In this episode, we talk about the Jonestownsville massacre in Guyana and how it affected the people there. We also talk about what it was like to go on a river trip with the Amerindian people and how they live in the jungles of Guyana. And of course, we discuss the poison used in the massacre and the possible link between it and Koolaid. We hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned for the next one! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The opinions and thoughts expressed here are our own and do not necessarily those of our companies. If you have any thoughts or opinions on any of the topics covered in this episode please reach out to us at gimletpod@whatiwatchedtonight.co.nz and we'll get them on the show. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the podcast. Love ya! Peace, Love, Blessings, EJ & Cheers, Ej and Elesa. - The EJ Crew. Ej & Elicia. Mike & Mike Mike and Ej Music: "The EJ Podcast" by Mike & EJ and "The Crew" by EJ and the Crew . EJ is a production of Gimlet Media. "Thank you for sponsoring this podcast! and EJ's music is produced and edited by Mike and Mike's music was produced and mixed by Ej's music stylists. Thanks to EJ for producing the music. and Mike and the Ej for producing this episode was produced by Mike's background music, and the rest of the music was done by his mixing and mastering the background music and background music is by Jake and his editing and mixing and mixing for this podcasting and mastering all of the sound design and mastering his mixing, and also his editing, and all of his background mixing and editing and mastering and mastering, etc. by the rest is done by Bobby Lord. , and the background mixing, mastering the mixing and processing and mastering in the background and background mixing. . . . by , and mastering of the mixing, etc., thanks to all of EJ s music is done in this podcast, - EJ, and the editing is by &
00:02:25.000I've brought up Jonestown a number of times because in the U.S., if you say, hey, I'm going to Guyana, all anybody says is don't drink the Kool-Aid.
00:03:53.000In its raw form, when you shred the root and squeeze the shredding, so it'd be like, imagine you took a yam and shredded a yam and then squeezed the yam between your hands and dripped out a liquid.
00:04:41.000When I got home, I looked into this, and it seems that that commune, Jonestown commune, Had been ordering actual potassium cyanide, which is used in a number of mining practices and other stuff.
00:05:12.000Yeah, and the same stuff with different poisons that people use to poison fish.
00:05:19.000What strikes me about it is how, in the village, the Mikushi village I was in is mostly Mikushi, but there's also Wapashana, which is another tribe.
00:05:32.000Carib is another tribe, but it's predominantly a Mikushi village.
00:05:35.000And there's about 300 people that live in this village.
00:05:39.000And how careless they are with the liquid.
00:05:43.000Like, if you nowadays, like, picture, like, the type of person that, like, you and me are married to and raise kids with, right?
00:05:52.000If you had that type of mom, and you had a big bowl of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a bit, how that bowl would be monitored in your household?
00:07:42.000He has a leadership role in his community, and he's learned just standard English very well.
00:07:49.000He's had a fascinating life, just how much stuff has changed for him.
00:07:53.000So you can just, like, converse, okay, in a way that...
00:07:59.000You can converse in the type of English we're talking right now, almost.
00:08:04.000Which creates this weird tension between the things that you're discussing and how you're discussing them.
00:08:10.000Like, for instance, to have a guy just in conversational English talking about problems they're having with neighboring shamans and their own shaman putting curses on each other.
00:08:22.000There's a strange tension between how it's being conveyed to you.
00:08:29.000Like, okay, if you're talking conversational English, I guess like a life, it's almost like you'd want it to be, when he's telling you this, you'd almost want to be reading it in like closed caption.
00:08:41.000And he'd be saying it in the indigenous language.
00:08:44.000Because it sounds weird to have an idea that's so foreign to us.
00:08:51.000Which would be like a battle of shamans, battling over access to wild animals.
00:08:56.000To have that delivered in conversational English just struck me as unusual.
00:09:01.000Because usually when you're traveling, you're getting all of your information...
00:09:58.000The language, you've never, like, when he's speaking, you're like, I've never, in all my travels, I've never heard a language that sounds anything like that.
00:10:30.000So I guess what I'm getting at is to hear someone talking about something in conversational English that seems so far removed from just our understanding of things.
00:10:39.000But what's nice about it is you can go to a place where life is so vastly different than anything we understand.
00:10:46.000And just get the straight dope right from the source.
00:10:49.000It's kind of like what's so cool about Guyana because you can go and converse with people who are very much a hunter-gatherer culture today, but just shoot the shit with them without ever feeling like you're missing something.
00:11:06.000Everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and painstaking to wade through.
00:12:16.000The following is an interview with a member of the Chumani tribe of Bolivia due to their inherent difficulties of translating indigenous languages.
00:13:50.000So I got home, yeah, so it wasn't the same poison, but Jim Jones, he grew up in like a, he was involved in a Pentecostal church, he was involved in the Methodist church, then he kind of became a healer.
00:14:06.000It was funny, I was reading about him, when I was trying to figure out the poison, I was reading about how he was kind of ahead of his time.
00:14:12.000Because the Jim Jones Massacre was 1979. 78 or 79. And one thing that got him sideways with his church was that he wanted to have interracial service.
00:14:24.000And that caused friction in his church at the time.
00:14:30.000And he moved out to the Bay Area and started this church, and then he got kind of paranoid and thought that his congregants shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities, but he was siring illegitimate children left and right.
00:14:41.000They go down to Guyana, go out to the jungle.
00:14:45.000There's a thousand of them down there.
00:14:47.000People in the U.S. from the Bay Area are kind of like wondering what happened to their loved ones.
00:14:51.000They send a congressman down there to try to figure out what's going on.
00:15:24.000But then, yeah, when you talk to these boys, I'm like, you know Georgetown, like the Jonestown, or the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, never drink the Kool-Aid?
00:16:16.000The main river that drains Guyana is the Essequibo.
00:16:22.000And if you go way up the Essequibo, you'll get to a stream that comes in from there called the Rupanuni, and you go up the Rupanuni, and then you get to the Riwa.
00:16:30.000And at the mouth of the Riwa in Rupanuni is Riwa Village.
00:16:35.000And in Riwa Village, you're isolated enough where you don't know about 900 Americans and some other people from other areas dying in a mass suicide.
00:17:55.000They do have their wet season and dry season, but you always get about the same amount of darkness as daylight, and they don't have the wild fluctuations that we have in the temperate zone.
00:18:08.000So you have a crop that's coming in, you have a crop that'll be coming in in three months, you have a crop that'll be coming in in six months, you have a crop that'll be coming in nine months.
00:18:16.000And once you get a certain number of cycles, I can't remember how many cycles you get off a piece of ground, you let the ground go feral.
00:18:23.000Give it a few years and then come in and burn it again.
00:18:40.000And that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the surrounding just detritus scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it.
00:19:01.000There's other poisons that are extracted.
00:19:06.000People in South America, in the jungles, people that use blow darts, so people that hunt with blow guns, it's generally understood, even talking to the Mikushi who hunt with bows and arrows, I asked him, why don't you guys hunt with blow darts,
00:19:57.000So you go out in the jungle, find this piece, and you know one of the theories on how we domesticated plant species would be that it was a very gradual, unintentional domestication where you would go out.
