Justin Wren has returned to the UFC and is fighting for Bellator 141 on August 28th. Justin talks about his return and how he got back into the fight game after 5 years away. He also talks about how he deals with malaria and how it has affected him in the past and talks about what he's doing to raise money to fight against it. We also talk about his new charity Fight for the Vergotten, which is a non-profit organization that helps fight malaria in the African bush. Fight for The Vergotten is a group that fights against malaria and other diseases that kill millions of people in the bush every year. Fight4TheVergotten.org/fightforthevergotten is an organization that is dedicated to fighting malaria in Africa and other places where it affects millions of other people. If you or someone you know is suffering from malaria, please contact them or go to Fight4theVergotten and they can help you get the treatment you need. The fight4thevergotten@fight4vergotten.net. Thank you so much for all the support, stay safe, stay strong, and stay strong! and thank you for being a fighter. Cheers. -Jon Soraya. Jon & Rory . Jon and Rory . . . Jon - Rory - Jon - Jonathan Justin - Justin Sean Jake Chris Mike Ryan ( ) Shane Chad Brad Mark Steve Jack Paul Matt Brian Daniel Matthew Evan Ben Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast, we really appreciate you guys. We really really appreciate it. We hope you enjoy it. Thank you for tuning in and we really really do appreciate you. We look forward to seeing you guys listening to the podcast. xoxo. XOXO -Jon xOXO -ROBBIE - RYAN - THE PODCAST - P.A. - SONGS - JUICY PENNY AND JOSHYANTHORIOS - MALAYAJORDY AND KELLY -JOSH BOBBY & JOSH WALLACE - DANNA - KEVIN JAMES
00:00:34.000So you talked about doing this when you were here before, and you said, you know, it was a good way to raise awareness for your cause, Fight for the Vergotten.
00:04:03.000They use other kinds of stuff that's real sticky sap to kind of mend things together.
00:04:09.000From trees, they also use vines to tie up a bunch of stuff.
00:04:12.000Like soccer balls, they'll use a t-shirt, old t-shirt, a rag, and then they just use these vines and tie them so tightly that it becomes a perfectly round ball.
00:04:21.000Not perfectly round, but round enough to kick around.
00:04:24.000Well, that's one of the things about soccer that people find appealing is that it's not that hard to create a ball, and all you need is just flat ground.
00:05:12.000It's only got about 74 million people, but I think 85% of those people, or maybe 80-85% live on less than a dollar a day.
00:05:22.000Yeah, it's the flip-flops between the poorest country in the world and second poorest, but it is the most underdeveloped country, so...
00:05:30.000Least amount of roads, clean water, education, medical, like it's just the most underdeveloped.
00:05:36.000Like when I go to Uganda, I kind of get the feeling of whenever I come back from Africa to the United States and how it's just like, wow, this is really developed compared to there.
00:05:46.000When I go from Congo to Uganda, I feel like, wow, Uganda's really developed.
00:06:29.000I'll buy some KFC, and I either eat it or I wait till it gets cold, and I eat it with hot sauce.
00:06:35.000KFC with some habanero hot sauce, get some El Yucateca, the real Mexican shit that you gotta go to those funky grocery stores to buy, or online.
00:07:58.000So what I love, and that website that was up, was we're partnered with Water4.
00:08:03.000Now it's water4.org, so the number four.
00:08:06.000But man, it's kind of like we set up an exit strategy.
00:08:11.000This is a lifelong goal for me, and I'll be going back wholeheartedly, everything else.
00:08:15.000But our goal is to empower the locals to be able to do it themselves.
00:08:19.000I was there for the first 13 water wells.
00:08:22.000People from the Director of Implementation of Water Fork come in and teach our guys hydrology, geology, all the different ins and outs of how to drill a well and protect it and all the sanitation.
00:08:33.000But we're investing in the locals so that they can I think?
00:09:00.000Million-dollar drilling rig and Westerners that are, you know, water engineers, and that's great.
00:09:06.000But they'll go into a community and kind of say, you know, get back.
00:09:10.000We're here to do this for you because you can't do it for yourself.
00:09:13.000And then the parts are so expensive, they're not going to be able to repair it when it breaks.
00:09:17.000And there's a good chance, like, I think, two and three of those expensive ones, or at least, no, one-third of them, don't operate after a year of drilling it.
00:09:27.000And so what we want to do is go in there, teach the locals how to do it themselves, create a local economy for it and stimulate that, give people jobs, and then let the community feel a part of it.
00:09:39.000So we look for day laborers in the communities we go to and give them a job while we're there.
00:09:43.000Invite them in on the process, teach them some of it.
00:09:45.000We've acquired some of those guys that are just big, strong, love helping people.
00:09:52.000But the core of our team graduated from university in degrees of community development.
00:09:57.000So that's what we want to do we want to go in there empower the locals and yeah, I'm a big part of it and but what I want to do is be able to fan the flames and say you can do it because a lot of international aid Tells the locals that they can't do it for themselves Maybe maybe they don't say that but it's kind of the way they go about attacking the problem and you got to go about it in a way that That kind of creates dignity for the locals instead of kind of robs them of dignity
00:10:27.000where they feel like they can't help themselves.
00:10:33.000I love that you're trying to help these people become a part of this solution, you know, instead of like someone solving it for them.
00:10:40.000Now, when you're involved in digging these wells, and you're saying these expensive wells break, or the machines, like the pumps, how many parts are involved?
00:11:27.000But whenever, say, in the Congo, it's a place that is Dangerous.
00:11:31.000There's lots of rebel groups, lots of instability.
00:11:35.000They're not going to drive a million dollar or half a million dollar drilling rig deep into the forest over these bridges that are notorious for collapsing and taking and washing away big lorries or 18-wheelers.
00:11:49.000They're not going to drive them across there.
00:11:51.000They can't get on the roads that we go on because they're heavy, they're dense, the parts break on the travel just out to the villages.
00:11:57.000And then once you get there, like going into the Pygmy Villages where we are, sometimes it's taken up to two days, I think, to get our equipment into the village after we traveled there because we have to hike it all in.
00:12:08.000And we can hike an hour off the nearest road to the village.
00:12:12.000We can hike three hours from the nearest road to the village.
00:12:19.000So when I'm saying this is hard, like our guys are, I think they're just as much fighters or more than I am because they're gritting down, they're hauling this stuff in from the augers.
00:12:30.000The way we do it is we use a tripod and we use augers and ropes and pulleys and we use these chisels that go down and they're single prong, triple prong.
00:12:41.000And so we have all these tools we can use for each obstacle that we're going to hit as we go down in different geological layers.
