Joe Beef and his partner, Fred, are writing a cookbook about surviving the apocalypse. They talk about what it s like to live off the grid in the dead of winter, and how to survive the cold in a city where the power is out and the heat is off. Plus, they talk about their new cookbook, Surviving the Apocalypse: A Cookbook About Surviving The Apocalypse, and how they plan to survive a nuclear apocalypse. Joe Beef is a stand-up comedian, writer, and podcaster. He's been in the comedy game for a long time, and has been writing for years. Fred is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and actor. They live in Montreal, Canada, and have been cooking up a storm in their off-grid cabin up north of Montreal. The guys talk about how they prepare for the coming apocalypse, and what they do to survive in the harsh conditions of winter. They also talk about why they don t cook in the cold, and why they like to cook with wood. And how they think that s a good idea. If the power goes out in the winter, they'll survive. This episode was produced and edited by Joe Beef. It was produced in Los Angeles, California. Music by Ian Dorsch and Jake Chapman. Additional music by Zapsplat and Bobby Lord. We're working on transcribing this episode of the podcast, so we can make it better for you, the listeners. . Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. Please rate, review, review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, and tell us what you think of it. and what you're listening to this podcast means to you think about it in the comments section, and share it on your thoughts on social media! and we'll be hearing about it on the podcast on the next episode of this podcast and other places you'd like to help us spread the word about it. Thank you! in the podcast! on the pod? if it's a good thing, please leave us out there on your podcast and we can help us reach more people out there. more like it in a review, and we're listening out there in the next week with their thoughts on it's good, more like that's a review or a review of it on a podcast about it, and they're listening about it is a good one, and more of it helps us make it more helpful than that.
00:02:49.000But what I was going to say is, do you think that living in such an extreme environment, a beautiful city, amazing city, but it's an incredibly harsh environment in the winter, do you think that makes you more cognizant about the need for survival?
00:03:20.000Our city, over the last couple of years, have been talking about a complete ban of fireplaces and wood-burning stoves inside of homes, condominiums and houses.
00:03:32.000The laws governing wood-burning in the city of Montreal are stricter than the ones in California.
00:04:17.000You go into my land, St. Vieter bagel, Fairmount bagel, all the other ones, you smell it.
00:04:22.000It's a massive part of our culture as well.
00:04:24.000You have to understand that food-wise, the province of Quebec, the city of Quebec City and Montreal, This is the first place that's populated in North America.
00:04:32.000The Europeans, to get to anywhere in North America, came through Quebec first, New York afterwards.
00:04:40.000The food culture in Quebec is over 400 years old.
00:06:03.000You know, you just get it like you're in a restroom somewhere with paper towels that you wet down and sort of get your underarms or whatever.
00:06:14.000So you just wanted to write a book that kind of covers all of your interests, not just with food, but...
00:06:21.000One of the things that I really enjoyed about, there was an episode that you guys did of Anthony Bourdain's show where you were ice fishing and you had one of those ice fishing huts and you guys cooked.
00:06:33.000Tony told you it's notorious in the show that they never caught fish and whenever he had a gun he never hit anything.
00:06:41.000So we knew that and we knew that there was not a pike and there was not a walleye that was going to bite.
00:06:46.000So we're like, okay, option A, we sit there and we like take some fake fish and we fry it up in cornflakes and shortening in a hollow cabin.
00:06:55.000Or we just went like Joe Beef crazy and we brought all the old cookbooks we had, all the spirits, like Cuban cigars, all the copperware, all the stuff.
00:07:03.000And we made the menu from an old Leonet restaurant, Paul Bucuz, that he did a show at after.
00:07:29.000And we brought some fine wines and fine spirits and some really rare oddities, some old chartreuse and stuff like that that Fred had lying around.
00:09:42.000But mostly, now they're figuring this out, that The problem of the low-fat diet and the, you know, like brown rice and chicken breast, you know, the bodybuilder diet, nothing triggers your fullness.
00:09:55.000Because they realize that fat actually makes you full quite fast, right?
00:10:00.000So if you eat a bit of cheese, you're done.
00:10:03.000You don't eat like a full plate of cheese or layer it on a hamburger, but just a little bit of cheese after just cuts you off and then you have spirits and cigars are not that healthy, but...
00:10:14.000Yeah, I've been talking about that with a lot of nutrition experts where they say that your body, when it eats a lot of carbohydrates, you can consume carbohydrates far past what you actually need, whereas if you're just eating a lot of fat and protein, your body tends to regulate itself much better.
00:10:29.000Now, you guys, how long have you been in Montreal?
00:10:32.000And I have to tell you, and I've said it before...
00:10:35.000If I had to say my all-time favorite restaurant, I think Joe Beef's my all-time favorite restaurant.
00:10:40.000I don't like to say my all-time number, because there's a lot of great restaurants in this world, but damn, if I had to choose one, I think I might choose you guys.
00:10:47.000No, you're very kind, but we have to take you out to other places to change your mind.
00:11:17.000If I put a bison tenderloin and serve you a beef tenderloin and a cow tenderloin and a deer tenderloin, at the end of the day, it just has a couple of degrees of separation from the other.
00:12:27.000So they took the back straps off, and they cooked it and ate it.
00:12:31.000But he said it was a really weird moment where, like, this is an animal that was like everybody's petting it, and you're riding it, and it was a working animal, but it was an animal that you loved.
00:12:43.000And then all of a sudden it's down, and you have to kill it, and he's like, well, it's going to go to waste.
00:12:47.000He said it just felt wrong to let it go to waste, so they cut the back straps off of it.
00:12:51.000You know, the reason I think we don't eat horse culturally is really based ultimately on the Battle of Wolfe between Montcalm on the plains of Quebec City.
