The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren

00:00:18.000 The Joe Rogan Experience. 0.98

00:00:28.000 And we're live, back from the motherfucking jungle, Justin Renn, saving pygmies, hanging out, having a good time. 0.97

00:00:36.000 What's up, brother? 0.97

00:00:37.000 How are you?

00:00:37.000 Man, I'm excited to be here.

00:00:38.000 Excited to have you.

00:00:39.000 Hey, thanks.

00:00:40.000 I've been paying attention to your crazy travels and your journeys, and you brought some pictures and videos for us today, too.

00:00:47.000 How long have you been back for?

00:00:48.000 I've been back since late October.

00:00:51.000 And you were here for a little while, and the last time you were supposed to be here, you were real sick.

00:00:56.000 And I gotta be honest with you, we weren't too excited about a dude fresh back from Africa coming in with some sort of funky jungle virus. 1.00

00:01:06.000 Well, I'm glad I didn't come in.

00:01:07.000 What did you have?

00:01:08.000 Did you have anything crazy?

00:01:09.000 Well, I had bronchitis, but before that I had Shigella, which is an intestinal bacteria.

00:01:15.000 How do you get that?

00:01:15.000 I don't like that.

00:01:18.000 It's a waterborne disease.

00:01:19.000 Waterborne?

00:01:20.000 So you drank the water out there?

00:01:21.000 There were just times that I couldn't help it.

00:01:21.000 Yeah.

00:01:24.000 Or it could be from food or a fly landing on your food while it's being cooked.

00:01:28.000 There's many different ways that you can get it.

00:01:30.000 Whoa.

00:01:31.000 So you either live your life like the boy in the plastic bubble?

00:01:33.000 Remember that John Travolta movie?

00:01:35.000 Yeah, I think that's the only way you can't get sick.

00:01:36.000 How many times have you gotten sick over there?

00:01:39.000 All throughout?

00:01:39.000 All throughout.

00:01:40.000 You're always sick?

00:01:41.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:01:41.000 Yeah, I had this guy on the sci-fi show that I did who told me that everyone who lives in South American or jungle climates, everyone has parasites. 0.95

00:01:53.000 They just live with them.

00:01:53.000 Oh yeah.

00:01:54.000 Yeah, I had them too.

00:01:55.000 I had amoebas.

00:01:58.000 I had some kind of parasite in my stomach also.

00:02:01.000 I'm actually still a bruise from here because I got seven vials of blood drawn to see what kind of parasites are still in me.

00:02:08.000 Still recently?

00:02:09.000 Yeah, that's just a few days old.

00:02:12.000 Yeah, so it's been a battle since coming back, but I think I'm on the track to get my health back together.

00:02:19.000 It's a crazy place to live, to spend your time in.

00:02:24.000 It's a very strange thing, the environment where you have all these crazy tropical diseases.

00:02:31.000 Is it the heat and the moisture and all of the above?

00:02:34.000 Yeah, I think it's just the entire environment.

00:02:37.000 It's just brutal because right when I got there, I got malaria.

00:02:42.000 And so that was pretty bad.

00:02:44.000 So the mosquitoes, the bugs, the parasites, everything can mess with you.

00:02:49.000 Yeah, so the water, the climate, the bad living conditions.

00:02:54.000 So, I mean, not having a nice bed and not having a good home to sleep in, all those can contribute to sickness.

00:03:02.000 Malaria is no joke, huh?

00:03:03.000 What was that like?

00:03:04.000 Oh man, that was brutal.

00:03:05.000 That was one of the toughest times of my life, but I counted it as...

00:03:11.000 I don't know.

00:03:12.000 It was actually a good experience for me in the end because I got to share in the suffering that they're going through because they don't even have all the antibiotics and all the medicine to pump your body with to get healed from it.

00:03:24.000 So I had to be evac'd out of the Congo and into Uganda.

00:03:27.000 I was misdiagnosed four times.

00:03:29.000 So they drew my blood.

00:03:31.000 They did two quick tests for malaria, and they said it was negative.

00:03:35.000 Then they drew my blood, said it was negative, but I got real sick.

00:03:39.000 Real sick.

00:03:40.000 Like, six days I couldn't eat.

00:03:42.000 Six days I couldn't urinate.

00:03:45.000 I think I lost 34 pounds.

00:03:47.000 And then whenever I finally did urinate in Uganda, it was after I got the right medicine, they took my blood out and saw that I had over 70% of my bloodstream was parasites.

00:03:58.000 What?

00:03:59.000 70% of my blood was full of parasites.

00:04:02.000 They would hide in the liver and then they would distribute through your blood.

00:04:05.000 Whoa! 0.71

00:04:07.000 That's crazy!

00:04:08.000 Like you're invaded.

00:04:10.000 Yeah, absolutely. 0.99

00:04:11.000 70% of your blood was parasites. 0.98

00:04:15.000 Am I getting that wrong?

00:04:16.000 Or 70% was infected with parasites?

00:04:19.000 They said 70% of my bloodstream.

00:04:20.000 So they said between 60 and 70%.

00:04:22.000 So I was on the third tier.

00:04:24.000 Like there's level one, two, and three, and four.

00:04:27.000 And four, I was right at four, which was a coma.

00:04:30.000 So when you get to four, you're in a coma and it's pretty bad.

00:04:35.000 A lot of people die.

00:04:36.000 Well, lucky you're a strapping, healthy, young buck of a man that you got through that, huh?

00:04:40.000 Yeah, absolutely, man.

00:04:41.000 It was really good.

00:04:42.000 I mean, the pilot that flew me out, it was actually on Thanksgiving of 2013, and he flew me out, just me and him on the plane, and he found out that they're misdiagnosing me, that my buddy there was like, the doctors don't know what's going on with him.

00:04:58.000 He's going to die if we don't get him out of here to a good hospital.

00:05:01.000 So they took me out of the jungle, flew me to Uganda.

00:05:03.000 And when I landed, an ambulance came and picked me up because my vomit had turned to blood and bile.

00:05:08.000 So it was literally, I could smell, you know, like in the fight game, you can smell the blood.

00:05:13.000 So I could smell the iron, I think, in my blood.

00:05:13.000 Right.

00:05:16.000 And it was literally Christmas colors, red and green.

00:05:19.000 And it was brutal.

00:05:20.000 For two weeks after, my esophagus was raw.

00:05:23.000 And so I could barely eat much.

00:05:26.000 I mean, I'd really have to chew it down a lot.

00:05:28.000 We'd have to just drink a lot.

00:05:30.000 And so, yeah, replenishing my body after that was a whole...

00:05:34.000 I mean, I think it's still happening, but it was at least a month-long process to start putting weight back on.

00:05:39.000 You think it's still happening from over a year ago?

00:05:41.000 Your body's still replenishing?

00:05:43.000 Well, from that and from some of the parasites and everything else, so...

00:05:47.000 Yeah, but the malaria, I guess there's mixed reviews, but a lot of times they say that the malaria never literally leaves your body 100%.

00:05:55.000 So it's dormant in your liver, and then it can come back up whenever stress and other things happen.

00:06:03.000 Wow.

00:06:04.000 So we're getting that tested.

00:06:05.000 That's one of the things they're testing for me.

00:06:06.000 So it can come back up.

00:06:07.000 Like, say, if you get run down, like maybe if you get the flu or something like that, malaria might go, come here!

00:06:14.000 Yeah, that would be brutal because my fever got to like almost 105. It was like 104.5 or 104.4.

00:06:22.000 What's 4.4?

00:06:23.000 Like 1.6 or 1.7 or something like that?

00:06:25.000 Like 1.10?

00:06:26.000 Yeah, they were saying it was getting high enough to where like they really had to watch me because it can do stuff to your brain.

00:06:32.000 Yeah, if your brain gets too hot, right?

00:06:35.000 Yeah.

00:06:35.000 Parasites are terrifying, man.

00:06:37.000 Don't ever watch that show.

00:06:38.000 You ever seen that show, The Enemy Within?

00:06:40.000 What's it called?

00:06:41.000 The Enemy Within You or Enemy Inside You?

00:06:42.000 It's all about people who do what you do. 0.99

00:06:44.000 Go to someplace and get some crazy parasite, and then they have some softball-sized ball of worms living in your brain. 0.96

00:06:51.000 And they're like, oh, I have headaches. 0.91

00:06:52.000 I started seeing Jesus, and there's angels floating around me.

00:06:55.000 I couldn't figure out what it was.

00:06:56.000 And then I went to the doctor.

00:06:58.000 They found this mass inside my brain.

00:07:02.000 I probably won't watch that.

00:07:03.000 Don't.

00:07:04.000 Well, you live it.

00:07:05.000 I mean, you don't have to watch it.

00:07:06.000 You live it.

00:07:07.000 We got plenty of coconut water for you, my friend, if you want some.

00:07:10.000 We got C2O. You ever have that shit? 1.00

00:07:11.000 No. 1.00

00:07:12.000 C2O is the bomb diggity.

00:07:13.000 Get the man a can of C2O. All right, thank you.

00:07:15.000 It's from Thailand.

00:07:16.000 Really?

00:07:17.000 Yeah, their coconut water is like, it's really sweet.

00:07:19.000 It's weird.

00:07:20.000 It's a short tree.

00:07:21.000 It's only like five feet tall.

00:07:22.000 And, you know, you think of like the big tall, like palm trees as being coconut trees.

00:07:26.000 But the Thai trees are short and it's like a much sweeter. 0.70

00:07:31.000 You drink it, you would swear that they have some sort of sugar in it, but it's not.

00:07:34.000 It's totally natural.

00:07:35.000 Dude, thank you.

00:07:36.000 It's delicious stuff. 0.99

00:07:38.000 But those parasites, the thing about parasites is that It's really hard to root them out of your system. 0.81

00:07:47.000 And some of them, like trichinosis, I've found out recently. 0.61

00:07:51.000 My friend got trichinosis.

00:07:52.000 And they said he's got it essentially for life.

00:07:55.000 Like, they give him pills.

00:07:56.000 It flushed, like, the active parasites out of his system.

00:08:01.000 But, like, say, trichinosis comes from an animal eating an animal with trichinosis.

00:08:06.000 So if somebody cannibalized him, they would get trichinosis.

00:08:09.000 Yeah.

00:08:09.000 Wow.

00:08:10.000 To this day.

00:08:11.000 And he's walking around like a normal person, but he's got trichinosis in his system essentially forever.

00:08:15.000 So that's like kind of how malaria is.

00:08:18.000 I guess so.

00:08:19.000 Something like that?

00:08:20.000 That's what we're looking at.

00:08:21.000 So if I ate you, I'd get malaria?

00:08:22.000 I hope not. 0.61

00:08:23.000 If you ate my liver, I think if you ate my liver.

00:08:25.000 I'll tell you right now, I'm pretty confident. 1.00

00:08:28.000 Unless we're in some Donner Party type situation and you die first.

00:08:32.000 Man, it's nuts the suffering that they're going through though with malaria.

00:08:37.000 Because they don't have mosquito nets and all that other stuff, so I was kind of not cautious enough.

00:08:42.000 And one thing I didn't want to do was take a Malaria pill that would prevent malaria.

00:08:49.000 What's that called?

00:08:49.000 A prophylaxis or something like that?

00:08:51.000 Something like that.

00:08:52.000 And so I didn't want to take that because a doctor here stateside said that if I took some of them, they're really intense.

00:08:59.000 They can really hurt your body.

00:09:00.000 They also said that even mentally, taking them for a full year, they could give you night terrors and terrible dreams, but then also like people have moments of psychosis from taking them and stuff.

00:09:12.000 So I was like, well, I don't want to be dealing with that.

00:09:14.000 And if...

00:09:15.000 The guys in Congo said, oh yeah, once you get malaria once, normally it doesn't come back very bad.

00:09:20.000 And so all we have to do is, all we have to do is, yeah.

00:09:24.000 The next time is much lower and much lower and much lower and it's much more, I don't know, you can control it easier.

00:09:30.000 And so the thing that was the struggle with me was that they misdiagnosed it four different times.

00:09:35.000 And we took it to two different labs.

00:09:37.000 And they just didn't have the, I guess, the right tools and technology to really see that.

00:09:43.000 Because whenever I got there, we're flying, and I'm hugging a bucket.

00:09:47.000 And whenever they were putting me into the ambulance, I remember my vision was tunneling.

00:09:53.000 And all in front of me was completely, I mean, it was just a blur.

00:09:57.000 It was just a blur.

00:10:00.000 And when you say tunneling, could you actually see the walls closing in?

00:10:03.000 Well, not at first.

00:10:05.000 I woke up one day and all of a sudden my peripheral vision was kind of blurry.

00:10:09.000 And that messed with me.

00:10:10.000 I was like, what's going on?

00:10:11.000 And then all of a sudden it started getting darker.

00:10:13.000 And so it didn't start closing, like if you're getting choked or something.

00:10:17.000 It didn't do that, but it kind of stopped.

00:10:19.000 And I think it just prevented my peripheral vision from really functioning or working.

00:10:23.000 And then the thing that sucks is you get these crazy back and forth between shivering uncontrollably and your teeth chattering to then you all of a sudden just like on a dime it switches and all of a sudden you're incredibly hot,

00:10:40.000 sweating and you're throwing everything off and you're grabbing a fan and it just goes back and forth.

00:10:45.000 It goes back and forth for maybe 30 minutes or something.

00:10:48.000 You're terribly cold.

00:10:49.000 Then for 30 minutes, you're terribly hot and incredibly thirsty.

00:10:53.000 But then you drink something, you vomit it up.

00:10:55.000 And so they were trying to force me to eat because they're like, you don't have malaria, you got to eat.

00:10:59.000 And everything I would eat, I'd just vomit.

00:11:01.000 You don't have malaria, you got to eat.

00:11:03.000 Yeah.

00:11:03.000 I had one doctor there that they couldn't agree with each other because they didn't know what was going on with me.

00:11:10.000 So the up-and-coming doctor and one of the young nurses said, this guy's got malaria 100%.

00:11:15.000 But the older ones were just going off of the results.

00:11:19.000 And they're like, no, look, you want to see the first test, second test, third test, or fourth test that says he doesn't have malaria.

00:11:24.000 And so there was some humanitarian organization there, and they had gotten this crazy, I don't know, virus or flu kind of thing.

00:11:33.000 And they would be sick for three or four days, and then they'd get better.

00:11:36.000 But it went through all of them.

00:11:38.000 And so they thought that I had gotten that.

00:11:41.000 So they said just let him ride it out and he'll get better.

00:11:44.000 And then kind of the head kind of doctor that was overseeing it came and I was in my room but she wouldn't even enter into the room because she was looking at me through the screen door saying I'm not coming in there. 0.97

00:11:58.000 I'm not risking me getting sick with that.

00:12:00.000 But malaria can't pass on like that.

00:12:01.000 It's got to be from a mosquito.

00:12:03.000 Do you know that malaria has killed half of all the people that have ever died?

00:12:07.000 I had no clue.

00:12:08.000 No.

00:12:09.000 It's the nuttiest statistic I've ever heard in my life.

00:12:11.000 I had to re-research it and look it up and find corroborating sources.

00:12:16.000 Yeah, it's killed half of all the people that have ever died ever have died from malaria.

00:12:20.000 I think there's a guy named...

00:12:21.000 That's nuts. 1.00

00:12:22.000 That's fucking nuts. 1.00

00:12:23.000 That's crazy. 1.00

00:12:24.000 But listening to your story, it's not surprising.

00:12:26.000 No, not at all.

00:12:28.000 Yeah, it's brutal.

00:12:29.000 I think even if you go back and look at Congolese history, James Jameson, I think is his name, but he's one of the Jameson guys that founded the whiskey in Ireland.

00:12:37.000 He went, and this is the story.

00:12:39.000 I think it's been conflicting, but it's been confirmed by some sources there that were with him traveling.

00:12:45.000 And he went to some of the cannibalistic villages there in Congo back in the day in the 1800s.

00:12:50.000 And he would actually...

00:12:52.000 That's crazy, but he would buy some of the young kids, and he would feed them to the cannibals, and he would do art and stuff like that.

00:13:02.000 What?

00:13:03.000 Yeah, that's what they said about the Jameson guy, the whiskey.

00:13:06.000 He would buy young kids from who?

00:13:10.000 From, like, slave villages and stuff like that.

00:13:12.000 That's a big past in Congo, is that tribes have enslaved other tribes and things like that.

00:13:18.000 And so they would buy, you can buy people there.

00:13:21.000 That's what happened whenever we brought a pygmy over to the United States, put him in the New York Zoo. 1.00

00:13:26.000 He lived in the monkey house for a couple years.

00:13:29.000 Yeah.

00:13:30.000 That was the Bronx Zoo, right?

00:13:32.000 Yeah, the Bronx Zoo.

00:13:33.000 Yeah.

00:13:34.000 And then also the St. Louis World Fair.

00:13:36.000 And he toured around with them for a little bit.

00:13:38.000 Got depressed, got a gun, and shot himself.

00:13:41.000 So he got off the security guard, I think.

00:13:43.000 But with the Jameson guy, he died in Congo or Uganda from malaria.

00:13:51.000 Whoa.

00:13:51.000 And that's the...

00:13:53.000 Has it been confirmed that he actually did that?

00:13:56.000 That he actually bought people and fed little kids to these cannibals? 1.00

00:13:59.000 Well, it looks like it because I think it was Stanley.

00:14:03.000 I forget Stanley's first name.

00:14:05.000 I think he was the one that confirmed it.

00:14:06.000 Like, they had a...

00:14:07.000 They would go and they would have to have protection, so they would get some of the warrior tribes there to protect themselves.

00:14:13.000 And then they would, yeah, in his downtime, he was an artist or something, would paint pictures and stuff like that.

00:14:20.000 So we'd paint pictures of suffering.

00:14:22.000 I'm pretty sure it happened at least once.

00:14:24.000 I mean, maybe that's something that the listeners can go look up or Google, but I'm pretty sure it's confirmed.

00:14:29.000 So are they related?

00:14:30.000 I mean, did the art, was it related to the children being eaten?

00:14:35.000 Like, did you draw art about that?

00:14:37.000 Yeah, I think there's one confirmed story, so I don't know that he did it a ton, but I know that he did it once, which is awful, terrible.

00:14:44.000 You know, it's crazy.

00:14:45.000 Wow.

00:14:46.000 You know, that's the weirdest thing about people is how much they vary and how adaptable people are.

00:14:53.000 You know, the people, when they're involved, when they're in an environment where horrible things are going on, they do horrible things.

00:15:00.000 Yeah.

00:15:02.000 And have talked about horrific things that they've witnessed and how it became normal and it became a part of them.

00:15:08.000 And they contributed and they became a part of these horrific war crimes. 0.54

00:15:13.000 Like riots.

00:15:15.000 Perfect example.

00:15:16.000 When people riot, you take a person who would never throw a Molotov cocktail or break a window or stomp a cop to death or whatever.

00:15:25.000 But you get them involved in a group of 10,000 people that are doing the same thing and it's almost like it's in the air.

00:15:31.000 It's like...

00:15:32.000 It's like people get infected by whatever's around them.

00:15:35.000 They sort of imitate their atmosphere.

00:15:37.000 Yeah, in Congo, in Uganda I saw it once, but they have something called mob justice.

00:15:42.000 And so that's a crazy thing, kind of like with riots, where if something happens, someone just has to accuse somebody, and then everyone comes.

00:15:49.000 And in some cases, it's okay, because if a thief is there and they yell thief, then the whole community surrounds the thief.

00:15:57.000 But the danger happens whenever someone wants to take justice into their own hands. 0.99

00:16:02.000 And instead of turning that thief over to the authorities, what they do is they beat him and kill him.

00:16:06.000 So me and my buddy Benjamin, he was my translator, we were walking down a center street of, like, basically Main Street in one of these big towns.

00:16:14.000 It's called Bunia.

00:16:15.000 And in Bunia, they have a big past for lots of different struggles and even, like, I think smaller kind of genocides. 0.74

00:16:24.000 Well, I say smaller, but I think 50,000 people were killed there, just in that one town.

00:16:28.000 50,000 people killed by different rebel groups, machetes, all this different stuff.

00:16:33.000 But we were walking down the street, And someone yelled thief, and nobody even confirmed it.

00:16:38.000 They grabbed the guy, started beating him, and then whenever we got up there, Benz grabbed me and said, you don't want to be around this because I'm the only outsider there.

00:16:46.000 And so, but at first, my instinct was like, instinct, I didn't know that they were saying thief, thief.

00:16:51.000 My instinct was like, there's 30 guys pounding on this guy.

00:16:54.000 Like, someone's got to, you know, give this guy some rooms, give him some space.

00:16:57.000 He was grabbing my shirt, pulling me.

00:16:59.000 And so, anyways, whenever we went back and saw him, his body was just twisted up.

00:17:04.000 And he was bent up in basically a ditch.

00:17:07.000 Dead.

00:17:08.000 They just beat him to death.

00:17:08.000 Yeah.

00:17:09.000 Yeah.

00:17:10.000 There's a lot of that for witchcraft, too, right? 0.85

00:17:12.000 They accuse people of being witches and burn them alive.

00:17:16.000 That's a big problem with orphans in Congo.

