Name: Joe Rogan Experience #765 - Tovar Cerulli
Uploaded: 2016-02-25T02:54:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #765 - Tovar Cerulli' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-02-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #765 - Tovar Cerulli' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-02-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #765 - Tovar Cerulli

no yes live all right we're live hey what's up man how are you i'm well i'm
here with uh
tovar cerule he's got his pen and his notebook out like he's about to take
notes uh author of
the mindful carnivore boy you went an unusual path man and this is one of the
reasons why i
really wanted to talk to you i've read some of your stuff and i've seen some
interviews with you
online obviously a very intelligent very thoughtful guy you started out a vegan
and became a hunter boy
that's that's a tricky path and it had to be uh fraught with peril right i mean
how much grief did
you take for that first of all you know not as much as i kind of anticipated
really i mean because you
live in vermont but you know they could be part of it you know they can't get
you up there it's
well and it's a funny blend of cultures there uh i mean i didn't become
vegetarian until i was like
20. so i spent basically 20 to 30 as vegetarian mostly vegan that whole time uh
and so then in
my early 30s i made this kind of bizarre transition into uh into being a hunter
uh and i wondered how
friends not so much family because i had one uncle who who was a hunter and was
well respected welcome
back son right but you know but friends you know i wondered yeah you know what
was that going to be
like and uh there were some you know some occasionally odd moments with uh with
friends or neighbors but
not as much as you might expect what was it that made you switch over like what
was there a moment was
it a realization was it an accumulation of information like what was it i mean
the switch to being vegetarian
had a lot to do with ethics and animal welfare and compassion and then it
became other issues
environmental you know all kinds of things the switch back um the first step
really was starting to
realize that my diet whatever i was eating was connected to all kinds of things
that i didn't realize
you know control of deer in soybean fields to make tofu i mean yeah you know
the control is a nice way
it is it's a gentle it's a gentle word right um and just the impact of
agriculture on the landscape as a
whole talk about wildlife habitat disappearing in a hurry you know um and even
the local organic farmer
down the road where we you know go get organic strawberries you know when there's
enough crop damage he calls a
friend and they shoot a deer or they're smoke bombing the woodchucks all the
time and so there are all
kinds of impacts that i realized my diet was having even though i wasn't eating
animals you know indirectly
that didn't change my diet that just sort of softened these very black and
white hard edges that
i had drawn in my mind these ethical lines right the shift to actually eating
something different had
more to do with nutritional needs in the long term and once i started eating
some yogurt which is a big
radical step if you've been vegan for 10 years you know eating a bowl yogurt is
a big deal right or or
a few you know eggs and fish and chicken once i did that i said i'm gonna go
back to fishing which i did as a
kid and then i i live in a rural area you know i'm in the woods practically and
i look around i was like
hmm if i'm gonna get protein animal protein there's some of it running around
here in the woods and it's
still part of the culture there you know right where i live in vermont you know
hunting is still alive as
part of the culture so it uh started to sort of sneak up on me as this idea to
to get into hunting
wow well eggs are an easy one because nobody has to get hurt like eating eggs
is so easy if you
especially i have my own chicken so it's just hey girls what's going on take
the eggs no one gets hurt
everything's fine and um that seems to me to be the easiest and most ethical
way if you just want to
get some animal protein in your body that one really is no one no one's getting
hurt those things i didn't
you know this is so embarrassing but i didn't even know i think i was in my
late 30s or early 40s
when i found out that chicken eggs couldn't become a chicken because uh they
weren't fertilized by a
rooster like this is how stupid i was or more more really removed from any
farming or any idea of farming
i just uh from my in my stupid mind i just had this idea that and then i i
thought i think oh yeah of
course there's no rooster how wait a minute why are they laying eggs every day
like what the hell's going
on i don't understand that part of it but um it's so easy to just get eggs from
chickens i mean as long as
you're feeding the chicken and chickens exist off of so many different things
they clean your garden
they run around or they mostly bugs and grass and right chicken and you know
healthy chicken food but
once you decide you're going to pull the trigger on a deer things get real that's
a totally different
experience because there's this one guy who's this healthy ethical vegan who's
walking around looking at
the deer like hello friend and the next day you know your elbows deep in that
deer pulling out its guts
hanging it up in a barn and taking skin off of it that's exactly right and it
took me a few years
from when i started hunting to and i was learning through email to my uncle and
reading articles and
poking around in the woods and it was a slow learning process yeah and there
aren't tons of deer running
around vermont there are some but there's not really no back in the back in the
60s and 70s we had all
this young growth forest you know all these these uh farm fields that were
coming back uh into forest and
there were a ton of deer it was really rich habitat for for deer now it's a
much more mature forest and so
the numbers have have really dropped down do they have predators up there what
do they have we got
coyotes and bear but you know nothing that is really a good predator on adult