00:13:01.000You know, that was a decisive battle in North American history, whereas if the French had won that battle, everybody in North America ultimately would be speaking French.
00:13:13.000You know, they didn't win that battle.
00:14:03.000You know, Quebec is a very open-minded dining public, very advanced dining public, very old dining public, and of course Latin, French dining public.
00:14:11.000The amount of proteins that are served in a Montreal restaurant...
00:15:05.000Like, it's not what other restaurant people are eating.
00:15:07.000It's just part of the registry, you know.
00:15:09.000Little girls, like your daughters, raised eating, you know, the food that their dad hunts and the food that their parents buy.
00:15:17.000Some people of lesser means eat pork liver and are raised on it.
00:15:21.000So when they see liver on the restaurant, cute little, you know, 19-year-old girls that are about to go out to the club later will have a slice of liver.
00:15:34.000You have to buy farm-raised stuff, and oddly enough, most of it's from New Zealand.
00:15:39.000Most of the stuff that we're getting here in the United States is from New Zealand, and if they call it venison, it's most likely some sort of stag, and the elk that we get, if we buy elk at a restaurant, it's all from New Zealand.
00:17:04.000But if they did that everywhere else, then we're just reinventing the wheel, you know?
00:17:08.000We're going back to market hunting, which is what almost wiped out almost all of the animals in this country anyway.
00:17:13.000Some chefs in Quebec would like to bring that back, and I said, listen, we can barely manage our roads, our infrastructure, we can barely manage our...
00:17:43.000Yeah, I've heard stories of a guy in his Econoline van with 500 pounds of geoduck going to the Victoria airport to send them to Japan, get hijacked on the highway at night, and they steal the clams because they're worth a fortune in Japan.
00:17:59.000Matsutake mushrooms as well, another famous white, it's called a pine mushroom, and in Japan, a Matsutake mushroom.
00:18:06.000The closer the shape of the mushroom to a penis, the more expensive it is, you know?
00:18:10.000So they'd actually hijack people on their way to the patch and undress them and make them turn around so they can never find a place again.
00:18:54.000One of our favorite, there's a great recipe for that in the book, is like you poach chicken legs, right, until they're ready.
00:19:01.000And then in the broth, very little broth, you know, you strain the broth, you add cream and saute morel mushrooms in there, and a little bit of sherry wine, any of oxidized wine, and you just add the legs in there and you let that simmer.
00:20:19.000I wish there was a way to reintroduce bluefin to the wild.
00:20:23.000It just seems like the appetite that people have for those things is just untenable.
00:20:27.000If you look at any given night in a city like Manhattan, how much red tuna is sold on the island of Manhattan any given night of the year, it's scary.
00:20:40.000Yeah, I almost feel like it's like killing the last giraffe in a herd, you know?
00:20:47.000And again, you know, they're big, they're feisty, they're majestic, so that shouldn't guide my choice, my decision to protect them, but that's heartbreaking.
00:20:59.000Well, the problem is there's complete lack of regulation in the open waters when these guys have these enormous ships filled with huge nets and they just drag them across the ocean floor and capture everything.
00:23:03.000And it's super interesting because his thing was like...
00:23:06.000You know, we try to portray our history as, like, glorious, and we herded bisons before for protein, and that's how we started, like, modern farming.
00:23:14.000But, in fact, we probably farmed oysters and snails and clams, because they don't move, and they're the most prolific and the most abundant source of protein.
00:23:25.000In that book, Kurlansky brings up a premise, and I'm loosely...
00:23:30.000I'm interpreting it now because I read this book a few years ago, but think of this for a second, right?
00:23:37.000The island of Manhattan is a perfect—all the rivers around it, all the water systems around it—is actually one of the greater oyster situations on the Atlantic East Coast, right?
00:23:50.000The reason that the population exploded in Manhattan in the early days was that any person could literally get off a boat, walk onto the island of Manhattan, homeless, broke, and sleep in an alley and walk down to the river.
00:24:37.000It was a free, available source of protein that will make you live another 24 hours.
00:24:43.000So if it takes you three days to find a job, four days to find a job, 20 days to find a job, you're not going to die because there's oysters.
00:25:53.000And in case you haven't noticed, New York's waterways aren't exactly the cleanest.
00:25:57.000The folks behind the Billion Oyster Project are trying to change that by recycling shells from the partnering restaurants and getting them back in the water to build oyster reefs.
00:26:05.000The goal is to add a billion oysters to the water by 2035. So far they've restored 1.1 acre.
00:31:15.000People pay a lot of money, fly there to go eat there.
00:31:18.000You know, he's doing some good legwork on how to prepare them, how to raise them, how to, you know, I'm not saying his food is based on that, but I'm happy that somebody did that part of the research.
00:31:28.000And he'll bring the point up and they'll, you know, ultimately by osmosis, the other younger chefs.
00:32:15.000No refrigeration and there's buckets of clams and you know like mesh bags like you put onions in this big mesh bag in a bin and it's full of giant bullfrogs.
00:33:51.000I know that, you know, if I chop the legs off and I peel the skin and I dredge them in flour and I fry them and I serve them with garlic cream, that they're delicious.
00:34:00.000They're as delicious as chicken wings.
00:34:02.000What I'm worried about is the frog is so big and...
00:34:07.000The discarded part of the frog is the size of a softball.
00:34:12.000It's like eating the stem of the apple and leaving the apple.
00:36:22.000It's really great that we're watching this because I'm a lot less horrified by the whole prospect of it.
00:36:26.000So he's just hacking it up, bones intact, and chucking it into a basket.