00:20:12.000I'm going to just take something simple.
00:20:14.000Let's say you eat a lot of raspberries.
00:20:15.000You go out and you gather raspberries and you bring them home.
00:20:40.000Except for Maniac, which people don't even really, I don't think it's really well understood what it came from.
00:20:45.000It's been domesticated for a long time.
00:20:47.000All the plants they use are widely available in the jungle, but tend to also have some around home too, that they've brought home and planted nearby, or they just grow up there now because they've been bringing the stuff into their village for so long.
00:21:05.000They cut the arrow shaft green, and it looks like just a green dowel, but it has some curvature to it.
00:21:12.000Then they'll come home and they start a fire, and they heat the green thing just by twirling it over the embers or over the flame.
00:21:22.000Twirling it and getting it hot, and it'll let off a little steam, and then you bend it.
00:21:28.000And then you twirl it and get it hot and bend it and you'll eventually make it, well, arrow straight.
00:21:34.000Then they make four different kinds of arrows depending on what they're hunting for.
00:21:40.000So let's say you were making an arrow to...
00:21:44.000Let's say you're making a big game arrow.
00:21:50.000In the big game they hunt would be red-brocket deer, white-lip peccary, which is a favorite, Collard peccary, which we call javelina, and sometimes tapir.
00:22:05.000The arrow they use for that, so they would take that, so let's say they're going to build one of those.
00:22:09.000So they take that green shaft and straighten it.
00:22:11.000The next step is they find a wood called bullet wood, and they cut what would be like, what's going to form the base of your Tip.
00:23:48.000He remembers people using wood blades, which is made from a bamboo-like material, so it would be like a convex spear point cut out of bamboo and sharpened.
00:24:01.000He remembers people using those, but he had always used cutlass blades.
00:24:08.000Now, in Bolivia, you'd see people who are just using the old form.
00:24:14.000There are other arrows, when they make arrows for hunting birds and they make arrows for hunting fish, the only man-made material on those arrows is hog wire fencing.
00:24:22.000So basically wire fencing, they snip out the hunks of wire, smash it down until it's flat, and then they can cut barbs in there to hunt birds and hunt fish.
00:24:34.000The bow is, it's not a laminate bow, so they make a bow by just cutting a tree.
00:24:41.000Single piece, a single stem tree, shaving it down to what they're after, and then take that same yucca plant, pull out the fibers out of the yucca strands, and make bow strings.
00:25:51.000We're always talking about, you know, you shouldn't be surprised to get a good hit.
00:25:54.000You should know what's going to happen.
00:25:57.000Don't take shots that are too far away.
00:25:59.000We really put a strong value on when you let the arrow go or when you let the bullet go, you damn sure know that you're going to have a quick, clean kill.
00:26:09.000At least we put a lot of value on that.
00:26:11.000In practice, sometimes that stuff goes out the window, but anyone would say that that's your goal.
00:26:23.000If you're trying to shoot a bird, all they're trying to do is get a wire point.
00:26:28.000So one of those arrows I described, fitted with a long wire on the end, cut out of a piece of steel fence, with a barb, with a couple barbs filed into it.
00:26:57.000So when they shoot, all they really need to do is prick that thing with that wire barb, knowing that the bird, or they hunt for a large aquatic rodents, knowing that the bird is going to get tangled up in the trees overhead, and that they can then climb up to go get it.
00:27:14.000Even then, I think, even shooting like that kind of thing where you're just trying to prick the thing, 30 yards would be very long.
00:27:22.000Shooting fish, you're not shooting that...
00:27:23.000I mean, shooting fish, you're not really...
00:27:25.000Like, bow fishing, which I've done a lot of in my life, a 10-yard bow fishing shot is very far.
00:30:17.000The Mikushi will make more to take a guy out to catch an arapaima and let it go than what you'd pay to hunt for elk in the U.S. on a guided trip.
00:30:26.000They get seven grand to catch an arapaima.
00:30:29.000And when Rovin was a kid, they would go on two-week hunting trips where they're gone for two weeks with their father.
00:30:41.000They would go for two weeks to hunt saltfish.
00:30:44.000So they were operating out of dugout canoes that they would have to paddle.
00:30:48.000And they would make a dugout canoe themselves, paddle the dugout canoe upriver for a week to get to the good hunting and fishing grounds.
00:30:56.000Then they would hunt and fish for one week until they would get 100 pounds of salted fish.
00:31:05.000Then you'd go back downriver, which would take a day or two days, And then get to the mouth of the Rupinuni River and paddle up the Rupinuni River for two days to another town.
00:31:17.000And then they would haul the salt fish, including arapaima flesh, and sell that 100 pounds of salted fish for $75.
00:31:29.000So two weeks plus work for a family for $75.
00:31:34.000And now they will not touch those fish because they make a handful of people every year go down and give them seven grand to catch one and let it go.
00:31:44.000So seven grand to them must be just an enormous fortune.
00:31:47.000When I was talking about, like, that they discovered sunglasses and shit, there's been a lot, like, they were already on to this arapaima thing the first thing I went down, and it's changed everything about, it's changed that village.
00:32:16.000So the river jumps an S and it abandons, and the main channel abandons the curves of the S. Okay.
00:32:24.000Those curves become what's called Oxbow Lakes.
00:32:27.000Where during high water, during a flood, those oxbow lakes are connected to the main river system.
00:32:32.000When the water goes low, the oxbow lakes become isolated.
00:32:36.000Arapaimas live in those oxbow lakes and they feed on peacock bass and other stuff.
00:32:41.000So when the water got low and the arapaimas were all kind of restricted to very small little spots in the river, they would climb up in trees Overlooking these places and wait for the arapaima to come up near the surface and shoot it with an arrow.
00:33:01.000That was a detachable, basically a harpoon head arrow and shoot it with the arrow.
00:33:07.000The harpoon head would detach from the arrow and the arrow would float on the surface connected by string to the arrow shaft.
00:33:14.000You would then go take a hand line with a hook.
00:33:17.000And follow that fish in your dugout canoe until you could cast your hook out and catch your arrow.
00:33:24.000And then you're connected by your fishing line to your arrow.
00:33:29.000And your arrow is connected by the tether to the harpoon head.
00:33:34.000And you would hand line in and slaughter the arapaima.
00:34:03.000Because their whole lives occur on this one river.
00:34:06.000And once those market influences came in and they had moved beyond...
00:34:11.000Subsistence hunting and fishing and they moved into market hunting and fishing.
00:34:15.000They did the same thing that we did to our own country in the late 1800s and early 1900s is they were on course to entirely deplete the resource through market demands because their village gets more and more people all the time.
00:34:29.000It grew considerably in the five or six years between my two visits and their environment just couldn't support that level of market hunting.
00:34:38.000So this arapaima thing It gives them a way to make money, to buy staples and run a school and stuff like that.
00:34:52.000And it's funny because I'm a lot more interested, like personally, I'm a lot more interested in a guy shooting fish out of a tree and salting the meat than I am a dude like me going down to catch an arapaima and let it go.
00:36:19.000But these arapaimas, they can just keep excavating a little spot in the bottom and just wait, praying, or their equivalent of praying, that the water level comes back up and liberates them from the oxbow they're stuck in.