00:12:53.000Like anywhere from gravel to bags of cement that are 100 pounds to the rock breaker that can be 40 pounds, another one that's 80 pounds, and another one that's like 130 pounds.
00:13:49.000And then once we start drilling, our average well in other parts of the world where the obstacles aren't as big, they can bust out a well in a week, 10 days.
00:13:59.000But where we are, we average 10 to 16 days per water well.
00:14:03.000And so our guys are out there and living with the pygmies.
00:14:06.000That's something that we selected every member of our team Based on, can they survive in the forest?
00:14:14.000And more than that, can they love my pygmy family?
00:14:18.000Because that's important because other people around there, a lot of them don't love them, hate them, or discriminate.
00:14:23.000So we want to find people that are passionate about the people, passionate about the water crisis.
00:14:29.000And then that way, yeah, we can then teach them and put the tools in their hands and invest in them.
00:14:35.000And so that's what the last four years has been for me, really investing in good people, people that believe in it.
00:14:42.000And then from there, we can fan the flames for them.
00:14:45.000Is it perplexing for you to have discovered this place and, you know, to being alive in the 21st century with all the modern communication and all that and to know that these people are out there and no one has tried to do this before and that you're stumbling across these giant groups of people that don't have anyone looking out for them?
00:15:07.000I mean, I would say that I'm not the only guy that's ever tried to help them, but I would say that maybe we're trying to take an approach, and that's what's so awesome about the university that I'm partnered with.
00:15:19.000They've been working with the Pygmies for years and years.
00:15:22.000The guy that's leading the way, the Dean of the School of Community Development, he's been doing it since the year I was born.
00:15:28.000And then he started with the university there for the last 10 years.
00:15:32.000So I went to them to say like, hey, how can we do this in a strategic way that the impact will last?
00:15:38.000It'll keep going on and on and on instead of a lot of...
00:15:43.000I don't know if it's American culture or what, but it's so fast, you know, and we want the quick fix.
00:15:48.000And the quick fix a lot of times isn't the best route.
00:15:51.000The results can just be a temporary one where we have a...
00:15:56.000I call it the show up, blow up, and blow out technique.
00:15:59.000We show up, we do the show, we take the pictures, and then we leave and we never come back.
00:16:04.000And so what we want to do is be opposite.
00:16:07.000We want to build relationships, get in touch.
00:16:10.000We want to be like a family with them and then show them that, hey, we're not just here for land because that's what we started with first.
00:16:30.000We petitioned, lobbied, and basically said, yeah, we went to battle saying, I mean in a peaceful way, but said, these people are the first people of Congo.
00:16:48.000Well, if that's true, then that's the origins of humanity.
00:16:52.000I was just reading this Bill Nye thing about humans.
00:16:55.000It was just some quote that he had said about the human race.
00:17:00.000It's been proven now that we are literally all one race and the only thing that's different is our exposure to ultraviolet light and different environments have changed the way we look and how our bodies react to the environment.
00:17:12.000I didn't know that, but I love that standard effect.
00:17:13.000Well, we know that all people, as far as we know today, you know, the knowledge kind of grows and changes over the years, but we know today that all human beings, as far as we know, came from Africa.
00:17:23.000So if that's the case, these people you're dealing with could very well be the oldest humans in the world.
00:17:29.000And it kind of makes sense if you really think about it.
00:17:31.000I mean, that's where the primates evolved and came down from the trees and started experimenting and moving along and trying different environments and spreading out throughout the land.
00:18:41.000And don't they have a right to have some land?
00:18:44.000And so that's kind of where, yeah, we just lobbied on their behalf and then said, so if I bought the land in Fight for the Forgotten, if we would have bought it in our name, we would have gotten a five-year certificate and we would have had to renew things and fees and everything every five years.
00:18:58.000If we bought it in the name of the university there that we partner with, It would have been a 25-year certificate, but then at the end of the 25 years, we'd have to pay the same price that we purchased it for 25 years earlier.
00:19:09.000Would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars every 25 years, maybe more.
00:19:13.000And then we were thinking, it's kind of cool.
00:19:18.000In Africa, I would say a lot of the countries, at least, my understanding is that it was the colonialists or colonists or however you say that, they were the ones that set up the boundaries of the countries.
00:19:34.000And so, like say Rwanda, the Hutu and Tutsi, they probably wouldn't have put their country together right there because they've had a long history of disputes with each other.
00:19:43.000So they wouldn't be in the same country.
00:19:44.000They would have been two different countries.
00:19:46.000Same thing in Congo, there's over 200 tribes.
00:19:48.000So, in Congo, what's very, I don't know, here we're all, America, America Pride, or Texas, and things like that, but in Congo, it's about what tribe you're from.
00:19:58.000And so, in a lot of parts of Africa, they're really proud about their tribe.
00:20:02.000And so, on the government level, the strongest thing in court was buying the land in the name of a tribe, because that's what they respect, that's what they value, and yet nobody was petitioned.
00:20:13.000Petitioning and lobbying on behalf of the Pygmies.
00:21:09.000You need to put your seeds farther apart because they're not producing fruit because the corn is only half of a cob instead of a full cob because your plants are basically choking themselves out.
00:21:23.000They've already done a great job, but we're wanting to expand from three villages to ten villages.
00:21:28.000It's just an immense sacrifice that you've done, that you've taken on, and it's probably quite difficult to find people that have the same kind of passion for it that you have.
00:22:53.000Some of the land is only like a 30-minute hike off the nearest quote-unquote road.
00:22:58.000That's just dirt and clay and silt and big boulders.
00:23:03.000But yeah, most of them are 30 minutes an hour, two hours, one's even three hours off the nearest road.
00:23:09.000So yeah, we got to hike that stuff all in.
00:23:12.000But I would say that the manual drilling method, which has been approved by UNICEF and USAID and all these other major organizations that say it can be just as clean, just as safe as the deep water wells as long as we do it to a high standard and keep a high integrity when we do it.
00:23:30.000Which means we backfill it with a clay sanitary seal.
00:23:34.000We put a cement plug on there so that way there's no sort of bacteria or anything else that can get down into our well.
00:24:28.000We need to have the augers changing, but as of now, it's just the same way.
00:24:33.000But yeah, so it's us just drilling, and we can go up to 150 feet deep in the ground.
00:24:40.000And so when we're doing that, it's brutal.
00:24:43.000I think the deepest we've gone is like 70. So when you're doing 70 feet, what kind of a pipe do you have to keep attaching a longer and longer pipe to it?
00:24:51.000Six-meter, 20-foot-long segments of this drilling stem.
00:25:49.000Yeah, no, I have no clue, to be honest, the validity.