00:36:32.000So it doesn't look like they're missing much other than the guts.
00:36:36.000So it seems like the innards, and then they seem to be boiling all that stuff, and okay, so they put it in a soup with the bones intact, and you just sort of...
00:40:08.000I mean, I know how to make the roasts, and I use the ground for a bunch of different things, and I just think that...
00:40:17.000If you do it properly or if you want to handle it properly, you've really got to read up on how to cook wild game as opposed to how to cook anything else.
00:40:53.000So you put long strips of pork fat inside and you cook it slowly enough that the pork fat will melt inside so in every bite you'll have a little bit of fat.
00:41:06.000Or what we do, actually, like for the wild rabbit, which is extremely dry, we'll put a veal foot with the skin, so that'll give off the collagen, and we'll put a slice of pork belly with it.
00:42:07.000We have a lot of sturgeon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
00:42:09.000The laws are like lights out ridiculous.
00:42:12.000If you get caught with like a gram of caviar in your boat and you don't have a license, they'll freeze your bank accounts and seize your house kind of thing.
00:45:16.000In old French cookery, one of the ways to cook sturgeon is ultimately you apply cooking a piece of sturgeon loin as you would a piece of veal loin or pork loin.
00:46:17.000But a fish like sturgeon is great if you have a little bit in a sauce like David May talks about over like buttery mashed potatoes or like with like egg noodles or something like that.
00:47:31.000We sold a ton of them at the restaurant.
00:47:33.000It would literally, you'd be at Joe Beef and you'd get on your plate what looked to be like six McNuggets with a sauce and a little paper cup on the side.
00:47:39.000People were like, what the hell is this?
00:51:44.000But even in that restaurant David was talking about, if you take a fresh piece of eel and put it in a cast iron pan, the smoke it does, it's like mustard gas.
00:51:56.000I'm a little bit allergic to, I guess, not all fish, but some fish.
00:52:00.000And when I used to work at that restaurant, we would literally put a knife through its head and into the cutting board, and then another knife through its tail so it would be straight on the cutting board.
00:52:10.000So we'd pin down the left side and the right side of the eel.
00:52:13.000Then we'd lift the fillets, skin them, score them, And then pan-sear them with artichoke and country ham.
00:52:22.000And as I was pan-searing them, I was breathing in the vapors of searing the eel and my lungs would seize.
00:52:32.000It would give me an asthma attack somewhat.
00:54:58.000The Atlantic Northeast, I think in Maine or Massachusetts somewhere, they're raising eels, I think, releasing them into nature, and they're selling eels commercially.
00:57:29.000My friend Steve Rinella has described this to me.
00:57:33.000Apparently when bears eat blueberries, when they find, like it's towards the fall in particular, when they're trying to fatten up before they go into the den, they'll find these massive fields of blueberries.
00:58:16.000But he said it all smells like blueberry.
00:58:19.000So he rendered down the bear fat, because this was all in the field, and then cooked the bear meat, this blueberry bear meat, chunks of it in the fat.
00:58:29.000Well, if the pigment is liposoluble, then it would make sense that you find it in the fat.
00:58:34.000But they made experiments, our friends with the deer farm, and what they did, they wanted to know if the taste of venison was owed to the fact that...
00:58:45.000The diet of the animal or the way that hunters traditionally break down the meat in the field, the field dressing of the meat, you know?
00:58:53.000So what they did is they put a beef, like a steer, and they shot him and they prepared him.
00:59:01.000They dressed him the way you would a deer or a moose.
00:59:04.000And then they, at the same time, did the same thing with the deer.
00:59:08.000And then they did The slaughterhouse treatment, like a commercial treatment for both animals.
00:59:13.000And they realize that once you wait a little bit, even on the beef, before you gut it, before you skin it and everything, that funky or that gamey taste will come even to beef.
00:59:28.000So you picture that's what, yeast in nature?
00:59:32.000It's probably also they think that you might lack the skills to properly extract the guts.
01:00:46.000This is a modern cuisinier, like culinary fancy thing to have a breast of partridge seared on a bed of cabbage.
01:00:55.000You know, those things are always treated with, like I said earlier, with fat, with like all the spices, with wine, with cognac, with layers of like...
01:01:04.000Even organ meats in there and you put a crust over it and cabbage.
01:01:08.000Like we said, it needs a lot of skills to eat good games.
01:01:18.000First of all, I've learned to hunt from people that really know what they're doing.
01:01:21.000So we didn't let anything sit out in the heat and made sure we opened it up and cooled it out quickly.
01:01:26.000But one of the things that they do do when guys are deep into the backcountry and they have an animal and they kill it, and even in the summer when it's warm out, what they do is they hang it and give it a lot of air circulation and it develops a crust on the outside.
01:01:42.000And then they cut that crust back and then the meat underneath it is sort of tenderized in a lot of ways.
01:01:48.000And a lot of hunters say that it's even more delicious that way.
01:01:51.000Yeah, it's protected by the crust the air is created.
01:01:55.000And of course it probably starts, the bacteriological work starts to work inside of that crust.
01:02:00.000There's two process, right, by which the meat gets tender.
01:02:03.000The first one is the rigor mortis, right?
01:02:07.000Like the meat rests and the rigor mortis, like all, I guess all the cortisol and everything that like stiffens the meat at death.
01:04:11.000Unless there was no other way to store it, and they didn't have refrigeration, which of course they didn't when they first started doing this.
01:04:16.000Refrigeration is a super modern invention, if you look back.
01:04:19.000I worked for chefs in my apprenticeship that told me stories about their apprenticeship, and it's like night and day.
01:04:28.000They said, when we woke up in the morning, we used to have to fill the ovens with coal, you know, and go down to the ice locker and drag an ice block through the...