00:36:33.000So, they found 26 that were out of the water and their backs were all messed up from birds and other predators grabbing the arapaimas, trying to grab the arapaimas.
00:37:09.000So they realize there's just like a finite, they have like on their river, the river that they call home, the river they kind of control, there's like a finite resource.
00:37:16.000But the thing is, other groups, so they're mostly Mikushi, and my friend Rovin's Mikushi.
00:39:02.000The male face, you're looking at it, it just is like a...
00:39:06.000It reminded me of the first time I saw Lynx, where you're just looking at it, and it's just so freakishly different than anything you'd looked at, like that Harpy's face.
00:39:23.000He's telling me this story, how the Wapashana will come down and hunt, and they hunt different than the Mikushi.
00:39:27.000Like, the Mikushi aren't that big on killing tapirs, but the Wapashana will come down in their area, and he says they come down with arrows that got 12-inch steel tips on them.
00:39:36.000He's like, you know those boys are hunting tapirs.
00:39:40.000But he said one time he was going up the river, and he sees a green anaconda.
00:39:44.000And he goes to look, and it's got an arrowhead stuck into it.
00:39:49.000And he said, and I told my companion, the Wapashana are here.
00:39:54.000And they go up the river a little bit, and of course they come to a Wapashana camp.
00:39:58.000Because the Wapashana, he said, he's like, talking about this particular, there's Wapashanas all over, but he's like, this particular group of Wapashanas that travel ahead of Christmas.
00:40:09.000Because they're like, they have animist...
00:40:14.000You know, mystical systems, but it's also infused with a certain level of Christianity.
00:40:20.000So, ahead of Christmas, the Wapashana will go on a couple-month-long hunting trip to get food for Christmas celebrations.
00:40:29.000And they'll travel overland and by river to come down and hunt the Mikushi River.
00:40:35.000And when they come down, they're there.
00:42:00.000But he was telling me, if you're really hard up and have really bad arthritis, you can take the fat from an anaconda and help cure the arthritis.
00:43:34.000This group of Wapashana that come down to rape and pillage on the Rewa, yeah, Rovan explained to me their hunting area is a piss-poor hunting area.
00:44:58.000It's like different people in different areas.
00:45:01.000In the Amazon drainage, there's a thing they call barbosco.
00:45:04.000And that is a leaf that you just pulp.
00:45:07.000And it would look like you're just like taking, if you just imagine if you took a bunch of thyme or rosemary and put it in a mortar and pestle and pulped it, and then you take and spread that in the water.
00:45:31.000And you need to get an area where there's not much current because it'll just wash the poison away.
00:45:35.000So you get into one of these oxbow lakes, apply the poison, kick back 20 minutes, and pretty soon all the fish are up gulping at the surface.
00:45:44.000And then you shoot them with bows and arrows.
00:46:29.000And they were telling me usually the fish you don't shoot will recover.
00:46:34.000If there's some amount of water flowing through it.
00:46:37.000So they might go in and build a temporary dam to block whatever inlet.
00:46:42.000Let's just say it's an isolated channel off to the side of a river.
00:46:46.000They'll go in pretty carefully with rocks and logs, block the flow coming into it, poison it, and then once they've gotten whatever they want, they unblock it and let the clean water come in and it'll resuscitate the fish.
00:47:30.000I remember we were sitting in Rovin's friend's house, his outdoor palapa kind of house with hammocks strung in it, and there was just being a giant tarantula, like a two-and-a-half-inch diameter tarantula, and not even doing anything to it.
00:49:19.000There was some sort of a nature documentary where something tried to eat it, and the electrical eel zapped it, and you see this animal just lock up and fall over sideways.
00:50:22.000I never saw anything about jaguars killing caimans until about three or four years ago, and then there's like a whole slew of these videos coming out.
00:50:32.000I guess maybe the advent of GoPros and all these different video cameras that people take down there and finally started catching it on film.
00:52:18.000There's two, like, sights that'll forever be stuck in my mind, and one of them is a Wapashana woman in a DKNY t-shirt up to her armpit in a riverbank digging out 150 turtle eggs,
00:52:35.000giant river turtle eggs, putting them in a handmade woven basket.
00:52:52.000So you see people with, like, crazy American t-shirts and stuff on, where, like, I have, like, a Bob's Pizza, Santa Cruz, California, or whatever, you know, and it's just, like, something sent down there through Goodwill Donation Centers, whatever.
00:53:04.000So they'll have, like, brands, you know, like, famous brands that you see, like, people, you know, in our culture wearing, but there'll be, like, hunting monkeys in them, like, And like the Langer thing, it creates that kind of tension,
00:53:45.000As they become more aware of conservation, do you see them recognizing, like, hey, there's some stuff that we have to leave alone, we've got to let it recover?
00:53:53.000I mean, obviously they're aware of the cycle of life when it comes to their slash-and-burn agriculture and leaving spots alone.
00:54:00.000Are they becoming more aware of what animals they've kind of...
00:54:06.000Yeah, and it's like, I don't even know how much is coming from the younger generation, because talking to guys, talking to a guy who's, I'm 43, this guy just a couple years older than I am, and talking to him, and he was a market hunter.
00:54:20.000He's glad to see what's happened because he, in his own lifetime, saw how much they had depleted everything.
00:54:29.000So he, in his lifetime, saw it from market hunting, not just from subsistence stuff, but as that village grew, because the village was a handful of families, right?
00:57:31.000At one point in time, Roven had a recurve, but he lost it.
00:57:35.000His house burnt down, and he lost his recurve anyways.
00:57:38.000So just for the simple fact that you can make them and make arrows very quickly, they don't need to worry about how you'd ever source parts.
00:57:44.000Right, but they have all this other stuff, like machete blades and all these different things.
00:57:48.000It seems like they would, I mean, if you could get a good compound bow, Jesus Christ.
00:57:53.000Yeah, I think if you brought one down and left it there, I think if you brought one down and left there, it would get a lot of use.
00:58:09.000I think that if you went down, this is speculation, I would think if you went down and gave, if you went down with a dozen of these things and left them there, I think that along that river corridor,
00:58:26.000You would see a diminishment of a handful of bird species for sure.
00:59:46.000Over the previous two months lost 24 dogs, including a dog while we were there, to a jaguar who comes in at night and kills dogs and chickens.
00:59:54.000He was speculating that at some point in time they'll probably have to get rid of that jaguar and that it would be a firearm issue they would have to figure out a solution for with a firearm.
01:00:06.000So even people that might have a firearm...
01:00:11.000Have limited ammunition, and it's sort of a tricky spot in a legal situation for them to have a firearm.
01:00:19.000But bows, I think they would knock the shit out of curasows and guans if they had good bows.
01:00:24.000But they might not hunt them as heavily because they didn't need the fletching.
01:00:28.000For fishing, I think their tackle's superior.
01:00:52.000And then you're still limited to very close range shots.
01:00:56.000When I was in Bolivia, where they hunt for a bigger variety of stuff, including monkeys, compound bows would be a real game-changer on monkey hunting.
01:02:56.000Another thing is why don't you eat X? Right.
