The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #687 - Justin Wren

00:00:00.000 We're live.

00:00:00.000 What's with the funky bag, fella?

00:00:02.000 Look at that.

00:00:03.000 Beautiful little hippie case you got going on there. 0.74

00:00:05.000 You got the bandana rocking.

00:00:07.000 The pygmy has returned.

00:00:09.000 When did you become the big pygmy and not the viking? 0.99

00:00:12.000 Yeah, I think that was just something that kind of naturally changed a couple of weeks ago.

00:00:17.000 Oh, a couple weeks ago?

00:00:18.000 Yeah.

00:00:18.000 So you've returned, everybody.

00:00:20.000 Justin Wren.

00:00:22.000 You're going to be fighting for Bellator now.

00:00:25.000 Yeah, it's Bellator. 0.98

00:00:26.000 Pull this sucker right up to you. 1.00

00:00:27.000 Absolutely. 0.95

00:00:28.000 It's Bellator 141, and yeah, it's Friday night, August 28th.

00:00:33.000 We'll be on Spike.

00:00:34.000 So you talked about doing this when you were here before, and you said, you know, it was a good way to raise awareness for your cause, Fight for the Vergotten.

00:00:41.000 I got the t-shirt on right now.

00:00:43.000 Is it fightforthevergotten.org?

00:00:46.000 Fightforthevergotten.org right now, yeah.

00:00:48.000 And fightforthevergotten.com will be changed in a matter of a day or two.

00:00:52.000 So you decided to make a comeback just to try to raise awareness and help these pygmies. 1.00

00:00:58.000 That's the number one motivation for sure.

00:01:00.000 Second would be, man, I love the sport.

00:01:02.000 I love the sport.

00:01:03.000 Just like you.

00:01:04.000 But, yeah, I think that's a great opportunity to give my family a voice.

00:01:09.000 And how long has it been since you fought?

00:01:11.000 It's been five years, bro.

00:01:13.000 Wow!

00:01:13.000 Five years, two months.

00:01:15.000 How old are you now?

00:01:16.000 I'm 28. You're still a youngin'.

00:01:17.000 Damn, man. 0.99

00:01:18.000 I think I've still got at least seven years. 1.00

00:01:20.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:01:21.000 Especially heavyweights.

00:01:22.000 Heavyweights.

00:01:23.000 I watched some videos of you training, too, man.

00:01:25.000 You're looking good, dude, for five years off.

00:01:27.000 That's crazy.

00:01:27.000 Yeah, thanks.

00:01:28.000 Yeah, I guess in the forest it wasn't too much of a fatty diet like here in the States.

00:01:34.000 Well, it's not just that.

00:01:35.000 Like, you didn't take any beatings.

00:01:38.000 You didn't, you know, no gym wars, no stress on your joints, all that.

00:01:43.000 I got to heal up a lot on the battle wound kind of things.

00:01:47.000 I mean, I went through a lot of sickness and stuff.

00:01:49.000 But besides that, like, yeah, fighting-wise, I healed up from a lot of injuries.

00:01:53.000 Imagine if, like, you have a malaria actually gives you endurance or something crazy.

00:01:57.000 That'd be awesome.

00:01:57.000 I'd go get it again.

00:01:59.000 You know, because they say that, like, certain things are actually good for injuries, like bee stings, like, are good for arthritis.

00:02:05.000 I didn't know that.

00:02:06.000 In some strange way, yeah.

00:02:07.000 Yeah, like, they put bee stings on people that have certain types of arthritis and it actually helps relieve them.

00:02:14.000 Imagine if people found out that, like, malaria, because you were saying you were, like, basically on death's door.

00:02:19.000 Yeah, I was about to die, for sure.

00:02:21.000 One thing that's crazy, say insect bites, there's a way that they do sutures or stitches in the Congo with these crazy ants.

00:02:30.000 And they're these army ants or soldier ants that literally they pierce your skin.