00:25:52.000I just don't know how it could possibly really work.
00:25:54.000I have a friend who had a well dug out here, and they hired this guy to come over, and they had the two sticks, and he's standing there, and he's telling them where to dig.
00:26:50.000Now, with the VES machine, we can see if it's sandstone, if it's quartz, if it's granite, what kind of rock is underneath, where the water table is.
00:28:33.000And the gravel pack kind of keeps any dirt, silt, sand, depending on what layer we're in, it keeps that from coming into our well.
00:28:41.000So that way the water that is inside of our casing, there we go, our four-inch casing pipe, that allows, it has like little slits in it.
00:28:50.000Maybe it would be like the size of a A saw if you just kind of put a saw in there and it's every like centimeter apart from each other and that way inside of our casing and Before the water touches our pipe like it's crystal clear.
00:29:04.000It's clean We test it all that stuff and so the gravel pack keeps the sand the the dirt the silt anything out of our well Wow That's incredible, man.
00:29:15.000It's just incredible, the amount of thinking and planning and all that's involved in just getting people what everybody here just totally takes for granted, water.
00:29:33.000And sometimes, man, I'm thankful that I was a fighter, because sometimes you have to Bite down on your mouthpiece and just keep swinging whenever you want to give up and you have a team out there that's tired.
00:29:46.000So in between the failed well and the other one, we took two days off, but we can't go back to, we call it Bunia, the town where we can kind of...
00:29:55.000Rest and get some good food and come back out.
00:29:57.000What we did was go to a little market and get more dried fish and some more rice and some more beans.
00:30:04.000We're not stopping until we finish, until we get these people clean water.
00:30:08.000And when you look at what they're drinking, we do the water walks with them.
00:30:12.000I love telling my team, like, let's do the walk that they have to go on to get water.
00:30:17.000And, man, I've gone 45 minutes, an hour.
00:30:21.000Walking with the women because it's the women that collect the water in that culture because the men are off in the fields or they're off hunting or they're off doing stuff.
00:30:29.000So the women go and get the water and it can be a 45 minute hour hike with these 20 liter jerry cans and 20 liters I think full is like 40 or 44 pounds whenever it's full and they're going to get dirty water.
00:31:37.000I think it's called the Opportunity at Freedom or something that's on the Waterfore site.
00:31:41.000But five of seven children are gone and her husband and it's all waterborne disease and she has river blindness.
00:31:47.000So not only has she lost all her, not all of her children, but five and her husband, but she's blind and she's blind because of river blindness.
00:31:56.000And so the worms get in your body and there's five different kinds.
00:32:00.000Of filarial worms and one kind of the worms, like the babies, go to your retina, I think, and they attack and eat and live and sleep in the retina of your eyes until you have no vision left.
00:32:31.000Right, it's killing the worms, killing the parasites.
00:32:33.000And so I was like, man, if I have this, and if our team has it, because we treated our well drillers first, and some of them broke out in rashes and hives and really were itching.
00:32:44.000If you go to that region, you're going to get it, if you're out there long enough.
00:32:49.000Maybe not if you go for a week, but if you go for an extended period of time, you need to at least take the treatment to make sure you don't have that.
00:32:57.000And so I was like, man, if I supposedly had it and if my team has it, then I know the pygmies, it's like ravaging them, you know?
00:33:05.000And so we went to the different villages and took a scale and from that we knew how much medicine we should give them.
00:33:11.000I talked to this guy, Dr. Peter Hotez.
00:34:21.000There's parts in Uganda that barely touch the stuff in Congo, but they call it the impenetrable forest because there's sayings that it's harder for a fish to swim through the rivers there because even the rivers are thick vegetation and all this stuff.
00:34:39.000Um, in some parts, but dude, it's, it's crazy.
00:34:43.000Like walking through and hiking through, I have a picture that's going to be in my book of, of Ben walking.
00:34:47.000And I was like, how much of this do we have to walk through?
00:34:50.000It was, we were literally macheting, uh, using a machete to get through, um, to this pygmy village.
00:34:56.000And I'm like, dang, they walk through this every day where it's like the, you're just walking through the thicket that's going across your face, going across your arms.
00:35:04.000There's bugs latching onto you while you're doing that.
00:35:06.000There's mosquitoes like crazy at all times.
00:37:39.000Actually, reach in there and you'll see the actual cloth that's his.
00:37:43.000So this is kind of a thank you way that they kind of gave me a few things to remember them by and to say, like, tell your friends and people that supported this, like, thank you.
00:37:55.000But San Gi is, he's probably 12, I would say.
00:38:46.000He's probably 12. None of them really know their age just because they don't really have a calendar and don't keep up with it and don't have school or anything like that.
00:40:22.000I mean, it was like an old abandoned tire and he just made this thing out of wood to make a guitar.
00:40:27.000So he got the wire, like stripped it out of the rubber?
00:40:30.000Stripped it out of the rubber and made himself a stringed instrument.
00:40:34.000But if you sand geese over my back and this is just us, this is...
00:40:38.000How we learn the most about how we can help them.
00:40:41.000When we sit around the campfire with them, we've kind of made a goofy name for it, but we call it Campfire University because that's where they take us to school.
00:40:50.000Whenever we're sitting around, that's where we can hear the truth about how they're really treated.
00:40:56.000No one else is around, like any of their oppressors and stuff.
00:42:07.000What they do is they chase it into a net.
00:42:08.000So they string these nets up through the trees...
00:42:13.000And then the men and the women sometimes, too, they go through with leafs and other things and make sounds, and they scare the antelope into their nets.
00:42:23.000These nets can be, man, they can be a football field in length, and then they scare the antelope into it, and then they have to catch up to it before it escapes, and they spear it.
00:43:37.000Yeah, and a Cajun guy just came over because we kept catching turtles, and he would cut off the head because you can't really get your hook back.
00:43:46.000And then he would just open it up and see if they had eggs in them.
00:43:49.000And right there, without cooking it, without really cleaning it, he would just pop the eggs in his mouth.
00:44:44.000It's only in the Congo, and that's what it looks like at least, but it's in the Giraffidae family, and so it's the only other surviving animal in that family.
00:47:01.000It's sort of like the Native Americans did that with buffalo, and they do that in Mexico, too.
00:47:07.000They take the buffalo, and they make really thin slices, and they dry it in the sun, and then they rehydrate it again and cook it.
00:47:17.000And so kind of like with their situation of them being the first citizens of Congo, that's what we always use with them, the terminology, similar to the Native Americans and what we did here.
00:47:28.000Pushed them off their land, took their land from them.
00:48:04.000We want him to replant a thousand trees.
00:48:07.000We're like, hey, you can feed anyone that helps you.