01:03:00.000But, if I think about it, imagine if someone came from another country to here, and you're driving them around, and every single thing they see that's alive, if they said to you, why don't you eat that?
01:05:34.000And then they start shooting, and then they'll chase them into the jungle and maybe even track them for a day, trying to whittle away at them because it's a great meat.
01:05:42.000It's like the favorite game meat is whitelit peccary.
01:05:46.000They like it better than collard peccary because they're bigger.
01:05:49.000But is it like a pork or something like that?
01:05:51.000Well, yeah, but they have that scent gland.
01:05:53.000Yeah, looks like pork has a very strong off-putting.
01:05:57.000The animal has a very strong off-putting smell.
01:06:02.000If you handle it properly and keep it clean, it would never be regarded as good as pork to the American palate.
01:06:11.000But to the Mikushi palate, it's the best.
01:06:16.000So their whole thing, like, we don't hunt all these animals, various animals, because we have so many fish, flies out the window with white-lip peccary.
01:06:23.000But a lot of the white-lip peccary hunting is also related to the protecting of crops.
01:06:29.000Now, as long as Rovin can remember, Rewa Village has had a group of white-lipped peccaries that would come through the area trying to raid the gardens.
01:06:42.000And when it came through the area raiding the gardens, they would kill some number of them.
01:06:46.000And then they would track them into the jungle and stick with them and kill a handful.
01:06:51.000And when that happened, it was a very good thing.
01:06:57.000There's been a number of years where no peccaries, where something happened to this group of 1 or 200 peccaries.
01:07:05.000They haven't, for years, they have not been through the village.
01:07:08.000It's not attrition, because he was saying, at the most, when we get, when they come through and get us, he would say, on average, we would get, actually kill between 1 and 4 when they come in and hit the crops.
01:07:25.000If we stick with them, and a group of guys goes after them, we might kill between one and four.
01:08:33.000Getting them out, getting them unlocked is difficult because at the time that this shaman locked up their peccaries, they happened to be without a good shaman in their village.
01:10:21.000And it's so interesting to me, and also gives such an interesting glimpse into how most cultures and societies were structured long time ago, in pre-Christian times, right?
01:10:33.000That it's just like, it's just educational.
01:10:34.000So I'm not in any way, I'm never saying like, well, I don't buy that.
01:10:44.000Yeah, so I'm not in any way, I'm never like, but here's some things that were explained to me.
01:10:48.000If you're having a problem where your archery skills go downhill, like you have a few misses, the way to correct that would be to go up and take the hand that holds the bowstring and punch a beehive.
01:11:05.000And then hold your hand up to that hive.
01:12:29.000I'm torn even talking about it because I have such a love for him as a person that I wouldn't want to say that would dispel that idea that he's not perfectly rational.
01:13:36.000But there's a staff writer at The New Yorker, one of my favorite journalists of all time, John Lee Anderson.
01:13:43.000You might be familiar with his book, Che.
01:13:44.000He wrote sort of the definitive Che Guevara book, Che.
01:13:50.000He's a war correspondent, writes in troubled spots around the world, John Lee Anderson.
01:13:56.000He wrote a piece not long ago in The New Yorker about a group of people that were making first contact with the outside world, just recently, 2015. They had been...
01:14:11.000They were initially regarded as an uncontacted group that lived in the border between Peru and Brazil in the jungle.
01:14:20.000And for whatever reason, they started coming out to a main river where they were having some contact with other groups and they killed a couple people with bows.
01:14:32.000So, the government was in a situation of, when dealing with a first contact group, you can't go in and just start putting people on trial and shit.
01:14:43.000So, they were trying to, it's an article about the difficulties of leading, of introducing a first contact people into sort of a constructive engagement with the outside world.
01:14:56.000A trick there is some people look and some countries have a policy of isolation for uncontacted people and try to enforce isolation.
01:15:06.000Other theorists on this or other anthropologists think that that's completely unfair.
01:15:21.000It would be laughable that I would come to you and say, Joe, I'd like to prevent you from meeting the French lest some aspect of Frenchness rub off on you.
01:15:34.000Now, they're worried about other things, too, but they're worried about disease and stuff, but also a tendency that alcohol can be destructive, being lured into prostitution, all forms of exploitation, trying to protect people from this.
01:15:46.000Wasn't there also the romance of running into these uncontacted tribes that wanted to cherish that?
01:15:51.000Have you seen those photos that they took from the helicopter where they see these people, they're covered in war paint, they're pointing arrows at the helicopters?
01:16:54.000It's almost like the opposite of colonialism or something, where you get caught in this thing of wanting to be like, oh, these precious, cute people.
01:17:03.000If I could just keep them like how I like them, where they stir my imagination.
01:17:10.000I just want them to stay like how they are, because that's how I like them.
01:17:13.000When I come down to visit, I like to know that they're all doing the shit that's interesting to me.
01:17:19.000But in no way are they perceiving their experience in that way.
01:17:26.000But you go down and see like in the handful of years, as much as they've changed all the time, right?
01:17:31.000In the handful of years to see that just like practices are different, dress is different.
01:17:42.000So you're just seeing it happen in real time.
01:17:46.000You're seeing it happen in a fast way.
01:17:48.000Now you might come up and be like, oh, I was in the U.S. in the pre-internet days, and I came to the U.S. in the post-internet days, and man, is that place different.
01:17:56.000But you're watching it like wherever you live, you're also seeing that happen too.
01:18:14.000As much as I hate to admit it, and as wrong as it is, but just to be absolutely upfront, it kind of bummed me out.
01:18:21.000So when you talk about it from a hunting perspective, because I tend to view the world through a hunting and fishing perspective, but when you talk about bringing bows down, my first thought is, oh, that's no fun.
01:18:32.000They shouldn't do that, because I like watching them hunt with the homemade bows.
01:18:47.000You know, as much as you know about the American West, as much as you told me about the history of the American West and the Native Americans, to see these people that are essentially, like, in some ways, like the Native Americans before the colonial people arrived.
01:20:34.000And Francis Parkman traveled with them as a tourist, and they went into the Black Hills of South Dakota.
01:20:40.000They went in there to get lodge poles.
01:20:43.000Because that was a time of year when they would go and fit out their lodge poles for their teepees to replace broken lodge poles.
01:20:49.000They went up in the Black Hills, killed some bighorn sheep by throwing rocks down on them off a cliff, went and shot a bunch of buffalo, and he was out there as a tourist.
01:20:58.000So tourism in the American West, now you've got to remember, the last free roaming, the last non-confined Plains Indians didn't get rounded up until, depending on your definition,
01:21:16.0001876, 1877. So he was out there way before that.
01:21:20.000There were still what they described at the time as hostile wild Indians were running around, and he was traveling with them as a tourist.
01:21:27.000So I just bring that up to bring this idea that here's this group of people who are very much engaged in tourism.
01:23:17.000So when you go pick it up and you're like, man, you got to give props to these guys for being able to kill fish with this bow, it's like, well, kind of and kind of not, because if you spent 27 years doing something, you're damn sure going to be good at it.