00:02:35.000 And so they'll just take it and let it bite a wound and then they pull the body off.

00:02:40.000 And so they leave the head, leave the mandibles or the jaw that literally close your wound that way.

00:02:44.000 What?

00:02:45.000 I've been bit by them, man.

00:02:46.000 They're terrible. 1.00

00:02:47.000 That's fucking crazy. 1.00

00:02:48.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:02:49.000 So you just walk around with a bunch of heads on a cut.

00:02:52.000 Right.

00:02:52.000 Absolutely.

00:02:53.000 Does it work?

00:02:53.000 It works.

00:02:54.000 It works for sure.

00:02:55.000 So it's like a staple.

00:02:56.000 Yeah, it's like a staple.

00:02:57.000 Yeah, it'd be just like getting staples, I guess.

00:02:59.000 Necessity, the mother of invention.

00:03:01.000 I don't know if you know this, but this is a crazy malaria fact you could throw around.

00:03:06.000 Malaria has killed half of the people that have ever died ever in the world.

00:03:11.000 Wow.

00:03:11.000 That's crazy.

00:03:13.000 That's nuts.

00:03:14.000 Had no idea.

00:03:15.000 But I believe it.

00:03:18.000 Absolutely believe it because it's terrible.

00:03:21.000 I've known people that have thought of it.

00:03:22.000 Look at that picture.

00:03:24.000 Yeah, there you go, bro. 1.00

00:03:25.000 That's fucking nuts. 1.00

00:03:27.000 That is nuts. 1.00

00:03:29.000 Wow, those guys have some really long...

00:03:31.000 We're looking at a photo of the army ants being used to suture a wound.

00:03:36.000 Yeah, and those ones have these crazy long and slender ones, but the ones in Congo, they have these thick, just nuts. 0.62

00:03:44.000 So, yeah, look right there.

00:03:45.000 Look at that one up top.

00:03:46.000 That's crazy.

00:03:49.000 Is that fake? 1.00

00:03:50.000 That looks fake as fuck. 0.99

00:03:53.000 But... 0.99

00:03:54.000 That's just stitches.

00:03:55.000 Yeah.

00:03:55.000 That's, well, necessity, right?

00:03:58.000 I mean, you gotta figure out a way to close things up.

00:04:00.000 There's no crazy glue in the Congo, right?

00:04:02.000 No, no.

00:04:03.000 They use other kinds of stuff that's real sticky sap to kind of mend things together.

00:04:09.000 From trees, they also use vines to tie up a bunch of stuff.

00:04:12.000 Like soccer balls, they'll use a t-shirt, old t-shirt, a rag, and then they just use these vines and tie them so tightly that it becomes a perfectly round ball.

00:04:21.000 Wow.

00:04:21.000 Not perfectly round, but round enough to kick around.

00:04:24.000 Well, that's one of the things about soccer that people find appealing is that it's not that hard to create a ball, and all you need is just flat ground.

00:04:31.000 Right.

00:04:31.000 You know, that's why it's such a good sport for people that don't have money.

00:04:34.000 Yeah, they even play with half... 0.99

00:04:37.000 Flattened balls that they kick around because they still use it.

00:04:41.000 Yeah, everybody's using the same ball.

00:04:43.000 I guess it's not as good.

00:04:45.000 Yeah, they get beaten up and popped and everything.

00:04:48.000 Because they sell the really cheap soccer balls anyways.

00:04:50.000 They're only going to last a couple weeks.

00:04:52.000 Now, when you say the Congo, the Congo itself is really huge, right?

00:04:57.000 I mean, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think it's as wide as the United States of America.

00:05:03.000 Yeah, I think it might be like three quarters of the continental United States.

00:05:07.000 Something like that.

00:05:08.000 It's the 10th largest country in the world, I believe.

00:05:11.000 And so it's massive.

00:05:12.000 It's only got about 74 million people, but I think 85% of those people, or maybe 80-85% live on less than a dollar a day.