00:17:20.000 Is that if they get accused of witchcraft, they just excommunicate them from their family.

00:17:23.000 Jesus Christ.

00:17:25.000 Yeah.

00:17:26.000 Well, education, man, right? 0.79

00:17:28.000 It's like these people have these ancient ideas that are based on just one person who's ignorant telling another person who's ignorant and becomes doctrine. 0.72

00:17:38.000 And they just pass it down through generation to generation. 0.92

00:17:41.000 They really believe in witchcraft.

00:17:43.000 Apparently they have a real issue with albinos, too.

00:17:46.000 They think that albinos, like, they're cursed or something like that? 0.96

00:17:50.000 Yeah, cursed. 1.00

00:17:51.000 And then if you can kill, cook, and eat an albino guy... 1.00

00:17:54.000 This is in Tanzania that I can confirm this. 0.99

00:17:58.000 If they can consume the flesh of an albino, then it can cure them of HIV, tuberculosis, I don't know, some other sicknesses too. 1.00

00:18:09.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:18:10.000 That's crazy. 1.00

00:18:11.000 And that's with the pygmies while we're there celebrating on our first water well that we accomplished there. 1.00

00:18:17.000 Some of the government officials came and said that this is the first ever clean water source among the Pygmy people, the Mabuti Pygmies in Eastern Congo.

00:18:25.000 Because the Pygmies are in many different countries, but in there, that country, this is the first water source for them.

00:18:32.000 And so, but on that day, a rebel leader named Morgan of the Mai Mai, it's a terrible rebel group there, they had been confirmed in 2012 Of killing, cooking, and eating pygmies, thinking that it makes them invincible going into battle. 0.59

00:18:48.000 But while we're there celebrating, all of a sudden, all the Congolese army is driving by us.

00:18:53.000 And basically, the Congolese army is just a bunch of rebel groups that defected and came together to be the Congolese army.

00:19:01.000 But they're all driving by, you know, where we are celebrating.

00:19:05.000 And I guess what turns out, these guys have RPGs and machine guns and all sorts of crazy stuff.

00:19:11.000 And I guess I had Morgan, the main leader in the back, and they had killed him.

00:19:15.000 But he came to peacefully turn himself in, but anyways, they killed him.

00:19:20.000 So that took the Mai Mai.

00:19:24.000 The rest of the rebels now don't want to turn themselves in, because if they turn themselves in peacefully, then they might be killed or executed, you know? 0.61

00:19:32.000 So they went back and started killing more, raping more, attacking more gold mines, stuff like that.

00:19:38.000 And then some of the people there from the UN that were studying the conflict and stuff said, be careful in that area where you're going, don't go, for a little bit.

00:19:48.000 So we stayed for maybe three weeks and then we went back out.

00:19:50.000 But they were saying that the Myanmar were walking around drinking from all the pygmy skulls, just drinking out of their skulls.

00:19:57.000 So it's pretty nuts, man. 1.00

00:19:58.000 Fuck. 1.00

00:20:00.000 Jesus, man. 1.00

00:20:01.000 You've seen some crazy shit in the few years that you've been down there. 0.98

00:20:05.000 I mean, what a wild transformation your life has taken from going from the ultimate fighter, fighting in the UFC, experiencing The initial trip when you went and you met those people and you became incredibly committed to helping them, 0.96

00:20:22.000 you just felt like you were overcome with this almost like a calling, right?

00:20:27.000 Is that the best way to describe it?

00:20:28.000 Yeah, I'd say so.

00:20:29.000 And then you've been there back and forth ever since.

00:20:32.000 Yeah, the first time, I would say it wasn't until my flight back that I felt that initial, like, I gotta do something.

00:20:39.000 Because whenever I was there, the problem just seemed so huge and so insurmountable that, what am I gonna do?

00:20:46.000 How am I gonna help?

00:20:48.000 And am I gonna endanger myself or get sick or die or whatever in the process?

00:20:55.000 But on the way back, I just felt like, you know, if not me, then who, you know?

00:21:01.000 They asked me if I would give them a voice, if I could help them, if I could.

00:21:05.000 And I just felt, I don't know, a yearning, a longing that I had to do something.

00:21:10.000 And so the second trip back was great.

00:21:14.000 I got to actually...

00:21:15.000 Meet some people that really had some real plans, because the first time I went with people that we didn't have plans to actually help or anything, like sustainability, it was just kind of a learning trip, going and seeing what their problems were.

00:21:27.000 Second time it was the university there, their school of community development, and they had dreams of giving them water, giving them land, giving them food, but they didn't have any way to do it really.

00:21:38.000 They had the plan and everything in place.

00:21:39.000 But they didn't have funding behind it.

00:21:41.000 They didn't have the technology behind it.

00:21:43.000 And so the third time was whenever I came back and I had studied how to build those ecodomes and I partnered with an organization.

00:21:51.000 It's a great organization called Water 4. And their big thing is what I was searching for, was how to put the The tools are basically the power in the hands of the people there.

00:22:03.000 Instead of having to have outside help, how could we actually help them to continue to do it, continue the process?

00:22:10.000 And so Water 4 puts the tools in the people's hands, and then they teach them how to do it, and then now they can do it for themselves.

00:22:16.000 It can be a sustainable business for them.

00:22:18.000 They can use whatever model they want, if it's a nonprofit model, if it's a business model, to make it sustainable there.

00:22:25.000 So that way, Yeah, where I'm at, Congolese can help Congolese, and that way I can hopefully, you know, fan the flame, go over there, teach them more, bring over the right people.

00:22:36.000 Water4 really supported and sent over, you know, their director of implementation to come, really sit down with us for two weeks, teach us.

00:22:44.000 He came back out, did it again.

00:22:45.000 Now he's gone over since I've been back already.

00:22:48.000 He's been back over teaching our team and more, you know, strategies of how to dig these water wells.

00:22:52.000 No, we had a bunch of people donate to your cause, which is, it's fight for the forgotten.

00:22:58.000 We had a bunch of people donate Bitcoin, and I matched the Bitcoin, whatever people donated, I matched it. 0.53

00:23:04.000 But Bitcoin's kind of weird, like it's fluctuating up and back, and although I'm a big believer and supporter, and I think it'd probably be better if people donate cash, so we know exactly what the fuck we're dealing with.

00:23:14.000 What's the best way they can donate to your cause?

00:23:19.000 Well, they could go to fightfortheforgotten.com and they could just click donate and do it there.

00:23:23.000 We're going to be updating the site real soon.

00:23:25.000 But yeah, that's straight to the non-profit 501c3 bank account.

00:23:31.000 They could go to Water 4 if they want to fund the water projects there.

00:23:34.000 Spell that.

00:23:34.000 F-O-R. Water 4, F-O-R. Water 4 with a number.

00:23:38.000 The number 4. So water and the number 4. Water4.org.

00:23:41.000 So they could go to fightfortheforgotten.com, donate, or they could go to water4.org.

00:23:45.000 Water and the number 4. Not F-O-U-R, but the number.

00:23:47.000 Right, the number.

00:23:48.000 There you go.

00:23:49.000 And since coming on the podcast and people becoming aware of what you're doing, are you getting other organizations that are reaching out to you to try to help you and contribute as well?

00:23:59.000 Yeah, that's been a cool thing, but it's trying to be selective in the process because, I mean, funding is something that, yeah, we definitely need, but at the same time, we want to do it in a way that's going to be practical for the people there.

00:24:11.000 So sometimes you have to, it sucks, but...

00:24:15.000 Sometimes you've got to say no to good opportunities or chunks of money if they're going to tell you how to use it, when to use it, and kind of control.

00:24:24.000 If they give it to you with strings attached, instead of saying like, well, culturally, it might not work here, doing it that way.

00:24:31.000 You know, instead of going and just, I don't know if that, does that make sense?

00:24:35.000 Well, sort of.

00:24:36.000 What experience have you had?

00:24:37.000 Have you had people that just had the wrong idea of what the environment is like there or what the culture is like?

00:24:44.000 I don't want to knock any organization, but things have to be sustainable to really continue change.

00:24:53.000 My mind frame is that opportunity is much better than charity.

00:24:57.000 If you give people an opportunity to get out of their poverty, then that empowers them.

00:25:03.000 Like teach a man to fish.

00:25:04.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:25:05.000 And you feed him for life.

00:25:06.000 You know, give him a fish.

00:25:07.000 You feed him for a day.

00:25:08.000 And so there's been things where people are like, hey, I'm donating.

00:25:12.000 You know, I had to turn someone away that was going to donate 5,000 of the water straws.

00:25:17.000 And that might sound really bad.

00:25:19.000 I said, hey, how about you help us fund a water well like you guys did.

00:25:19.000 I didn't turn them away.

00:25:22.000 And I got some pictures to show.

00:25:23.000 It's awesome of the village you guys supported.

00:25:26.000 Cool.

00:25:27.000 But really, the water straw thing is great.

00:25:30.000 What's a water straw?

00:25:32.000 Well, I don't want to knock them, but I think it's a great organization.

00:25:36.000 And I didn't turn the organization down.

00:25:39.000 I turned a private person that wanted to say, hey, I'm doing this, and you run with it.

00:25:43.000 And I said, thank you, but I think a water well will support them better.

00:25:47.000 Because I've had one of those, it's called a life straw.

00:25:50.000 And I think the way it's marketed is that it's going to save the third world.

00:25:54.000 But then if you think about it, how many times does someone in the third world, every single time they want to get a clean drink of water, do they want to have a straw wrapped around their neck and then put their face in the water?

00:26:05.000 I'm not sure what exactly is it.

00:26:07.000 Is it a filter?

00:26:08.000 It's a filter, yeah.

00:26:08.000 Yeah, it's a live straw.

00:26:09.000 And I think it's great.

00:26:10.000 I think it's great for survival, you know, if you're out camping.

00:26:14.000 I also think that...

00:26:15.000 What does it look like?

00:26:16.000 Can you pull it up, James?

00:26:18.000 You say it wraps around your neck?

00:26:20.000 Yeah, it wraps around your neck, you walk around with it.

00:26:24.000 And then whenever you need clean water, you put your face in the ground, in the dirt, and then you suck clean water out of it.

00:26:32.000 But what he was going to support was going to be worth two or three different water wells.

00:26:38.000 And it's a really cool idea.

00:26:40.000 It's a great thing.

00:26:41.000 I really don't want to knock him.

00:26:43.000 I think it's awesome.

00:26:43.000 Is this what we're looking at here?

00:26:44.000 Yeah.

00:26:45.000 So he has this whole contraption?

00:26:46.000 So see how you have to put your face in the ground right there on LifeStraw?

00:26:49.000 Oh, it's called a LifeStraw.

00:26:50.000 Okay.

00:26:51.000 So see, now that's a great marketing...

00:26:54.000 I agree with that, you know?

00:26:56.000 You're out camping doing something like that and you need a clean drink of water, you don't have it.

00:26:59.000 Put your face on the ground and get it.

00:27:00.000 So he can just drink through that straw?

00:27:03.000 That's it?

00:27:04.000 And it's clean water. 1.00

00:27:05.000 But you have to suck pretty hard. 0.88

00:27:07.000 I mean, you really do have to pull on it real hard to get the water. 0.99

00:27:11.000 Maybe after you use it a while, it gets easier.

00:27:14.000 That's how most of those filters are.

00:27:14.000 I'm sure it does.

00:27:17.000 Yeah, but at first, you're having to really...

00:27:17.000 Really?

00:27:19.000 You're turning red in the face and stuff like that.

00:27:21.000 Sort of like inflating a really thick balloon or something like that, but the opposite...

00:27:25.000 Yeah, and I think it's great.

00:27:26.000 I really do.

00:27:28.000 But at the same time, to take it in and say to my...

00:27:32.000 I really think of the pygmies as my family. 0.99

00:27:34.000 I'm not going to go in there and just drop those off.

00:27:36.000 I'd rather give them a water well that they can go to time and time again.

00:27:39.000 They can fill up as much as they want.

00:27:41.000 They can drink it from a glass instead of a face on the ground.

00:27:44.000 No, well, that definitely totally makes sense.

00:27:46.000 It may be good to have both.

00:27:48.000 Yeah, it could be.

00:27:50.000 At the time, though, it was like even getting it over to Congo.

00:27:53.000 Some people are really gung-ho, and I love it.

00:27:55.000 Like, please, you know, help us, support us, things like that.

00:27:58.000 But then if you're going to donate and say, this is what it's for, and then we have to find a way to get it there, ship it, you know, 5,000 of these straws or something like that.

00:28:09.000 It's a lot of work.

00:28:10.000 So you turned them down because you didn't have the ability to ship them there?

00:28:13.000 To ship them, and then I was trying to just say, hey, this is the real solution that we see right now.

00:28:20.000 That could be in the future, and right now I'm in the jungle.

00:28:24.000 It's hard for me to come out.

00:28:25.000 Getting things in through customs is crazy.

00:28:28.000 Also seeing 5,000 of those boxed up. 0.56

00:28:30.000 The Congolese government there, and the Border Patrol, They're absolutely crazy, man.

00:28:36.000 There was $3,000 worth of mattresses donated to this hospital, and these people sent it on a truck and paid for the shipping and everything.

00:28:45.000 Then whenever they got there, the government wanted $5,000 so that they could bring it into the country.

00:28:51.000 And they're like, what do you mean?

00:28:52.000 So the hospital now has...

00:28:54.000 $3,000 of donated mattresses for their beds, but now they have no way to get it in there because they don't have the funds to pay $5,000 to the corrupt government officials just to get their beds released across the border, all that other stuff.

00:29:09.000 That's gotta be insanely frustrating for you, trying to make a change and running time and time again into all this corruption and all these devious people.

00:29:18.000 It sounds like, if you go back to the Jameson thing, it's like this long history of horrible things that have been happening in this area, and there's kind of like a momentum attached to that.

00:29:28.000 It's almost like this is just the way it is. 0.98

00:29:30.000 This is a fucked up part of the world. 0.98

00:29:32.000 Is that accurate? 1.00

00:29:33.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

00:29:34.000 It's nuts.

00:29:37.000 Every single time I've gone across the border, there's been some kind of problem where they want to arrest me and my team.

00:29:45.000 They want to find someone that they can single out, find something that they can get a bribe for, and they just waste so much of your time.

00:29:54.000 For instance, we...

00:29:55.000 We got a truck donated to us, which was awesome, so that we could get our PVC, our tools, all that out to the forest.

00:30:02.000 And whenever we brought it into the country, we had all the paperwork saying it's under the university.

00:30:07.000 It's tax-free, basically.

00:30:09.000 And this is a university vehicle that's going to be used for humanitarian aid.

00:30:12.000 But then whenever we get to the border, the head guys, the absolute head guys of customs were saying, yeah, but how's that going to feed my family?

00:30:22.000 And it's like, well, isn't your job a government job?

00:30:25.000 And they pay you.

00:30:26.000 It's not my job to pay you.

00:30:27.000 So they locked up our truck for three and a half weeks.

00:30:30.000 So we were delayed almost a month in our process and everything we had laid out, strategies.

00:30:35.000 We're going to be in this village from this day to this day, this week to this week, this month to this week.

00:30:39.000 So they were just waiting for a bribe.

00:30:41.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:30:42.000 So after three and a half weeks, how did you resolve it?

00:30:45.000 Yeah, they came back to us with a long list of new fees, of processing fees, and we had to go do this to get it, and go do this to get it, and go do this to get it.

00:30:57.000 And by that time, we just decided that, I think we ended up paying like $750 to get our truck released, but it was going to be $500 anyways, so I think they got an extra $250. 0.98

00:31:10.000 Fuck, but you lost three and a half years. 0.92

00:31:12.000 Yeah, but they were first asking for $7,000 or $8,000. 1.00

00:31:16.000 They were looking for 50% of the purchase price of the vehicle. 0.99

00:31:21.000 Oh, god damn, man. 0.99

00:31:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:31:25.000 It's gotta drive you nuts when you're dealing with something that's, you know, you're trying to help. 0.99

00:31:30.000 You're going over there, you're essentially dedicating your life, a huge part of your life, you're going over there and helping these people, being, you know, completely humanitarian in your actions, and then you run into this kind of shit. 0.99

00:31:43.000 It's gotta be really, really frustrating. 0.99

00:31:45.000 Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is.

00:31:47.000 It's different than anything that we experience here because that corruption isn't...

00:31:51.000 I mean, sure, there's corrupt stuff that goes on here, but it's not so open, so public.

00:31:56.000 I mean, by the time we finally paid that $750, I remember grabbing my wallet because he was wanting more.

00:32:05.000 And I grabbed my wallet, and I had Congolese francs in my wallet, and I just shook it on his desk.

00:32:10.000 And he had other people witnessing this and other people outside that could see in.

00:32:14.000 I'm like, here, this is all I have.

00:32:16.000 This is all I have.

00:32:17.000 You've delayed us one month from giving your people, your countrymen, water.

00:32:22.000 Like, and they're dying from it.

00:32:23.000 And I think right before that, a little guy named Bobo had died, and I had been holding him in my hands.

00:32:30.000 And so, I mean, I've buried, you know, now a couple of kids, but I've seen, I've been to over 10 funerals.

00:32:40.000 And so, yeah, I was holding Bobo, and You know, I didn't know.

00:32:46.000 I just got in the hut and whenever I crawled in, you know, his mother is my mother's sister.

00:32:56.000 So basically she was my aunt and Baba was my cousin.

00:32:59.000 So Chibu Siku is my mother, Macho is her sister, and Baba was Macho's son.

00:33:04.000 When you say my mother, like your adopted mother?

00:33:06.000 Yeah, my adopted mother there.

00:33:08.000 So they just gave you a whole family there.

00:33:10.000 Yeah, I love them, man.

00:33:11.000 Wow.

00:33:12.000 I love them.

00:33:12.000 My name in that village is Efeosa, which Efeosa means the man who loves us.

00:33:17.000 And then my new name that everyone's been calling me, especially when I drive up and down the roads there, is Mabuti Mangbo.

00:33:24.000 And Mabuti Mangbo means the big pygmy.

00:33:28.000 And so they just call me the big pygmy.

00:33:28.000 Wow.

00:33:30.000 The big pygmy and the man who loves us.

00:33:32.000 Yeah.

00:33:33.000 Wow.

00:33:34.000 So the thing that was tough with Babu had just passed away before we got the truck, I think.

00:33:40.000 And I actually think Babu happened after. 0.77

00:33:44.000 A girl named Little Moe happened before. 0.97

00:33:47.000 And so it's just tough stuff because I'm seeing this.

00:33:51.000 It's really wrecking me, you know, seeing kids go through this.

00:33:56.000 Or anybody, really.

00:33:58.000 And knowing that we have the tools, We have the solution to that problem.

00:34:02.000 And what was that problem?

00:34:03.000 What were they dying from?

00:34:04.000 Water.

00:34:05.000 Yeah, just dirty water.

00:34:06.000 The parasites, they get tapeworms.

00:34:09.000 There's other kinds of sicknesses that attribute to it, but most of them, the little kids, they run around with these huge bellies, and it's just full of tapeworms, other kinds of bacterias and things like that.

00:34:21.000 And if you can just give them clean water, I think the stat from the United Nations Human Development Report is 85% of sickness just disappears.

00:34:30.000 Once you have clean water in your system.

00:34:32.000 But once you're constantly getting sick from that, not only that, but it's diarrhea.

00:34:36.000 Whenever you have waterborne illness and drinking dirty water, now these people that don't have a lot of food, that are either slaves to get their food, which a whole family can work, you know, a mother, father, and their two or three children can go work for their masters, and they get two small bananas at the end of the day.

00:34:53.000 And they have to split that within their whole family.

00:34:55.000 But now if you have diarrhea added on top of that, Now you don't absorb any of the nutrients from that banana you just ate.

00:35:02.000 It just goes straight through you.

00:35:04.000 And so it's real tough to be like, man, first we got them land while we were there, which was a huge thing.

00:35:11.000 We negotiated and petitioned and lobbied for them and their rights with the government there, but also the local slave masters, the chiefs of that area, and said, you know, these are the first citizens of Congo.

00:35:24.000 Why don't they have any land?

00:35:25.000 Why has all their land been stolen from them?

00:35:27.000 Why is the land that they're on now all of a sudden legally in the name of somebody else?

00:35:32.000 And so where's some land that we could get and purchase on behalf of them?

00:35:36.000 And the university did a great job in that.

00:35:39.000 I was kind of in the background for that, for sure, because just being an NGO, a nonprofit, something like that, the local government officials, again, will see dollar signs.

00:35:49.000 And so if we were going to buy the land, it was going to be astronomical.

00:35:53.000 We couldn't have done it.

00:35:54.000 If the university would have done it, it would have been over $250,000.

00:35:59.000 But since we came up with an idea and a solution saying, well, who cares who gets the credit?

00:36:04.000 Like, I don't need it and fight for the forgotten's name.

00:36:06.000 Like, it doesn't have to be in the university's name.

00:36:09.000 What if we're just kind of the caretakers and we handle the documents and the negotiations?

00:36:15.000 And seeing that it's legally done.

00:36:16.000 And then all parties will get copies of it.

00:36:18.000 They'll put their thumb prints all on the documents.

00:36:21.000 And each chunk of land, they have like 10 or 12 thumb prints on it with signatures.