01:23:27.000The same way is if you took someone, like one of these first contact peoples from between Peru and Brazil, and handed them my laptop and said, hey, pull up my Gmail contacts from scratch, and He might be like,
01:23:50.000I was having this conversation with someone the other day where the first time Daniel Boone in 1760, Daniel Boone went through the Cumberland Gap for the first time and dropped down into what's now Tennessee and Kentucky.
01:25:17.000I thought China was always like some sort of ceramic.
01:25:20.000There's a place in Detroit, on the Rogue River in Detroit, that the Rouge River, Rogue River, depending on what dude in Michigan you're talking to...
01:25:29.000There's a place there called the Detroit Carbon Works that used to...
01:25:35.000When you're watching movies, including The Revenant, you know that giant pyramid pile of buffalo skulls that turns up in everywhere, every book, every movie?
01:25:46.000That photo was taken at the Detroit Carbon Works, and what they were producing was bone fertilizer.
01:26:01.000That's taken to Detroit, Michigan, where I'll point out it was one of a handful of states that never had Buffalo in the history in California.
01:26:15.000Those bones were picked up in the American West, shipped by rail to Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, turned into bone fertilizer, and then shipped back out for people tilling up the Great Plains.
01:26:31.000In my book about buffalo, I'm describing that picture, and I say that the man standing on top is like an exclamation point at the end of a long sentence about death and destruction.
01:26:46.000It's like he somehow realizes the weirdness of what he's involved in, but that was post-extermination.
01:26:51.000There's a crazy podcast from Dan Carlin on the Wrath of the Khans on Genghis Khan, and they describe how the Charisman Shah sends a group to check out Jin China, and they got there like about a year after Genghis Khan had killed everyone in the entire city,
01:27:09.000over a million people, and they thought what they saw in the distance they thought was a Snow-capped mountain.
01:27:15.000As they got closer, they realized it was a pile of human bones.
01:28:16.000Yeah, I mean, anybody listening, Wrath of the Cons, it's a five-part series, and I think Dan Carlin, he charges for them, you can buy it on iTunes, but I think it's only a dollar per, and it's the best dollar you'll ever spend in your life.
01:29:08.000But his main focus of study, his entire life, has been history.
01:29:14.000When he does these things, if he calls what he does a podcast, I need to change what I do.
01:29:20.000What I call a podcast pales in comparison because we're just sitting here talking.
01:29:25.000What he does is he prepares for these things for months and cites different sources and references and then essentially does an educational entertainment piece.
01:29:37.000Maybe that's why he doesn't like the term historian is because he's not...
01:29:42.000He's not contributing to the body of knowledge.
01:29:47.000He's interpreting the body of knowledge.
01:29:53.000He just wouldn't say that, no matter what.
01:29:56.000But somehow, I don't know why, more disturbing to see a pile of human bodies than it is to see a pile of the buffalo bones.
01:30:04.000Yeah, I think I told you, and I've talked about this a thousand times, after the Custer Massacre, The guys that were following the other soldiers who were coming in after the Custer massacre, they didn't know what had happened.
01:30:20.000They hadn't got word yet that Custer and his entire command had been wiped out by the Sioux in Northern Cheyenne.
01:30:27.000And they're riding up the valley, and they're looking off in the distance, and they see all these sort of white, bloody-ish things, and all these dark brown things.
01:30:39.000And one of the guys wrote that their initial impression, looking at it, was that Custer must have caught the Indians in the middle of a buffalo hunt.
01:30:49.000And what they were seeing was, it was summertime, and they were seeing fatty buffalo carcasses that had been skinned.
01:30:58.000And that the brown things were the buffalo hides laid out next to the carcass.
01:31:03.000But on closer inspection it was the brown things were horses, cavalry horses, and the white things were stripped and mutilated soldiers.
01:31:15.000Wasn't one of the guys, one of the Native Americans, that was in the Little Bighorn whatever event, wasn't he one of the guys who toured with Wild Bill?
01:33:49.000So they had some mock war that they would do?
01:33:53.000Yeah, they would come out and reenact the battle.
01:33:57.000Yeah, so you could go down, and this would have been in your own lifetime.
01:34:01.000The people who, the families of the men killed at the battle of Little Bighorn could have gone down and got their photo taken with and paid to watch and interacted with the gentleman who likely clovered their father's head in with a tomahawk.
01:36:08.000The way I remember, a detail that I remember very clearly is that this guy, it was his neighbor kid, and he had told this kid's parents, they were going down to wash the airplane and look at the airplane, and he decided to take the kid up for a flight.
01:36:22.000I was trying to find that article to confirm that aspect of it, but I lived on a lake called Middle Lake, and everybody remembers, for whatever reason, this guy buzzed our lake a couple times really low.
01:36:32.000There was a guy down on the east end of the lake, Named Mr. Rupert.
01:36:38.000And I remember what was unusual about Mr. Rupert was he would eat freshwater clams, which we were forbidden from doing by our dad.
01:38:07.000And we were riding around on our bikes out in the woods just kind of following these sheriff's posse guys as they were sort of combing through the woods.
01:38:13.000And eventually a news helicopter was hovering over a spot like right at the end of White Lake Drive.
01:38:24.000And there was a news helicopter hovering over there.
01:38:26.000My two brothers went directly there on their bikes.
01:38:30.000And for some reason I went and got my mom And then we drove over and we got to the end of White Lake Road where you had to walk into the woods.
01:38:38.000And there was a guy there that tried to block my mom and me from going in there.
01:38:44.000And I always remember he said, if you're going to go in there, you better have a strong stomach.
01:38:49.000And she's like, well, my kids are in there.
01:38:51.000And so we go in there and Matt and Danny are just standing at the edge of the hole there.
01:40:34.000And what's funny is he was one of the combatants.
01:40:37.000So some of those guys, like Wild Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok actually had a dispute over who got to have the name Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok.
01:40:46.000There were some other Wild Bills, I guess, and it was like a popular name, right?
01:42:52.000Sorry, William F. Cody, so I don't know which one is which.
01:42:54.000But he found a 14-acre swath of land where he set up stands for 18,000 people to watch each show, and over 2 million people saw it during the World's Fair that year.
01:43:08.000I don't know if he was the first one, though.
01:43:09.000And there weren't even, there were 2 million soft, but there were less, well under, probably way less than 75 million people in the country.
01:44:26.000And later, some of these individuals, like Gall and others in interviews, said that even at the time, Our understanding is that these people were all hopelessly drunk.
01:45:30.000It was either that he just didn't really comprehend what they were telling him or he was so, you know, he was a decorated Civil War figure and probably was a very ardent believer in the superiority of We're good to go.
01:47:19.000It's so funny that we've done that, you know, that people have taken what they know most likely were historically inaccurate accounts and they pass them down generation to generation.
01:47:30.000It makes you wonder, like, this is what we know now because this is only a hundred and so years ago.
01:47:35.000Like, what are we getting when we're getting some version of something that happened a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, you know?
01:47:45.000But the problem we have as a culture, I think, is when someone goes to challenge our popular perceptions, it's branded as revisionist and somehow loses interest.
01:48:48.000A minister or someone, some religious person who came with him at the time, left a journal about the atrocities committed directly by Columbus and his men when they hacked off arms for people who couldn't bring them back gold.