00:48:10.000The pygmies, give them breakfast, lunch, dinner, and we'll give them a day's wage and teach them how to make money and how to work for the first time making money.
00:48:22.000When he came back, we were blown away because he had replanted 3,500 trees.
00:49:19.000But yeah, some are massive, and they're just cutting them down.
00:49:21.000Just the perspective that you must gain from being in this insane environment, it's got to be a really, for lack of a better word, enriching experience.
00:49:32.000Yeah, I mean, it's so good for the soul, I would say.
00:49:36.000Just your heart, you feel like you're a part of something greater than yourself, something bigger than yourself.
00:49:42.000And I would say that that's where a lot of my struggles in life came from was when I was so focused on something small, which is myself.
00:49:52.000I was like magnifying glass or putting myself under a microscope in my life.
00:49:56.000And it's like whenever I took the focus off of me, And put it on others like it gave me such a Greater sense of purpose in life of man.
00:50:06.000I don't need to live for myself Like this problem like what if I could be part of a little a little part a little link in the chain To help to be in the in the problem in whatever small problems anybody here has in comparison to the issues that they have there It's it's one of the things that happens to people when crisis It takes place when there's any sort of a crisis like after 9-11 One of the weirdest aspects of being in New York was how friendly everybody was
00:50:37.000like everybody kind of had this newfound perspective They had this new instead of dealing with the stress and the the grind of the big city in the traffic and all the nonsense and all the Agro behavior that people normally had it wasn't there.
00:50:49.000It was like people were friendly and they were nice and kind it's like they had put it in perspective and Because of the attack.
00:51:19.000Anything that they get for that day, even whenever they're working underneath their slave masters and they're getting a minnow for a full day's labor or two bananas for a family of four or five that are literally working from sunup to sundown,
00:53:36.000Some places, I give them my iPhone, and they get to look at themselves, and they're just like, oh my goodness, because they've only seen themselves really in reflection of water and stuff like that.
00:53:46.000How long before they start taking selfies?
00:54:00.000But, man, on my Instagram at the Big Pygmy, there's some pictures of me actually giving this village Pictures.
00:54:09.000And dude, some of their expressions whenever they get to see a picture of themselves for the first time, it's like the craziest looks in their eyes seeing themselves on a piece of paper.
00:54:19.000Yeah, I could only imagine seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time.
00:56:28.000And what he found was the old piece of...
00:56:31.000So in Congo, the Belgian Congo with like King Leopold II, who was due to as evil as Hitler...
00:56:42.000I mean, they say during his reign of Congo, he said in Europe that he was like the savior of Congo, that he was helping all the Congolese, but really he was extorting them for mainly rubber and ivory.
00:56:55.000And there was an estimated 20 million people, and there's a book called King Leopold's Ghost, and the guy had a big old beard, kind of like I have in one of those pictures with Sanghee.
00:57:07.000But what they say is that it's an estimated 10 million people, half the population of Congo, that he was responsible for killing and murdering.
00:57:18.000So they call that like the African Holocaust or one of the first Holocaust because there was, you know, six, some, I mean, I'm not sure about the Jewish Holocaust, six million or something like that.
00:57:29.000But this was eight to 10 million people.
00:57:32.000Half the, half of the Congo was, was murdered and everything else just over rubber, the rubber boom and, and ivory.
00:57:41.000And I had, I had a slingshot for you from like the original rubber, but it kind of like rotted and broke.
00:58:07.000They'll knock, and it might sound bad to our culture or whatever, but this is their food, you know, so...
00:58:14.000But they'll shoot like a nest and whatever comes down, you know, if it's baby birds or mama bird or eggs or something like that, that's free game.
00:58:24.000Yeah, I mean, we are very privileged that we can just go to a supermarket and buy food.
00:58:28.000So we have these ideas of what you should and shouldn't do.
00:58:31.000But when you're starving to death, you will eat whatever you can get a hold of.
00:58:34.000Yeah, and whenever the outsiders make it so much even harder for you to hunt because they're cutting down the trees and it's making the animals skittish and scared and so much harder for you to find them.
00:58:43.000Yeah, so there's no regulation whatsoever on how many trees they can chop down.
00:59:06.000And they'll bring in trucks from Kenya and Tanzania and Rwanda.
00:59:11.000And there's some, like, big businessmen that then sell these hardwoods to China, the U.S., Brazil.
00:59:17.000I mean, just different big countries that they send it out.
00:59:20.000And I've seen these hardwood on these roads sometimes...
00:59:25.000Three-fourths of an 18-wheeler or a lorry is what we call them there.
00:59:31.000It can be completely sunk in mud or it can just be fallen off of a face of a cliff because it's so overloaded.
00:59:39.000They fill up these containers just so full with this heavy, heavy, heavy wood because if they can get it back, then they're going to make a ton of money off of it.
00:59:49.000So they just overload it because it's so hard to get from point A to B to like Mombasa and Kenyatta where they can ship out this stuff.
00:59:57.000It's just so depressing sometimes you think about the damage that people are capable of and the insensitivity that people can exhibit.
01:00:23.000I think they said, I forget where I got it, it was a reputable source, but the size of Texas has been cut down from the Congo rainforest in the last, like, just 20 or 25 years.
01:00:38.000Last 20-25 years of the rainforest in Congo, the size of Texas, which that's where I'm from.
01:00:56.000And then to think about the fact that it takes hundreds of years to replenish those forests if they do get replenished, because the environment that they're growing in, it gets changed as soon as you chop everything down, then the sun bakes the land, and then there's less rain.
01:01:10.000That's got to be such a strange place to go while you're there and you're trying to help and you're trying to replenish and help these communities and give them water and help them sustain.
01:01:23.000And then you're hearing these trees fall and knowing that there's just these insensitive people just chopping down trees left and right and fucking the whole thing up.
01:01:56.000And literally the first trip she came on, which was only like...
01:02:03.000Six months before that, like all those trees were there.
01:02:07.000All those trees were there and it was and now we walk into it and it's probably like 10 or 20 acres of trees that were just leveled in that amount of time and the way that they were doing it there wasn't by these guys weren't using the big chainsaws and everything else.
01:02:23.000They were just like going at it with axes and stuff.
01:02:25.000And a lot of it actually isn't just for the hardwoods.
01:02:30.000I mean, I would say that's the majority of the problem, but another big problem in Congo or Sub-Saharan Africa is the charcoal everyone uses for cooking.
01:03:09.000You know, there's a photograph of a tree somewhere in California.
01:03:12.000I forget where it was, but one of the captions was this tree is somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hundred years old or something like that.