00:36:26.000 And there's a handwritten one.

00:36:27.000 There's a typed out one.

00:36:28.000 And then the government comes out.

00:36:29.000 Now we're doing GPS coordinates of the land.

00:36:31.000 But the land we got was 2,470 acres.

00:36:35.000 So we've been able to do that in 10 different spots.

00:36:37.000 So it's one square kilometer in each different village that we've tried to now establish.

00:36:42.000 And now we're putting water wells all on those and hoping to start farming projects on them all too.

00:36:46.000 That's fantastic.

00:36:47.000 Do you have any concern that with all this added publicity and all this attention that's in that area that people will come in and try to exploit that because they know the resources are in that area now?

00:37:00.000 I think what's been great for me is being able to kind of dive in as part of the university and have their covering because now they say I'm a teacher of appropriate technologies.

00:37:17.000 And so I'm teaching Congolese how to dig wells, farm, and build new homes.

00:37:24.000 Just different sustainable things.

00:37:25.000 I'll come back here, learn it, and I'll come and I'll either teach it or I'll bring someone with me that really can, you know.

00:37:30.000 Even if I don't know everything about it, I'll get someone there that will.

00:37:34.000 And so the university there is kind of just, they're able to really negotiate and show everybody on both sides, like, hey, this is in everyone's best interest.

00:37:45.000 Which is something cool, because whenever we go in and we drill water wells, we're not just drilling them for my pygmy family.

00:37:51.000 We're drilling them for the people that oppressed them, too.

00:37:53.000 And that way we can show them that the project isn't just...

00:37:56.000 For the pygmies and just going to benefit them. 1.00

00:37:58.000 If you can sell us their land, which sometimes the land prices that we're buying them for are three years, five years, ten years salary for the people that either enslaved them or that own that land.

00:38:09.000 And then we come in and we say, we're also going to give you a water well.

00:38:12.000 Well, their kids are dying of the same stuff too.

00:38:14.000 And they've been struggling with diarrhea their whole life or parasites or whatever it is.

00:38:18.000 Now we're going to give you guys both water wells.

00:38:21.000 And when we start our farming project, We're bringing in an agriculturalist to teach both sides better farming practices.

00:38:27.000 Oh, that's great.

00:38:28.000 That's a beautiful strategy.

00:38:28.000 Yeah.

00:38:30.000 Right.

00:38:30.000 And so that way, nobody gets offended.

00:38:33.000 It's like, hey, no, this isn't a pygmy project.

00:38:35.000 Because if it's a pygmy project, then that's not going to be received well. 0.89

00:38:39.000 But people get jealous, and then they'll...

00:38:41.000 Yeah.

00:38:41.000 And they're used to oppressing them, and why are they getting help?

00:38:44.000 And so we want to help everybody out.

00:38:46.000 Let's come up together.

00:38:48.000 Wow, that's beautiful, man.

00:38:49.000 That's beautiful.

00:38:50.000 And is there any resistance there?

00:38:52.000 Because they've been so prejudiced against the pygmies for so long.

00:38:56.000 Is there any resistance to the pygmies having equal treatment? 0.96

00:39:01.000 I'm sure that there is questions and things like that, but we haven't seen...

00:39:07.000 And what we do also is we go in there with the university, like, dean of the Department of Development, and we sit down with them, we explain everything, and it all becomes, like, agreeable and written down on paper before we ever take action.

00:39:20.000 And so that way we can always show them, hey, we all agreed to this, you know?

00:39:23.000 And so it's been a great process for me.

00:39:26.000 Do they all speak the same language, these people that you're communicating with, the Pygmies and their oppressors? 1.00

00:39:31.000 They kind of have their own dialects also, but most people have...

00:39:35.000 Congo has so many languages, there's about 200. Wow!

00:39:39.000 Yeah, 200 of their local tribe languages.

00:39:42.000 Do they share words in common?

00:39:45.000 Some of them do, for sure, especially ones that border each other, but then there's always a common thread.

00:39:49.000 I think there's five national languages of Congo, and one's French, so that's kind of the government language and the language spoken schools.

00:39:58.000 Another is Swahili, and that's on the eastern side, so that's what I've been trying to learn.

00:40:03.000 I can pick it up pretty good, but speaking it, I'm still kind of far behind, so I always have a translator right beside me.

00:40:08.000 But they have Lingala, and they have, I think it's called Bannacongo or something like that.

00:40:13.000 So kind of in each region, the north, the south, the east, the west, all that, they have their own kind of language that everybody speaks.

00:40:20.000 And then as a nation, everybody speaks French.

00:40:23.000 Wow.

00:40:24.000 So do you speak French at all?

00:40:26.000 No.

00:40:26.000 Are you using like a program or something like that or books?

00:40:31.000 Yeah, Rosetta Stone, but really just immersing myself because it's really hard.

00:40:34.000 Even the French there is, I mean, I guess you could, French would be good for me to learn.

00:40:39.000 It absolutely would.

00:40:41.000 To communicate with the government officials, for sure.

00:40:44.000 But everybody in the East speaks Swahili.

00:40:47.000 And my pygmy family, they speak Swahili.

00:40:48.000 But it's broken.

00:40:49.000 And so even like Rosetta Stone, it's a hard thing to go on there and learn.

00:40:54.000 Because that's the proper Tanzanian Swahili.

00:40:57.000 And then Kenya kind of gets a little worse. 0.90

00:40:59.000 And then there's a break in between Uganda. 0.52

00:41:02.000 Where in Uganda, it's basically just the military language of Swahili.

00:41:06.000 And then you get over to Congo.

00:41:07.000 And so there's a big break between that pure, proper Tanzanian Swahili and the Swahili spoken in Congo because they mix in local language and they mix in French and all that other stuff.

00:41:17.000 And accents, I'm sure, as well.

00:41:19.000 Oh, yeah, definitely.

00:41:20.000 So I just try to immerse myself in there and learn it that way.

00:41:24.000 I'm able to talk a little bit, but really just having a translator there is helping me.

00:41:27.000 It's amazing how many variations there are in languages.

00:41:30.000 I went to Northern Ireland once for the UFC and spoke to people in Belfast. 0.99

00:41:36.000 You can't understand a fucking word they're saying. 0.98

00:41:39.000 I mean, they're speaking English, and you'll pick out like one out of every four or five words that you're pretty sure that's what the word is. 1.00

00:41:47.000 But they're speaking English.

00:41:48.000 Isn't that nuts? 1.00

00:41:49.000 Hey, there's this fucking guy with his English. 1.00

00:41:51.000 Hey, how the hell in? 1.00

00:41:52.000 How the hell in?

00:41:53.000 How the hell in?

00:41:55.000 Like, whoa!

00:41:56.000 And they're communicating back and forth with each other like this.

00:41:59.000 And it sounds like...

00:42:00.000 Remember that cantina scene in Star Wars?

00:42:03.000 You ever seen...

00:42:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:06.000 And they're all, like, speaking all these crazy languages. 1.00

00:42:08.000 That's what it's like.

00:42:09.000 It's like being in this, like, weird starport.

00:42:12.000 But they're speaking English, you know?

00:42:14.000 Yeah, and my best friend there, Ben, he used to be a translator for the United Nations, so he speaks fluently seven languages, but he knows more than that.

00:42:22.000 Wow.

00:42:23.000 Fluently, so he just goes around.

00:42:25.000 We're buddies.

00:42:26.000 We're side-by-side all the time, and he's helping me out.

00:42:27.000 You have to, like, if you speak fluently seven languages, you have to kind of practice those languages all the time, right, to keep them fluent?

00:42:33.000 I'm pretty sure, but that's what he was doing where...

00:42:35.000 I mean, yes, but that's what he was doing when he was at the United Nations for the Russians, because he speaks...

00:42:40.000 I mean, he's a Congolese guy that's speaking Russian.

00:42:42.000 I'm like...

00:42:43.000 That's crazy.

00:42:43.000 Whenever we see any Russian soldiers, he would just go on in a conversation with them.

00:42:48.000 English is one of his, not his worst, because he's great at it.

00:42:52.000 But yeah, all the other languages he's super fluent in.

00:42:55.000 It's so fascinating.

00:42:56.000 It's like that story from the Bible about the Tower of Babel, you know, that the idea being that this was all like some sort of a plan to keep people from being able to communicate with each other. 0.56

00:43:05.000 I mean, it's probably indicative of like how frustrating it must be to realize that there are, I mean, I don't know how many languages there are worldwide, but I think it's over a thousand, right?

00:43:14.000 Yeah.

00:43:14.000 If there's 200 in Congo, it's got to be...

00:43:16.000 Yeah.

00:43:17.000 Imagine.

00:43:18.000 I mean, until you have some sort of a program that translates in order and still...

00:43:23.000 Until someone creates a universal language and gets people to adopt it. 0.97

00:43:27.000 But, shit, we won't even adopt the metric system. 0.98

00:43:30.000 You know? 1.00

00:43:31.000 I mean, when I was in high school, they tried that shit. 0.99

00:43:33.000 They tried to push the, someday, everyone's gonna be on it. 1.00

00:43:35.000 And I remember everyone in the class was like, fuck this. 0.98

00:43:38.000 Nobody's gonna adopt this. 0.99

00:43:39.000 You know, we lived 15 years learning about inches and yards, and we're not into meters.

00:43:44.000 You know, we don't really care.

00:43:46.000 And it seems like it's...

00:43:48.000 Incredibly frustrated for people to communicate without some sort of a universal translator, whether it's a program or something, but even then, without a universal language.

00:43:58.000 It's it's it's gonna be really hard for people to relate to each other and to to not like it's it's easy to Look at someone who's speaking some crazy language like people in Afghanistan or people in Saudi Arabia and think of them as like not us Because they don't they don't speak the way we speak if we heard someone in Afghanistan speaking total Fluent English, 0.61

00:44:23.000 we would think of them way different than if you hear them in some crazy Arabic language. 0.98

00:44:27.000 We totally don't understand.

00:44:30.000 Yeah, without a doubt.

00:44:32.000 Language is something that I wish I had a gift at.

00:44:36.000 I really wish I could just grasp it and speak it so well, but I really think just immersion into it is the way that you really start to pick it up.

00:44:46.000 Because I found myself just able to Start learning Swahili, and then someone's over to the side, and they make a little joke, and I would be able to start laughing with them.

00:44:55.000 You understand the jokes?

00:44:56.000 Yeah, sometimes.

00:44:57.000 Sometimes, for sure.

00:44:59.000 What's a good Swahili joke? 1.00

00:45:00.000 Good Swahili joke. 1.00

00:45:04.000 I'm not sure.

00:45:05.000 Two white guys walk into a bar.

00:45:08.000 Yeah, well, they call us mzungus. 1.00

00:45:09.000 They both have diarrhea! 0.96

00:45:11.000 Ha ha ha! 0.73

00:45:15.000 Like, would they call you what?

00:45:17.000 Mazungu. 0.99

00:45:18.000 That's what guys call tits, isn't it? 1.00

00:45:19.000 The same thing? 0.98

00:45:20.000 Mazungus?

00:45:21.000 Mazungus?

00:45:22.000 Delated?

00:45:22.000 Mazungus or something like that?

00:45:23.000 Yeah.

00:45:24.000 Mazungu is definitely, they just mean that for white men.

00:45:27.000 That's Swahili. 0.82

00:45:28.000 Mazungu.

00:45:29.000 Mazungu.

00:45:30.000 Is that, like, derogatory?

00:45:33.000 Like, haoli?

00:45:34.000 Like, Hawaiians call, uh...

00:45:36.000 It, it...

00:45:37.000 I think it is, but to them, it's so...

00:45:40.000 I embrace it, though.

00:45:42.000 I embrace it, and I'll say it with them if the kids are saying it and stuff like that.

00:45:46.000 But for them, it's just more everybody sticks to their tribe, and I think that's a problem with some of the violence that goes on there.

00:45:55.000 I mean, a lot of times you'll hear people in Congo saying that, and other parts of Africa saying, well, we weren't the ones that chose...

00:46:01.000 The boundaries of our country, you know, as the people that colonize us, stuff like that. 0.94

00:46:05.000 And so we would have been off on our own in this region because this is our language and this is our tribe.

00:46:12.000 And so I think that's why there's a lot of tribal conflict and things like that in different languages.

00:46:16.000 And so people will pride themselves on their culture, which I love cultures.

00:46:21.000 It's great.

00:46:22.000 The pygmy culture is awesome. 1.00

00:46:24.000 In fact, I mean, there's like some great photos in there of hunting and a little boy getting his first hunt, which is great.

00:46:31.000 His name is Sam Gee, in the same village that you guys sponsored a water well for.

00:46:35.000 So I love cultures.

00:46:36.000 And this little boy, what did he hunt with?

00:46:39.000 A spear?

00:46:41.000 Yeah, it's a spear.

00:46:42.000 He got a forest antelope.

00:46:44.000 So I was there and had just woke up, and this is early in the morning.

00:46:49.000 I don't know if you can tell, it's kind of like a tunnel.

00:46:50.000 How tall is that little fella? 1.00

00:46:53.000 He's a little dude.

00:46:55.000 There's another picture of me standing by him, so you'll see.

00:46:57.000 But he got it with a spear.

00:46:58.000 That spear that he's holding?

00:47:00.000 That seems like a heavy spear for a little guy like that.

00:47:02.000 Yeah, it's his great-grandfather's spear.

00:47:04.000 So his grandfather took him out hunting and he was the one that got it.

00:47:07.000 Oh, he's got the arms.

00:47:08.000 How cute.

00:47:10.000 So there's another picture of it.

00:47:12.000 And if you go to the next one, there's a, it's called a, I think they call it a janae or spotted janae.

00:47:17.000 It's almost like a, more like a mongoose, but it's kind of like in the leopard.

00:47:21.000 I mean, like, it'd be like a cross between a mongoose and a leopard or something, a small leopard, because they're pretty small in size.

00:47:27.000 That is wild.

00:47:28.000 They eat that?

00:47:29.000 Yeah, totally.

00:47:30.000 They eat everything, man.

00:47:31.000 Wow.

00:47:32.000 So.

00:47:32.000 So you can see how small it is.

00:47:34.000 How old is that?

00:47:34.000 Yeah.

00:47:35.000 I think he's probably around 12. They don't know their age.

00:47:38.000 Wow, they don't know their age.

00:47:39.000 That's fascinating.

00:47:40.000 So there's some of the men in the village.

00:47:41.000 But if you go back to that last one, you can even see the bellies on the little guys down right there.

00:47:48.000 You can see the big infected bellies of different kinds of parasites and sickness and disease. 0.88

00:47:54.000 Wow, that is nuts, man.

00:47:56.000 And these people have a clean water well now.

00:47:59.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:48:00.000 Do you have to give them medicine to get rid of that belly, or does it go away just with clean water? 0.98

00:48:06.000 It doesn't go away just with clean water, but the sickness drops about 85%.

00:48:11.000 But what we do is we have different nurses and things that are partnered with the university, and we send them out, and the pills are like, I mean, a dollar for like 10 of them, and you can give one pill to each of them.

00:48:22.000 It's not a fun process, man.

00:48:25.000 Either vomit or they have to get the worms out of them.

00:48:29.000 It has to kill these biological entities inside their bodies, so it's poison essentially.

00:48:35.000 Some type of poison, right?

00:48:37.000 Definitely.

00:48:37.000 I mean, I've seen mounds of these.

00:48:40.000 I mean, it's mixed with other stuff, but just stumbled upon it.

00:48:43.000 And Ben's like, oh, that's because we gave him the pill.

00:48:46.000 And I'm like, what is that in there?

00:48:47.000 And there was tapeworms all inside this mound of feces on one of the trails that we're hiking.

00:48:54.000 Wow.

00:48:55.000 And how come the adults don't have it?

00:48:56.000 They have flat stomachs.

00:48:59.000 I think as they get older, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I think their body just starts learning to fight it better.

00:49:05.000 And some of them have had the medicine, and so they'll be smarter and try not to drink dirty water just from anywhere.

00:49:12.000 When these little guys are walking around, now they're being taught, you have a clean source of water, this is where you get your water from.

00:49:19.000 And they can carry little containers or bottles and take those around with them.

00:49:23.000 And they do most of their hunting with spears?

00:49:26.000 Most with bows and arrows, I think.

00:49:27.000 But they'll drive them into nets. 0.88

00:49:29.000 And if you keep going down, there'll be a picture of the net.

00:49:33.000 But they have these nets.

00:49:34.000 That's a net?

00:49:35.000 Yep.

00:49:35.000 And they just go and they break these little trees that are starting to grow.

00:49:39.000 They're maybe three foot tall.

00:49:40.000 They break them and they lay a net, the top of the net on it, and then they just kind of weave them in and out of the forest.

00:49:46.000 And what they do together is maybe they get leaves, maybe they see an animal, and they just drive it into these nets.

00:49:52.000 Sometimes, like with monkeys and parrots and stuff like that, they're using their bows and arrows.

00:49:57.000 Which, if you go up one picture, that shows the...

00:50:00.000 The little boys, I mean, even from that age right there, those little boys are just nailing anything.

00:50:05.000 I mean, you give them a target.

00:50:07.000 My wife and I would get passion fruit, and what we'd do is, if there's a rotten one, if there's an empty one, we would roll it to them.

00:50:18.000 And these guys could hit the moving, like this age right here, which, I don't know, what do you think?

00:50:23.000 That's five?

00:50:23.000 Five years old?

00:50:24.000 They could hit a moving passion fruit target that we're rolling.

00:50:27.000 They could just nail them with their bows and arrows.

00:50:29.000 Wow.

00:50:29.000 There's even a short video I got of them nailing a mouse.

00:50:35.000 A mouse?

00:50:35.000 That's what it is.

00:50:36.000 Yeah.

00:50:36.000 There's a mouse in the village and they wanted to show off to Emily.

00:50:40.000 That's my wife. 1.00

00:50:42.000 She came to visit and it was just really fun because she wanted to experience their culture and whenever you show them interest in the culture, they get really, really excited.

00:50:55.000 Is this the video?

00:50:56.000 Yeah, there's the mouse running.

00:50:57.000 I don't know if you can see it running around there.

00:50:59.000 But it's definitely live, moving. 0.99

00:51:01.000 And I just said, hey, shoot it.

00:51:03.000 And just nailed it. 0.99

00:51:06.000 Well, that was like a foot away.

00:51:08.000 Yeah, I'm not that impressed.

00:51:10.000 But did they eat that mouse?

00:51:11.000 Yeah, they'll eat it.

00:51:12.000 They'll eat it.

00:51:13.000 And then they'll even do like turtles.

00:51:17.000 They'll go out and they'll make backpacks out of turtles.

00:51:21.000 That sounds crazy, but they'll go out and they'll look for the antelope or something like that.

00:51:25.000 And then if they come across a turtle, they'll make out of, I don't know, these little vines, literally just backpacks where they tie it onto the legs of the turtle and they walk around with it.

00:51:36.000 And if they find a big thing of meat, then they let the turtle go.

00:51:39.000 But if they don't, if they come back empty-handed, they're going to come back with the turtle.

00:51:43.000 And these arrows that they use, what do they use for the feathers, for the fletchings and all that stuff?

00:51:50.000 The feathers are leaves.

00:51:52.000 They make a small slit in the back of the arrow, and then they slide in a leaf that's formed just like a feather.

00:51:59.000 And when they use the tips, what's the tip?

00:52:02.000 The tip can be metal.

00:52:04.000 If they find scrap metal somewhere, they can beat it down and turn it into a very, very sharp.

00:52:10.000 But then sometimes they have these wicked barbs on them too.

00:52:13.000 And then what they use most though, they would use They would use the metal on smaller game, but on bigger game, they use their poison-tipped arrows.

00:52:21.000 So they just have it in wood, and they sharpen it down, and they kind of do the spiral at the tip of the arrow, and then what they do is they take roots and berries, and I think that's pretty much it, but they get basically a poisonous cocktail that they make,

00:52:38.000 and it turns black, and then they dip the tip of the arrow right in it, and that's what they use for something they really want to get, a monkey or an antelope or anything like that.

00:52:46.000 And when they do that, doesn't that poison the meat?

00:52:50.000 They eat it, and I eat it.

00:52:52.000 So, I guess it could.

00:52:55.000 I didn't ever think of that.

00:52:57.000 Maybe I should be careful.

00:52:58.000 Well, I would wonder, like, how does the poison work?

00:53:00.000 And if that's the case, how are you not ingesting it?

00:53:03.000 Maybe is it local?

00:53:04.000 Is it only the spot where the arrow hits?

00:53:07.000 That doesn't seem to make sense, though.

00:53:09.000 Or the bloodstream, maybe, once you drain the blood out of it?

00:53:11.000 They shoot it, and then they just track it, and then once it It falls over dead.

00:53:15.000 They just put it over their shoulders and bring it back. 0.74

00:53:17.000 How long does it take before the poison kills them?

00:53:20.000 This will be kind of funny.

00:53:22.000 I can't really follow them very well through the forest.

00:53:26.000 I'm just big and clunking around.

00:53:28.000 I got hiking boots on or whatever, but they're just fast and quiet.

00:53:31.000 So I've tried to go out on a couple of hunts with them, but I knew they were just kind of humbly being nice, letting me experience their culture.