00:05:22.000 Yeah, it's the flip-flops between the poorest country in the world and second poorest, but it is the most underdeveloped country, so...

00:05:30.000 Least amount of roads, clean water, education, medical, like it's just the most underdeveloped.

00:05:36.000 Like when I go to Uganda, I kind of get the feeling of whenever I come back from Africa to the United States and how it's just like, wow, this is really developed compared to there.

00:05:46.000 When I go from Congo to Uganda, I feel like, wow, Uganda's really developed.

00:05:49.000 They got 3D movies, a yogurt land.

00:05:52.000 They have a KFC. Actually, they have like four or five KFCs now.

00:05:56.000 Wow.

00:05:56.000 How racist.

00:05:57.000 No, I... First thing that gets there, KFC. What's next?

00:06:03.000 Watermelons? 1.00

00:06:04.000 Assholes. 0.99

00:06:05.000 They have, what is it? 1.00

00:06:09.000 Oh, it's kind of fine dining at KFC. KFC is?

00:06:12.000 Yeah, they have a waiter.

00:06:13.000 Really?

00:06:13.000 Yeah, it's real nice.

00:06:15.000 You've got a charging station for your smartphone in Uganda.

00:06:19.000 Really?

00:06:19.000 Yeah.

00:06:20.000 Wow. 0.96

00:06:21.000 KFC's pretty goddamn delicious. 0.95

00:06:23.000 I know it's supposedly not good for you, but I'll tell you what, man. 0.95

00:06:26.000 I indulge in KFC every couple months.

00:06:29.000 I'll buy some KFC, and I either eat it or I wait till it gets cold, and I eat it with hot sauce. 0.98

00:06:35.000 KFC with some habanero hot sauce, get some El Yucateca, the real Mexican shit that you gotta go to those funky grocery stores to buy, or online. 1.00

00:06:43.000 Some good stuff. 0.99

00:06:44.000 Oh, dude.

00:06:45.000 It's just not good for you, apparently.

00:06:47.000 Yeah.

00:06:47.000 We're talking about how they're putting sucralose in Diet Pepsi.

00:06:50.000 You need to figure out a way to make Kentucky Fried Chicken good for you.

00:06:53.000 Yeah, that'd be great.

00:06:54.000 That's the worst thing about all the tasty food is it's bad for you.

00:06:57.000 Exactly.

00:06:58.000 It's the opposite. 1.00

00:06:58.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

00:06:59.000 What's up with that? 1.00

00:07:01.000 This is first world problems, like literally.

00:07:03.000 If anybody can talk about first world problems, it's you.

00:07:05.000 I mean, a guy who goes from being a reality star on The Ultimate Fighter, fighting in the UFC, and then...

00:07:14.000 We're good to go.

00:07:34.000 And you've done incredible things.

00:07:37.000 And because of the money that was raised, because your show's on here, there's the Fight for the Forgotten website.

00:07:42.000 Oh, yeah.

00:07:42.000 How many wells have you created now?

00:07:45.000 We just celebrated, as of yesterday, our 25th water well.

00:07:50.000 Oh, my God.

00:07:51.000 Yeah.

00:07:52.000 And what's so great about that to me is I was there for the first 13 water wells.

00:07:57.000 And now we've built...

00:07:58.000 So what I love, and that website that was up, was we're partnered with Water4.

00:08:03.000 Now it's water4.org, so the number four.

00:08:06.000 But man, it's kind of like we set up an exit strategy.

00:08:11.000 This is a lifelong goal for me, and I'll be going back wholeheartedly, everything else.

00:08:15.000 But our goal is to empower the locals to be able to do it themselves.

00:08:19.000 I was there for the first 13 water wells.

00:08:22.000 People from the Director of Implementation of Water Fork come in and teach our guys hydrology, geology, all the different ins and outs of how to drill a well and protect it and all the sanitation.

