and i knew there were laws about serving game in restaurants so in canada and i'm pretty sure the u.s is pretty similar you can't serve wild game in a restaurant so there's public health excuse me um all meat has to be inspected through a slaughterhouse europe is different you could kind of do whatever in europe but so i thought okay cool we'll have this game dinner out of his house and we're in the clear but with the with the ministry of natural resources you can't sell game meat so for any kind of profit but we weren't profiting off it we were just going to

78:40have fun um anyway do this game dinner uh a local paper uh a national paper i actually wanted to buy ticket they came we thought they're going to write this little blurb about it they did a two-page spread in the national newspaper about this game dinner so we started to get all this press about it and 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 and really just have fun and explore uh canadian cuisine it's something that i'm really passionate about um something that's really you know 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 are these traditional recipes or are they improvised well i you know a lot of it is is improvised it's a lot of it's my take on it um

79:29you know i i definitely want to do some more kind of studying about native and indigenous cooking um you know traveling across the country is something i want to do and and learning from uh 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 and and for me it's it's morels it's it's maple syrup it's the wild leeks in this photo it's deer and turkey and rabbit and these things we all we serve at antler because that's what's growing around us in canada it's wild fish and thanks again for the maple syrup man i'm gonna have to break my diet to enjoy some of this but that is the liquidiest looking richest looking maple syrup i've ever seen yeah man that looks amazing so i was telling you earlier that takes uh 18 liters of sap boiled down to make one liter wow of syrup and the cool part is you can

80:17drink the sap it's a natural uh it's full of a natural electrolytes and minerals so it's kind of like a coconut water uh type of beverage what's crazy to me is how someone figured out to do that like 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 uh when it's uh freezing at night and it thaws during the day and what happens is the the tree roots are sucking up as much water as it can to feed the buds that it's trying to uh to make to make leaves again how the fuck did anybody figure that out no idea how to figure out how to take the take the sap from the trees like that it's so simple it's it's really really cool uh when you when you go you know you drill a hole in the tree you put in this little tap and hang a bucket and it just drips out and wow yeah and how long does it take to drip

81:04um 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 okay yeah yeah that's great so that's awesome getting the winter fat off so when you were talking about indigenous people how they would cook their food have you learned any of those dishes yet um i have um like i said i'm not an expert um but it's something i'm we're going to be kind of studying uh moving forward 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 want to travel and travel across the country and learn really what that is um there's so many different indigenous communities in canada

81:49like canada's 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 oceans you have an ocean up top fuck that ocean though isn't that ocean can you walk across it it's frozen but uh jesus yeah it's uh it's something that i definitely want to learn more about um like how would they cook moose do you know um a lot of it would be open fire and a lot of it's raw you know like the the seal meat and whale blubber you know they don't like in the arctic they don't have a lot of wood to burn you know and they would have like uh oil lamps from the oil from the blubber but uh you know a lot of the cooking is is raw yeah steve ranella went to nunavac is that it nunavac yeah yeah something like that how do you say it nunavac island nunavut yeah i think there's yeah the the north there's the

82:39northwest territories and there's nunavut and they were eating a lot of um fish frozen fish that was dipped in seal oil crazy dip the fish in seal oil and eat it they have a tremendous amount of oil and fat in their diet yeah you know which kind of makes keto diet yeah it's super keto and i mean they're they're up there in the coldest of cold climates one of the things we do that's kind of cool is uh uh i know the native the indigenous cultures would would make cedar tea and it's it's full of uh um uh vitamin c and minerals and nutrients um but we we do a cedar uh sorbet so we boil cedar leaves and then i just add sugar and make it into like an ice so it's a frozen kind of sorbet wow which is really cool and it's it's like uh when you eat it it's like the forest in your mouth it's really really neat and then where do you get the cedar from we just go into the woods and cut it down and we bring

83:30that 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 then i'll go and you know forage for all this stuff and bring it into antler uh another way we use the cedar is in a cocktail we do a cedar gin sour so we infuse we infuse the gin with uh with cedar leaves for like a week and then we shake that with some simple syrup damn dude you make me hungry yeah so when you um it's interesting that when you go to the woods to forage for uh plant life it's totally legal yeah you could sell it yeah but if you forage for animal life you can't do that i think that is because of market hunting that really decimated most of the population of north american game animals in the 1800s and early into the 1900s like most people associate that with the death of the buffalo yeah the um and it makes sense and i think i