00:53:41.000 But then I realized, these guys are quick, they're quiet, and I'm not.

00:53:45.000 And so I better just let them go off on their own and do their thing.

00:53:48.000 Do they hunt barefoot?

00:53:49.000 Yeah.

00:53:50.000 They do everything barefoot.

00:53:51.000 Everything.

00:53:51.000 Most time, everything barefoot.

00:53:53.000 If they can find, like, most of the things that they're wearing on their body is because they've worked for someone or been a slave for someone, and that was part of their payment was clothing.

00:54:02.000 Wow.

00:54:03.000 Clothing or shoes or things like that, but it's their culture just to run around barefoot everywhere.

00:54:10.000 They got tough feet.

00:54:11.000 It's pretty cool to see, like, just their feet, the structure of their feet.

00:54:15.000 They don't have the real high arches, and it's not real soft skin, you know, but they can just book it through the forest and step on stuff that I'm feeling through my boots, but they just keep going.

00:54:26.000 Yeah, did you ever see that show, Dual Survivor?

00:54:29.000 I don't think it's on anymore. 0.64

00:54:31.000 Yeah, yeah, that guy's crazy. 0.68

00:54:32.000 The guy walks around barefoot everywhere. 0.96

00:54:34.000 Yeah, everywhere.

00:54:34.000 Yeah, he does everything.

00:54:35.000 Yeah.

00:54:35.000 Cody is the name.

00:54:36.000 Yeah, he's an odd character.

00:54:39.000 He has this house that he built that's some sort of a sustainable house.

00:54:43.000 It's got, you know, I think it uses like sod for the roof or something like that.

00:54:49.000 And his whole deal is like surviving with minimal equipment.

00:54:52.000 But he does everything barefoot.

00:54:54.000 He runs around barefoot and his feet are like this thick skin. 0.92

00:54:58.000 It's disgusting. 0.69

00:54:59.000 You don't want to give that dude a foot massage. 0.95

00:55:01.000 Yeah, he probably wouldn't feel it.

00:55:02.000 Yeah.

00:55:03.000 Well, it's like a shoe.

00:55:04.000 I mean, he wears a permanent shoe.

00:55:06.000 I guess that's, like, really what's supposed to happen to people, you know?

00:55:11.000 Yeah, I think so, too. 0.96

00:55:12.000 But it's kind of funny, like, you know from martial arts, but, like, the bottom of your heel, you could fucking pound on things with your heel. 0.90

00:55:20.000 But, like, that same impact on your shin would be very painful. 0.87

00:55:26.000 You know, it's kind of interesting how that works.

00:55:28.000 Even on the Ultimate Fighter, Wes Sims, when I fought him, I mean, it was like a minute and a half fight.

00:55:28.000 Yeah.

00:55:33.000 I got him to the ground and put him in an arm triangle.

00:55:36.000 But before that, he fractured a small fracture, a hairline fracture in my foot, with just a couple of foot stomps.

00:55:43.000 I mean, he just did it a couple times.

00:55:44.000 I was like, dang, I've never, you know, we didn't train for that in the gym and stuff, so I never felt that before.

00:55:50.000 But right when he did it, I knew whenever that hairline fracture came.

00:55:54.000 Yeah, just being able to stomp with that is...

00:55:56.000 Yeah, the heel is amazingly powerful, which is one of the reasons why I've been sort of a proponent for no gloves.

00:56:04.000 I've been on this kick for like a few months now.

00:56:08.000 I mean, I'd always been aware that gloves really protect the hands more than they protect the opponent.

00:56:15.000 You know, they really protect the guy who's using the gloves more than the guy who you're hitting with.

00:56:15.000 Definitely.

00:56:20.000 I think it's kind of unnatural in a way.

00:56:23.000 And I think it's also unrealistic.

00:56:25.000 Like, wrist wraps as well.

00:56:27.000 Wrist wraps and gloves.

00:56:28.000 I think those probably contribute more to opponents getting hurt than anything.

00:56:34.000 Sort of like the same argument that a lot of people think that football would be safer if people didn't wear helmets.

00:56:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:56:40.000 If you can wheel kick somebody in the head... 0.99

00:56:40.000 Absolutely. 0.99

00:56:43.000 With your heel, which is like one of the most powerful kicks you can throw.

00:56:47.000 Is that Barbosa?

00:56:49.000 Yeah, Edson Barbosa and Terry Edom, which is a crazy knockout.

00:56:53.000 The first knockout ever in the UFC from a wheel kick.

00:56:56.000 But if that is legal, and you could spin and kick someone with the heel, why do your knuckles have a pad on them? 0.94

00:57:04.000 That seems completely ridiculous to me. 0.88

00:57:06.000 It doesn't make any sense. 0.69

00:57:07.000 And it seems also like an unrealistic depiction of martial arts.

00:57:12.000 Of course, if you want to go that route, you would say, well, you shouldn't wear cups either, because that's kind of unrealistic, too.

00:57:18.000 Yeah, I like wearing that. 0.99

00:57:19.000 Yeah, I'm not a big fan of kicking people in the balls. 0.97

00:57:22.000 Yeah, but even with the gloves, being able to hook into it, you know? 0.98

00:57:25.000 Hook into it and pull.

00:57:26.000 I mean, that's a little trick that everyone...

00:57:28.000 Well, guys use that to submit guys, too.

00:57:31.000 I've seen guys get chokes and guillotines where they'll hook their own glove and use it to finish a choke because it's like you can get some mad leverage along with grabbing it.

00:57:41.000 Yeah, and that guy's not going to be able to hand fight it very easily.

00:57:43.000 Yeah, no, man.

00:57:44.000 Once you hook it, you're allowed to hook your own gloves, too, which is another thing.

00:57:48.000 You're allowed to hook your own...

00:57:49.000 You're allowed to grab your own shorts.

00:57:51.000 Like, say if a guy's trying to get you in a kimura, you can grab your own shorts and hold on.

00:57:57.000 As long as they're not his?

00:57:58.000 Yeah, as long as they're not his.

00:57:59.000 Yeah.

00:57:59.000 Wow.

00:58:00.000 It's just kind of squirrely, you know?

00:58:03.000 But it's a frustrating thing, too, when you see two guys grapple, and one guy's trying for a takedown, and the other guy's grabbing the guy's shorts, and the referee will say, stop, and they will stop.

00:58:13.000 But that brief moment where they held on might have been just enough for them to scoot their hips out and defend.

00:58:20.000 Yeah.

00:58:21.000 I think everybody should wear tights, too.

00:58:23.000 I think everybody should wear old-school Marco Huas, little bikini briefs.

00:58:26.000 That'd be great.

00:58:28.000 Dennis Hallman?

00:58:29.000 Yeah, Dennis Hallman.

00:58:31.000 Dennis Hallman, he almost got fired from the UFC for that, man.

00:58:34.000 I think so.

00:58:34.000 I think there was almost a slip.

00:58:36.000 Yeah, well, apparently he lost a bet, so Dennis Hallman came out.

00:58:40.000 See if you can find a picture of that, because they're hilarious.

00:58:42.000 Dennis Hallman came out with the smallest bikini briefs.

00:58:46.000 Yeah, man panties. 0.80

00:58:47.000 Probably of all time. 0.99

00:58:49.000 It was pretty ridiculous. 0.89

00:58:51.000 Aren't they Superman? 0.92

00:58:53.000 Were they Superman?

00:58:53.000 I don't remember, man.

00:58:54.000 I think it had a logo on it.

00:58:58.000 Was it training mask?

00:58:59.000 Is that what it said?

00:59:00.000 I think it is.

00:59:03.000 But meanwhile, why is that homoerotic? 1.00

00:59:06.000 Why is everybody upset about that if they're longer shorts? 0.99

00:59:10.000 I mean, his junk is covered up. 0.96

00:59:12.000 Are we terrified of the upper thigh? 0.99

00:59:14.000 What is it?

00:59:15.000 What is everyone afraid of? 0.98

00:59:16.000 How come you can see his nipples and nobody freaks out? 0.98

00:59:18.000 You know? 0.98

00:59:19.000 And when he freaks out, the guy's bare-chested, but for some reason having little shorts on is offensive.

00:59:24.000 I don't get it.

00:59:25.000 That was even the thing I would do to joke around with guys was wear mantis at Wayans because they couldn't look into my eye serious if I had these leopard man panties on with sequins and things like that. 0.88

00:59:35.000 That kept guys from looking into your eyes?

00:59:37.000 Well, they would grin or something like that, you know?

00:59:39.000 They wouldn't really do the deep stare down, if that makes sense.

00:59:43.000 You made a post, like, recently, like, within the last six months, saying that you were considering coming back to fighting.

00:59:50.000 Potentially, yeah.

00:59:51.000 I mean, I think I should give it a shot.

00:59:54.000 How old are you now?

00:59:55.000 27. You're still young.

00:59:56.000 I'm a year younger than the youngest dude I fought.

00:59:58.000 So, in my 15 fights, the youngest guy was 28 years old.

01:00:01.000 I think I was 19 or 20. And...

01:00:04.000 So, I mean, I think that...

01:00:07.000 The reason I would want to really at least give it my full effort, at least for a season, at least for a year or two, see what I can do.

01:00:14.000 See, I'm not taking, you know, big, really tough fights, you know, right when I come back, but to build my way back up.

01:00:21.000 Because if I could use the platform of fighting to, and the name of the nonprofit is Fight for the Forgotten.

01:00:28.000 If I could literally fight for the forgotten and fulfill my first promise to give them a voice, then man, I'm passionate about both.

01:00:36.000 Those are like my two greatest passions, you know, is MMA. I can't stay away from it.

01:00:41.000 In Congo, if I got to the internet, it was, yeah, it was straight up the Eugenia MMA TV. Yeah, the underground.

01:00:48.000 It was what I had to check.

01:00:50.000 The first thing I was on was how to get my MMA fix.

01:00:53.000 And then, I mean, I'm so passionate about the Pygmies and seeing just... 0.99

01:00:58.000 Just what I can do.

01:00:59.000 I mean, there's even an African proverb or a Congolese proverb about mosquitoes.

01:01:03.000 It says, if you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito. 1.00

01:01:09.000 Or try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.

01:01:11.000 And so I just think that me in my mind, like at first when I got there, it's like there's no way I can make a difference.

01:01:19.000 Um, and then, and then I met some great people that already were, had a heart for it.

01:01:25.000 And then if I could use fighting as a platform, um, I'm passionate about it.

01:01:29.000 If I can use a platform to say, hey, for my win bonus, we're gonna buy this much more land.

01:01:33.000 We're gonna drill three more water wells. 0.88

01:01:36.000 We're gonna, you know, fund this new farming project.

01:01:39.000 Um, I think if I didn't do it, I'd be an old man one day wondering, what if?

01:01:45.000 What if I would have tried it?

01:01:46.000 You know, and if I just went to the jungle, because I would love, I mean, I feel like I could be completely content with living in a twig and leaf hut for, I don't know, maybe the rest of my life, at least for a while.

01:01:57.000 But if I just did that, then, you know, nobody's going to know about it, nobody's going to support it.

01:02:04.000 And so if I could use this as just a tool, a platform, I would have to take it super serious.

01:02:09.000 There's no way I could just, you know, lackadaisically come back into fighting.

01:02:14.000 Have you been training at all?

01:02:15.000 I'm getting back into it with Team Takedown.

01:02:17.000 Yeah?

01:02:17.000 Yeah, Dallas-Fort Worth.

01:02:19.000 Okay, so are you living out there now?

01:02:21.000 Yeah, I am.

01:02:22.000 So that's where...

01:02:23.000 Great spot.

01:02:23.000 That's a great place to train.

01:02:24.000 Yeah.

01:02:25.000 Dude, I love how Mark Lehman trains.

01:02:27.000 Just...

01:02:28.000 He's a genius.

01:02:29.000 I mean, I've never seen it in a gym.

01:02:29.000 Yeah.

01:02:31.000 Maybe you have out here in Cali.

01:02:32.000 But we walk into the cage, or they do.

01:02:35.000 I've only done a few times there, but that's going to be my gym, I think.

01:02:38.000 And so...

01:02:40.000 Whenever you walk in, he's got the flat screens all around the cage, and he's got his Mac.

01:02:47.000 And if he's showing you a move, he'll show you three, four, five fights that this move has been finished in in the UFC or other promotions.

01:02:54.000 And so if you doubt him, he's going to say, hey, pull up to his assistant.

01:02:58.000 He'll say, hey, pull this fight up this much into it.

01:03:02.000 And then he'll start breaking down the fight, breaking down the move, the setup, and how to finish.

01:03:07.000 So I think it's great.

01:03:08.000 Yeah, he's a wizard when it comes to MMA knowledge and jiu-jitsu knowledge.

01:03:13.000 He's always been completely engrossed in the world of jiu-jitsu.

01:03:18.000 He was one of those guys way back in the day that had all these moves categorized and he had folders and files for basically every move.

01:03:27.000 I never even heard of anybody that sort of broke it down the way he did.

01:03:31.000 Yeah, so that's what I love about that team.

01:03:33.000 Whenever I walked in there, I was thoroughly impressed because they treat it like any other professional sport.

01:03:41.000 You walk in and the water, the supplements, whatever you need is at your disposal.

01:03:46.000 And then whenever you get in there to train, you have five full-time coaches that are paid just to train you.

01:03:52.000 So you get a lot of focus.

01:03:54.000 And they're training the guys really right.

01:03:56.000 I like what they're doing with heavyweights, actually, with Rochelt.

01:04:00.000 He's training five days a week.

01:04:01.000 And what I used to do is always train six days a week.

01:04:04.000 And I'd train two to three times a day.

01:04:05.000 And that's what Brennan would do.

01:04:07.000 And that's what Shane would do.

01:04:08.000 And that's what, you know, I think attributed to a lot of our injuries.

01:04:12.000 But with Rochalt, they train five days a week and make sure they're getting his cardio up.

01:04:16.000 But he can't train like a 125 pounder, 135 pounder.

01:04:20.000 Heavyweights are taking more of a pounding on their body.

01:04:23.000 So you got to find a way to not just train harder, but train smarter.

01:04:27.000 That's interesting.

01:04:29.000 Is it just because of the gravity, just carrying the extra weight, the pressure on the joints?

01:04:35.000 Why do you think that a heavyweight can only train five days a week?

01:04:38.000 I don't think they can only train five days a week, but I think it's a smart move for Rochelt, and I think it would be a smart move for me to do, too.

01:04:38.000 What is it?

01:04:46.000 Maybe other guys would adopt it.

01:04:47.000 I don't know.

01:04:48.000 For me, whenever you look at the heavyweight division, they can end the fight at any minute.

01:04:53.000 And you look at the 145, 135, 125, the smaller guys, they're really exciting fights.

01:04:59.000 Super talented guys.

01:05:00.000 World class, without a doubt.

01:05:02.000 But sometimes they're just not the same weight.

01:05:04.000 And power behind their punches, behind their takedowns, behind everything.

01:05:08.000 I mean, it goes from, you know, 255 pounders equal almost one of us, you know, or a little more than one of us.

01:05:16.000 And then now you have 500 pounds colliding into the mat whenever you're taking someone down or punching.

01:05:22.000 There's just all this stuff that I think you take a lot more of a beating on your body.

01:05:26.000 Well, certainly cardio-wise, it's very difficult.

01:05:28.000 That's what makes Kane so unique is that he can keep up a pace that's usually reserved for people that are like 170. He can do at 240. He's so unique in that way.

01:05:39.000 Right.

01:05:39.000 And maybe if you're going to train six days, it's something that's specifically about recovery or cardio.

01:05:45.000 Or both.

01:05:46.000 Because the way that we were doing it at Grudge, and that's a world-class gym.

01:05:51.000 But something I look back and see from assessing, just my opinion, is, man, we were, you know, three days a week training and sparring hard.

01:05:51.000 I love it.

01:06:02.000 And for heavyweight sparring hard, three days a week, you're taking...

01:06:05.000 You're taking a lot of punishment.

01:06:07.000 You're dishing out a lot of punishment.

01:06:08.000 And so where you don't even have time on Sunday, it's not enough time to rest and to recuperate and for your body to heal up. 0.97

01:06:17.000 Yeah, especially if you're sparring Shane fucking Carwell. 0.92

01:06:19.000 Oh yeah, dude. 0.98

01:06:20.000 That guy was scary.

01:06:22.000 Still scary, absolutely.

01:06:24.000 But whenever he would throw a hook, your body would quake.

01:06:28.000 It would send like a ripple effect through your body.

01:06:30.000 Yeah, he's a big boy. 1.00

01:06:32.000 Big ass bones, too. 0.99

01:06:34.000 And again, his issue was the same issue. 0.99

01:06:37.000 It was cardio.

01:06:37.000 I mean, go to the Brock Lesnar fight.

01:06:39.000 I mean, he had Brock Lesnar all butt out in that first round.

01:06:42.000 But the second round came around and he just was spent.

01:06:45.000 He just emptied his gas tank in that first round.

01:06:48.000 And if you look at it though, he was, I mean, if you look at how he's training, he was training six days a week.

01:06:53.000 And so somehow that cardio didn't come and even training six days a week.

01:06:57.000 So I don't know what, I think maybe it was also that adrenaline dump, I think he was going to finish off Brock and all that other stuff.

01:07:03.000 He forgot to breathe.

01:07:05.000 He was talking about how when he was punching him, he literally forgot to breathe.

01:07:08.000 Yeah.

01:07:08.000 Because he was just...

01:07:09.000 He figured, like, let's just sprint, and this is going to be the end here.

01:07:13.000 Yeah, well, it was very close to being the end, so I could...

01:07:15.000 I can understand what his mind frame was.

01:07:16.000 As close as you could ever get.

01:07:18.000 Yeah.

01:07:18.000 I mean, it was like many people would have stopped that fight.

01:07:22.000 Many refs would have stopped that fight. 1.00

01:07:23.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:07:24.000 It's cool they gave...

01:07:25.000 I mean, it's cool they gave Brock a chance to recover.

01:07:28.000 I mean, I... I love Karwin, and he's a great friend, and he's a great person.

01:07:35.000 But it's cool to see whenever a guy can have that time to recover and see during the round them recover and then come back and win.

01:07:41.000 Yeah, that was an issue this weekend, like the Dan Henderson fight in particular.

01:07:45.000 Like, that fight was stopped fairly quickly.

01:07:48.000 He got tagged by Gegor Mousasi.

01:07:50.000 And in a way, I kind of understand because I think that referees sometimes will look at a guy who's older And judge it slightly differently than a guy who's younger.

01:08:03.000 I always go to this one example.

01:08:05.000 Frankie Edgar Gray Maynard.

01:08:06.000 They could have stopped that fight multiple times.

01:08:09.000 And Frankie came on to stop Gray Maynard in the second fight.

01:08:13.000 It was an amazing, amazing fight.

01:08:15.000 But if you go back and watch that fight, watch that first round...

01:08:19.000 There's so many moments where you say, like, if a guy was quick to pull the trigger, it could be over.

01:08:25.000 Not everybody's Frankie Edgar, either.

01:08:27.000 Like, the other one was this weekend, Andy Ogle, and I don't want to mispronounce his name, so let me say it right.

01:08:35.000 Oh, the guy that was Finnish, but from Iraq, right?

01:08:40.000 Yeah.

01:08:41.000 Hold on a second.

01:08:42.000 I actually missed that fight.

01:08:44.000 I didn't see it. 1.00

01:08:46.000 Maquan Americana, who is a bad motherfucker. 1.00

01:08:48.000 This kid, first of all, this kid goes into the octagon and does these perfect flips, like, and you could, like, right away, you could say, like, whoa, this kid is like a serious gymnast, and then hits Andy Ogle with this ridiculous flying knee, like, launched across the ring, tags him with this flying knee, 0.99

01:09:04.000 and then tags him with an upper guard. 0.91

01:09:06.000 And then the referee stopped the fight.

01:09:07.000 And I even said, I probably shouldn't have said that I thought it was a premature stoppage.

01:09:11.000 The referee could see better than I can, obviously, whether or not a guy's eyes rolled behind his head.

01:09:16.000 But Andy Ogle was pretty upset.

01:09:18.000 Maybe I was going on that.

01:09:20.000 But the stoppage in that fight was certainly more understandable, I think, than the Henderson fight.

01:09:28.000 The Henderson fight was like one shot.

01:09:30.000 And he went down and then stumbled back.

01:09:33.000 Well, he tagged him.

01:09:34.000 I mean, it was kind of grazing, but it was kind of like the temple area, which always fucks with your equilibrium. 0.96

01:09:40.000 But this Americani hit him with this flying knee. 1.00

01:09:44.000 Like, he traveled so far.

01:09:46.000 Like, if you watch the flying knee, see if you can find it, Jamie.

01:09:49.000 This is his opening move. 0.94

01:09:51.000 He hits him with this ridiculous flying knee. 0.95

01:09:53.000 I mean, it was just... 0.94

01:09:54.000 He launched himself like 14, 15 feet across the...

01:09:59.000 The kid's a freak athlete, man.

01:10:00.000 And I'd heard that about him entering into this fight, too.

01:10:03.000 Eight seconds.

01:10:03.000 How quick was the fight?