00:08:33.000 But we're investing in the locals so that they can I think?

00:09:00.000 Million-dollar drilling rig and Westerners that are, you know, water engineers, and that's great.

00:09:06.000 But they'll go into a community and kind of say, you know, get back.

00:09:10.000 We're here to do this for you because you can't do it for yourself.

00:09:13.000 And then the parts are so expensive, they're not going to be able to repair it when it breaks.

00:09:17.000 And there's a good chance, like, I think, two and three of those expensive ones, or at least, no, one-third of them, don't operate after a year of drilling it.

00:09:27.000 And so what we want to do is go in there, teach the locals how to do it themselves, create a local economy for it and stimulate that, give people jobs, and then let the community feel a part of it.

00:09:39.000 So we look for day laborers in the communities we go to and give them a job while we're there. 1.00

00:09:43.000 Invite them in on the process, teach them some of it.

00:09:45.000 We've acquired some of those guys that are just big, strong, love helping people.

00:09:50.000 Now they're part of our team.

00:09:52.000 But the core of our team graduated from university in degrees of community development.

00:09:57.000 So that's what we want to do we want to go in there empower the locals and yeah, I'm a big part of it and but what I want to do is be able to fan the flames and say you can do it because a lot of international aid Tells the locals that they can't do it for themselves Maybe maybe they don't say that but it's kind of the way they go about attacking the problem and you got to go about it in a way that That kind of creates dignity for the locals instead of kind of robs them of dignity

00:10:27.000 where they feel like they can't help themselves.

00:10:29.000 That's a great way of approaching it.

00:10:31.000 I'm really, I'm so happy you're doing that.

00:10:32.000 I love that.

00:10:33.000 I love that you're trying to help these people become a part of this solution, you know, instead of like someone solving it for them.

00:10:40.000 Now, when you're involved in digging these wells, and you're saying these expensive wells break, or the machines, like the pumps, how many parts are involved?

00:10:50.000 Is it like a lot of stuff?

00:10:53.000 Is there different ways to do it?

00:10:54.000 It's a lot.

00:10:55.000 It depends on how deep it is.

00:10:56.000 Yeah, there are multiple ways of drilling a well.

00:10:59.000 The way we go about it is, I would say, more simple but harder, a lot harder labor-intensive.

00:11:07.000 But it's just as safe.

00:11:10.000 Well, for instance, the deep wells, those are great.

00:11:14.000 And honestly, in a place like Ethiopia or places where the water tables are super deep, you're going to need those.

00:11:21.000 So those are absolutely part of the solution.

00:11:24.000 We need those water engineers. 1.00

00:11:25.000 We need those people doing that.

00:11:27.000 But whenever, say, in the Congo, it's a place that is Dangerous.

00:11:31.000 There's lots of rebel groups, lots of instability.

00:11:35.000 They're not going to drive a million dollar or half a million dollar drilling rig deep into the forest over these bridges that are notorious for collapsing and taking and washing away big lorries or 18-wheelers.

00:11:49.000 They're not going to drive them across there.

00:11:51.000 They can't get on the roads that we go on because they're heavy, they're dense, the parts break on the travel just out to the villages.

00:11:57.000 And then once you get there, like going into the Pygmy Villages where we are, sometimes it's taken up to two days, I think, to get our equipment into the village after we traveled there because we have to hike it all in.

00:12:08.000 And we can hike an hour off the nearest road to the village.

00:12:12.000 We can hike three hours from the nearest road to the village.

00:12:16.000 And so we're hiking in over a ton.

00:12:19.000 So when I'm saying this is hard, like our guys are, I think they're just as much fighters or more than I am because they're gritting down, they're hauling this stuff in from the augers.

00:12:30.000 The way we do it is we use a tripod and we use augers and ropes and pulleys and we use these chisels that go down and they're single prong, triple prong.

00:12:41.000 And so we have all these tools we can use for each obstacle that we're going to hit as we go down in different geological layers.