01:50:36.000What they mean is you're saying, I uphold The idea of Western civilization's annexation of the New World as being a good thing.
01:50:50.000So, when someone gets pissed at the revisionists for questioning the legitimacy of Columbus, they're not actually talking about what he specifically did.
01:51:02.000It's become a proxy For the cultural annexation of the New World.
01:51:09.000And to say, oh, I hate Columbus, he's an asshole, they take it to mean you're saying that you're questioning our claim on the Western Hemisphere and that it was a bad thing.
01:51:20.000I think that's why people are annoyed by it.
01:51:23.000I don't think people are too much annoyed by it anymore.
01:51:26.000Because I think it's pretty much been established that Columbus is a really bad guy.
01:51:29.000But no one's gone in and undid the day.
01:52:14.000Just give us a day off, we'll take it.
01:52:16.000I'm generally, like, little movements, like little cultural movements like that, I'm generally not receptive to?
01:52:23.000No, I don't try to read too much into them.
01:52:25.000If I woke up tomorrow and told me that we had decided, you know, that people got together and decided against Columbus Day, I wouldn't, like, do a lot of soul-searching on that day.
01:53:57.000Or to think that one day, and this is not too long ago, You know, some of our grandparents remember this, to think that one day we had devised a contraption that was capable of ending life on Earth, and that these contraptions could be initiated by the distant actions of a handful of people.
01:55:34.000It would take many, many months to being just a thing you just do on a whim.
01:55:39.000Now, I do believe, I accept that we are in a state of upheaval right now, and I think that we're probably impacting ourselves in ways we don't fully understand.
01:56:07.000Just looking around, trying to make conversation with people.
01:56:10.000My friend Rourke was talking about a conversation his wife was having with someone where someone said I was in Starbucks drinking a coffee, just sitting there staring at the wall like a fucking lunatic.
01:56:24.000Are they going to start killing people?
01:56:26.000They're not doing anything with their phone.
01:56:29.000It's a big thing, but one of the helpful things, I guess one of the helpful things, just to bring it full circle, one of the helpful things about traveling or about just reading about history is you lose some of that sense of specialness about Thinking that the life you're living in the moment you're living it is this great test of humanity or some like super peculiar thing going on and realize that people have always been involved with and struggle with cataclysmic upheaval You
01:56:59.000know and then to go and then to go witness some other people in some version of that transition Is pretty healthy man Maybe in the long term, like just traveling, going to see how other people do stuff.
01:57:14.000It's unsettling, but probably ultimately pretty good for you.
01:57:41.000A couple years ago, when I was mentioning that, I mentioned to you that a couple American companies that have some conservation spending they do, they were training some guys from Rewa Village.
01:57:57.000They were training some of them to just how to interface with Westerners.
01:58:04.000And as part of that, he went up to, he might have even gone up to the Bahamas.
01:58:09.000To go for a couple days to a fly fishing lodge.
01:58:14.000So, yeah, he flew on a commercial aircraft.
01:58:49.000But he's never, like, if he hadn't done that trip, or just all of his siblings and most other people in those villages, they never experienced 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:58:58.000Now what is it like to them when it comes to bugs?
01:59:00.000Do they have any sort of resistance to mosquitoes or anything along those lines?
01:59:05.000They don't care about it nearly as much as we care about it.
01:59:07.000Do they get the same amount of bites, though?
01:59:25.000At about the same rate that you'd get bit by mosquitoes if you were at like some 4th of July thing out at your uncle's pond, you know, shooting fireworks off at night on the edge of a cattail marsh.
02:01:29.000Is that why they call it a poor man's?
02:01:30.000No, the reason they call it poor man's lobster, it doesn't really taste like lobster, but it's suitable for boiling it and dipping it in butter and cocktail sauce and eating.
02:02:00.000They're able to sell bycatch of burbot, and they have restaurants.
02:02:06.000In the UP, I got some friends that do it, and they got restaurants in the UP that they sell their burbot into, and they make burbot sandwiches.
02:03:27.000And you've done it all within a 25 mile, a 20 mile radius of your home.
02:03:35.000So you're outside hunting and fishing or farming or gathering in the jungle every day and you're in your 30s or 40s and you've done it in a radius of 20 miles.
02:04:05.000He guides a little bit, but typically not.
02:04:07.000Like most days, he's not engaged in that activity.
02:04:10.000So the spatial awareness is the thing that's most striking to me in spending time with these individuals is everything.
02:04:24.000I'm interested in what they notice and what they never miss.
02:04:31.000It's like you realize that all of the bits of information that you're able to contain in your head that allow you to function and carry on, right?
02:04:40.000You're like a comedian, and you do shit with MMA, and you have a very successful podcast, and you have a family, and you're digitally very astute, and you have opinions about fucking coffee, right?
02:04:50.000All this shit, you're widely read, right?
02:04:55.000You sort of fill up your brain with as much as it can hold.
02:04:58.000But for them, it seems to be, from my perspective, it's like all of that breadth of knowledge but crammed into the natural world to where every plant, every tree, what are its uses, what are the other things?
02:05:23.000In a way that our breadth of knowledge, which would probably be astounding to them if they realized all the shit we knew about, but all those bits of information are just applied in a different way, down to a granular understanding of the jungle.
02:05:37.000It would probably be very bizarre for them to see us walk out to this parking lot, these little patches of plants.
02:05:45.000We don't have a fucking clue as to what they are.
02:05:47.000We pass through them like they're just peripheral.
02:05:51.000There is no like, oh, I don't know what that is.
02:06:21.000It's like you can't, like, and the shit that, like, it's almost just something you have to go see is the ability to just, like, move through the jungle and notice everything.
02:06:34.000Now, are they like the people in Bolivia where they're barefoot most of the time?
02:06:37.000Yeah, but, you know, that's another bummer is getting more into shoes, man.
02:06:42.000Roman still likes to take his shoes off when he goes into the jungle.
02:06:45.000Like, we went into the jungle after some curacao and he pulled his shoes off to be extra quiet.
02:06:51.000But, yeah, so he'll now and then put flip-flops on now.
02:07:43.000This is probably some high-resolution National Geographic photographs of people's feet.
02:07:48.000If he's any good at his job, you will be seeing some crazy feet in a moment.
02:07:53.000Another thing I wanted to share with you, I mentioned sort of a surreal image, is watching a woman in a DKNY shirt digging turtle eggs for food.
02:08:31.000It reminded me of, you know, in the end of Apocalypse Now, when Kurtz, when Captain Willard finally catches up with Kurtz, and Kurtz asks him where he's from, and he mentions Ohio, and Kurtz tells him about a river trip he took with his father on the Ohio River when the gardenias were in bloom,
02:08:51.000you know, and he talks about the smell in the end of Apocalypse Now, but these flowers would smell like that.
02:08:55.000But when the rain would come, what's going on?
02:09:53.000So what we're looking at for people that are just listening to this, it's like at the middle of their foot, especially that one foot in the middle to the right, it's like he's taking a turn, like a hard turn, like a 15 degree plus turn.
02:10:08.000Why do those seem like disembodied feet?