01:10:04.000 Wow.

01:10:05.000 Yeah, man.

01:10:06.000 It was amazing.

01:10:07.000 He's pretty impressive.

01:10:09.000 Yeah, that's great.

01:10:12.000 Is that what he said about me?

01:10:14.000 I thought he was a drunk.

01:10:16.000 That's what he said about me?

01:10:19.000 He's a funny dude, man.

01:10:21.000 He's got a lot of personality, too, man.

01:10:23.000 He's very funny.

01:10:24.000 Very funny.

01:10:24.000 But find the fight itself.

01:10:26.000 Don't just pull shit up. 0.97

01:10:29.000 I think the thing with... 0.99

01:10:31.000 You can't look at it without us seeing it?

01:10:32.000 Yeah.

01:10:32.000 Why is that?

01:10:33.000 The way it's set up currently.

01:10:34.000 Oh.

01:10:35.000 But the audience doesn't see it?

01:10:37.000 Oh, okay.

01:10:37.000 Is that what's going on?

01:10:38.000 That's fine.

01:10:40.000 But I think with that Dan Henderson fight, I think maybe the angle, because I watched a couple times, and I think maybe the angle of the ref, he was kind of maybe behind kind of Musashi whenever he hit him, and then whenever Hendo's head kind of hit the back of the cage,

01:10:56.000 maybe that...

01:10:56.000 That scared the ref and prompted him to stop it early.

01:10:59.000 I always wonder when you go to new places, too, whether or not commissions are more sensitive, you know, because, like, maybe Sweden has, like, less sensitive or referees are more sensitive to fighters getting injured.

01:11:12.000 Like, we find that in Boston.

01:11:14.000 In Boston, they stop cuts.

01:11:16.000 They stop fights on cuts way quicker than other places.

01:11:19.000 Like, Mark Della Grotte, who's from Boston, told me they've always had issues with that.

01:11:23.000 Like in Boston, when fighters get cut, they'll stop it way quicker than they would, say, in Vegas.

01:11:28.000 Were these all Swedish refs from that area?

01:11:31.000 A lot of the guys were English guys.

01:11:31.000 No.

01:11:34.000 It was different.

01:11:36.000 I know in Finland they have the brutal MMA that you can headbutt still and all that stuff.

01:11:41.000 In Finland?

01:11:42.000 Right, isn't that right?

01:11:43.000 I mean, at least a couple years ago, I went to Golden Glory out in Amsterdam, and I was training with Alistair for a bit, but also...

01:11:43.000 Is that right?

01:11:51.000 Do you remember John Olav Animo?

01:11:53.000 Yeah.

01:11:54.000 John Olav Animo.

01:11:55.000 Animo, yeah. 0.61

01:11:56.000 Who was a Abu Dhabi champion.

01:11:58.000 Fantastic grappler.

01:11:58.000 Yeah.

01:11:59.000 Dude, absolutely a beast on the ground.

01:12:01.000 He was like a, I don't know, like a spider.

01:12:04.000 His legs and everything were nuts how they could wrap around you.

01:12:08.000 But he was from Norway, and there, MMA, they were very, very resistant.

01:12:13.000 And this was when I was training with him back in 2008, I think.

01:12:15.000 But they were very, very resistant to it.

01:12:17.000 I thought it was a brutal, barbaric sport, all that.

01:12:19.000 But then in Finland, just a couple countries away, you could still headbutt, and that's where he was getting some of his first fights, I think.

01:12:25.000 Wow.

01:12:26.000 So just such a contrast in how they viewed the sport.

01:12:29.000 This is the flying knee.

01:12:30.000 Watch this kid.

01:12:33.000 The kid just flies out.

01:12:38.000 Wow.

01:12:38.000 That was...

01:12:39.000 I mean, it was a quick stoppage, but man, that kid, that flying knee is fucking incredible. 0.98

01:12:46.000 Look at that! 0.95

01:12:47.000 I think he only took like three or four steps before he launched in the air.

01:12:54.000 Yeah, and Ogle tried to tackle the referee, which is always bad.

01:12:59.000 I just, you know, I get sensitive because Ogle was in the cage.

01:13:02.000 He was super freaked out and upset.

01:13:04.000 He thought the fight was stopped too quickly.

01:13:06.000 It's a weird thing, man.

01:13:08.000 It's hard to say when to stop and when not to.

01:13:11.000 It's hard.

01:13:11.000 You want to give a guy a chance to recover, but you also want to save the guy from unnecessary punishment if he can't defend himself.

01:13:18.000 Absolutely.

01:13:18.000 They have the fucking hardest job in the world next to fighters is referees.

01:13:21.000 I wouldn't want to know all the backlash that they get. 0.98

01:13:21.000 Yeah, man. 0.98

01:13:23.000 I think it's like fighters number one, of course, referees number two, judges three.

01:13:27.000 You four?

01:13:28.000 Some of the...

01:13:29.000 I think I'm way down the line.

01:13:30.000 Bruce Buffer's job's probably harder than mine.

01:13:32.000 I mean, my job is...

01:13:33.000 I'm just reacting to things, you know?

01:13:36.000 The only time it becomes an issue is things like if I'm critical of a stoppage or if I'm critical of judging, and then it becomes a point of debate.

01:13:43.000 But I think that the controversy...

01:13:45.000 Especially subjective controversy, whether it's you can agree or disagree, I think it's important because it starts the discussion of what should be legal, what shouldn't be legal, what should happen, what shouldn't happen.

01:13:58.000 There's a lot of people that have some really strong feelings about the shape of the gloves right now.

01:14:03.000 And that they're contributing to eye pokes.

01:14:05.000 And that's something I've had some recent conversations with Dana and with Lorenzo.

01:14:10.000 And they're of the opinion, I think, that the fighters need to be penalized more.

01:14:14.000 Because their gloves have been the same for a long time.

01:14:16.000 But back in the day, it wasn't nearly as much of an issue.

01:14:20.000 If you go back to UFC 37.5 or UFC 40, you don't see a lot of eye pokes.

01:14:27.000 But now it's hard to go one fight or one event, rather, without a couple of fights.

01:14:37.000 Yeah, absolutely. 0.99

01:14:55.000 Or elbows behind it, but doing it with his fucking fingers, man. 1.00

01:14:58.000 Fingers just go in the eyes so much. 1.00

01:15:01.000 It drives me crazy.

01:15:02.000 And when you see a guy like Bisping, he's got one eye that looks completely different from his other eye now because of surgery, detached retina surgery, and then they have to put oil inside his retina.

01:15:13.000 And I don't even know how much he can see out of his right eye.

01:15:16.000 But when you look at him in the eyes, his one eye looks very different than the other eye.

01:15:21.000 Alan Belcher.

01:15:23.000 Same thing.

01:15:23.000 Even Anthony Johnson had a problem with that, right?

01:15:25.000 Yeah, with Kevin Burns.

01:15:26.000 Yeah, Kevin Burns poked him in the eye.

01:15:27.000 And then in this fight, Gustafson accidentally poked him in the eye.

01:15:31.000 They're totally accidental, but it's like this thing where guys are doing that.

01:15:35.000 Jon Jones is the number one guy as far as the controversy because he's so tall and long.

01:15:42.000 That's an excellent strategy.

01:15:44.000 He's almost like doing that cartoon thing where he puts his hand on your head and you're swinging because he can't reach him.

01:15:49.000 I wonder if there's a way to cover the fingers.

01:15:53.000 I've always wondered.

01:15:55.000 This is kind of hypocritical because I think they shouldn't be wearing gloves at all, but I wonder if there's a way to Like, put some sort of a soft leather over the tips of the fingers.

01:16:06.000 You know those old-school Everlast boxing gloves, those bag gloves?

01:16:10.000 Remember those?

01:16:11.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:16:12.000 They had the little bar inside them, almost.

01:16:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:16:14.000 They had the bar inside of them.

01:16:15.000 I don't know why they had the bar.

01:16:16.000 Why was the bar there?

01:16:17.000 I don't know.

01:16:18.000 Didn't make any sense.

01:16:19.000 But those gloves almost like would be better.

01:16:23.000 Like some people think that it would be bad for grappling because the fingers wouldn't work as individuals.

01:16:28.000 But you never really do this anyway.

01:16:31.000 You know, if you use your thumbs at all, you kind of use it like this.

01:16:34.000 It's very rare that you hook a finger and a thumb together.

01:16:37.000 I think the Pride gloves, you weren't really...

01:16:40.000 We have a pair of them around here somewhere.

01:16:42.000 Do we have a pair of them still?

01:16:43.000 The Pride Gloves, they had far less problems.

01:16:47.000 But, you know, Krokop and Josh Barnett, that was an issue.

01:16:50.000 I mean, it happens.

01:16:52.000 Guys get poked in the eye.

01:16:53.000 It's almost like...

01:16:55.000 It seems like it's inevitable, but Dana's opinion is that they should be penalized.

01:16:59.000 Every time there's an eye poke, one point.

01:17:01.000 Which, I mean, it's pretty harsh.

01:17:04.000 But you wouldn't do it.

01:17:05.000 Yeah, you wouldn't do it.

01:17:07.000 I've never had a...

01:17:08.000 In my fights, I've never had a problem.

01:17:10.000 The pride gloves are blue, Jamie.

01:17:12.000 Yeah, I never had a problem poking a guy in the eye.

01:17:14.000 I got poked in the eye once and it absolutely sucks because for the whole round my vision was like it would double and it would turn black and it just jacked with me the entire round.

01:17:24.000 These are the pride gloves.

01:17:28.000 Brian from London Real gave me these.

01:17:30.000 That's awesome.

01:17:30.000 Thank you, Brian.

01:17:31.000 Piece of history.

01:17:33.000 Yeah, these are...

01:17:34.000 Nobody fought with these on, but these are the original Pride gloves.

01:17:37.000 They're very different.

01:17:39.000 And there's a pronounced curve to them that you don't get from the gloves the UFC uses.

01:17:46.000 Everlast, which is now a sponsor of the UFC, or...

01:17:50.000 I don't know if it's a sponsor or a partner or they're working together with the UFC. I guess we're going to use the Everlast gloves.

01:17:55.000 Everlast has an excellent MMA glove that is more curved than the ones that we use now.

01:18:00.000 These also are longer.

01:18:01.000 Yeah, and they're easy to form, too.

01:18:03.000 Whenever you get those UFC gloves, you instantly have to start breaking them in, you know?

01:18:07.000 And so I could see the argument of it making it harder to close your hands sometimes because if they're not broken in like this...

01:18:14.000 Yeah, look, these automatically make your hands curve.

01:18:18.000 Like, automatically.

01:18:19.000 It's like, by default, your hand wants to curve. 0.99

01:18:22.000 I would think these would be, why don't they just go back to fucking pride gloves? 0.99

01:18:25.000 I don't understand. 0.99

01:18:26.000 Why don't they go back to this?

01:18:27.000 This seems like a good glove.

01:18:28.000 Yeah, absolutely, man.

01:18:30.000 Yeah.

01:18:33.000 I don't know.

01:18:33.000 I just feel like there's a better way.

01:18:35.000 And I feel like if you do, you know, that's that expression, like, what's the definition of insanity?

01:18:40.000 Do the same thing over and over again, expect a different result.

01:18:43.000 You know, it's just, it seems like the gloves that we have now, everyone says the same thing.

01:18:48.000 Every fighter that I've talked to, that it actually, they make your hands straighten out, especially as your hands fatigue as the rounds go on.

01:18:54.000 They literally make your hands straighten out.

01:18:58.000 But the Bellator gloves that they're using that Everlast designed are far more curved.

01:19:03.000 So Everlast has like their own sort of patented technology, their patented design.

01:19:09.000 And they're also having less hand breaks too.

01:19:12.000 I didn't know that at all.

01:19:13.000 Yeah, Bellator, they did some sort of a study on handbrakes before the new gloves and handbrakes after the new gloves.

01:19:20.000 And they have much less breaks after the new gloves because of the shape of it and the support on the top of the glove.

01:19:26.000 It lends more support to the metacarpals, I guess.

01:19:30.000 Wow.

01:19:31.000 I don't know.

01:19:32.000 But then again, like I said, I think they should be bare-knuckled. 0.77

01:19:35.000 I think if you can hit somebody with a shin... 0.69

01:19:35.000 I really do. 0.69

01:19:37.000 I was just about to ask you that.

01:19:38.000 Do you think you'd ever go back to that?

01:19:40.000 Probably not, right?

01:19:41.000 I think it's too ingrained or too adopted, too part of the culture now.

01:19:45.000 It's a weird thing.

01:19:45.000 I don't know, man.

01:19:46.000 It's like, why is everybody so hung up on everything staying the same?

01:19:51.000 First of all, I think cups. 0.99

01:19:53.000 Cups are a huge goddamn issue. 1.00

01:19:56.000 Guys get hit with glancing blows to the sack and they go down. 1.00

01:20:00.000 I think there's a lot of guys that wear really shitty cups. 0.62

01:20:04.000 Have you worn the Diamond MMA Club? 0.64

01:20:06.000 I haven't.

01:20:07.000 I heard they're great.

01:20:07.000 Oh, get them one.

01:20:08.000 Oh, sweet.

01:20:08.000 We have them in the back.

01:20:09.000 That's awesome.

01:20:09.000 Yeah, we'll give you one.

01:20:10.000 Might not fit your fucking giant strapping glutes, you savage. 1.00

01:20:10.000 I had one in one fight. 1.00

01:20:14.000 But if they do fit, see if you get a large or probably extra large, whatever the bigger ones are, but Diamond's figured out a way to make this compression short with all these straps and this cup that is like sort of, it's got a rubberized outside but it's hard as fuck around it and the compression shorts keep the cup right over your junk and you could take full blast shots and you're, 0.62

01:20:37.000 it's not gonna feel good, but it feels way better than anything else I've ever used. 0.90

01:20:42.000 Yeah, I've had it.

01:20:43.000 The same fight I got my eye poked, I got a groin shot that splintered my cup.

01:20:48.000 It splintered my cup, and I had a little cut from it.

01:20:54.000 It was up in the pubic area, but it was brutal, and I hated it.

01:20:58.000 Hated that, and then I wanted to go to steel cups, which it's got this in it.

01:21:02.000 Well, the steel cup is, I think, probably one of the best.

01:21:05.000 The Thai steel cup.

01:21:06.000 See, that's their design.

01:21:08.000 It's a very good design of a cup, but there's nothing too extraordinary about it.

01:21:12.000 But what's really interesting is the way it fits into the compression shorts.

01:21:17.000 And they're constantly redesigning it.

01:21:19.000 They just had a new, updated design that just sent me a couple of weeks ago.

01:21:24.000 But I had one incident in jujitsu where I wasn't wearing a cup and I had a lot of bleeding.

01:21:33.000 And since then I went to cups.

01:21:35.000 But a lot of guys say that the steel tie cup is one of the best solutions too. 0.99

01:21:41.000 Because you could tie that fucker up tight. 1.00

01:21:43.000 It feels super uncomfortable, you know, when it goes up your... 1.00

01:21:47.000 Asshole area and g-string style, but when it's tied in, like really fucking tied in, that's one of the best ways to protect yourself, too. 0.98

01:21:57.000 But they outlawed steel cups in jiu-jitsu matches. 0.98

01:22:01.000 Oh yeah, because of stuff like Frank Mir, right?

01:22:04.000 Yeah, well the leverage.

01:22:06.000 I mean, it becomes like this insane fulcrum point because it's literally steel.

01:22:10.000 And when that steel is pressed against your pelvis, I mean, that's like this crazy lever.

01:22:15.000 And if you get an arm there, you know, it's really unfair.

01:22:20.000 It's an unfair lever that doesn't exist in nature.

01:22:22.000 It's like the opposite of what nature gives you. 0.98

01:22:25.000 Like I've had a lot of people, like you teach them how to do an arm bar, like, ah, it hurts my balls. 0.95

01:22:28.000 Like, yeah, you got to get used to that. 0.99

01:22:30.000 Like, an arm bar will probably hurt your balls. 0.98

01:22:32.000 But if you're wearing a steel cup, it hurts them way more than it hurts you. 0.98

01:22:36.000 I think that's what popped Tim Sylvia's arm in the forearm, right?

01:22:39.000 Well, certainly Frank Miri yanking on it.

01:22:42.000 Yeah, well, for sure.

01:22:43.000 No, he's an incredible martial artist.

01:22:45.000 He's a jiu-jitsu guy.

01:22:46.000 Stud jiu-jitsu guy.

01:22:47.000 One of the best guys ever.

01:22:48.000 Whenever you can get Naguera and do that to him. 1.00

01:22:50.000 Break his fucking arm, man. 1.00

01:22:52.000 Yeah, that's nuts. 1.00

01:22:52.000 He's the only guy in the UFC's heavyweight division that's broken two people's bones with submissions. 1.00

01:22:57.000 You know, I mean, Frank Mir will go down in history as one of the greatest submission guys ever.

01:22:57.000 Wow.

01:23:01.000 Yeah.

01:23:02.000 The times I grappled with him, I was like, wow, he's amazing.

01:23:02.000 For sure.

01:23:05.000 Oh, he's a stud. 0.99

01:23:06.000 He's a guy who's got a lot of fucking miles, man. 0.99

01:23:08.000 He's fought a lot of fucking hard fights. 0.98

01:23:10.000 But those steel cups, like, you can't wear them anymore in jiu-jitsu matches. 0.98

01:23:16.000 So, I mean, I wonder how long before people recognize that in MMA and say...

01:23:20.000 Because right now you could get away with wearing a steel cup.

01:23:22.000 But, like, have you ever had someone mount you and they have a steel cup on?

01:23:26.000 And they compress your...

01:23:26.000 Oh, it hurts.

01:23:27.000 On your sternum.

01:23:28.000 Yeah, it's brutal.

01:23:28.000 Yeah.

01:23:29.000 It's brutal.

01:23:29.000 Yeah, those are dangerous, man.

01:23:31.000 In that way.

01:23:31.000 Definitely.

01:23:32.000 Well, hey, man, thank you for this one.

01:23:33.000 Oh, please.

01:23:34.000 I'm excited to give it a whirl.

01:23:36.000 Yeah, those guys are pretty dedicated, man.

01:23:38.000 I shouldn't say pretty.

01:23:39.000 They're very dedicated.

01:23:40.000 There's Diamond MMA guys.

01:23:41.000 They've done a lot of...

01:23:42.000 They're constantly redesigning that thing, too.

01:23:45.000 But I think that's an issue.

01:23:47.000 Like, there's guys who wear, like, the standard jockstrap with, like, the little silly cup inside of it. 0.74

01:23:52.000 That's just fine if you're playing softball, you know, but, goddammit, when you're getting kicked, we really need, like, a better design when it comes to that.

01:24:03.000 Definitely.

01:24:04.000 Man, yeah, thank you so much for this.

01:24:06.000 And I also want to thank you, man, for coming in here because the village of Bobofi is the village that you guys sponsored, and they got a water well.

01:24:14.000 So I'm just thankful you're giving me this.

01:24:16.000 You sponsored my family getting water.

01:24:18.000 We even had, I mean, if it's okay, I could show you a picture.

01:24:20.000 Yeah, yeah, please.

01:24:21.000 This is kind of the drilling process right here of the tripod.

01:24:25.000 Is that something you brought over there?

01:24:27.000 Yeah.

01:24:27.000 Well, the tripod legs we bought in Uganda and then we hauled them over.

01:24:31.000 So that's our drillers.

01:24:33.000 They get ready.

01:24:33.000 They put it on that tripod.

01:24:35.000 This is us getting ready in Bobofi to put the pump down.

01:24:38.000 And so those bricks and that circular, it's the cement well pad that we're getting ready to do.

01:24:44.000 But first we've got to put the PVC down and put the pump.

01:24:47.000 How do you find where to drill?

01:24:49.000 Do you get one of those dudes that has that chicken bone thing? 1.00

01:24:52.000 Does that shit work? 1.00

01:24:53.000 No. 1.00

01:24:54.000 Divining? 0.88

01:24:55.000 I'm not sure if that works, but there's some expensive equipment that you can get, but we're really there for the things that they're going to do and where they are in the rainforest.

01:25:05.000 There's water there.

01:25:06.000 There's clean water.

01:25:07.000 It's just under your feet.

01:25:08.000 You've got to get to it.

01:25:09.000 And so most people don't know how to get to it, so we show them how to get down there to it.

01:25:12.000 And so once it's below 6 meters or 20 feet, the Water 4 system has been approved by USAID and the UN and all these places saying it's just as safe as a lot of mechanicalized rigs.

01:25:30.000 And so what they do is they drill it down there and once you get to a certain depth, you can put a cement pad that protects it at the top, but you also put like a clay sanitary seal up from six meters and above.

01:25:45.000 A clay sanitary seal.

01:25:47.000 A clay sanitary seal.

01:25:48.000 Do you guys make that or is it something you purchase?

01:25:51.000 You can purchase it.

01:25:51.000 Like how does it work?

01:25:53.000 Did you guys make it?

01:25:54.000 What we do is we go find it from a hill.

01:25:56.000 Powerful on a t-shirt.

01:25:58.000 Look at you.

01:25:58.000 There we go.

01:25:59.000 Yeah.

01:25:59.000 So that helped me out too over there.