01:06:22.000In American winemaking and French winemaking, there's things in winemaking called flaws.
01:06:27.000You know, usually the flaws of wine in France and in natural winemaking, organic winemaking, will always be volatile acidity and Bertanomyces.
01:07:00.000Natural wines from France that have high volatile acidity and Britannomyces smells.
01:07:07.000What would be ultimately considered a flawed wine in France in natural wine world is considered a delicacy in Japan in the natural wine world.
01:07:17.000Wow, so do they purposely take ones that have that funky smell and ship them off to Japan?
01:07:22.000Some winemakers, you know, the wine agent will come and visit the cellar and usually the winemaker will point him in the direction and say, maybe this might be for, and then he goes, yes, yes, this is what we like.
01:07:34.000Do they cultivate it on purpose in that direction?
01:07:36.000I figure, like, nobody right now will come up and say it outright.
01:07:44.000There are Japanese winemakers now all through France that work in a very funky way and are more or less pushing those wines into the Japanese market.
01:07:54.000Okay, I have to try this just because it's disgusting.
01:07:56.000So tell me what the name of the candy is again.
01:08:59.000We're talking about Olivier Aubin-Mercier, who's a fighter in the UFC. Yeah, and they'll have, like, ghost pepper parties, you know.
01:09:05.000And then the next day, they'll go to Comic-Con and dress up as superheroes and then play some online poker and then eat more ghost peppers.
01:12:16.000If you don't want to talk, if you want to talk, we're here, you know, and we'll hang out.
01:12:20.000But then you feel like you're eggs in a tortilla, you feel like you're eggs with potatoes, or, like, it's mellow, and it helps a lot with just the context of not being, like, ordering pizza from room service, you know?
01:12:33.000George used to tell us horror stories, you know, before some of his biggest wins years ago, George said, eating, like, room service rigatoni.
01:12:42.000And pizza before a major fight, you know?
01:13:00.000We couldn't do this job if it was for, like, 12 stoves in the kitchen, a bunch of pans, cooking pieces of meat, writing books about the seasons, and tomatoes, and starting again.
01:13:27.000Well, you guys have a great philosophy about that, and that's one of the things that really came through with the Bourdain show when you guys were in the ice shack, is that you enjoy living well.
01:16:10.000We're running restaurants with employees and a constant burden of payroll.
01:16:15.000And we can't just call everybody all the time.
01:16:20.000By default, any good cooking school today...
01:16:23.000What Fred is saying, and Fred is the example of what a great chef should be, should be a very good cook, a very good person with people skills, but should also have a minor in electricity, plumbing, and refrigeration technology.
01:17:06.000If you want to do that until you're 60 and then get a little cottage and write, paint, watercolor, buy a sailboat, you have to think about it.
01:17:19.000Why do you think that life is synonymous with chefs?
01:17:23.000We've been promoted and taught ultimately that you will get paid, you will make money, you will persevere if you understand how to promote excessive eating and excessive drinking.
01:17:34.000You will be recompensed if you build a place where people come and eat too much and drink too much and then spend too much, then you will be able to have a life, a car, a house, and raise children.
01:17:47.000First you have to learn how to cook, then you have to learn how to run a restaurant, then you have to learn what a restaurant looks like, and how to host, what the playlist should be like, how to fix a plumbing disaster, how to fix an electricity disaster, how to fix a staff situation disaster,
01:18:03.000how to run a clean house, or people are working together with all their different idiosyncrasies.
01:19:25.000And then what happens is one week turns into two to four, and then you kind of look back and you realize in 2017 that you may have drank 48 weeks out of 52. And then it goes quick.
01:21:46.000You know, make bad decisions and I just went to a great rehab called Chatsworth that Educated me.
01:21:56.000You know, I was sitting in a classroom with a pad and paper for six hours a day, learning about the disease called alcoholism, learning about a disease that 30% of the population has, you know, and how and why I was an addict,
01:22:15.000Then, you know, at a young age, after a traumatic event, then I was an addict with beer, then I was an addict with marijuana, like, you know, all drugs, and then I was an addict with wine.
01:22:24.000Follow up a couple more traumatic events in my, you know, horrendous apprenticeship and the stress of leadership in these restaurants.
01:22:46.000You know, I don't like to tell him, but maybe it's a little bit of mentoring, you know?
01:22:50.000I was the canary in the coal mine for Fred.
01:22:52.000You know, and I decided, I was like, fuck.
01:22:54.000You know, after Tony passed, I was like, you know, I remember I was working on a new project doing tilings, and I was like, oh, I heard the news in the morning.
01:23:04.000I went to tile all day, and then I couldn't wait to get home and have, like, two bottles of wine.
01:24:45.000Olfactory, the nose, the flavor, understanding the winemaker, his philosophy, the geography of where the wine comes from, his work...
01:24:55.000You know, with using organic and biodynamic viticulture, not using sulfur, just making this amazing organic beverage with very little intervention, natural wine.
01:25:39.000Ryan Gray, our friend from Elena that worked with us for years, Ryan goes to a restaurant and asks for a bucket...
01:25:48.000He'll sit with other people, people in the wine business, and they all drink wine, and he tastes the wine, and he has discussions about wine, and he tastes it and spits it.
01:27:51.000But I have friends, again, I know a lot of sommeliers, and even I know winemakers, some of the most famous winemakers in the world I've met in Burgundy at an AAB that are completely sober.
01:28:04.000Because they wanted to break this cycle of my great-grandfather was an alcoholic, abusive person, my grandfather was an alcoholic, abusive person, my father was an alcoholic, abusive person, and I didn't want to take over this thousand-year-old winery, the legacy of my family.