01:03:23.000They were talking about when this tree first came up, Columbus was sailing.
01:05:44.000But whenever I compare that, 11,000 people total in this Ebola crisis, and then the stat for children, and this is on Water4's website and stuff, and on ours, and, dude, it's what I want to fight and let people know, because there should be a real public outcry and uproar that 5,000 kids 5,000 kids under the age of 5 years old die every single day.
01:06:10.000Every single day because of dirty water.
01:07:23.000I don't I don't mean to go crazy, but no, it's not crazy at all It's and that statistic is crazy 5,000 a day a day and they're under five years old So I mean, I don't know how many with the six seven eight nine-year-olds, you know I've been to the funerals of those kids.
01:07:37.000We are very strange about what we have What we focus our attention on and the Ebola thing is just something that was over here because we were worried about it coming over here We don't see a problem over here.
01:07:49.000We It's so convenient for people to not look at impoverished third-world countries, people that are just, they've always been in this sort of state of poverty, so we just sort of accept them at being like that.
01:08:02.000We don't think that they necessarily, that they have to live the way we live or have access to clean water and medical.
01:08:26.000But the way we reacted to that, to know your statistic, to know that what you just said, that 5,000 little kids die every day from dirty water, and people aren't freaking out about that.
01:08:58.000And the thing that really wrecked me with that was, so I spoke at this university in Oklahoma, it's slipping my name, or the name's slipping me, but their students, this is right when I got back from Congo, and they had heard about what I was doing.
01:09:14.000It was Southern, it's in Oklahoma City, SNU, and they said, come speak to our students, we want to try to raise enough for a water well.
01:09:28.000And dude, they set out in their courtyard.
01:09:31.000They set out in their courtyard 5,000 white flags.
01:09:36.000They set out 5,000 little white flags and on it said the stat that's 5,000 kids every day die of dirty water.
01:09:44.000And so I saw that right before I went up and spoke and I went and saw the courtyard and it just wrecked me because like for me, like the people that see that, like the stat can go in one ear.
01:09:54.000It can it can jack with you for a little bit.
01:10:00.000Um, but it's so easy to go in one ear and out the other, or once you sleep, you know, you're not going to wake up thinking about that just from seeing those white flags.
01:10:08.000And so I grabbed one of those white flags and I, and hopefully some of the people just from seeing those flags will get it.
01:10:14.000But like, I had to write Andy Bo on the back.
01:10:17.000And, and then when I got up and spoke, I showed him, I'm like, Hey, every one of these white flags, you see it, you saw it, like it's a terrible statistic, but this, the real statistic is that each and every one of those flags has a name.
01:11:18.000So that was when I gave the chief, Andy Bo's chief, my first promise I ever made the Pygmies, which was...
01:11:28.000We had buried him and he had told us that he was rejected hospital treatment twice.
01:11:34.000So he didn't just die of waterborne disease, but his other brother, his father had died of waterborne disease and his mom was all alone now.
01:11:43.000And she couldn't even cry, bro, whenever I met her or whenever I saw her at this time.
01:11:49.000Like, she was topless and I could see every single bone in her sternum, like every single rib attached to her sternum because she was so hungry and she was so malnourished and she was so thirsty.
01:12:03.000And so our team went and we got mangoes and passion fruit juice, rice, and tilapia.
01:12:12.000And we brought it back and fed it to her.
01:12:34.000It wasn't 10, 15 minutes later that then she started sobbing.
01:12:39.000Because she had, like, that sugar and that energy a little bit.
01:12:42.000And then after that, like, dude, the next day was so brutal.
01:12:44.000And I had blisters on my hand from digging the grave.
01:12:48.000And that's when the chief came up and said, the first time we went and got treatment, they told the mother, you're too dirty to come in here.
01:12:55.000And she said, well, can you give them treatment?
01:13:05.000And then the second day, the whole village, and this is like 85 or 100 people, they grab everything they can, which was like almost two dozen eggs.
01:13:17.000They brought a chicken and They brought a bag of charcoal.
01:13:54.000It's in the book, I got the real number.
01:13:57.000$45 for his casket that I buried him in.
01:14:00.000And it just blew my mind that the oppressors, the people, the makpala, the non-pygmies that surround the pygmies were thinking like, These people are so worthless or they're like animals or whatever that it's easier for us to let them die or cheaper for us to let them die than to take care of them.
01:14:20.000And so that's when the chief grabbed me and pulled me to the side and said, Efe, which Efeosa is my first pygmy name.
01:14:47.000I didn't know how all of that stuff was going to go.
01:14:48.000But I knew that through MMA and through some of the other stuff, like a platform, that, hey, I can at least help these people have a voice of some sort, even if it's just with 100 people.
01:15:00.000You know, maybe I can help them have a voice.
01:15:37.000What you're talking about is just, it's not even human.
01:15:41.000I mean, it's so outside of the realm of our imagination, to even imagine...
01:15:47.000Living in a world where someone won't give someone a $3 shot or whatever it costs to treat a baby that's dying and this woman can't even cry because she doesn't have any food.
01:15:59.000She doesn't have enough energy for tears.
01:16:05.000And you continue to go back there to try to help these people.
01:16:11.000Now you're going to fight, not just try to build them wells, not just try to help them and get them food, but now you're going to fight in Bellator and try to raise more awareness for this.
01:16:39.000You're training a team takedown where Johnny Hendricks, former welterweight champion trains big giant modern facility one of the best places in the world and you are preparing for this fight But your main goal, you love the sport,
01:16:55.000but your main goal is to try to bring awareness to the Pygmies.
01:17:01.000So it's kind of a crazy way of a roundabout sort of a way of getting attention to them to compete in a sport and arguably the most brutal sport in the world.
01:17:39.000So I was just so focused on that and building the team and getting something legitimately started that will really Impact them long term, not just a flash in the pan.
01:17:51.000But I saw fighting as something that is a platform.
01:17:56.000I mean, I'm here with you now just because I was a fighter and then the other stuff that came about, but that's the link together.
01:18:08.000And my wife started talking to me and other people started talking to me and kind of said, well, what if you could do both?
01:18:13.000And yeah, fighting the lifespan of it, that's kind of like a flash in the pan.
01:18:17.000It's just, it's a short, limited window.
01:18:20.000And the thing, the problem there is going to take a lifetime worth of dedication.
01:19:45.000And I went to Popeye's right when I got back, and it was after I had...
01:19:51.000Buried Andy Bo and it was my second trip back coming back that was in like 2011 I think or maybe 2012 and I get back and I'm in a I go straight to Popeyes and it's in Atlanta and I Walk inside,
01:20:08.000and there's this mom and daughter, and they're there with a group that's going to do some kind of international aid in Haiti.