deer so
i was trying to hunt but unsuccessful for several years and in retrospect i'm
really glad because i don't
think i was ready for that experience so you were saying i'm going to go
hunting but you weren't getting
anything so you're trying to find the deer so it's more like it's awesome deer
but hiking with a
backpack that has a gun in it yeah i mean i did a little bit of small game
hunting i took a you know
snowshoe hare or two small you know but a deer is a different experience you
know something it's a mammal
but something that big yeah too um and you know something that beautiful i mean
they're they're stunning
animals and so when it finally happened a few years in it was a total shock the
actual experience even
though i'd seen someone else with a deer they had just killed and i helped my
uncle but doing it
yourself different game and how did you prepare for this did you take courses
did you train yourself how
to shoot did you already know how to shoot i had shot a bit as a kid i'd been
around firearms that
right up to you sure it went a little closer sure um you know i'd been around
firearms a little bit as a
kid i'd never shot a deer rifle you know center fire rifle so that was new um
but yeah it was learning
from books articles my uncle a lot of uh emails back and forth you know i was
totally clueless you know
right about firearms about deer about everything it was uh starting from from
ground zero and
so it was slow it was slow it's a real commitment like especially if you're
doing it essentially by
yourself you know to to decide to really get involved in quote unquote gun
culture and uh understand what
kind of round you need what kind of rifle you need what's the best kind of
rifle what's the best way to
pull the trigger how do you how do you keep yourself from jerking or punching
the trigger and you know
there's a lot of practice involved oh yeah there is there's a ton to learn and
i think that's one of the
interesting things with you know what i call adult onset hunters those of us
who come to it later
in life sounds like diabetes it does exactly
adult onset hunters uh that we
don't know a million things that those people who grew up doing it take for
granted yeah about the
woods about firearms about all kinds of things and they forgot they even
learned them because it you
know they learned it when they were 10 or 15 and we don't know any of that we've
lived maybe we've
spent some time in the woods maybe we know something about fishing or but we
don't know
that whole world so it's a challenge without a mentor so for me my uncle was
really helpful but having
a mentor is really key i think for folks who come to it later in life yeah it's
so much so that i was
thinking that there's got to be some way to start a program that teaches people
the ethics of it and
boy it's it's so hard to do because you're talking about something that
reasonably should take a long
time before you actually i think the way you did it taking a long time before
you actually shoot a deer
it's probably the way to go i got a crazy crash course from steve ranella right
um where i did his
television show i shot literally a couple times at a piece of paper and i'm not
bullshitting we set up
a target put it on like a patch of dirt and uh shot a couple of times where he's
explaining how you have
to squeeze you can't jerk it you have to squeeze and uh then next thing you
know i'm shooting a deer
like five days later or whatever it was it was uh very strange and it took me a
while to sort of
let all the information set in and then get my my skills up to like i pulled it
off the first time
but i easily could have fucked up i easily could have wounded an animal you
know i really wasn't ready
um to get someone especially someone with a full-time job someone with a family
obligations to get them
and somehow another set up some sort of a course that allows them to learn how
to do that right
well there's a demand for it and yes there are a bunch of states that are doing
it they're like
wisconsin minnesota have really good programs adult learn to hunt programs and
they do it over the
course of like six or nine months you know so they have an intro workshop
usually at the local food
co-op or something you know recruit people there and then they end up um having
these weekend sessions
throughout the course of the year and it culminates with a sort of a mentored
hunt on public land
in um in wisconsin minnesota or other states that have similar programs but
there's enough demand that
there are private courses i mean there's work weekend workshops being offered
by folks i know not
associated with the state program at all just teaching people because they didn't
learn and there's a huge
demand i think not just for hunting but people want these old skills yeah you
know hands-on you know
whether it's how to physically build something out of wood or how to can your
own food or how to you
know hunt and butcher a deer and there's an interest in that sort of do-it-yourself
uh
quote-unquote primitive or just basic self-reliance skills yeah i mean even if
you're not thinking about
being a prepper if you're not you know if you're not getting ready for the end
of the world it's still
it's a fascinating thing to learn how to take care of yourself and learn how to
get your own food from
the actual wilderness right or even or from the garden i mean just that hands-on
experience that
direct experience is really different from sitting in a cubicle getting paid
and then going and buying
food at the grocery store yeah you know the the uh author richard nelson has
written great books about
deer and all kinds of things um he lives up in alaska and he calls the uh the
supermarket an agency an
agent of our forgetfulness you know we forget where things come from yeah if we
don't live on a farm if
we didn't grow up doing that kind of thing yeah i think that's an issue that a
lot of people who have
paid attention to all the different videos that have been released from these
factory farms that are
horrific and they try to figure out well what is a way to get around this what's
there's got to be a way to get
around this and the most ethical way i thin