02:10:11.000Because they're just photographing the feet, I guess.
02:10:15.000This is like a big article about some people from the Philippines, I think, from the same area.
02:10:21.000Go back to it for a second, Jamie, because what we're seeing in this is this massive spacing between the big toe and then the first toe to the point where it looks like a hand.
02:11:36.000But it really does show you From fucking wearing shoes your whole life.
02:11:41.000Yeah, and given the different environment, that's insane.
02:11:46.000Like what we're looking at here, they literally look like thumbs.
02:11:48.000Like they're sticking out of the side, but it's the same structure as a human foot, meaning that it's the same length of toes and just you see that from using it that way, they've just developed this incredible...
02:13:48.000What part of the world was it where they have that...
02:13:55.000Incas, where they have those lines, the Nazca lines, you know, and they've found all these skulls from people back then where they had stretched their heads out and almost made their heads look like aliens.
02:14:13.000It's so much so that a lot of the really loony people said, look, they're trying to be like the aliens that have come down and given them knowledge.
02:14:21.000Have you ever been down to, do you remember those, they're held in Salta, Argentina, I went to see them one time, but those children that they found, they were entombed at the top of a mountain, and they were basically freeze-dried?
02:14:40.000Well, they were taken up and given as an offering.
02:14:44.000So first, it seems, based on the stuff they had with them, that they were paraded through the Incan Empire, and people lavished them with gifts.
02:14:53.000And when they look at the isotopes in their bodies, it's like their diet, their whole lives, they had just had potatoes.
02:14:59.000But then you can see that toward the end of their lives, they were very well fed with meat and fish and all kinds of stuff.
02:15:04.000And they had just innumerable treasures.
02:15:22.000It's like, it's best that they haven't dated it exactly, but it seems like, I mean, it seems like we're talking about, you know, Columbus 1492. It's like we're talking about 1491. Wow.
02:15:31.000So, the height of this empire, the height of the empire budding up against its dramatic and sudden collapse with European contact.
02:15:42.000But they took, yeah, I went to see, and, um...
02:15:46.000They made a deal with the indigenous people where they only put one on display at a time, but she was on display when I was there.
02:16:49.000What freeze drying is is your liquid, it's like you freeze something and then expel the liquid where the liquid goes from a gaseous, where it goes from a solid to a gas without passing through its liquid state.
02:17:03.000So when you freeze dry food, you like freeze dry it, you put it in a freezer and get super cold and then you start, then you start putting it under a vacuum to a point where all the water It goes immediately to a gaseous state.
02:17:16.000It doesn't pass through a liquid state, so it holds its form, but all the water's gone.
02:17:23.000If it goes through a liquid state, then it collapses, but it just holds its form in the non-water parts.
02:19:29.000I never dehydrate a bunch of different things and combine it into a recipe that I then bring with me.
02:19:37.000The reason I use dehydrated food, and a lot of backpack hunters use dehydrated food, is because If you have a dish made up of dehydrated ingredients, they have different hydration times.
02:19:55.000So if you do beans, like a piece of meat is going to be digestible to you.
02:20:02.000A piece of dehydrated meat that's then hydrated is going to be digestible to you.
02:20:06.000A dehydrated bean might take 30 or 40 minutes before it's going to be in a condition that doesn't rip you apart.
02:20:15.000If you want to fuck yourself up, eat straight dried beans.
02:20:31.000But if you take food and cook it to a ready-to-eat state, And then freeze dry it, you can rehydrate it kind of like simultaneously if you do everything right.
02:20:47.000Now it wouldn't work with like a hamburger, right?
02:20:49.000If you dehydrated a hamburger and then you add water to it, you're going to wind up with a soggy ass bun.
02:20:54.000So the trick is like finding things that are going to, in a hot water bath, are going to all come back to life kind of at the same time.
02:21:02.000But places that make backpack food out of just dehydrated but not freeze dried ingredients is a recipe for disaster.
02:22:04.000I have heard, we eat a lot of it, because we do a lot of backcountry trips.
02:22:10.000I've heard everyone's complaints about it, but it's like, from my perspective, which I will argue is a well-informed perspective, it's like, it's the lesser of two evils.
02:22:21.000For day-in, day-out consumption, I think that the companies that do freeze-dry, it's just better, in my opinion.
02:22:28.000Now, when I say that these children were freeze-dried, I think some people are going to challenge that because it's not technically freeze-dried, but a similar thing going on where they're keeping their form but shedding their water and, you know...
02:22:43.000Shedding water, keeping their farm and being frozen and preserved for a long time.
02:22:48.000Because I was reading a podcast, or reading a podcast, listening to a podcast, rather, where this guy was talking about how he's doing that with his own food for backpacking trips.
02:23:57.000And the same guy that one time our dear late friend was getting married and his bride...
02:24:10.000The wedding was at his bride-to-be's house, and a neighbor was away on vacation.
02:24:14.000And the neighbor that was away on vacation said, you know, since we're out of town, if you guys want to use our home for some of your wedding guests, go ahead.
02:24:24.000And so, all the groomsmen were lodged up in this house of this man we didn't know who was the neighbor of his wife's parents.
02:24:36.000I don't know why, but my brother got to snooping around in this guy's freezer and found that he had a bull elk in there that had been in there for seven years.
02:24:44.000And he had this crisis, this moral crisis, where he's trying to figure out, is it morally worse to steal or morally worse to allow this man to waste this meat?
02:24:56.000How long will a bull elk stay good if you freeze it?
02:24:59.000You're fucking pushing it at seven years.
02:25:36.000So he weighed it out in his head, and when he left, he had a bunch of that meat with him and took him home and ate it, because he just hated to see an elk go to waste.
02:25:57.000But throughout his whole life, he always is running into these situations where he just cannot let food go to waste.
02:26:07.000If I talk to him right now, there's probably 10 more things like that that have happened to him since I talked to him last.
02:26:12.000When he found in his alleyway one time, and he's living in Montana, he still lives in Montana, living in Bozeman, found in his alleyway a discarded cash from a homeless man and ate all that guy's food.
02:26:29.000And he was a PhD candidate at the university.
02:26:39.000The first time, here's where he kind of, not where it came from, but he drew a bear tag when we were in Michigan, and it was hard to get a bear tag at the time.
02:26:49.000And he drew a bear tag, and the only way to hunt bears in the UP is like...
02:26:53.000You're not going to spot and stalk on them because it's flat ground and you can't see shit, right?
02:26:57.000You're going to use dogs or you're going to use bait.
02:27:01.000So he started a bait pile, and the way he was feeding his bait pile ahead of the season was just dumpster diving.
02:27:08.000So, as he's dumpster diving, it's like, he's living off, not only is he baiting the bear with the dumpster food, but he's, like, living off the dumpster diving food that he found, too, because he, like, discovered his great richness.
02:27:34.000He'd just walk through the woods with boxes of bugles under his arm and get out, and he'd be, like, dumping them out for the bear and then just eating the bugles, too.
02:27:43.000And then he'd walk back with a handful of bugles.
02:27:47.000His old girlfriend had a job cooking, like, the brown food in the Albertsons, you know, like, the display case where they fry all those, like, burritos and shit.