84:23think 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 you know but 45 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 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 actually newfoundland um they're allowed to serve wild game and the hunter has to go and get a permit uh to sell and then he has to bring it to a butcher that has a permit to process it and expect it and then that butcher can then sell it to a restaurant oh well that makes sense yeah and it's it's controlled and like i don't want to decimate the population i don't want to hurt uh anything is that the way to say it though newfoundland

85:08newfoundland yeah i think it's newfoundland i think if you call it newfoundland it's like calling chicago chicago they'll get pissed at you like you're a fucking fake canadian i have an ant from there yeah yeah i don't want market hunting of wild game and it's because i love wild animals again what do you eat them then yeah how do you love an animal you have to yeah well i just think it's very complex that's what i think i think just staying alive being a human is very complex and i think we have very simplistic ways of looking at it yeah 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 yeah that's supported by more and more research every day they're they're finding out that plants have some interconnected network of communication with each

86:00other and that they recognize when they're being eaten and they they change their flavor profile to make themselves taste terrible to animals that are eating them there's some communication between them and there is some sort of a primitive life form that many argue are far more complex than things that vegans won't eat like mollusks like mollusks although we think of them as animals they're the simplest dumbest fucking things on earth vice just did an article that uh questioning whether mollusks were vegan i thought it was kind of funny they should 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 they have a cleaning property too i've i've watched something that they were using mussels to clean up ocean beaches and filter the water and uh fast and mushrooms too apparently are very cleansing they're trying to

86:48find ways to use mushrooms to clean kind of oil spills and you know yeah screwed up environmental things people should eat mollusks they really should and they should also eat eggs eat eggs folks just eat them from ethical animals and i'm just saying this just as a person who values health yeah and 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 nutrition has on physical performance and i think eggs are gigantic they're so goddamn good for your health and this idea that somehow or another you're doing something cruel my chickens are my friends you see it from that video that's proof in the pudding they're not scared of me at all they're running around with you they're running around with me and i eat their eggs and those eggs are good for you

87:35and i know everybody can't do that but you can get these kind of 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 extra buck or two bucks 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 like 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 you give people the option to make the most amount of

88:21money and not have to account for ethics or cruelty standards or whatever 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 yeah 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 i think it's one of the things that really ramps up the the the anger on the the side of the animal rights activist 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 yeah and it's why i asked you to come on because i thought it was so frustrating and watching you carve that venison up in front of those people what were they screaming at you murderer murderer that's not true yeah that's like saying you know it's just it's like saying you're

89:24you're a thief because you cut grass like it's it's no it's not it's not murder it's it's killing animals 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 they're like no they're murdering animals they kind of laugh 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 this this beautiful creature that just wants to live and it's a chicken she's talking about a chicken and they're like my friend the chicken was killed and it's like what whoa and everybody in the restaurant is like

90:15what the fuck i've seen these videos and like they'll storm a restaurant there'll be like 50 people they go and like occupy a steakhouse here's this crazy lady here we go i have a little girl she was very abused for her entire life she was terrified she has a very determined look in her eyes wherever she goes and she was hurt and abused her entire life because of this establishment and because of establishments like it she was locked away she was hidden she had nobody there for her she was crying she was scared every single moment look at the maitre d what and because her usefulness had run out yeah my girl in the background someone was going to murder her someone's going to murder her and i can see you smiling and i can see you laughing but to her this is not funny i can see you smiling laughing at least i think at least i'm not busy yeah that's true that's such a restaurant way of thinking

91:16she wouldn't be with me right now she would be gone she should go keep it going just like her sisters just like everybody who we left behind where's the chicken part come soon crazy town disrupt speciesism uh oh it's unfair to those mice oh her name is snow and every time you see someone eating somebody else's eggs or somebody else's body oh eggs you're going to remember her name her name is snow she's a beautiful little girl and she just wants to live she's a mouse murderer this isn't food it's not food it's violence now here they sing it together look at they all get together with signs oh my god look at this it's not food it's violence please think of their names okay cut it short oh my god you should see the way your cunt little bird snow fucks up a worm you crazy bitch fucks up mice throw a mouse in the cage no snow only grain oh this guy's amazing fuck you that guy's funny this guy's amazing so yeah there's like

92:37you know i get that 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 it's not disrupting a business yeah there's not it's not the place for it that's harassment look if you the best place for something like that is really what we just saw a video make make a video about your thoughts yeah you know if you i mean if you they honestly think that what you're doing is wrong like this is what something like youtube is for yeah make a video where you state your case or come and talk to me and all right they didn't even come and talk to me they just showed up my restaurant with signs but at least with a video you leave the comments open and then people debate they decide whether or not they agree or disagree or you fucking crazy asshole let that snow loose watch what she does