01:26:01.000 So you helped me out a lot over there.

01:26:04.000 But what the sanitary seal does is one meter of clay, it can take a hundred years for water to get through.

01:26:11.000 One Layer impermeable clay.

01:26:17.000 And so if you can put that down there, then it takes a long time.

01:26:20.000 So any ground contaminants that are trying to pass through that, first you have the cement pad that we put on, and then you have the clay sanitary seal beyond that.

01:26:28.000 And then it's not going to let the ground contaminants and other kinds of waterborne disease get down into our clean aquifer.

01:26:35.000 So we try to find a good aquifer that's going to keep refilling.

01:26:39.000 That's fresh water, clean water.

01:26:41.000 We test it.

01:26:42.000 Did you have failed wells where you tried to make some?

01:26:46.000 Yeah, we did.

01:26:47.000 The first probably seven or eight we failed because I had like a short training here.

01:26:52.000 Then they also sent over a guy that had done 28 water wells in Congo.

01:26:57.000 And I was like, great.

01:26:58.000 He's a Congolese guy all the way across the country.

01:27:00.000 And we flew him out and he was 28 for 28. He had never failed a well.

01:27:04.000 And then we got out there and we hit seven in a row that we failed.

01:27:08.000 And so...

01:27:09.000 So when you say failed, like, it didn't give you any water or it was bad water?

01:27:13.000 Well, I guess, sorry, what I should have said was seven holes fail.

01:27:17.000 And so what we're doing is we're looking for the water.

01:27:19.000 And sometimes you're digging and you come across a layer of granite or a layer of...

01:27:25.000 Our problem was sandstone.

01:27:27.000 Well, what happened was we'd have these augers that have like these claws on it. 0.93

01:27:33.000 And we'd pull out scoop after scoop after scoop and a foot at a time.

01:27:37.000 And sometimes you get to like a sandstone layer.

01:27:39.000 And if you get to that, it's hard to advance through.

01:27:41.000 And so a lot of times you do need a machine that helps you get through that.

01:27:44.000 And so Water4 has been helping us with that.

01:27:46.000 And so normally under that sandstone layer, there's fresh, like a very good, powerful aquifer that's going to keep...

01:27:52.000 You have to probably be careful about ruining your equipment on that too, right?

01:27:55.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:27:56.000 We didn't want to waste our tools, so what we'd do is we'd pick up and we'd move.

01:28:01.000 Because we can't make those tools yet in Congo, so we're bringing them from the States and it's high-quality stuff.

01:28:08.000 Hopefully one day we do have a metal shop there that we can start trying to produce things that will just blast through softer layers.

01:28:15.000 And so you're doing this not just in the pygmy villages, but in also these neighboring villages, too, to try to help these people out so that they don't get angry at the pygmies for having this stuff? 0.75

01:28:25.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:28:26.000 So how many of these wells have you guys completed?

01:28:29.000 Fifteen water wells.

01:28:29.000 Wow.

01:28:29.000 Fifteen.

01:28:30.000 Each one of them is serving hundreds of people.

01:28:32.000 This is the JRE area.

01:28:35.000 Well, this is the Joe Rogan Experience water well.

01:28:38.000 That's so cool.

01:28:39.000 We're dancing around it.

01:28:40.000 Look how happy those people are.

01:28:41.000 That's so cool.

01:28:41.000 That's actually sangue on my shoulders on that other picture.

01:28:44.000 The hunter that killed those two things.

01:28:46.000 Oh, that's so cool.

01:28:47.000 It's on my shoulders.

01:28:48.000 If you go down, this is the chief's wife, and she took one of our well-driller sunglasses, and she was the second one to pump, and so she loved it. 0.88

01:28:58.000 So that...

01:28:59.000 The thing that's on top, that blue metal thing, is that metal?

01:29:02.000 What is that thing that we're looking at that's pouring into the bucket?

01:29:05.000 The blue is actually just a bucket that's holding our cement.

01:29:10.000 We use it as a form so we can pour the cement inside of it that protects the pipes that are coming up from deep in the ground.

01:29:16.000 And the pump is a hand unit?

01:29:18.000 Is that how it works?

01:29:19.000 Yeah, it's basically like a T-handle, and you grab each side, you pull up, pump down, pull up, pump down.

01:29:24.000 An old-school cartoon dynamite thing?

01:29:26.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:29:27.000 And every time you go down, it sprays out, I don't know, maybe 10 ounces of water.

01:29:32.000 Wow, that's amazing.

01:29:34.000 Yeah.

01:29:34.000 So what is the quality of life change for these people now that they have this clean water?

01:29:39.000 I mean, it must be amazing.

01:29:41.000 Yeah, they've never seen clean water before.

01:29:46.000 That's so crazy.

01:29:46.000 They've never tasted it, except for maybe rain water, but they don't have a way to collect it.

01:29:50.000 So it's like them going out and if you go to the folder saying bad water...

01:29:55.000 How often does it rain there?

01:29:57.000 It rains quite often, but they don't collect the water.

01:30:00.000 It's easier for them to go to where the water sat, where the creeks or streams that rose to get their water there.

01:30:06.000 Well, it seems like that would be an awesome supplement as well.

01:30:09.000 So that's the water that they usually get?

01:30:11.000 Yeah, that's actually a pretty good one.

01:30:13.000 But I thought what was cool here was she was using the leaf as a funnel. 0.78

01:30:18.000 But she would scoop it and pour it into the container.

01:30:21.000 But yeah, that's completely dirty, contaminated.

01:30:23.000 That's where the...

01:30:24.000 The antelopes and other animals are going to get water and then they... 0.97

01:30:28.000 Shitting it. 0.98

01:30:29.000 Yeah, absolutely, man. 1.00

01:30:30.000 Giardia is something that people get from gophers and shit and all these different animals, beavers. 0.94

01:30:36.000 I had typhoid while I was there. 0.91

01:30:38.000 What is typhoid like?

01:30:40.000 It's brutal.

01:30:42.000 But I had it at the same time.

01:30:43.000 That's why they misdiagnosed me with malaria.

01:30:45.000 They thought that I had typhoid because I had gotten typhoid, but like a small amount of it.

01:30:52.000 And then they started treating me for typhoid.

01:30:55.000 But since it was mixed with malaria, I don't know if that was why malaria was so...

01:31:01.000 So brutal.

01:31:01.000 I mean, I got it from two different sources.

01:31:03.000 I obviously had dirty water or someone cooked with dirty water and ingested the typhoid fever.

01:31:11.000 So cooking with dirty water, even if you boil the water, you still get some of those illnesses?

01:31:17.000 You can if you don't cook it correctly right, if you don't get it really, really hot.

01:31:21.000 And sometimes out here, you're just cooking over a fire, and it just sticks, and you put on a bowl over it, and it has to get to that boiling point and stuff.

01:31:32.000 And if they don't cook it right, or if they add some water to it a little later to add some more, you can still get sick from that.

01:31:39.000 Do they have metal pots and pans and stainless steel or cast iron?

01:31:43.000 Like, what are they cooking in?

01:31:44.000 Yeah, a lot of times they do get, well, they would make a tripod.

01:31:48.000 I wonder if that's in the folder.

01:31:50.000 They would make a tripod to smoke the meat.

01:31:53.000 And so they would just use wood and leaves to cook the meat.

01:31:58.000 But yeah, they would bargain or get the scraps from either their slave masters or someone they went and worked for.

01:32:04.000 They would negotiate and bargain labor to get some kind of pot that's discarded.

01:32:09.000 Yeah, right there.

01:32:10.000 That's great.

01:32:11.000 That's Bobofy Village, the Jerry Village.

01:32:14.000 And that's kind of how they cook it.

01:32:17.000 So that one I think we brought with us, though.

01:32:20.000 And they just cook it over the fire.

01:32:21.000 That one we got real hot.

01:32:23.000 Normally they don't waste wood, man.

01:32:26.000 They just put an X or a cross of wood and they just push it in from the sides.

01:32:31.000 And so basically it's just smoldering.

01:32:33.000 There's no real flame.

01:32:34.000 And so that's how they cook. 0.61

01:32:35.000 It's not even on a real hot flame.

01:32:39.000 Wow.

01:32:40.000 It's so much we take for granted, living in civilization.

01:32:44.000 Those huts, maybe you can go to the folder with my wife.

01:32:49.000 It'll show some of the size of the pygmies and then also the huts.

01:32:54.000 But it's crazy how they're living.

01:32:57.000 This guy's Bajanji, but that behind him is one of our huts that we're staying in.

01:33:03.000 So their huts are chest height to us.

01:33:07.000 And then...

01:33:09.000 Living there, it's crazy.

01:33:10.000 There's all sorts of stuff that come in.

01:33:11.000 There's spiders, snakes.

01:33:15.000 Love those too.

01:33:16.000 A lot of poisonous stuff, right?

01:33:17.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:33:18.000 A crazy story right here in this village was a spider.

01:33:21.000 Actually, Emily had gone in there.

01:33:24.000 By the way, this is her first ever camping trip.

01:33:27.000 Her first ever time camping.

01:33:29.000 She went hard.

01:33:30.000 That's how you go hard.

01:33:32.000 First ever camping.

01:33:33.000 Camping in the Congo.

01:33:34.000 Wow.

01:33:34.000 Maybe there's another picture of a hut, her and I, but it's crazy because, yeah, right there, the rain had beat us there.

01:33:43.000 So going from the roadside to getting to the actual village can take over an hour.

01:33:47.000 It can take an hour and a half hiking.

01:33:49.000 And so rain had moved in, and it just drenched us on her first night ever camping.

01:33:54.000 And then there was roaches.

01:33:56.000 Well, it stopped raining, and then you're thinking that it's raining, but it's actually, or that's sprinkling, but it's actually the legs of the roaches running on the leaves.

01:34:05.000 So that freaked her out.

01:34:07.000 And she had to get up and leave, and I understood, you know.

01:34:11.000 I walked her out.

01:34:12.000 It's going to be okay.

01:34:12.000 She's like, because one of the roaches had fallen on her neck, and that's when she kind of lost it.

01:34:19.000 I don't know if I can do this.

01:34:20.000 But after that, she embraced it and really fell in love with the people.

01:34:25.000 And then there was another crazy story with this gigantic spider, or at least to me, you'll know why I thought it was gigantic in a minute.

01:34:35.000 It was on her, what we'd do is we'd put up a little tent, almost like a mosquito net tent inside of the huts, so that she could be protected from all the mosquitoes and stuff like that. 0.98

01:34:43.000 But Ben and I would sleep next to that and we didn't have a mosquito net over us.

01:34:48.000 And all of a sudden she saw this gigantic spider crawling on the mesh.

01:34:52.000 And she freaked out and called for me.

01:34:55.000 And then it jumped.

01:34:56.000 It's like this tarantula kind of spider.

01:34:58.000 And it jumped onto the leafs, and that's the wall.

01:35:01.000 It's just leafs and sticks.

01:35:03.000 And so I grabbed a flip-flop trying to kill this tarantula.

01:35:08.000 And whenever I finally started to hit at it, it slipped right behind one of the leafs and disappeared.

01:35:16.000 Oh, great.

01:35:17.000 And she's like, you didn't kill it!

01:35:19.000 And I'm like...

01:35:19.000 Yeah, I think I did.

01:35:20.000 And Ben's like, I killed it. 0.97

01:35:22.000 Yeah, he killed it. 0.72

01:35:23.000 And she's like, I want to see a leg, a body, something. 0.64

01:35:23.000 He killed it. 0.64

01:35:26.000 I want to see its guts.

01:35:27.000 And so anyways, right after that too, there's two chickens sleeping beside her tent in the wall.

01:35:34.000 She's like, get these chickens out of here. 1.00

01:35:35.000 So I grabbed them, got them out.

01:35:37.000 But then the next day we woke up and she woke up before me and she was outside.

01:35:40.000 The women were kind of painting, doing this awesome paintings on a bark cloth. 1.00

01:35:46.000 So it's cloth that is actually just bark.

01:35:48.000 And so they're out there painting.

01:35:50.000 It's bark?

01:35:51.000 Cloth?

01:35:51.000 Like, what do you mean by cloth?

01:35:53.000 They make like a cloth.

01:35:54.000 It used to be clothing that they would wear like in traditional ceremonies, but it would be bark that they would beat down and it would kind of be like these fibers that would stick together and it would actually be like a bark cloth.

01:36:07.000 You know, I'll have Emily bring you some of it.

01:36:09.000 She's coming out here and we got you a knife because they can bang down these knives into, or bang down these nails into knives. 1.00

01:36:19.000 Super wicked looking and sharp, but they can make nails into knives.

01:36:23.000 And so we got you one of those.

01:36:27.000 And it's nuts the things they can do.

01:36:28.000 How big are these nails that they can turn them into a knife? 1.00

01:36:30.000 They're normally pretty big, like from the lumber guys and stuff, whatever they're doing, if they're building ladders and things like that.

01:36:38.000 And so they can do everything.

01:36:40.000 And so she was out there watching them paint on this bark cloth.

01:36:44.000 I think if you just Google bark cloth, they'll show it too.

01:36:48.000 And then I step out of the hut, and Ben's standing there, and when Ben's standing there, he looks at me, and all of a sudden, he goes, don't move.

01:36:57.000 And I said, my eyes got big, and I said, why?

01:37:00.000 And whenever I said why, all of a sudden, I saw that big spider from the night before, that tarantula.

01:37:06.000 It was in my, at the time, gigantic, you know, chest-length beard, and its legs were just coming up right on my face.

01:37:13.000 Doom!

01:37:14.000 And Ben literally just slapped you in the face.

01:37:17.000 Oh my gosh, so hard. 0.86

01:37:18.000 Just smacked me.

01:37:20.000 And the spider fell and Emily starts turning around and Ben steps on top of the tarantula because he doesn't want to freak her out.

01:37:28.000 She's like, what just happened?

01:37:30.000 I said, oh, nothing.

01:37:31.000 Nothing happened.

01:37:32.000 She's like, what's going on? 0.75

01:37:33.000 And Ben's still, you know, moving his foot back and forth, squashing the thing, killing it, making sure it's dead.

01:37:38.000 But there's just crazy stuff out there.

01:37:40.000 Like, I've been able to pull out, I think Emily and I counted five times in one night that I pulled these little roaches out of my beard.

01:37:47.000 Because I guess they think it's like a nest or something like that.

01:37:50.000 Why are you growing that crazy beard out there, man?

01:37:53.000 Well, I didn't take any beard trimmers with me or anything like that, but also I wanted to see how long it would get in a year.

01:37:59.000 And it's kind of an icebreaker for me.

01:38:01.000 It's kind of funny or crazy, but for me, they've never seen something like it.

01:38:06.000 I look like an animal to them a lot of times walking through.

01:38:09.000 They have these jokes that I wouldn't want to come across him in a dark forest, you know, on a dark path.

01:38:17.000 And I've come into the village, actually Bobofy, that one, whenever I first walked in, people grabbed their kids, jumped in their huts or...

01:38:23.000 We're literally just booked it and disappeared through the forest because they didn't know...

01:38:27.000 They've never seen anything like you before.

01:38:28.000 Yeah, they've never seen a white dude.

01:38:29.000 They've never seen someone with white skin.

01:38:32.000 Did they know that white dudes exist?

01:38:34.000 I'm sure there they did, but they've never seen it, never heard of it.

01:38:38.000 They've been told at times...

01:38:41.000 It's almost like sometimes... 1.00

01:38:44.000 White guys are the boogeyman or something where, you know, if you don't behave, a white man's going to come get you or come eat you. 1.00

01:38:50.000 Really? 1.00

01:38:51.000 I've heard that before, yeah.

01:38:53.000 And so for me to go in there, they're really timid or scared at first until I develop a relationship with them.

01:39:02.000 And as goofy as it is, my hair...

01:39:06.000 My hairy, hairy, enormously hairy arms and beard and long hair can be an icebreaker.

01:39:12.000 So I can first scare them, then it can be an icebreaker, and then it can be kind of entertainment for them.

01:39:18.000 They braid my hair, they play with my beard, all that.

01:39:20.000 Well, there's some great videos of you that have gone online that people have actually tweeted to me, not even knowing that I know you, of them seeing you for the first time, of pygmies touching you and touching your beard and seeing your white skin for the first time.

01:39:33.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

01:39:35.000 Some of the rumors that happened, too, is there was a neighboring village, and he had sprinted from Bobofi back to Bahaha.

01:39:44.000 And he was visiting there, got terrified, ran away, and basically said that there was a big white ape that had walked into the village.

01:39:53.000 And basically, I was a great white Sasquatch or vanilla gorilla, and it made him terrified.

01:40:00.000 And so then he found out that we had been there, we'd gotten them land, we'd dug a well, we started farming yams and potatoes and beans and corn now there.

01:40:10.000 And so it's been pretty funny.

01:40:12.000 Another thing was...

01:40:14.000 One of the slave master villages had said that I came to leave...

01:40:21.000 Jamie, do you have your mic on?

01:40:23.000 No, there's someone outside.

01:40:23.000 Is that what's going on?

01:40:25.000 Oh, there's someone outside?

01:40:26.000 My real reason of being there was that because I would go and I would walk with them to the dirty water source.

01:40:34.000 If you pull up the bad water, I would carry it with them just to experience how long that they would have to walk.

01:40:40.000 Sometimes they were walking five miles Five miles with dirty water to come back and cook with and give their kids and drink and bathe. 0.95

01:40:48.000 And those, I think, are 20 gallons or 40 liters or something like that.

01:40:55.000 But they're like 30, 40 pounds, man.

01:40:58.000 And my neck, just doing that with them, would get so incredibly sore.

01:41:03.000 I mean, those are grown women next to me. 1.00

01:41:05.000 And they're walking sometimes with two of them.

01:41:07.000 Wow.

01:41:08.000 Sometimes they're walking with two of those, or one about half that size.

01:41:12.000 But the other people from the other tribes that are bigger and stronger, they're walking with one on top of their head and one over their back. 1.00

01:41:19.000 And it's just crazy.

01:41:20.000 And one of those villages that said, what I really come there to do was study their streams, their creeks, and then I left behind my half fish, half woman, and stationed them at each little creek and each little stream that I was going and investigating.

01:41:39.000 So basically they were saying that I had brought mermaids to leave at every village.

01:41:46.000 And I'm like, where did that come from?

01:41:48.000 Like, where did you guys think I'm coming up with a mermaid to come bring and leave here?

01:41:54.000 And they didn't say it was evil or anything, but they said I was bringing mermaids.

01:41:58.000 It's so strange.

01:41:59.000 It's like you're living in the 21st century, but it's almost like you're going into this land that hasn't changed much in thousands of years, and they still have the same sort of mythologies and folklore that you'd expect from people that lived Before education,

01:42:16.000 before the internet, even before books.

01:42:19.000 Yeah, I mean, it's like you're going back in time.

01:42:22.000 Because people don't have cell phones.

01:42:26.000 A lot of times, what I would do is, yeah, we'd take pictures together.

01:42:31.000 But then I'd come and I would go into town and I brought with me, I think it's called a selfie.

01:42:37.000 It's like a little Canon printer.

01:42:39.000 And I could print off photos that I took.

01:42:42.000 So I'd go back, and them seeing themselves on my camera for the first time.

01:42:45.000 Some of this is their first time seeing themselves, besides being in a reflection of water.

01:42:52.000 I mean, they don't have mirrors.

01:42:53.000 They don't have cameras.

01:42:54.000 They don't have any of that.

01:42:55.000 So how do they see themselves besides their reflection?

01:42:58.000 But what we would do is, I mean, there's been other people that have come into some of the villages and take pictures, and they leave, and then they never get to see them.

01:43:05.000 But we would go print them, and we'd come back, and we'd give them family photos.

01:43:09.000 We'd give them like a family portrait.

01:43:11.000 But we would either put it in like almost a Ziploc bag or kind of do...

01:43:16.000 One time we did like this laminate kind of stuff on it because in their living conditions, in their huts, with the rain coming through it, with their ground sometimes turning to mud that they're sleeping on, you know, we wanted to protect the pictures that we were giving them.

01:43:31.000 But just something like that, it's a small gift to us.

01:43:34.000 But to them, it just blows their mind that you can take a picture of them, a moment in time, you can go print it, and then you can give it back to them, and now they can have it forever if they keep it right.

01:43:45.000 That's incredible, man.

01:43:47.000 Is there any superstition involved in photographs, like you heard with the Native Americans? 0.99

01:43:51.000 No, not there.

01:43:53.000 Now, in other places like populated areas in Congo and Uganda and Rwanda, anywhere that there's been conflict, that then brings in a lot of reporters and other people.

01:44:05.000 Like, they come and they take pictures, and the locals will say, oh, they're coming and taking our pictures, and then they're going and making money off of us.

01:44:13.000 We don't get to see those pictures or anything like that, so you have to be, like, I'm not going around like a tourist and taking pictures.

01:44:19.000 I'm When I get into the village, you know, sometimes I pull it out for entertainment and show them themselves where they can, you know, in the iPhone where you can actually see yourself on the screen at that time and their eyes just light up and it's like a mirror but it's, you know, it's on a screen.

01:44:33.000 And so it's crazy for them.

01:44:35.000 That is so cool, man.