02:29:40.000There's a couple things you need to do.
02:29:41.000It seems to me like it's a neck issue, because when you start getting elbows and things where your arm starts atrophying, usually it's a cervical disc, which is somewhere up in here.
02:29:52.000What you should do is get a neck decompression device.
02:32:33.000Because sciatica is, what sciatica is, is a disc that's bulging, meaning the disc, the soft tissue in between the two hard bones is pushing out and it's pressing up against the nerve.
02:32:46.000And it causes pain that shoots down your ass and your lower legs.
02:32:50.000And a lot of people don't even recognize it as a lower back issue because maybe their back is not really that painful, but the leg and the ass is painful.
02:32:59.000I had a similar issue with my neck where I was pushing on my ulnar nerve and I was getting this elbow pain and I was like fuck this really hurts like down my arm and in the back of my tricep and then I started getting numbness in my fingers and that's when I started figuring out what was going on then I went to a doctor I went to a chiropractor first which is a fucking giant mistake I spent a year But do you not believe in chiropractors?
02:33:22.000I don't believe in chiropractors at all I think it's 98% horseshit.
02:33:28.000And I don't know, but I think chiropractors that are smart, they incorporate things that I think are beneficial.
02:33:34.000Cold laser, massage, a lot of different things.
02:33:37.000But I think that manipulation that they do, unless you have like some sort of significant scoliosis or something they're attempting to slowly put back into position, I think most of the time it's just popping your neck and it just feels good.
02:33:52.000I went to a guy that's a very nice guy and he was trying to tell me that I didn't have a bulging disc because he was pushing down on the top of my head and it didn't hurt.
02:34:14.000Because I was angry that I was being treated by someone who was a professional that really didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.
02:34:20.000And they were treating something that was a significant issue that I was experiencing.
02:34:24.000A real deterioration of my function, Pain.
02:34:28.000I wasn't able to do jujitsu correctly.
02:34:31.000There was a lot of problems that I was dealing with that I was like, well, what the fuck is this?
02:34:35.000And then I started talking to doctors about it.
02:34:37.000And when you have a bulging disc, man, they want to cut you open like you're a pinata and you got gold inside of you.
02:34:44.000Well, that's a thing that my bro's talking about is he's very nervous about a procedure that he could or could not do.
02:34:52.000Well, for some people, it's not a bad move, depending on whether or not your brother's willing to do all the different things that can...
02:34:58.000But he's got a lot of atrophy already, which is a real bad thing.
02:35:09.000Boss Rutten, former UFC heavyweight champion, he fucked his neck up and went through a bunch of different treatments and then eventually wound up getting it fused.
02:35:18.000He's got, I believe, two discs and maybe more.
02:35:21.000And his neck fused together, where he doesn't have any disc tissue.
02:35:25.000They just screw the bones in together and remove the disc tissue and stabilize the area.
02:35:29.000But his right arm is significantly smaller than his left arm, to the point where he calls it baby arm.
02:35:35.000And this is a former UFC heavyweight champion of the world.
02:35:37.000And what's ironic is that some of it came from fighting, but the last thing came from doing a stunt on Sons of Anarchy.
02:36:48.000And then a lot of people go on to think that they always have it, but they're like, You had a thing, it's treated, it's gone, but it'll live with you for so long because of the damage to your nerves that it's so slow to recuperate.
02:37:01.000I talked to a doctor about Lyme disease and he said it's not just a Lyme disease you're dealing with.
02:37:06.000He said Lyme disease is this overall term.
02:37:08.000He said you can get a tick that has A hundred pathogens in it.
02:37:13.000When you look at that list of shit, it gets scary.
02:37:20.000Morgellons is a disease that a lot of times they think is psychosomatic because there's some sort of a neurotoxicity involved in Lyme disease.
02:37:27.000And all these people that have Morgellons almost, without a doubt, have Lyme disease as well.
02:37:33.000And what Morgellons is, is they start itching at themselves and they think they have fibers growing out of their body and they start hallucinating.
02:37:40.000Well, most of the time it's treated as a psychosomatic disorder.
02:37:44.000Like they'll get carpet fibers in their body and they'll claim these carpet fibers are coming out of their body and growing out of their skin.
02:37:49.000But I talked to this doctor who was the only lucid person that sort of explained it to me because he's a doctor and he has Morgellons.
02:38:49.000But he's saying, with the people that have more gelins, what he believes is they're suffering from hallucinations brought on by Lyme disease.
02:38:57.000That's a thing about Lyme that I found was...
02:39:01.000About medicine and about people and about mysterious diseases is like...
02:39:06.000I quit doing it now, but I would get in arguments with people.
02:39:09.000Where I was trying to deal with it and finding out about it, and people were telling me, here's what's happening to me.
02:39:15.000I'm like, no, I was told that's not how it works.
02:39:32.000It's like, on one hand, all these people are sort of going through this regimen, this educational regimen, which is, you know, there's government oversight, there's certain criteria you need to meet, things you need to pass, and you think it would sort of have this unifying effect,
02:40:18.000He was telling me that he had a cyst in his balls, and he thought he had ball cancer.
02:40:22.000Went to a doctor, and one doctor told him that he has excess cum stored up in his balls, that it's sperm, that's stored up in his balls, and that's what's causing this knot.
02:40:33.000He went home to his wife and said, listen.
02:41:21.000I don't know if the guy's going to tell me.
02:41:22.000He's not going to tell me the same thing the other guy's going to tell me.
02:41:23.000The big thing when it comes to health, and this is one of the things that I have a big problem with when it comes to anything dealing with the back, is preventative maintenance is one of the most important things for back health.
02:41:35.000We're sitting in desks all day, and most people are not sitting up straight.
02:41:39.000A good thing is one of those balls, those gym balls, those big balance balls.
02:41:43.000Those are great to sit on because they force you to kind of stabilize yourself.
02:45:06.000And we had the meat split up between, like, three of us, so it was probably only like 50 pounds on everybody's back, and I was like, holy shit!
02:45:16.000Once we finally got to camp, two miles, pretty flat, it wasn't that hilly, Yeah, if you're not accustomed to it, it's a lot.
02:46:10.000Because when your shit's wiggling around, then it like, I don't know, it doesn't like make you stronger, it just makes you more inclined to like fuck something up.
02:47:19.000Well, the straps are on my back or on my hip, like this, and then there's like a chain in between my legs, and the kettlebell hangs in between my legs.
02:47:26.000But it's not getting your scrow at all.
02:47:38.000They say that that's the best way to get more reps in with your chin-ups is not to try like 19, 20. The absolute best way is do less, but with heavy weights.
02:47:49.000Do like, you know, put a weight vest on or hang a 70-pound kettlebell between your legs.
02:48:11.000I remember at various times not running for a long time and then being like, yeah, I'm going to start running and then go on a five mile run.
02:48:19.000I've been running now for just a little over a month.
02:48:22.000I've got a friend who's a runner and he's a hobbyist but runs marathons and he never did before.
02:50:16.000And then, you know, months ago, a couple months ago, if you go to my Instagram, Stephen Rinella, you'll scroll back and find a bunch of pictures from...