01:28:21.000And I'm sure, like, you know, with all the epigenetic stuff, if you don't drink when your kids are young, like, there might be a thing where you can stop the passing of the gene, you know?
01:29:46.000This feeling when you do, like everybody always talked about runner's high, and I never really experienced it, even though I had worked out really hard my whole life.
01:29:54.000I'd never been into like long-range cardio.
01:29:57.000I'd never done hours and hours of the same activity, just droning on, you know, either on a bike or running.
01:30:05.000I'd run hills for the most part, and I'm sure it benefited me and it made me relaxed, but it's at a totally different level when you're doing it for three and a half hours, four hours a day.
01:30:16.000It's a true survival mechanism that kicks in.
01:30:18.000It's that, but it's also you feel wonderful.
01:30:28.000I've been out of the house for a week now because of the fires, so we've been running around and the kids aren't in school, so they're here hanging out with me.
01:30:39.000We haven't had a chance to get our stuff together.
01:30:42.000It's been very stressful, so I haven't really been working out much.
01:30:46.000I've only worked out like once or twice this week, so I have more stress.
01:30:49.000I feel a little bit more tense, a little bit more take a deep breath, calm down, During October, I had none of that.
01:32:11.000Is there any obsession looming over you that you have to do it tomorrow morning and at night?
01:32:16.000Well, my take on it was a little bit different.
01:32:18.000My take on it is that everyone's anxiety levels and all the different stress and all the things we deal with, a lot of it is because your body has capabilities.
01:32:26.000And you're not using even a small percentage of those capabilities, so it's always like, what are we doing?
01:32:33.000And we're in traffic, you're moving quickly, so you're constantly aware of all these cars around you, and there's all this stress, and there's very little physical release that the body takes part in.
01:32:43.000And for most people, I mean, the great percentage of our population lives a sedentary lifestyle.
01:32:48.000They sit in their cars until they get to the office, they sit in their office until they get home, they sit in front of the TV until they go to sleep.
01:32:53.000This is a giant percentage of our population, whatever the number is.
01:32:57.000It's very normal, and occasionally they work out, and when they do, it's a struggle.
01:33:02.000When you force the body into rigorous exercise on a constant basis, your body's, all the needs of this capacity, the capabilities that it has, all those needs are satisfied.
01:33:15.000So what I found is incredibly low anxiety levels.
01:35:23.000When you feel this way, usually what's your go-to?
01:35:26.000I'd be like, I could taste sometimes when I'd fall into stressful situations at the restaurant, three tables I don't like, a couple of criminal elements behaving badly at one table.
01:35:37.000Maybe on the border of lacking respect to their waitress, I might have to get involved, and I could almost taste Chardonnay in my salivary glands.
01:35:46.000Yeah, your brain still plays the trick on you.
01:35:48.000My brain was making me high before the high.
01:35:51.000I was like, why do I taste Chardonnay?
01:35:55.000I think it's the same with sugar addiction too, where people eat sugar, lots of carbs, mostly carbs.
01:36:02.000Then you're like, oh man, I have to go for three hours without eating.
01:36:06.000I have to bring something sweet with me because I'm going to get shaky.
01:36:57.000You know, sometimes we fall off the wagon and stuff.
01:36:59.000And I was pretty solid for a few years.
01:37:02.000I think that two weeks of drinking more water, having walks, and not eating ice cream and fries, and two weeks of home-cooked meals and water, cutting down on coffee, because that, too, will fuck with your anxiety, you know?
01:39:02.000And the scientists that I've talked about...
01:39:06.000You know, this is a very new thing for people to embark on this and do it on a mass scale because there's quite a few people doing it.
01:39:12.000What they're attributing it to is the calorie restriction, is that because of the fact that you really can't eat that much steak, if you eat a steak, you know, it might be a thousand calories, whereas if you eat a full, big, Thick steak, lots of fat.
01:39:26.0001,000 calories of steak is a lot of steak.
01:40:35.000So I'll eat a piece of meat for breakfast or eggs or whatever, and then I won't eat until I show up at work or at home later and eat.
01:40:45.000So it's what you've excluded that counts.
01:40:49.000It's not that the steak is so good for you.
01:40:52.000It's that you're not eating all this processed food anymore because you can't eat it anymore.
01:40:57.000That's what the scientists are saying.
01:40:58.000But the people that are pro-meat, it's really fascinating because they're just as culty as the vegans are.
01:41:03.000The people that are the real pro-carnivore diets, they want you to think that it's the meat that's healing them, the meat that's helping them, the meat that's making them lean.
01:41:17.000I mean, there's a lot of real nutrients in red meat.
01:41:19.000And this is also a problem with a lot of studies that people have A lot of vegans love to cite about heart attacks, strokes, cancer in relationship to meat.
01:41:31.000These epidemiology studies, they're essentially saying, look, when you look at people that eat meat five days a week, these are the people that have higher instances of cancer, higher instances of diabetes, all these different things.
01:41:42.000What they're not taking into consideration is they're not just eating meat.
01:41:45.000They're usually eating a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, and there's all this sugar.
01:42:13.000So you cannot have people, you cannot say, like, this is cocoa fat and beef tenderloin, I'm gonna give you a weak portion, you go home, then you come to report, we do blood tests.
01:42:22.000You get anecdotal evidence from people that talk about their own personal diet, but yeah, it's very difficult.
01:42:32.000I mean, whether it's on one side with the vegans or the other side with the carnivore diet people, I find the same psychological characteristics in both groups.
01:42:41.000They want to convert people, they want to proselytize, they want people to think that their way is the right way, and they are not honest about health issues that they're having.