93:22watch what she does to every fucking bug she finds she's a murderer she's not she's not a vegetarian your fucking chicken's not a vegetarian no 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 yeah same like cats cats need meat you can't feed a cat a vegan diet well you can it's one of my bits I have a bit about it do you really fucking hilarious because of something that I found online when someone was angry at me when someone was angry at me I went to her page and one of the things said hashtag vegan cat and I went oh Jesus and I went down a rabbit hole I think I heard that was illegal it should be like animal rights people will come it fucking should be take your cat we'll talk about that later I don't want to do my bit I'm doing a comedy special soon but the the problem with this is that as we said before it becomes like a contest it becomes

94:10like a battleground yeah that's my concern it's like how does this end yeah how do we bridge the gap how do we get people like how do they stop fucking with you I have no idea well their their thing is they want us to put a sign in our window that says explain that that you know we're mistreating animals and animal lives are their right and they say you know this extortion if we put this sign in our window they're gonna 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 have you gone outside so no we had one of our managers go outside and they're they just screamed at her they wasn't the time I think just murderer what about snow yeah what about my little girl so you know we did send an email trying to we invited them to go foraging with us and we talked about our different ideologies and how you know they're really far apart

94:58but maybe we can come to some kind of understanding and you know at the time they didn't respond they didn't respond for a while and you know now I don't I don't think you know I don't think that anything good would come of that meeting at this point so so what do you do how's business by the way business has always been good for us we were very lucky well it sounds like you have a great restaurant I mean I'm sure that's part of it thank you but we've had some international recognition we've I've done a lot of traveling last year I've been to five continents in the last year two of them cooking I went to Abu Dhabi with there's a company called IMG if you know them they own the UFC now they run they have a culinary department and they run these festivals called Taste and our first year opening we were part of this Taste Festival and I didn't even know there was a competition going on these people came by and they were like

95:51oh we're judging this competition and we want to try your food and I was like 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 compete against 11 other chefs from around the world it was amazing it was incredible and then from there I think six or eight months later there was this festival in Australia so they brought me to Australia to cook in Western Australia at this event called the Gourmet Escape really really cool event and it was down the road from a deer farm and we were putting on a lunch and dinner for 200 people so we actually roasted two whole deer asado style over open fire whoa where did you do that? right in the woods it was incredible wow yeah there's photos on my Instagram we're in the antler kitchen bar dot or at antler kitchen bar on Instagram there's photos of this

96:47this asado deer it was super super super cool what does that mean asado? asado is I think it's the Argentinian cooking style and it's a whole animal that's kind of split down the middle and kind of like flayed across there it is whoa and it's really cool so pig is probably the best one to do it with because of the fat content deer and lamb and stuff like that you kind of have to baste it to keep it moist how do you regulate temperature when it comes to something like this just by stacking up the wood? stacking up the wood and kind of how far it's leaning on it how do you know how to do it? just practice just playing around having fun just low and slow have you done this before many times? yeah so we do it at the restaurant I do it in my backyard a lot I actually did it for my wedding we did two pigs for my wedding I'm like poking the fire in my suit that's so graphic it's great yeah that got a lot of hate

97:35there was a bunch of hate on that but it's food you know and people want to disconnect themselves from where it's coming from but anyway back to your question you know business has always been good and business is business there's good days and bad days you know right now there's a lot of attention on antler a lot of media attention on antler so we're a little bit busier than normal right now get ready after this podcast it's gonna get crazy it's gonna be nuts down there and there's gonna be a bunch of people on your side too yeah and that's hopefully nothing bad happens like people don't get into anything physical or no even start shouting at each other yeah but that the shouting stuff was happening but but yeah hopefully you know this will kind of all smooth out and people can learn to to get it to get along and live together yeah well it doesn't seem like that's what they want though it seems like what they want

98:21is for you to bend their demands I mean that's like what a lot of this is when it comes to change you know when it comes to people wanting change they want you to change yeah they and they want their right and they want you to admit you're wrong and this is this is a real problem real problem with something that's complex yeah and the funny thing was like we've had vegan and vegetarian items on our menu since 2015 when we opened and so I think it was like the second or third week they came we thought okay we're gonna we're gonna feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign and hopefully like that makes them happy and so we we feature one of our vegan dishes on the sign and then we saw from their online post that they thought that we made their posts where we made them change a meat dish to a vegan dish we have to keep pushing them and it was so frustrating like no you guys just don't know who we are well that's exactly what

