Joe Rogan - Radical Vegans & Factory Farming

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 kale or whatever it is that we grew in our garden to. And it tastes better. 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. Yes. And it's like nothing compares to that freshness that you go to the grocery store that may be 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, nothing tastes as good as that. Right. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate where vegans and animal rights activists are coming from because it's coming from, I think there's a lot of distortion with like really angry ones. But this is my take on a lot of this. If you get a group of a hundred people, one of them for sure is a fucking idiot, just out of just sheer odds. Right? Like what are the odds one of them is a fucking idiot? It's pretty strong, right? Well, if you're going to get a group of a hundred vegans, you're going to get at least one of them that's fucking idiot. And they're going to be, some of them are violent. Some of them are super aggressive about it. I mean, there's a ton of them online. They can go, their identity is completely wrapped around veganism. They use vegan in their name. It's always I'm the vegan this or the vegan that. That is a hundred percent of their name. So a hundred percent of their identity. So they can't, they can't separate from it ever. Like that is who they are forever. And there's been some serious problems. What was the name of that cafe again? Cafe gratitude. There were some people that were running a vegan restaurant. I think they have a couple of them, right? In LA and they were having health issues and some people, the vegan diet just doesn't agree with them. They're doing it wrong. Maybe they have unique dietary needs, but they started raising cattle and they started eating those cattle and the vegans freaked out death threats, all this crazy shit coming after them, protesting. And you know, these people were terrified. They're older folks. They're, you know, they're elderly. There it 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 all the right reasons. Yeah. If they're misinformed. If you choose to not eat meat and choose that kind of lifestyle, like power to you. It's amazing. And I think that, you know, if it works for you and your body, that's great. And for me, it doesn't work for me. Like, I've done vegan cleanses. I've done the juice cleanses. I've done, you know, I've gone out for as a chef to vegan restaurants and I'm not full. You know, I'll eat three or four courses. I'll spend tons of money and half an hour later I'm starving. Starving. And I just need to eat something with protein and lots of protein and it's meat or fish or you know, I've made tofu from scratch from soybeans and it's just, it doesn't, it's not the same. Yeah. Well, right now people are screaming at their, you're doing it wrong. My vegan food is amazing. I love it. It's the most delicious. But I'm not full. Some of it is. Yeah. Some of it's good. I eat vegan all the time. I eat, there's a vegan restaurant near me. I go to it all the time. Sometimes I get dirty looks. It's people like, oh, this motherfucker's here. Why are you here? Why are you here? You're not allowed to eat. You're not one of us. You're not allowed to eat our food. It's just, it's very unfortunate that I think these ideological groups get tainted by the most extreme members. And I think that's true on the hunting side too. And you got guys like fucking Ted Nuget, you know, and all the people that I think that they distort the real sort of fascinating and mystical qualities of wildlife and harvesting wildlife and being out there and experiencing nature. It's an almost psychedelic experience to hunt and be in the wild. That sounds so counterintuitive to someone who's never experienced it. But the world of these animals, when you're away from your cell phone, when you're away from, you know, television and all the bullshit and the computer, when you're out there in the wild, you are almost in another dimension. If you're in complete silence in the forest and your mind goes into a completely different sort of mode that is familiar, but yet alien. It's familiar in a way that your body's like, oh, this is hunting. This is what humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years. This is why we became human. I mean, 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. And I'm sure the vegan argument against that would be, well, that's then, and we're past that now. Well, we're not. No, we're not. 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 after us. They start encroaching on people. Well, we're in their territory. We shouldn't be in their place. Humans and, look, I'm on team people. So I don't know what the fuck you're saying here. 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 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 can leave them to their own devices and they can sort of sort it out. But you know how they sort it out? Through disease and starvation. I mean, what happens is there's too many animals and not enough food. So they get horrific diseases. That's where mange comes from. That's where a lot of like serious diseases that infect wildlife come from. They come from a lack of food or overpopulation. That's how nature sorts it out. 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. We worked hard to get there. We are. And I think it comes with a certain responsibility. And that responsibility is really, we're really doing a disservice to that responsibility with factory farming. And that's one of the main arguments for veganism. One of the main arguments is the horrific treatment of those animals, whether it's veganism or whether it's rather factory farming or whether it's a large scale dairy farms where they mistreat their cows or the chicken farms or all these different factory farms where they treat these animals not as a living being, but as a commodity, then it becomes a giant problem. But if you look at guys like, do you know what Joel Salton is? No. Joel Salton is a very fascinating guy. He runs a farm called Poly Face 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, they go right back into the chicken house. And this is where he gets the eggs from. This is how they raise chickens. This is how they raise cattle. They do it with all these different animals. And his perspective on all this is that if you do it right, it's not horrific. It's not an evil thing. And that these animals are living the way they're meant to live. Right. That's one of the things that we do at Antler is to find those farmers and guys like that. One of the farms we get our deer from, they have 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. And then when it's time, they're collected and harvested. And that is where we get our meat from. And we try really hard not to buy from these factors. We don't serve chicken, beef, or pork. We have bison, pheasant, duck, wild boar because these game farms, they don't have these massive large scale operations. And I buy direct from the farmer and they can tell me what their diet is. They're good months, they're bad months. We know all about these animals that we're bringing to the restaurant. And we're really proud of that.