01:20:14.000They got their Haiti shirts on, and it wasn't too long after the earthquake and stuff, maybe a year and a half, two years after Haiti.
01:20:22.000And the daughter is sitting there and she's saying, uh, I'm gonna get a Coke and I'm waiting behind them at the Coke machine.
01:20:29.000And so she starts filling up with the Coke.
01:21:24.000Like you're about to get a rude awakening when you go to Haiti and I've been there and I've seen the people walking through snow drifts of garbage to take a bath and walking back out and having to climb up that snow drift of garbage to get out after they took their bath.
01:21:39.000And I've seen them digging in the trash to find food.
01:21:42.000I've seen kids sniffing glue to fall asleep.
01:21:44.000Like, I'm like, you guys are about to get wrecked.
01:21:46.000And like, it wrecked me too, because I'm like, I just buried a kid over dirty water.
01:21:51.000And now you guys are fighting over sugar water.
01:21:57.000I don't want to offend people in a way of saying our culture is terrible or bad, but I want to point out certain things that life's bigger than our small problems.
01:22:06.000If we can get our eyes off of those small problems and get our eyes onto the big picture, it'll do a lot of good.
01:22:12.000It'll change a lot of things in our own lives, our own hearts, our own relationships.
01:22:18.000I think with people, it's just simply a matter of perspective.
01:22:20.000And when we don't have real problems, small problems become real problems, like this Coke thing for this little girl.
01:22:26.000I mean, it's probably, you know, it's just a natural thing that human beings do in some sort of a weird way.
01:22:34.000We just lack perspective if it's not right in front of our face.
01:22:51.000One thing, Water4 has been an organization that is, like...
01:22:57.000Believed in us since the very beginning kind of like you Whenever I had come back and I'd seen you know the two things but practically I hadn't done anything yet I hadn't like gotten land to start a water I didn't know I just had the passion and the dream and you put me on here and let me tell people that water for kind of did the same thing and They they gave me the tools when I had none the the training and knowledge when I didn't know anything and And just got behind me but I got back and three days later I was at their gala and
01:23:31.000It was a great event and man I was crying because they did a video of me in the Congo and then I had to get up and speak.
01:23:39.000And it was real tough, but I go right from there, and three days later, I'm at kind of like a black tie event, and women are wearing fur and all this stuff.
01:23:49.000And so it just was like, whoa, from one world to the other.
01:23:54.000But I see it as a way to, like there, they did so much that night for this project, for the people, for my family.
01:24:27.000The Water 4 thing, a little update for you, Fight for the Forgotten has gone into a dormant stage in our nonprofit.
01:24:37.000And we have officially partnered with Water4.
01:24:40.000We joined forces with them because when it comes to the reporting, the business...
01:24:45.000Anyways, even the logistics and the training, their water engineers, their hydrologists, the different kinds of things that they can add to us are so great.
01:24:55.000They've given us a truck, all the tools, all the training.
01:24:58.000They've really been a huge component behind us.
01:25:03.000But one of the things I love most about them is...
01:25:06.000Yeah, we're partnering in a way that...
01:25:20.000Dude, I love that because when you just do charity, you just help for such a short amount of time.
01:25:27.000But the Water 4 method is like, hey, we're going to put the tools in their hands, the knowledge in their heads, and then we're going to look to create an opportunity for them that goes beyond what we can do from the West or from our short-term mission humanitarian trip.
01:25:45.000We want to give this thing a life of its own, that it becomes a breathing, living thing, or even a business.
01:25:54.000They're in 31 different countries, and they're helping these entrepreneurs do social good.
01:26:01.000They get paid to drill water wells and to train nationals, and the jobs don't have to go outside.
01:26:23.000I want to be a spark plug, if that makes sense, in the engine.
01:26:29.000I want to get it started, get it running.
01:26:31.000But the people are the strength, the engine, the thing that makes it run.
01:26:37.000The spark plug gets it started, but but the locals and investing in them telling them you can do it fly on your own wings like You just need the training.
01:26:47.000You just need the tools once you have that you're golden You know once they have fresh water though, there's still gonna be the issue of food though, right?
01:26:55.000I mean it seems like with the logging you're saying it's more difficult to hunt Yeah, so what we've been doing is we're interning the three agriculturalists right now and we're about to hire them.
01:27:52.000But I promise, the dude is just a problem solver.
01:27:56.000And he inspires his people, the whole village, to get around the vision and let's do this.
01:28:03.000And so we basically said, start with what you have.
01:28:05.000That's kind of the Water 4 method too.
01:28:08.000Start with what you have and we're going to come and we're going to fuel it.
01:28:11.000We want to empower you to be able to do it for yourself.
01:28:14.000And and that's what people need they need a little little jump start and so So anyways in this village and just Liam is I wish I would have brought in the list of what it is but From the time I came back and got married and went back about 10 weeks ago.
01:28:31.000I Got to celebrate the 20th water well that was dug and drilled and it was such an awesome celebration of But one of the most exciting things to me was that I walk into Tundu and at first I was like,
01:29:34.000I think the list might have nine or ten.
01:29:36.000But they had done that all from, hey, if we get you your own land, do you think we could help you with water and you could help us with the labor, some of it, like taking the tools inside the village?
01:29:50.000Then it's like, hey, if we want to get a farming project started, can we empower you to do that?
01:29:55.000We gave them some tools, we gave them some seeds, we gave them some banana trees, and they just ran with it, man.
01:30:00.000And so, I don't know, I just love seeing that if you empower someone instead of treat them like a charity case.
01:30:08.000If you give them an opportunity instead of saying, you can't do this for yourself, get out of the way, I'll do it for you.
01:30:15.000It's definitely a much more intelligent approach and it's definitely better for them in the future, for now.
01:30:20.000It gives them that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that they're improving and that their life is getting better because of their efforts.
01:30:38.000And one of the other villages that we call it Mapinda, and it's, anyways, at first my heart sank because they really loved their, in nine of the ten villages, they really loved their huts.
01:30:53.000It's very culturally important to them, the twigs and leaves.
01:30:57.000But whenever I walk in onto their land, all of a sudden I saw huts that were just like the Makpala, just like the non-pygmies.
01:31:04.000It was the mud huts that were, I don't know, four to six inches thick walls.
01:31:09.000They had the leafed roofs, but they were much stronger houses.
01:31:13.000And all of a sudden I'd come back, I'd gone back, and then all of a sudden to that village, what was important to them, the other one, the farming.
01:31:21.000And yes, this village, also Mipenda, started farming for themselves as well, corn and beans.