01:42:51.000A conference on a deserted island, you know, in a rich man's castle, like a Bruce Lee movie, and you invite the vegans on one side and you don't tell them you're also inviting the other, you know?
01:43:01.000And then both groups, you just have like a kumite.
01:43:04.000Well, both groups think the other group is going to drop dead any second now.
01:43:47.000One school will say, yeah, quality beef is an organic animal, pasture-raised, eating grass, the flavor's different, it's not as tender, but it is high-quality beef.
01:44:02.000Okay, then the other, of course, is, you know, a cow, USDA Prime, corn-fed, incredible marbling, ridiculous fat content, restricted motion.
01:44:18.000I'd say a lesser quality beef than the other.
01:47:40.000Get a baby lamb that come from the parents' lamb and then they raise the lamb and they bring it to the slaughterhouse themselves and then we get a lamb.
01:47:48.000Beef is like tracing bourbons, you know?
01:47:52.000It's like trading and brokerage and stuff and we're not...
01:47:56.000It's the most sketchy item on a restaurant menu.
01:47:59.000Like, I know that I bought lamb from you and I know I bought rabbit from, you know...
01:49:35.000Yeah, they've been doing that for a long time and grading that beef that way, and I don't think they should change ever, not based on anything, right?
01:49:40.000Well, it's a great place where you get consistency.
01:49:42.000I mean, you go there, you get this fantastic steak.
01:49:45.000I mean, it's so old-worldy, too, when you get in there.
01:49:48.000I mean, how long has Peter Luger's been around for?
01:49:58.000Moishe's is a famous restaurant in Montreal, and they do have their beef program, and they should not change because there's new conversations happening.
01:50:06.000He knows what he's doing, Lenny Leiter, and he should keep on doing that.
01:50:10.000In a small restaurant, let's say that Fred, marginal characters like Fred and I own, I always see it like...
01:50:19.000Those restaurants maybe are public places.
01:50:24.000My restaurant is my restaurant, of which I want to do what I want in.
01:50:31.000We don't listen so much to the public.
01:50:53.000Well, that's one of the things that I learned from watching Bourdain's original show, the No Reservation show, that it changed my opinion on things.
01:51:00.000Because I didn't have a strong opinion on food before that, other than I really liked it.
01:51:05.000I didn't think of it as an art form and watching his show and seeing the passion, his appreciation for food and for the way it's grown and brought to table and the production of it and then ultimately the flavor of it and the taste and his admiration for chefs and you guys as well.
01:51:29.000His admiration for it and his appreciation for the way everything's put together made me realize, oh, this is an art form.
01:52:47.000Fred and I practice a weird faction of French cooking called Cuisine Bourgeois, and only kind of Tony and a handful of other guys could look at what we do and go, huh, those fuckers, they're up to that.
01:53:45.000I mean, you can, but you're not going to get it all.
01:53:47.000You're just going to want to go out and experience it.
01:53:49.000Yeah, ultimately food is, you can't, we go and do like, we're asked to do like demonstrations, you know, you can go on a big stage, 5,000 people to talk about food or make like little crackers with smoked salmon on stage.
01:54:56.000Everybody that I was talking to, our agent who represents us for our book, And she was saying all the big production companies are being berated by people pitching who's going to be the next Tony,
01:55:23.000Because you guys, you know the way he went in West Virginia?
01:55:26.000And it wasn't like Republican, Democrat, like he went to places and he's like, yeah, sure, I have my views, but let's break bread, you know?
01:55:34.000And I always said that, that like all our countries are divided on issues, but there's nobody that overlaps them with a coherent vision.
01:55:43.000Everybody loves each other when there's delicious food on the table, man.
01:55:46.000And guys like you, with a clear view and a rational and science-based and evidence-based view on things, and like Tony, just have such a voice now in our countries that it's...
01:56:42.000I travel more than enough already, and I've cut my traveling way back.
01:56:46.000I'm down to only 10 UFCs a year now, and I do comedy around that and stand-up comedy, but I consciously make the effort to travel much less because I just don't think it's good.
01:57:02.000And also that road life, you know, the drinking and all that other stuff that comes with it, that accentuates all the problems that you have with travel.
01:57:10.000And I think that's also one of the things that was dragging Tony down when he would talk about the sadness and the loneliness of being on the road.
01:57:19.000I can't help but, from knowing him and partying with him, I can't help but have thought that a lot of that was probably accentuated by the alcohol consumption.
01:57:48.000It's a sad life to watch River Monsters at 11 in the morning burping Jameson.
01:57:53.000And I'm referring to many occasions in our lives where you're traveling in a hotel room and You're in a beautiful place, but, like, it just...
01:58:05.000Yeah, I've taken steps to mitigate some of that.
01:58:08.000One of the big ones is I travel with friends.
01:58:10.000I bring really good comics to work with me on the road so that when I'm in these cities, I'm in these cities with friends, and we just go.
01:58:17.000It's like they're family, so we go, we'll go eat together, we'll go work out together, you know, and try to keep the unhealthy shit to a minimum.
01:58:25.000Plus, I'm more of a marijuana enthusiast than I am a drinker anyway.
01:59:36.000Well, I think it'll ultimately lead to a relaxing of people's opinions and ideas about marijuana and what it is.
01:59:42.000But I also think that marijuana, just like alcohol, can be used as a crutch and it could eventually overcome your life.
01:59:49.000I like it, but I like it every now and again.
01:59:52.000And one of the things that came out of last year's Sober October was taking a whole month off of it, realizing that, A, I don't need it, I can function fine without it, but it made me more apprehensive about regular use.