99:10I'm talking about it becomes a contest or a battleground an ideological battleground yeah that 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 gonna change if I change it's because of the evidence and because of thinking and careful consideration and I've done that I've done a lot of thinking I've done a lot of careful consideration and that's what led me to becoming a hunter in the first place yeah how did you start hunting? Steve Rinella took me out I had been thinking about it for a long time and the main reason I had been thinking about it was because of those PETA videos those fucking horrific

100:01factory farming videos I was like I don't want to eat that I don't want 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 you know figure out a way to get around it and I really started getting very very interested in hunting but I didn't know how to start I didn't know where to start and we were filming a fear factor episode at Tone Ranch this is 270,000 acre ranch in the middle of the country wow middle of the state rather and they were saying that they have wild pigs there and they would teach you how and so that was something that I had considered before I met Rinella yeah 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 it's amazing I'm a hunter I'm like that's it the cool part about hunting is nothing goes to waste so I take the hides to a guy to have them tanned so I actually made

100:53a knife roll out of one of the hides I have an apron out of one of the hides my wedding ring has antler in it wow yeah that's pretty cool I'm proud of that one that's crazy and yeah and I use all the bones to make a stalk 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 the deer and different animals is the neck and the neck has got all this really super flavorful kind of gelatinous meat kind of in between the cartilage and stuff like that and you make a stew with that stuff and it is unbelievably tasty and you know I think and a lot of guys when they go hunting they kind of breast out the birds and they leave the little legs and they don't really know that you know how to cook the legs of a turkey or a duck so that's one of the reasons why I want to write this book and to really educate people

101:39how to use those tougher cuts that you know can be kind of tricky to cook Rinella has a couple of good books on that and one of the things that he's really into is making shanks and asabuco so good braising things so good yeah and he's also you know a big advocate of not wasting anything that's why he's into organ meat loves liver and we ate liver over the fire that night oh so good I had turkey feathers in my little boutonniere on my wedding day from a turkey oh look at you yeah it was neat it was really cool well it's one of the reasons why it's so kind of crazy that you're the guy that they picked on and not the butcher shop across the street or not you know 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 battleground on their side it doesn't leave any room for giving in there's no room for reasons just you're either

102:32an animal murderer or you're the most amazing person ever because you're vegan go vegan you know it's a really it's a new thing in terms of first world problems and first world countries I mean people have been eating vegetarian dishes forever but in terms of like being ideologically rabid about your you know your position this is this is very new it's within the last couple of decades yeah it's 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 saying reasonable people yeah saying like hey these aren't our beliefs we're really sorry what you're going through you know you have our support and it's some of our customers are actually vegan and they come for like vegetarian risotto and like mushroom risotto that they know are like you know really cool wild mushrooms

103:23that you can't buy in the store so it's you know it is unfortunate it is kind of it's kind of sad but you know we're just going to continue you know being who we are and hopefully that you know like none of them have actually come in for dinner you know of course they're not going to you're carving up deer in the front window man you fucking murderer so there's you're right in the middle of this right now which is kind of interesting to talk to us about this is not like after the fact it's all going down right now it's still going on they're you know they're coming back weekly but it's kind of at this point it's like dinner and a show like people want to see it people are requesting the window table well guess what fans of this podcast they're going to want a front row seat it's going to be there's a lot of freaks out there listening to this that are going to want to be there for the freak show well Toronto it's only about

104:14an hour and a half drive from Buffalo at the border so it's make it across you 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 yeah so antlerkitchenbar.com is the website there it is scroll down Jimmy so you can see a look at some of that yummy murder so that deer dish whoa dude that was cool you put a skull on the table with all that stuff so that platter that charcuterie platter is all the meat from that deer wow and the terrine on the side the little square piece was actually meat from that skull so I braised that skull turned the meat into a terrine from the tongue and the cheek and then served that was actually at the game dinner that the newspaper did when are you heading back to Toronto Friday so I'm here visiting with family and then I'm do you have access to a freezer yes I have two commercial freezers in the back

105:08I want to give you some elk oh dude that is amazing thank you from that elk thank you so much that's an honor man I'll cook it with my dad this week please do and take pictures and I'll put it up on Instagram 100% man oh beautiful I love it so yeah antler kitchen antler kitchen bar dot com at the hunter chef at antler kitchen bar all that kind of stuff you can find me and what is your Instagram my Instagram is at the hunter chef at the hunter chef okay thanks man it was a lot of fun I really appreciate it and I hope this all works out and all angry vegans please just 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 battleground 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% that aren't fucking idiots I really do

106:03and I hope we can find it thank you alright fuckers be nice to each other bye