01:31:27.000But they started doing the huts because they were like, hey, if we're really equal now, we're equal to our neighbors, then we can live in the same kind of houses that they have.
01:31:41.000And so to them what was Of value to them was one of the reasons they get called animals and subhuman and other things is because of their twig and leaf huts.
01:31:52.000And their neighbors will say they live just like animals or they live in a nest or different things like that.
01:32:00.000Well, now this place is, now they have houses just like the others.
01:32:16.000Because I thought they maybe had gotten pushed off their land and that the Makapala had taken the land back.
01:32:23.000And we have strict agreements and paperwork and like stamped in the courts and law that, hey, this is the agreement that is going to be a peaceful way of doing this and we're going to help the community come up together.
01:32:38.000So it'd be dumb of us to go in and say, we're just gonna help the Pygmies.
01:32:41.000So we helped the community all together.
01:32:44.000I thought these guys had gone back on their word, but then all of a sudden it was, whoa, they're living just like everybody else now.
01:32:50.000Do these people have any idea of the impact of your work?
01:32:55.000Like, did they understand, like, that you could reach, I mean, you're probably gonna, a million plus people are gonna hear this podcast.
01:33:02.000The impact that you're gonna have when they talk about it on Spike TV, probably just as much.
01:33:08.000I mean, I don't know what the number Spike's been getting for fights, but it's got to be probably close to a million or at least...
01:34:06.000When you tell them that you are going to fight on Spike TV, and they're going to show a video of why you're doing this, and they're going to show a profile on you, do they understand what you do?
01:34:17.000Do they understand that these people are going to see you?
01:34:38.000And sometimes we'd put on little entertaining things where the pygmies would come around and I'm not going to wrestle one of those guys, but I'll wrestle some of our well drillers.
01:34:46.000There's one guy that's at least 6'5 on our team.
01:34:48.000And so I'm wrestling with them and throwing them around a little bit.
01:34:51.000And I think Ben will tell them sometimes that, you know, hey, in the United States, he was a wrestler, he was a fighter, and people know who he is.
01:35:00.000But for them, for a frame of reference, kind of like you're saying you don't have the frame of reference for 5,000 kids dying every day.
01:35:07.000I don't think they really have a reference for professional sports, television.
01:35:12.000I've never met a Mabuti Pygmy that has a cell phone, that has electricity.
01:35:18.000I've met someone with a flashlight, or a couple guys with a flashlight.
01:36:06.000They have a reference for what I'm trying to do for them, but that's not what it's about for me.
01:36:12.000No, I know it's not about that for you, but for them, it's got to be so odd.
01:36:17.000This guy, the first white person they've ever seen, and there's a video of you that was going around Reddit a long time ago of you meeting them and them touching you and they can't believe you're white and they're freaking out.
01:36:29.000But this guy who shows up out of nowhere, like a mythical creature.
01:36:37.000If no one else could ever reach them, and if you stopped going there, and if all contact with the outside world ceased, you would be like a part of their religion.
01:37:57.000No, I mean, I know you don't know about that because you're humble and you're not looking at it like that, but just the sheer perspective...
01:38:06.000For them to be living in that world where their number one concern is feeding themselves parasites, trying to get some clean water, and some guy comes from a place on the other side of the planet, and this guy does this thing called mixed martial arts,
01:38:25.000and he fights, and they broadcast it on television, something they've never seen before in their life.
01:40:11.000And with the pygmies and the makpala that's there, most of them, even our well-drilling team, everyone is fascinated with my body hair, the arm hair, because they don't have arm hair or leg hair, and then I'm just covered in it.
01:40:24.000So they think you're like some kind of a white gorilla or something.
01:40:28.000My buddies would call me the great white Sasquatch or the vanilla gorilla.
01:40:34.000I just can't imagine how odd it must be to them and they don't even really know how odd it is.
01:40:42.000Like for them to not have the preference of television, not understand, like if you could take them, I mean if Spike TV wants to really make an impact, what they need to do is go to the Congo, take some of those little fellas and fly them out to your fight.
01:41:37.000Maybe that sounds crazy, but also like giving them a place where all of a sudden they have everything at their fingertips and take them into a grocery store.
01:41:47.000And then they missed their family right away.
01:41:50.000Taking them out to go to Benjamin or Laryngo's wedding, they started missing the forest, like deeply missing their friends and family.
01:44:39.000I was on a reality TV show called The Ultimate Fighter when I was 21. It was the main event at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas when I was 23, and that was what I always thought was going to be my significance.
01:44:52.000My purpose was to be a champion fighter, if I could be that.
01:45:03.000Why should these sweet, loving, amazing people be literally thought of and believed to be animals whenever they're these sweet, loving, amazing people?
01:45:14.000And so if there's something we can do, if there's something I can do, I'm going to do it.
01:45:19.000I was fighting against people, but really I was just supposed to be fighting for people.
01:45:24.000And even whenever we feel like the last ounce of strength is leaving, we still got to choose to fight.
01:45:29.000And we'll see something amazing happen.
01:45:41.000My name is Derek Watson and I'm a filmmaker and this story has dramatically changed my life.
01:45:48.000What inspires me about Justin is here's a guy who's at the top of his game and he leaves everything behind to go and serve and love someone else.
01:45:59.000So we really want to tell the story through film because it's a story that really can inspire an entire audience to fight for something other than themselves and to fight for freedom.
01:46:10.000So what I love about Derek and I choosing the crowdfunding route and being on Kickstarter is that we get to involve passionate people to be part of the story, be part of the solution.
01:46:19.000And that's why we're inviting you along.
01:46:21.000We could have gone different routes for funding, but we wanted to involve people in this process.
01:46:27.000This is an awesome opportunity to really give my Pygmy family a voice.
01:46:32.000And that was my first promise that I gave them, that I could try, at least try to give them a voice.
01:46:37.000And now I'm asking you, help me, help me Give them a voice.
01:46:41.000So this Kickstarter campaign really is trying to help us get just the hard cost for this film to finish it out.
01:46:47.000Things that you have to do to get a film out on the biggest stage possible, that's what we're asking you to do.
01:46:52.000So this money is not going to me as the filmmaker.
01:46:55.000I am literally giving up all of my time and the time of my production team for free to do this because we really believe in the story.
01:47:04.000And we're going to have some amazing kickbacks.
01:47:05.000We're going to be talking to you guys.
01:47:06.000We want to make sure that you guys feel as involved as we do as the filmmakers and as Justin does as a subject in going down this journey with us.
01:47:16.000So you may be asking, why don't we just give money to Fight for the Forgotten, which is Justin Wren's organization that he works with.
01:47:24.000The answer to that is, yeah, that would be awesome.