02:00:07.000Like, instead of using it every day, I'll use it a day a week or two days a week or something like that.
02:00:12.000And I appreciate it more when it does happen.
02:00:14.000When I do get high with my friends on Friday night or something like that, it's like it means something.
02:00:21.000It's almost like a sacrament We're experiencing a little moment together and just having fun.
02:00:28.000What you just said is the proof that you don't have addiction issues, you see.
02:00:31.000I couldn't be able to prove that I smoked marijuana responsibly once in my life, that I drank alcohol once in my life, that I did drugs responsibly.
02:04:09.000It's funny because there's really B-list Hollywood stars hanging out at the pool, drinking champagne cocktails, trying to be cool, smoking blunts and trying to pick up girls.
02:05:41.000In retrospect, I spoke to some rheumatologists, and it's interesting you're talking about, like, Jordan Peterson, because the autoimmune thing can be everywhere, right?
02:05:52.000And now my doctor says, like, maybe celiac caused inflammation in so many places.
02:06:49.000And after we're done here, I'm going to take you into my gym and I'm going to show you some machines that I bought specifically to strengthen my back.
02:06:54.000I've had some disc issues too, and the doctors are pretty adamant about putting me under the knife.
02:07:01.000And I... I just didn't like the idea of it.
02:11:06.000I don't know if it's you that talked with Jeff Bridges about that because he's in the like school lunches thing.
02:11:10.000And the problem with school lunches is that if you subsidize half the kids, then you have a kid with like a badge here that says like poor, you know?
02:11:28.000I mean, the idea that that's a problem.
02:11:30.000I mean, Jesus Christ, we're talking about food and also the sense of community that's established when everybody eats together.
02:11:36.000You're going to create this rift between students where you establish that one student is poorer than the other one.
02:11:44.000So it's going to fuck them up already.
02:11:46.000You know, it's going to already make them insecure.
02:11:48.000Unless you have the labor force with the kids.
02:11:51.000Not to say that we're going to make the kids work, but it's going to be a learning experience and people can take their turns preparing family meals inside of the school system.
02:13:18.000There's very few people that get into stand-up comedy that were thriving in some other career.
02:13:23.000Most of us were extremely frustrated with traditional environments, and most of us didn't do well in school because we felt confined and just couldn't wait to get...
02:13:33.000I used to have nightmares about going back to school.
02:13:56.000It's not that there's something wrong with me.
02:13:58.000It's that I have no interest in what they're selling.
02:14:01.000And it's being sold by some underpaid, under-motivated person who really is just following some sort of a curriculum and they have to do that because they want to keep their job.
02:14:10.000This is what kids are being subjected to all across the world in the most fertile time of their life in terms of their imagination, their creativity, and their free time.
02:14:26.000No one would ever say to some kid who's cracking jokes in class and running around being a fool, no one would ever say, hey, you ever thought about being a comedian?
02:15:03.000And then according to the questionnaire and one of my friends who flies planes was supposed I think to be a folly artist, make sounds of horses with coconuts and stuff.
02:15:12.000Yeah, that's what they told them after the questionnaire.
02:15:15.000What the fuck kind of questionnaire do you guys have in Canada?
02:15:18.000The success of Restaurant though, you have to think though, is due to a lot of very sad people that have gone through the academic process.
02:15:26.000I have a disproportionate amount of lawyers and professionals and people who wear suits.
02:20:02.000Yeah, I mean, all he does is eat caribou.
02:20:04.000I mean, the guy is out there eating caribou, and during the time where they're filming this, his cabin and his caribou stash gets attacked by a grizzly bear, and he shoots the grizzly bear on film.
02:20:15.000He chases it down in the night and blasts it.
02:20:19.000One of the grizzly bears had eaten one of his dogs.
02:20:21.000I mean, this motherfucker's out there living.
02:20:40.000Maybe introverted, but he doesn't seem to have a hard time talking to people, so I don't know if he's introverted.
02:20:45.000But I mean, he's definitely restricted his access to dialogue.
02:20:49.000I mean, he's out there alone in the forest by himself, but he makes a very compelling point that there's a natural...
02:20:56.000Feeling that he gets from doing this where everything caught falls into place He's constantly getting exercise because he's hiking and chasing after these caribou But that there's natural human reward systems that are in place in his DNA For hunting and gathering and cooking this food over an open fire and the way he lives He just he just thinks it's the way people really are designed to live We're absolutely not meant to live We're good to go.
02:21:45.000Yeah, and there was a real worry because of climate change.
02:21:47.000That was going to be happening every year now.
02:21:49.000People were like, is this the new normal?
02:21:50.000I remember Shane Smith had some piece on Vice.
02:22:27.000I own a duffel bag full of everything that I need to throw in the back of my pickup truck, grab my kids, and I know which way to drive away from the city to go to the cabin.
02:22:37.000It's something I've planned just because I'm the ward of these small humans whom I love.
02:22:54.000The most common thing that people prepare is food.
02:22:57.000They prepare cans and cans and cans of food.
02:22:59.000But still, they eat so much of that food that the best way to prepare...
02:23:05.000The best way to prepare would be to start to eat less and learn how to live at 1700 calories, you know?
02:23:13.000And learn how to live with the people around you because if you're going to spend like two months in a bunker or in a bug out location or whatever, you're not some like asshole to your kids and your friends and the family and people with you.
02:23:28.000One of the things that happens to people, this is really fascinating, when disasters do strike is everyone gets a lot friendlier.
02:23:35.000And this is one thing that I've experienced myself this week.
02:23:38.000Because when we got evacuated, it was 2.30 in the morning on Thursday, and there was fire, rocks throw from my house.