01:44:37.000 What an amazing journey you've been on, man.

01:44:39.000 I mean, just...

01:44:40.000 I know Loretta Hunt, who's sitting over here to our right, to your right, who you've written a bunch of books, Loretta, and she's writing a book about you right now.

01:44:48.000 I want to read that book, man, because I think it's really fascinating.

01:44:51.000 But I think a documentary is really what we need to see, too.

01:44:56.000 Like, someone needs to... 0.99

01:44:57.000 Gotta have some bad motherfuckers that go with a camera crew to the Congo, too. 1.00

01:45:01.000 Yeah, well, we did something for Water 4, and it's on Vimeo, but it's called Freedom in the Congo, and it's a very, very well-done seven-minute documentary of kind of the work we were doing. 0.98

01:45:14.000 So yeah, it's called Freedom in the Congo on Vimeo.

01:45:17.000 And what was so cool was this guy that came to film it, his name's Derek Watson, and he's done stuff for National Geographic and PBS, and he's done like full documentaries and got a woman named Sister Rosemary that was helping girls that were abducted by the LRA and made quote-unquote wives of them,

01:45:34.000 but really they were just sex slaves.

01:45:36.000 She would help them out. 0.87

01:45:37.000 His documentary got her in Time Magazine's Top 100 People.

01:45:42.000 But anyways, he snuck in a GoPro drone.

01:45:46.000 Here it is right here.

01:45:48.000 So it's just flying over the forest.

01:45:50.000 Wow, you can't sense what the forest looks like.

01:45:52.000 Yeah, man.

01:45:53.000 That's what I thought.

01:45:54.000 You know, living in my American bubble.

01:45:56.000 You know, there's no slaves today.

01:45:59.000 You got rid of that in the 1800s.

01:46:02.000 Slavery in today's age?

01:46:04.000 Why?

01:46:05.000 Why?

01:46:05.000 Why should it exist?

01:46:13.000 We're good to go.

01:46:15.000 We're good to go.

01:46:17.000 We're good to go.

01:46:26.000 This is all subtitled for folks that are just listening to this.

01:46:29.000 Freedom in the Congo.

01:46:31.000 Check it out on Vimeo.

01:46:33.000 Slave masters come up to me and say, what are you here doing with my animals?

01:46:38.000 What are you here doing with my property?

01:46:40.000 I own these people.

01:46:49.000 They just need to be given a few fish, a few bananas, something small so that they can come back and work the next day, so that they're hungry enough that they have to come back and work the next day.

01:47:10.000 Let's leave this for people to wash the full things so they don't...

01:47:13.000 Yeah.

01:47:14.000 One thing on that that we're going to edit, just to know, is it says on there, it says Bantu on it.

01:47:22.000 And yeah, they are some of the slave masters there.

01:47:27.000 It's the Bantu and the Pygmies, but really it's the Makapala. 0.99

01:47:31.000 And it's basically the non-pygmies. 1.00

01:47:34.000 In the region that the pygmies live, we don't want to villainize a certain people group.

01:47:40.000 Again, we want to work with both sides.

01:47:41.000 And we want to add to each.

01:47:44.000 We don't want to take away.

01:47:45.000 We don't want to hurt them in the process.

01:47:48.000 But we want to educate them that, hey, we're both equals and how can we do this in the best way?

01:47:54.000 Possible so we're changing that just so that there's no like Nothing nothing seemed like we're trying to To to point them out because they're the biggest people group in a in all of Africa and they're there most of them live where there aren't even pygmies But where there are pygmies most of it most of the time the pygmies are being enslaved do these guys know these these pygmy folks do they know that you Fought in the UFC. Do they understand what the UFC is? 0.98

01:48:20.000 I'm trying to explain it.

01:48:22.000 They kind of I wonder, how can that be a job?

01:48:25.000 Because they've only seen physical conflict whenever there's a real dispute.

01:48:30.000 And there's not really martial arts there.

01:48:32.000 But they do kind of wrestle around some.

01:48:36.000 But it's gotten me out of trouble before in the Congo.

01:48:40.000 I had a Topps card, and I just kept it with me on me.

01:48:45.000 And I'd try to show them, and it was me just blasting, I hit them in the chin.

01:48:48.000 And it was... 0.68

01:48:51.000 Anyways, yeah, they were being real corrupt and everything and I showed them it and ended up signing it and just giving it to them and they let us go.

01:48:58.000 Instead of paying any money.

01:49:00.000 Give them a baseball card or an MMA version of the baseball card.

01:49:03.000 They were going to try to steal...

01:49:05.000 Well, Jay Lua, he's my grandfather, he gave me a pygmy bow and arrow.

01:49:10.000 Well, a bunch of arrows and a bow.

01:49:12.000 And this guy was just saying that it was illegal for me to have it.

01:49:18.000 And I'm like, it's a gift.

01:49:19.000 He's like, no, no, no.

01:49:20.000 You came here to come take our artifacts back to your country and make thousands of dollars.

01:49:24.000 And if you're going to go make those thousands of dollars, then you have to give me hundreds of dollars.

01:49:28.000 I'm like, that's not going to happen.

01:49:30.000 That's not going to happen.

01:49:30.000 And so he's like trying to pull it out of my hand.

01:49:32.000 I said, what if I give you this?

01:49:33.000 And just gave him the UFC Tops card and talked to him and played around with him.

01:49:40.000 Sometimes when they're asking you to give them something, Matt actually taught it to me, the guy in the video from Water 4. If they ask for you to give them something, sometimes you just got to give them anything and they'll let you go.

01:49:52.000 It can be a bottle of water, it can be a passion fruit, it can be a banana.

01:49:57.000 One time a guy said, you got to give me something or I'm not going to let you go.

01:50:01.000 So I just wrapped him up in a big bear hug.

01:50:04.000 Afterwards, I said, there, I gave you a hug.

01:50:06.000 And he was laughing, you know.

01:50:08.000 And in between us, you know, he's got a machine gun.

01:50:11.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:50:12.000 Jesus Christ!

01:50:13.000 A bear hug to do with a machine gun?

01:50:16.000 Well, he wasn't holding on to it and pointing it at me or anything.

01:50:18.000 They just always have them around him.

01:50:19.000 That's still a bold move.

01:50:21.000 And Matt had done basically that same thing in, I think, Togo, where he was doing water wells all throughout there.

01:50:31.000 He's done hundreds there.

01:50:32.000 But yeah, sometimes you've got to find a way to make them laugh, or to make them like you, or to try to find a way to get the job done.

01:50:42.000 Do they speak English when you're communicating with these people?

01:50:47.000 Some of them are.

01:50:48.000 Some of them are pretty educated.

01:50:50.000 I think it's harder for us and our culture to learn languages because we don't grow up learning several languages at once.

01:50:58.000 But there, they're growing up learning four, five, six languages at one time.

01:51:02.000 And so some of them, yeah, they speak English very fluently.

01:51:05.000 And are they learning this from school?

01:51:06.000 Are they learning this from...

01:51:08.000 School or a lot of times the military are learning it from their jobs, their work.

01:51:13.000 If there's humanitarian organizations that are speaking English and different things like that.

01:51:19.000 Yeah.

01:51:19.000 Wow.

01:51:20.000 What is the endgame for you here?

01:51:23.000 You're obviously improving their lives dramatically by creating these wells and bringing them medicine.

01:51:29.000 What do you eventually hope to do?

01:51:34.000 Well, that's a big question, but I'll try to simplify it.

01:51:38.000 I just want them to know that they're loved, that they're not forgotten, and that this is a lifelong thing for me.

01:51:49.000 There's no way.

01:51:50.000 I mean, it doesn't matter what's going on.

01:51:52.000 I'm going to be going there my entire life.

01:51:55.000 What I hope is just to add to their life.

01:51:58.000 Like for me, whenever I sit back and I say, okay, what does a perfect world look like?

01:52:04.000 And how can I try to take action to see that the good comes into the world instead of the bad, instead of the evil?

01:52:12.000 Instead of the kids dying of dirty water, what can I do as a person to see that that is alleviated at least a little bit?

01:52:23.000 Even just for one person, if I can do that.

01:52:26.000 For me and my pygmy family, I don't want to see that same kind of suffering.

01:52:30.000 We've actually seen them set free now, and we've seen them get clean water and seen them have food, and that's hopefully just the beginning of different things that will be a lifelong way to To sustain them and the people in that region.

01:52:45.000 When you're there and you hang out with these people, especially when they know that you've done the UFC and they understand that you participate in professional conflict, as it were, do you teach them things?

01:52:59.000 Do you ever have a class there?

01:53:02.000 I've shown a few of them, about maybe 10 or 15 of the men one time, just some little wrestling.

01:53:09.000 I was teaching them an arm drag, just because I didn't want people falling down and getting hurt or something like that.

01:53:15.000 So I was teaching them an arm drag, a throw-by, a little bit of a double leg, but how to set them down easy.

01:53:23.000 So it was fun, and then they really grasped onto it.

01:53:28.000 And a guy named Baiwanja, he loved it and he would go around and he would be grabbing onto everybody.

01:53:34.000 Yeah, arm dragging them, jumping on their back.

01:53:34.000 Arm dragging them?

01:53:36.000 You'd teach them how to take the back?

01:53:37.000 Yeah, from an arm drag or a throw-by.

01:53:41.000 Not on the ground grappling, but I would...

01:53:44.000 Yeah, he would get behind them.

01:53:46.000 That was just his natural reaction was to be a spider monkey, just jump on their back, Marcelo Garcia style.

01:53:52.000 Right, right.

01:53:52.000 Yeah.

01:53:54.000 That's awesome.

01:53:55.000 What about striking?

01:53:56.000 Do you teach him any striking?

01:53:57.000 No, I haven't done that, man.

01:53:59.000 I think for me now, it hasn't been a big thing showing them martial arts.

01:54:04.000 It's my big passion.

01:54:06.000 I'd love for them too.

01:54:07.000 It's just kind of hard being in the jungle, in the forest, there's trees everywhere, there's stumps everywhere.

01:54:12.000 It's hard to get a nice space to grapple.

01:54:15.000 Yeah, I would imagine that would be, especially for takedowns, right? 1.00

01:54:18.000 Fall down, land a log up your ass. 0.99

01:54:21.000 When you are planning, I mean, have you committed to this plan of fighting again, or is this still something that you have in your head? 0.99

01:54:29.000 I haven't announced it or formally made a plan with anybody yet, but for me, my family, my wife, and the Takedown guys know that I'm going to make a real stab at it.

01:54:42.000 So you're definitely going to do it?

01:54:43.000 I'm going to do it.

01:54:44.000 So when you do that, how much time will you spend here, and how much time will you spend there, and how much time do you spend here and there right now?

01:54:51.000 Yeah, well, I've been going since 2011, and I've taken, you know, month-long trips there until this last one, which was a one-year trip.

01:55:01.000 And if I go back into fighting, it would only allow me probably to go there one, two, or max three times a year for anywhere from two to four weeks at a time.

01:55:12.000 So I would love to train hard, to fight hard.

01:55:17.000 I know one thing's for sure.

01:55:18.000 I'll never have more motivation to beat a dude.

01:55:20.000 To go in there, to get my hand raised, not just for me, but for starting my family with my wife, but also for the family there in Congo, that more is going to be added to them and to alleviate what's going on there.

01:55:33.000 Now, were you released by the UFC, or did you just stop fighting?

01:55:37.000 Like, what happened?

01:55:38.000 Yeah, I was released, and then I fought, and I won three fights, and I stepped away.

01:55:44.000 I'm sure there was an open door to go back.

01:55:47.000 What organization did you win three fights with?

01:55:50.000 Ring of Fire.

01:55:52.000 So you were in Denver?

01:55:54.000 And then I fought in Vegas once for another promotion.

01:55:57.000 I fought a dude that I think was 6-0 at the time and stopped him.

01:56:03.000 For me though, I know that it wouldn't be a step right back into that level of the UFC. Not right away.

01:56:11.000 I'd have to work my way back up to that.

01:56:14.000 But you know what?

01:56:15.000 If the right opponent and stuff like that comes along.

01:56:17.000 But for me...

01:56:19.000 I want to train hard but smart, be strategic about the matchups.

01:56:24.000 I mean, me, I'm a competitor.

01:56:26.000 Whenever I was wrestling, I had Kenny Monday as my high school coach, Olympic gold medalist.

01:56:30.000 Kendall Cross, Olympic gold medalist.

01:56:32.000 Then I went to the Olympic Training Center.

01:56:34.000 So something I think, if you ask Brendan or anyone that's trained with me, they'll say that I'm a competitor and that my heart or spirit is a competitor.

01:56:43.000 Spirit of a fighter, heart of a fighter.

01:56:45.000 And Kenny Mundy's that team takedown, too, which is great.

01:56:47.000 Yeah, that's something that is, you know, is a light bulb moment.

01:56:49.000 I was amazed that they let him go with the Black Zillions. 1.00

01:56:52.000 I was like, are you crazy?

01:56:54.000 Do you know what a wealth of knowledge that guy has when it comes to wrestling?

01:56:57.000 I mean, I guess it was a personality conflict or something like that, but man, what a great coach that guy is and a great wrestler.

01:57:02.000 Yeah, with me, high school, and then ever since then, and then even now, whenever I stepped away, he fully 100% supported everything and said that he loves what I'm doing.

01:57:12.000 But what's so great about Coach Money is he really will invest into people and really teach them Slick stuff that you're not going to find from a high school or college program.

01:57:24.000 This is Olympic-level stuff that's coming from all over the world, and it's the little things that matter.

01:57:29.000 So he's able to teach us those things.

01:57:32.000 He's a great man.

01:57:33.000 Yeah, I thought he was a great addition to Team Takedown.

01:57:35.000 I saw him when he was training and working with Johnny Hendricks in the rematch with Robbie Lawler.

01:57:39.000 What's going on right now with Johnny Hendricks?

01:57:41.000 Are you training with him?

01:57:42.000 Are you there with him in Dallas?

01:57:44.000 I've watched him train.

01:57:45.000 I haven't really stepped in there yet.

01:57:46.000 I think for me, right now, I'm out of shape.

01:57:49.000 I'm out of shape, and I want to come back in.

01:57:52.000 My problem was that I would come back too soon, and then injuries would happen, so I'm going to get my core and all that back before I step in there with those guys.

01:58:01.000 What do you weigh?

01:58:02.000 Right now, 280. 280?

01:58:04.000 Yeah, 280 right now.

01:58:05.000 Wow.

01:58:06.000 Yeah, and so I'll have to get back down.

01:58:08.000 I'll probably be around 255, around fight time, 250. That's me coming back from Congo, having no food, coming back and having all the food at my disposal.

01:58:18.000 Barbecue, baby.

01:58:19.000 Are you living in Dallas?

01:58:19.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:58:20.000 Yeah.

01:58:20.000 Oh, yeah.

01:58:21.000 And my grandpa owns several barbecue restaurants.

01:58:23.000 Oh, how dare you.

01:58:25.000 Texas barbecue is something special, man.

01:58:27.000 Wow.

01:58:27.000 Yeah.

01:58:29.000 You're living an incredible life, man.

01:58:31.000 I think it would be really fascinating if you did come back and what a story that would be.

01:58:35.000 I mean, it would generate an incredible amount of press and an incredible amount of attention towards what you're trying to do in the Congo.

01:58:42.000 Well, that's humbling to hear because I respect your opinion so much of being in the fight game for so long.

01:58:51.000 I want to be realistic about it and say right now I'm not looking at the world champion level.

01:58:58.000 I'm not aiming at that right now, but that could be a future goal once I get back into it, get in shape, and really start Start just knocking some dudes down.

01:59:08.000 Do you know how crazy it would be if you got to the point where you're fighting for the title? 0.83

01:59:12.000 Do you know how fucking bananas that would be? 0.97

01:59:14.000 That would be nuts. 0.98

01:59:15.000 I mean, you want to talk about the most incredible PR campaign ever.

01:59:20.000 I mean, you want to talk about someone that you could really get behind and root for?

01:59:23.000 Jesus Christ, you'd have the whole world rooting for you. 0.99

01:59:26.000 It's a goddamn Rocky movie. 0.99

01:59:28.000 I'm getting goosebumps. 1.00

01:59:30.000 That would be crazy, man.

01:59:32.000 If you could really get into top shape...

01:59:34.000 Yeah, that's the thing.

01:59:36.000 I would love that.

01:59:37.000 That would be the perfect world.

01:59:38.000 That's the thing.

01:59:39.000 I feel like...

01:59:41.000 I feel like in my heart, that's one of my deepest desires is to fight and contend for the highest possible good in every circumstance.

01:59:50.000 Like, it doesn't matter if it's there or here, whatever it is, whenever I'm meeting somebody, like, what can I do to add to the lives of another?

01:59:58.000 And if I can do that through fighting, something that I'm very passionate about, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, it's humbling.

02:00:04.000 It goes through my mind.

02:00:05.000 I try to be realistic, try to...

02:00:07.000 But at the same time, I'm a big dreamer.

02:00:10.000 And I think that if I could do...

02:00:12.000 I mean, that would be, obviously, the cat's pajamas.

02:00:16.000 If I could be the champ in the cat's pajamas.

02:00:19.000 Could you imagine if you won the title?

02:00:21.000 I mean, that would be unbelievable.

02:00:23.000 Obviously, that's going to take some superhuman dedication to hit that level.

02:00:28.000 You don't get to that level without it.

02:00:29.000 No.

02:00:30.000 But yeah, that's what's so motivating about me getting back into it is I see a huge opportunity.

02:00:37.000 To fulfill that first promise I gave him, man, I was standing at the grave of Andy Bo, and I had held him in my hands and had his blood on me.

02:00:45.000 And I had buried him, and it was so tough, so hard.

02:00:51.000 And then one of the chiefs came to me and said, nobody knows.

02:00:55.000 About what's happening to us.

02:00:56.000 Nobody knows about the suffering.

02:00:57.000 And he said, I know you can't promise us water, land, any of that stuff, but can you tell people?

02:01:03.000 Can you at least give us a voice?

02:01:06.000 And so that's whenever I made that promise.

02:01:09.000 And so me going back into fighting would be...

02:01:12.000 Extremely emotional for me to get back into it, to get back in shape, to go back in there, to knock some dudes out.

02:01:18.000 They're gonna have to put me away, really put me away for me not to do everything in my power to win that fight. 0.68

02:01:27.000 Well, you've always had a ridiculous chance.

02:01:29.000 That was like one of your biggest assets. 0.97

02:01:30.000 You take a tremendous shot.

02:01:33.000 Has that always been the case?

02:01:35.000 People would always joke saying I have cement. 1.00

02:01:36.000 Get that big fucking Viking head, dude. 0.99

02:01:39.000 Yeah, well, even at heavyweight, my head's normally like twice the size of everyone else. 1.00

02:01:43.000 So it's an easy target, but it takes a beating.

02:01:46.000 Was it tough watching a fellow Viking go down this weekend?

02:01:50.000 Man, what was so tough was like...

02:01:51.000 Him afterwards, like even with Anthony saying that, you know, he's crying.

02:01:56.000 I can't even celebrate.

02:01:57.000 That was tough.

02:01:58.000 Well, he's so loved there, man.

02:02:00.000 I mean, he literally is carrying the entire country on his back there.

02:02:05.000 I mean, there's a tremendous amount of pressure involved in that.

02:02:08.000 A tremendous amount of love, too. 0.99

02:02:09.000 They fucking love Gustafsson. 0.99

02:02:11.000 I mean, they were cheering for him after he lost. 0.99

02:02:13.000 It was like, in America... 0.99

02:02:17.000 I mean, I don't want to shit on America, but man, when people lose in America, everybody fucking clears out of the arena right away. 0.99

02:02:22.000 And nobody cleared out after you lost. 0.99

02:02:25.000 They stuck around and they waited.

02:02:26.000 I mean, you're talking about an arena filled with 26,000 people, too. 0.99

02:02:29.000 It's a long fucking commute. 0.99

02:02:31.000 It's zero degrees outside. 1.00

02:02:32.000 It's cold as fuck. 0.99

02:02:34.000 They all stuck around. 1.00

02:02:35.000 They were chanting out his name after he lost.

02:02:38.000 Wow.

02:02:38.000 I didn't know that.

02:02:39.000 I knew that it was a deafening silence when he lost.

02:02:42.000 Yeah, I could have started crying if I started thinking about it.

02:02:44.000 I could have started crying then, watching him.

02:02:46.000 It was pretty intense.

02:02:47.000 But I was so blown away by Rumble, too.

02:02:49.000 It was like...

02:02:50.000 Beast.

02:02:51.000 Yeah, it was like this combination of...

02:02:52.000 I mean, that's often how it is when you watch fights.

02:02:55.000 It's like there's a combination of moments.

02:02:57.000 Like, I'm a big fan of Jon Jones, but I'm also a big fan of Daniel Cormier.

02:03:02.000 I love Daniel.

02:03:03.000 I love both those guys as human beings as well as as fighters.

02:03:07.000 So after Jon Jones trounced Daniel, part of me was like, man, I feel sorry for Daniel. 1.00

02:03:12.000 But other part of me was like, god damn, Jon Jones is a bad motherfucker. 0.99

02:03:16.000 There's this weird sort of, you revel in the moment for the guy who won. 0.99

02:03:21.000 Also, you've got to look at a guy like Gustafson and go, wow, that's hard for him.