01:47:26.000In fact, if you feel like that's what you want to do and you want to give directly to help free pygmy slaves through water, I would say go for it.
01:47:36.000Go to fightfortheforgotten.com and give there.
01:47:38.000Think of this though as an opportunity to see just a dramatic impact in the lives of the pygmies and honestly in the lives of our audience as well.
01:47:47.000So that's this project and we hope you get behind us.
01:48:09.000So it'll be, if you're hearing this in the future, just go back to Monday the 24th and look for my Twitter page or go to Fighting for the Forgotten.
01:48:16.000Just do a Google search for Kickstarter, Fighting for the Forgotten.
01:49:06.000And when it releases, it'll be like $24.
01:49:09.000And the cool thing about that is 33% of my portion of anything from the book, 33% goes to the pygmies, goes to water wells and stuff like that.
01:49:21.000When you decided to get back to MMA to try to bring awareness and try to bring more attention to these people, how long had it been since you had trained?
01:50:09.000And so from going to the Congo to celebrate the 20th water well, plus like visa issues, they wanted to try to take it because they're corrupt.
01:50:18.000And they were trying to take it like how so yeah, they so when my wife and I left Congo last time Or basically they marked it down.
01:50:27.000They wrote it down That we left six months earlier than we had no nine months earlier than we had and I have to go back at least every 11 months To check in to show them like hey, I'm I'm actively coming into Congo and doing stuff and So,
01:50:43.000all of a sudden, my time, they said, literally, I got a call, and it was from the university and from our team, the drillers, and they said, F.A., we heard that you're going to lose your visa in three weeks.
01:53:52.000Former rebel groups that disbanded and came on with the government And so there's like 38 different war warring rebel groups in just the Eastern Congo I think I think It was BBC in New York Times.
01:54:08.000I'm not sure which one said which but they call it the rape capital of the world and hell on earth for a woman Because a stat had come out in like 2012 Or 2011 that said, one woman every one minute is raped in the Congo.
01:58:35.000What made you decide to go with Bellator and not go back to the UFC? I talked, my management and everything talked with the UFC. I would say that, man, that's a great opportunity, obviously.
01:58:46.000I love the UFC. It's great, great, great.
01:58:50.000Even you helping support the water wells and Nate Marquardt.
01:58:53.000I don't know if I said that last time, did I? But from one of his performance bonuses...
01:58:57.000He gave us two water wells worth of donation.
01:59:56.000It's a Russian guy Volkov was and now it's a Vitaly or something like that Nobody knows though.
02:00:04.000I mean, it's not you know, it's gonna be me soon That's what I'm saying.
02:00:08.000I'm like you could be the Bellator heavyweight champion.
02:00:10.000That's like a legit possibility right and I would this is what I Like to look at it as in me for my wrestling background and in fighting sometimes you get you You don't get this perspective, but from a wrestling background, you think of a podium, and the champ's at the top, and then there's,
02:00:26.000you know, normally there's the top eight or All-Americans or whatever.
02:00:31.000And I look at it as, man, I want to get on that podium, and eventually I want to get to the top.
02:00:36.000I want to get to the top of that podium, be the guy at the top, the champ, because if I'm there, I have a bigger voice, a bigger voice for my family.
02:00:44.000So I mean people will look people will watch if I'm on the podium and I guess they already are because of You know you and great people that are getting behind the story that see that it's important, but I know that the better I do in fighting The more people will listen and I know that's cheap and shallow At times there's nothing cheap or shallow about that at all.
02:01:28.000Man, whenever I look at it because of the team that we've lined up, man, the 17 full-timers we got now, about to have 20, each and every one of those people on that team, like, they are such fighters,
02:01:44.000and they're so giving, and they're so selfless, and they'll go live in the force year-round.
02:01:50.000And drill wells and teach farming and teach all this other stuff.
02:01:54.000So we've got a team of such great people and we've had to let guys go that just weren't with it.
02:02:01.000We went through 20 people before we finally got to our team that we have now.
02:02:42.000We're looking at ways how we can, there's no like healthcare system or insurance there, so we're trying to figure out how we can really set up our team that they're giving so much of their bodies, you know, like their health, their time.
02:02:55.000We try to feed them really well out there, but still it's not as good as being in a city or town.
02:03:06.000The four labs told me I didn't have malaria until I was almost dead.
02:03:10.000And then I got out into Uganda and they're like, they either said 60 to 70 or 65 to 70 percent of my bloodstream was parasites.
02:03:19.000In Congo they didn't they couldn't see it at all So sometimes like well like our head guy We you know his wife was actually poisoned like people can be just wicked there and mean Somebody tried to poison his wife and kill her did did poison it didn't didn't kill her but I almost did she was she was in a coma because they were jealous and Literally,
02:03:47.000I'm not going to say their names, but first tried to get our guy and then went after his wife because they knew that if they could get her, then it would affect and hurt him.
02:04:41.000And because that's how it's kind of been.
02:04:44.000I mean, I got a lot of support after being on the show and lots of people were behind it.
02:04:49.000But when it comes to like the business side of it and filing with US government and all that other stuff is like, man, I got a CPA. I got other people got my board, everything else.
02:04:59.000But I'm like, man, all I want to do is go there.
02:05:13.000But I don't necessarily need to do all the business side of things.
02:05:16.000So anyways, Water 4 has been awesome on getting behind us in that route.
02:05:20.000That's beautiful that you've formed this incredible group of people and this organization becoming a part of you, or you becoming a part of them.
02:06:26.000I mean, he goes out there and either crushes guys or he gets crushed.
02:06:30.000That's my plan, go in there and crush him, even though I hear he's a stand-up guy.
02:06:34.000I've had so many people, even his friends, messaging me saying how great of a guy he is as a person, and that it's kind of hard for them to root against him or things.
02:06:43.000So it's cool I'm going to fight a good dude, but he's got to go down because...
02:06:49.000There's a lot more writing on it for me.
02:06:51.000There's so much more at stake now than ever before.
02:07:53.000I think later today or tomorrow, also.com will be there.
02:07:57.000Right now it's the old site on.com, but the new, improved site is fightfortheforgotten.org.
02:08:04.000The book, I mean, I think people can really, I mean, from our talks, this is the deepest people can see into what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and my heart behind it so far.
02:08:15.000But on September 15th, it's 28 chapters of this stuff, and I go into it real deep.
02:08:39.000I'm just sitting in this room in the valley.
02:08:42.000I literally can't tell you how many people from airplanes That I sit next to someone from San Diego that's watched it and someone at the hotel and just all over the place, man.
02:08:53.000I walk around and people are like, oh, it's Justin from The Joe Rogan Show.