02:23:46.000And I'm not talking a little bit of fire, I'm talking just hundreds of acres of fire.
02:24:20.000You want to get out of these things quickly because they can turn south quickly.
02:24:24.000But there was a sense of camaraderie and community that happens.
02:24:28.000And then quite a few of us all went to the same hotel, including my friend Tom Segura and his wife and his family went to this hotel, too, with some of my friends from this neighborhood who were all there huddled in together.
02:24:38.000But people were a little extra friendly.
02:24:42.000And there was the same kind of feeling after 9-11 when I was in New York City.
02:24:48.000There was people a little bit more friendly.
02:24:50.000We felt that during the ice storm back in the day.
02:24:52.000People were like assessing the street that we live on.
02:24:57.000And then they go, well, who's got a wood-burning stove?
02:25:01.000And then people would go to Roger's house.
02:25:04.000And all of a sudden, all these neighbors that just wave at each other were all at Roger's house by the wood-burning stove.
02:25:11.000Going back to the houses to get blankets, planning sleeping arrangements, planning food arrangements, and assessing each other, giving each other their personal space, and learning how to speak to each other in a respective manner that we might have to do this for several days.
02:25:31.000Through tragedy, a sense of community was built somewhat or reinforced for a brief moment in time, which made going back to our regular lives on that street better.
02:25:49.000It's a great book, and he kind of talks about that, about how, in part...
02:25:55.000Situations of extreme stress and when people are really pushed, those people bond together and they find that these are the happiest times of their life.
02:26:04.000People that even go to war, they find that they miss the camaraderie of the bunker.
02:26:09.000They miss the camaraderie of being in the trenches.
02:26:12.000They miss the camaraderie of being together, huddled up, not knowing what's going to happen in the future, but counting and depending upon each other for their very lives.
02:26:21.000That's a thing that happens in very, very, very busy kitchens.
02:26:24.000A bunch of no-education guys out of cooking school working a difficult restaurant line.
02:26:34.000We're working six guys on six four-burner stoves every night, a difficult menu with a difficult chef.
02:26:44.000In a very busy restaurant, those hours, you know, from 6 p.m.
02:27:11.000Often, like, some of my strongest relationships, some of his strongest relationships are, you know, the bond that I've built with guys that I've cooked on lines, whether in Europe or here, are unbreakable.
02:27:30.000I mean, I think they're better off when they're, you know, when life creates challenges.
02:27:37.000And there's things to overcome, and there's difficulties to get through, and there's real pressure involved in these, and there's physical activity involved in these pressures as well.
02:28:14.000You see when Gene Ackman's on the other side of the road, it's like freezing in New York.
02:28:18.000He's in a deli with a piece of pizza and a shitty coffee.
02:28:21.000He has little leather shoes on the icy pavement.
02:28:23.000And then the French gangsters are in the bistro and they're eating like snails and eclairs and like all the food that comes in the little crockpots on the cart at the table.
02:28:33.000If we could open a place like that for like 16 customers that we have the key only, we decide to open whenever we want and we don't lose money.
02:28:53.000Or I can take a four or eight or close it or just a toy to just practice this skill that we've learned all of these years to do this very, very weird, old, forgotten food that's not cool.
02:29:59.000To really practice hospitality at the level that it used to be.
02:30:04.000Back in the day, to bring out the very old porcelain, very beautiful silver, not ostentatious way, just almost in like a kitschy romantic kind of...
02:32:00.000I think down in St. Armand there, I bought a little farm right on the Vermont border, but there's a summer kitchen part that has beautiful brick, wood-burning oven situation and...
02:32:16.000Big window, an old factory wrought iron window.
02:32:20.000The room is just begging to have like three tables of four or three tables of four and a little stove and a zinc bar.
02:32:33.000He's talking about going down there in January and starting to build it.
02:32:36.000This is the polar opposite of the theme restaurant in Vegas.
02:32:40.000TGIF. Well, not just that, but like the celebrity chef as you're going down the escalator at the airport, there's a giant billboard of this latest chef.
02:32:50.000Did you ever hear this story about the Fertitta brothers?
02:33:51.000So that was flattering, you know, and we prepared a little dinner for them, a little lunch, and we talked, and they pitched us to take over one of the rooms in the palms upstairs.
02:34:04.000We had a wonderful meeting, but we knew right away as we were having the meeting that that was not for us and it was never going to happen.
02:34:39.000The dining public doesn't exist unless it's on my street.
02:34:42.000Montreal's just such a different place.
02:34:44.000The idea is like, before they offered any room there, I said, is there like a decommissioned laundromat in the back that's for employees only?
02:35:42.000Well, that would be a very interesting spot, and I'm sure if you did create something like that, or someone did, an unbelievably exclusive spot that literally has 20 seats available in a night, and they only open for one sitting.
02:36:14.000Yeah, I mean, I guarantee if someone did do something like that, particularly because of Vegas, it's all about who you know and who you are.
02:36:22.000I mean, if you can get in, you know, you can get into Joe Lamb.
02:37:35.000You know, we took the kind of like, there was a story in Bon Appetit magazine about Mark Vetri doing lobster spaghetti and fighting with his dad about removing a table to put a meat slicer in.
02:37:47.000I think they had 24 seats and he bought a nice red slicer and he said, we're taking out four seats and now we're down to 20 seats.
02:37:55.000But he insisted that, you know, they have 20 seats instead of 24. That story was endearing to Fred and I. And he was doing a lobster spaghetti at his Philadelphia restaurant at the time.
02:38:05.000So when we opened Joe Beef, one of the first items on the menu was our version of the lobster spaghetti that Mark Vetri was doing.
02:38:12.000And just a simple homage to that story.