02:03:25.000 That's got to be hard.

02:03:26.000 It's really cool hearing that about the Swedish fans, though.

02:03:29.000 I mean, that's a reason why I loved Pride, was that the fans were so educated.

02:03:34.000 And they would sit there, you know, quiet and polite, and then whenever they would appreciate even the moves of grappling, you know, passing full guard to half guard, and they would clap, you know?

02:03:45.000 That's something that...

02:03:47.000 We're starting to see that more now.

02:03:50.000 People understand positions.

02:03:52.000 Like someone will move to a mountain, you'll hear a big cheer throughout the audience where people understand.

02:03:57.000 But yeah, Japan, it's a very, very different environment.

02:04:00.000 It's incredibly quiet while the fights are going on.

02:04:03.000 And then there's a cheer when there's some sort of a transition or someone does something good.

02:04:08.000 Yeah.

02:04:08.000 And they also, they don't put as much of an emphasis on winning as they do as much as you fought your hardest.

02:04:16.000 Yeah.

02:04:16.000 And there's always going to be people that beat you.

02:04:19.000 Like, you could train your hardest, and you run into somebody who's just far better than you, and there's just nothing you can do about it.

02:04:26.000 That guy's always going to beat you.

02:04:27.000 You know, there's certain guys like Perfect example.

02:04:31.000 Stefan Bonner when he fought Anderson Silva.

02:04:32.000 You can fight your hardest, man.

02:04:34.000 You're not going to be in Anderson Silva.

02:04:37.000 He's better.

02:04:38.000 He's just better.

02:04:39.000 He trains just as hard.

02:04:41.000 He's probably just as smart, if not smarter.

02:04:45.000 He knows way more.

02:04:46.000 He can move way better.

02:04:47.000 But in Japan, when a guy would fight like that, They would still appreciate your warrior spirit.

02:04:54.000 Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

02:04:55.000 It's like that samurai kind of spirit, you know?

02:04:58.000 America, we just like winners.

02:04:59.000 Yeah.

02:05:00.000 We like winners. 1.00

02:05:01.000 When you lose, people will get on your fucking Facebook page. 1.00

02:05:03.000 They'll get on your Twitter page. 1.00

02:05:04.000 I mean, I've read... 0.93

02:05:05.000 Some, you know, I don't want to call them fans, just douchebags that torment people after they lose. 0.99

02:05:12.000 And I've read some of the tweets and it's just fucking appalling. 0.99

02:05:15.000 It's appalling that these anonymous shitheads who go on these guys' pages after they've spent, you know, eight... 0.99

02:05:25.000 Weeks plus camps every day preparing for this moment and then they get trounced and then people just go off on them and they make memes about them and they mock them. 0.95

02:05:37.000 That's a very unfortunate aspect of our culture.

02:05:41.000 They put so much emphasis on the winner only. 1.00

02:05:46.000 But on the other hand, it's like that cruelty and that intense pressure, it's also why the baddest motherfuckers come out of that culture. 1.00

02:05:55.000 It's like people that can withstand that. 0.99

02:05:58.000 There's a yin and a yang, and the yin is harder and the yang is harder.

02:06:01.000 It's weird.

02:06:04.000 I don't think it's the right way to be.

02:06:06.000 I certainly don't think there's enough respect paid to the people that lose in MMA in America.

02:06:11.000 I think I appreciate the Japanese version of it better.

02:06:15.000 I don't like win bonuses either.

02:06:17.000 I mean, I know the UFC probably doesn't like to hear this, but I think... 0.75

02:06:20.000 I think a guy should be paid a certain amount to fight, and I know the guys are going to fight their fucking hardest.

02:06:26.000 I mean, they're not fighting harder because they get a win bonus.

02:06:30.000 They're trying to survive.

02:06:31.000 I mean, you could say that.

02:06:33.000 I mean, you could explain that more than anybody, but...

02:06:36.000 You're trying to win.

02:06:38.000 A win bonus, the fact that you can make 50% more if you win than you do if you lose, it's kind of crazy.

02:06:45.000 Yeah, it's kind of crazy because once you get to a certain level at least, once you get to a certain level, man, I don't think it does make you fight harder. 0.63

02:06:54.000 Afterwards, it sucks more. 0.98

02:06:56.000 Yeah, it sucks more. 0.98

02:06:57.000 Because now you can't pay the bills that you were hoping to and things like that.

02:07:00.000 Well, Tyron Woodley had a really good statement recently.

02:07:03.000 We was talking about how people are always saying, you know, don't leave it in the hands of the judges. 0.81

02:07:08.000 He's like, do you fucking think we're trying to leave it in the hands of the judges? 0.95

02:07:11.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:07:12.000 You know, they're fighting the best guys in the goddamn world. 0.97

02:07:15.000 It's like, you do what you can do, and if you do more than that, like... 1.00

02:07:20.000 If you do something stupid, or you do something illogical, or you do something reckless, you can get knocked the fuck out. 0.99

02:07:27.000 I'm a big fan of guys fighting intelligently. 1.00

02:07:31.000 And when people fight intelligently, sometimes it's not the most entertaining fight.

02:07:37.000 But that is the fight that you have to fight.

02:07:39.000 That's the way you have to perform.

02:07:42.000 In order to to use your skills to the best of your ability, you know, and people don't understand that and this idea that like they're Trying to leave it in the hands of the judges.

02:07:51.000 I mean occasionally you'll see a guy fight safe Yeah, you know you see a guy that goofy fight Where the goofy ending Nate Corey versus who was it where he's walking?

02:08:01.000 Oh, yeah, yeah walking him down.

02:08:02.000 Yeah, I'm sure they wouldn't want to beat him the same amount I'm sure they were happy that they paid him 50% Yes, that's that's the worst example of all time.

02:08:10.000 Yeah And I don't know what was wrong with Caleb Starnes in that fight, but yeah, those memes exist.

02:08:17.000 That'll haunt that dude forever.

02:08:19.000 Yeah, without a doubt.

02:08:20.000 But I think, yeah, once you get to a certain level, and if you're a real competitor that does have the eye on the top prize, then you're going to fight your heart out every single time.

02:08:29.000 I'm glad Woodley said that.

02:08:30.000 That's a very important point.

02:08:32.000 I don't like that.

02:08:33.000 That's great.

02:08:33.000 I hadn't heard that.

02:08:34.000 Yeah, I don't like that.

02:08:36.000 Don't leave it in the hands of the judges.

02:08:37.000 Oh, God.

02:08:41.000 And then the judge thing, too, is a real issue.

02:08:44.000 In Boston, there's a few retarded decisions where people just went, what? 0.98

02:08:51.000 And people just turned around looking at each other.

02:08:53.000 I love watching a decision.

02:08:55.000 When a decision's bad, I always turn towards the crowd. 0.99

02:08:58.000 Because I like watching people look at each other like, what the fuck? 0.99

02:09:02.000 Because you'll see head turns where people turn to their friends like, what the fuck just happened? 1.00

02:09:07.000 How did that happen? 0.99

02:09:08.000 Yeah, there's some bad fucking judging, man. 0.99

02:09:10.000 There's some really, really bad judging. 1.00

02:09:12.000 And it didn't help that it was in Boston where the white guys were getting the good judges, the good call. 0.87

02:09:19.000 You know, because Boston, where I'm from, is not exactly known for being the least racist place on the planet, you know.

02:09:28.000 Yeah, I don't want to sound sexist at all, but one of my fights on...

02:09:32.000 Oops.

02:09:32.000 Too late.

02:09:34.000 Whatever you say.

02:09:35.000 I don't want to...

02:09:36.000 Sorry.

02:09:36.000 On The Ultimate Fighter, when I fought Big Country, two of the three judges we had were women.

02:09:44.000 And one had gray hair and the other had her two kids that were running around at the Ultimate Fighter like Jim.

02:09:52.000 And so she was worried about her kids while we were warming up for the fight. 0.73

02:09:56.000 And then I'm not saying that affected the decision.

02:09:59.000 It could have gone a third round.

02:10:01.000 I definitely believe that.

02:10:03.000 But at the same time, like, it was just nuts to me that I'm like, whoa, how are these the judges in Vegas?

02:10:09.000 Not that, I mean, but I think that judges should at least have had to have trained or fought before or really had to have gone through some deep training to become a judge.

02:10:19.000 Yeah, there's no way you understand it any other way.

02:10:22.000 I don't, especially the ground game.

02:10:24.000 You know, there's a judge, I don't want to say his name, but he told me that he was watching a fight once, and there was a woman who was also judging, and the guy was going for a Kimura, and the woman said, what's he doing?

02:10:35.000 Oh my gosh.

02:10:36.000 And she said to him, what's he doing?

02:10:37.000 Like, what's he doing? 0.99

02:10:39.000 Like, god damn. 0.99

02:10:40.000 See, for my fight, it was nuts, because I'm like, this woman, I don't know that she's ever, I mean, maybe she had really watched MMA and studied it, but... 0.99

02:10:47.000 She's got gray hair.

02:10:48.000 It's not normally into her element and then her time zone or whatever.

02:10:53.000 But then also the other lady that brought her kids there, do they know what these moves are that we're doing? 1.00

02:10:59.000 Do they know the names of them?

02:11:00.000 Do they know the setups?

02:11:01.000 Do they know the defenses?

02:11:02.000 Do they know what's going on during the fight?

02:11:04.000 While that human chess match is going on, do they know what the fighters are thinking, doing, how they're making it happen?

02:11:10.000 And if they don't, they shouldn't be judging.

02:11:12.000 There's no way they should be judging.

02:11:14.000 I mean, there's so many fans of MMA, and I've said this many times.

02:11:17.000 I've even said this on broadcast.

02:11:18.000 There's so many incredibly knowledgeable fans of MMA that if they held open casting calls for new judges, you would get incredibly qualified people who have either...

02:11:29.000 Trained their whole lives or competed multiple times that enjoy the sport love the sport like you if you decided to never like Ricardo Almeida He's a judge in in New Jersey.

02:11:39.000 That's great.

02:11:40.000 I didn't know that. 0.92

02:11:41.000 Yeah, he judges in New Jersey I would trust yeah fucking without a doubt or even if it was a girl if it was one of the women that had fought for a train before a Rose or Rhonda or someone like that like I could trust their judgment Yeah, and I think you should be like, God, you've got to have some grappling experience.

02:11:57.000 Because grappling seems to be the most confusing. 0.91

02:12:00.000 It seems like if someone is hitting the other guy more, and the other guy gets stunned, it's kind of obvious, oh, that guy's winning the fight.

02:12:07.000 But if you're watching, say, a guy who's really slick on the ground, like fill-in-the-blank, some guy who's got a nasty guard, and he's putting this guy in all sorts of bad positions, but the other guy's on top, Like Charles Oliveira,

02:12:25.000 a perfect example when he fought Jeremy Stephens.

02:12:27.000 I mean, he was catching Jeremy Stephens and all kinds of shit, but Jeremy's a beast and he kept pulling out of it. 0.72

02:12:33.000 But for my money, he's winning the exchanges. 0.97

02:12:36.000 I mean, he had him threatened with arm bars. 0.99

02:12:39.000 He's threatening with all this sort of shit off of his back. 1.00

02:12:41.000 If you don't know what the fuck is going on and you're watching that... 1.00

02:12:44.000 I think the guy on top's winning. 0.99

02:12:45.000 Exactly.

02:12:45.000 You might be inclined to think that.

02:12:47.000 I think with a person who's trained, you understand it way better.

02:12:52.000 And I just think it's unfair.

02:12:53.000 Like, just deeply, deeply, deeply unfair for a professional fighter who's taken eight weeks out of his life and just every morning got up sore and did his road work and, you know, hitting the pads and sparring.

02:13:06.000 Doing constant drills and strength and conditioning. 1.00

02:13:09.000 You're doing all this fucking shit. 1.00

02:13:09.000 You're jumping over hurdles. 1.00

02:13:10.000 You want to puke blood.

02:13:12.000 You're throwing up. 0.99

02:13:12.000 And then some a-hole who doesn't know shit about what they're talking about gives the other person, they just go left or right. 0.99

02:13:20.000 You know, oh, pick this guy. 0.99

02:13:21.000 Yeah, and it's a lot more than that eight weeks of training, too, that all goes into it.

02:13:25.000 All of the stuff that ever came before it and all your heart, all your soul, all that.

02:13:28.000 And then what is, I was going to ask, what is even the process to become a judge?

02:13:32.000 Because I don't even know what that is.

02:13:34.000 Well, it depends on the athletic commission.

02:13:35.000 Okay.

02:13:36.000 I mean, there's a lot of local athletic commissions where they do a better job than the bigger athletic commissions, really, because the people that are involved are dedicated mixed martial artists.

02:13:47.000 In Boston, I know Joe Esposito was part of the commission, and Joe Esposito was my first karate instructor.

02:13:54.000 I mean, he's a guy who's a lifelong martial artist, so he is a very credible source of martial arts knowledge.

02:14:00.000 I mean, he's a guy who's been involved his whole life.

02:14:02.000 Whereas, you've got people in Nevada that came from boxing.

02:14:05.000 They were boxing judges, and then someone said, you know, we need judges for MMA, you know, we'll just take these boxing people and, you know, we'll use them to judge MMA fights. 0.98

02:14:16.000 It's fucking crazy. 0.98

02:14:17.000 I mean, it's really crazy. 0.99

02:14:19.000 Well, you know, you've got people that don't understand how much a leg kick hurts.

02:14:23.000 They don't think that that's anything.

02:14:25.000 You know, you've got people that they have no idea what's going on when you're watching infighting up against a cage.

02:14:31.000 They have no idea, you know, who's getting the better of those exchanges.

02:14:34.000 They just don't know.

02:14:35.000 They just see bodies moving, you know, and they just, they don't, you know, see guys reversing positions back and forth and they really don't understand what's happening.

02:14:43.000 It's a real shame because the sport is growing in such a huge way.

02:14:49.000 I mean, it's exploding all over the world in leaps and bounds, but then you're hampered by these bad judge calls, you know?

02:14:57.000 Yeah, it's terrible.

02:14:58.000 I know that it's robbed a lot of people of not just, you know, their passion, their hopes to win the fight, but even that 50% win bonus.

02:15:06.000 Yeah, that's disgusting.

02:15:07.000 Yeah, so they're actually taking money out of people's pockets that should have won the fight.

02:15:11.000 If you decide, and you have decided I guess, to go and do this, what's your timetable?

02:15:16.000 How much time are you going to spend training before you get in there?

02:15:19.000 I think I need at least, maybe before my first fight, maybe around six months, of actually once I'm in shape, then training.

02:15:29.000 Which I'll be getting in shape while I'm training.

02:15:31.000 But actually before I start taking some of the bigger, tougher fights, maybe it's a year, maybe it's longer than that.

02:15:37.000 It's not something that I'm going to do in the next month or two months or three months.

02:15:41.000 It's got to be a...

02:15:43.000 A process of really getting my lungs back, getting my core, you know, tightened up so it prevents injuries.

02:15:48.000 Getting the timing back of the striking, you know, and timing back of even the transitions on the ground, that chain wrestling or just flowing and grappling.

02:15:57.000 So are you starting that process right now?

02:15:59.000 So you've already, like, tightened up your diet and started to train harder and started, you're just slowly ramping it up?

02:16:07.000 Begun to.

02:16:08.000 One thing that I'm getting done before I really maybe start sparring, before I start, yeah, before I start sparring, things like that, is I'm getting my knee checked.

02:16:17.000 I got an MRI done.

02:16:19.000 And so a doctor says it could be...

02:16:21.000 I mean, an MRI, like, scope can be three days down, but I might get something scoped either before or after my first fight back.

02:16:27.000 Three days down?

02:16:28.000 What do you mean?

02:16:29.000 Someone's...

02:16:29.000 Well, even Loretta's husband was down for only three days after getting his meniscus scoped.

02:16:34.000 Three days.

02:16:34.000 Listen, I've had my meniscus scoped a couple times.

02:16:37.000 This shit's more than three days. 0.99

02:16:38.000 I know it could be two weeks, three weeks, six weeks. 1.00

02:16:40.000 It can be all that.

02:16:41.000 You want to make sure that you don't...

02:16:42.000 There's a lot of guys that have had knee operations and then got in too soon and done more damage.

02:16:47.000 Yeah, that's brutal.

02:16:48.000 You're dealing with pain and inflammation and cutting away soft tissue.

02:16:51.000 It's not nearly as big a deal as ligaments, but it's so important with knee injuries especially to do the rehab.

02:17:00.000 Just do the full rehab.

02:17:02.000 You'll listen.

02:17:03.000 I mean, I'm sure.

02:17:04.000 If you get it done, you'll get it done at a reputable place and you'll talk to a really good doctor.

02:17:09.000 Right now it's the Denver Broncos knee doc that I'm talking to.

02:17:11.000 Perfect.

02:17:12.000 He's a great guy.

02:17:13.000 What's their prognosis as far as how long?

02:17:15.000 First MRI we sent his office, we think lost, but I sent another one out.

02:17:21.000 They lost it?

02:17:21.000 Yeah.

02:17:22.000 Well, it got lost in the mail or something, but we sent it.

02:17:25.000 The second one he's looking at, though, I went in for an exam.

02:17:28.000 He started moving my knee around.

02:17:29.000 He said it feels like there's something with my meniscus and whenever I move it around, it cracks a lot.

02:17:34.000 But I don't know that it's going to be something that keeps me out from the first fight.

02:17:38.000 Maybe it's something I do right after.

02:17:40.000 But I think it'd be good probably to get it done before.

02:17:43.000 Yeah, get it done before so I can train right.

02:17:43.000 Get it done before.

02:17:46.000 That's what fucked Kane up in the rematch or the fight with Verdum, his meniscus.

02:17:49.000 He blew his meniscus out earlier and then, you know, sort of rest and rehabbed and then tried to go back again without getting the operation and then wound up having to get an operation.

02:17:58.000 It's the same knee injury that he had when the first fight with Junior Dos Santos.

02:18:01.000 Right.

02:18:02.000 For me, before I want to actually hard spar, I know it might sound kind of goofy to some, but I think there's truth to it.

02:18:11.000 My wife was a swimmer in high school, and so getting into swimming, something that's low impact, but also that's going to be great on my lungs, cardio.

02:18:18.000 You don't even notice that you're sweating, you know?

02:18:21.000 So swimming, we'd do that at the Olympic Training Center.

02:18:23.000 We'd play underwater hockey 12 foot deep.

02:18:25.000 We'd go down and just have teams and have to score a goal.

02:18:29.000 Dude, swimming's not goofy at all.

02:18:31.000 Swimming is brutal.

02:18:32.000 Yeah, swimming and yoga is what I'm going to get into hard just to get my body back in shape.

02:18:38.000 In a way that my core starts to catch up and develop before I go in there and get put in these funky positions sparring or picking a guy up.

02:18:47.000 That's been one of my problems.

02:18:48.000 Sometimes I'm slamming a guy or something and that's when I get hurt because I came back from a back injury and then I slam him and then I re-hurt that back injury and I should have rehabbed it better, should have taken the time to really build my core back up.

02:19:01.000 So that's going to be not my focus, I'm going to be doing everything else, but that's going to be a priority of mine at the beginning is swimming and yoga.

02:19:08.000 Well, listen, dude, we're behind you 100% and your website.

02:19:11.000 Let's put it out there one more time.

02:19:14.000 Fightfortheforgotten.org.com.

02:19:17.000 And then water4.org.

02:19:21.000 Fightfortheforgotten.com.

02:19:22.000 And there's a donate button on there.

02:19:24.000 So please, whatever you can do, folks, donate.

02:19:28.000 This is a beautiful cause.

02:19:29.000 I think what you're doing is awesome.

02:19:31.000 It's so inspirational.

02:19:32.000 And you're just an awesome guy, man.

02:19:34.000 Just happy to give you a platform to let people know what you're doing.

02:19:38.000 Yeah, well, I can't thank you enough for what you've done for even...

02:19:42.000 I mean, I know you don't even want props, but whenever you did the Bitcoin and then whatever came in, you matched it.

02:19:49.000 I mean, that funded a well plus more.

02:19:51.000 Let's fund some more wells, baby. 1.00

02:19:53.000 Let's do it.

02:19:53.000 I'll be more than happy.

02:19:54.000 That'd be awesome, man.

02:19:55.000 Thank you so much.

02:19:55.000 You're an awesome guy.

02:19:56.000 Thank you, brother.

02:19:56.000 Thank you.

02:19:57.000 Justin the Viking on Twitter, holler at him.

02:20:00.000 Go tweet him and go to the website and donate whatever you can.

02:20:05.000 This is a real, legit, awesome humanitarian cause, and you're an awesome guy.

02:20:10.000 Thank you, Justin.

02:20:10.000 Thank you so much.

02:20:11.000 Alright, fuckers, we'll be back in a little bit with Eddie Huang. 0.98

02:20:15.000 He's got a new CBS sitcom, and we'll be right back with him at 3 o'clock, which is about 25 minutes. 0.98

02:20:21.000 See you!

02:20:34.000 I don't know what's going on.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 26, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren

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