00:12:48.000 This is incredible.

00:12:49.000 So you're walking three hours with a ton of equipment.

00:12:52.000 Yeah.

00:12:53.000 Walking.

00:12:53.000 Like anywhere from gravel to bags of cement that are 100 pounds to the rock breaker that can be 40 pounds, another one that's 80 pounds, and another one that's like 130 pounds.

00:13:04.000 Jesus Christ.

00:13:05.000 Yeah, and we're taking in all the PVC pipes and the galvanized pipes.

00:13:10.000 Yeah, everything that you can think of, sand, bricks, and we have to hike all that in from the roadside into the village.

00:13:20.000 So it can take two days of going back and forth to the truck if we're walking that long with all the supplies.

00:13:25.000 Two to three days of just walking with giant augers and steel pipes and sandbags.

00:13:32.000 Normally it's like a day.

00:13:33.000 We get there and we take all our stuff.

00:13:36.000 But yeah, it's taken a long time before because, yeah, it's a fight to even get there to start the work.

00:13:41.000 And then once we dig, man, that's the biggest fight.

00:13:43.000 Yeah, you must be exhausted by the time you even get there.

00:13:46.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:13:46.000 You're hiking with all this weight.

00:13:48.000 Wow.

00:13:49.000 And then once we start drilling, our average well in other parts of the world where the obstacles aren't as big, they can bust out a well in a week, 10 days.

00:13:59.000 But where we are, we average 10 to 16 days per water well.

00:14:03.000 And so our guys are out there and living with the pygmies. 1.00

00:14:06.000 That's something that we selected every member of our team Based on, can they survive in the forest?

00:14:14.000 And more than that, can they love my pygmy family?

00:14:18.000 Because that's important because other people around there, a lot of them don't love them, hate them, or discriminate.

00:14:23.000 So we want to find people that are passionate about the people, passionate about the water crisis.

00:14:29.000 And then that way, yeah, we can then teach them and put the tools in their hands and invest in them.

00:14:35.000 And so that's what the last four years has been for me, really investing in good people, people that believe in it.

00:14:42.000 And then from there, we can fan the flames for them.

00:14:45.000 Is it perplexing for you to have discovered this place and, you know, to being alive in the 21st century with all the modern communication and all that and to know that these people are out there and no one has tried to do this before and that you're stumbling across these giant groups of people that don't have anyone looking out for them?

00:15:05.000 Yeah, yeah, it's nuts.

00:15:07.000 I mean, I would say that I'm not the only guy that's ever tried to help them, but I would say that maybe we're trying to take an approach, and that's what's so awesome about the university that I'm partnered with.

00:15:19.000 They've been working with the Pygmies for years and years. 1.00

00:15:22.000 The guy that's leading the way, the Dean of the School of Community Development, he's been doing it since the year I was born.

00:15:28.000 And then he started with the university there for the last 10 years.

00:15:32.000 So I went to them to say like, hey, how can we do this in a strategic way that the impact will last?

00:15:38.000 It'll keep going on and on and on instead of a lot of...

00:15:43.000 I don't know if it's American culture or what, but it's so fast, you know, and we want the quick fix.

00:15:48.000 And the quick fix a lot of times isn't the best route.

00:15:51.000 The results can just be a temporary one where we have a...

00:15:56.000 I call it the show up, blow up, and blow out technique.

00:15:59.000 We show up, we do the show, we take the pictures, and then we leave and we never come back.

00:16:04.000 And so what we want to do is be opposite.

00:16:07.000 We want to build relationships, get in touch.

00:16:10.000 We want to be like a family with them and then show them that, hey, we're not just here for land because that's what we started with first.

00:16:18.000 We got them 2,470 acres of land.

00:16:21.000 That's 10 square kilometers in the forest.

00:16:24.000 Then we did the water, and now we're doing food.

00:16:26.000 You got them, meaning you purchased it for them or had a purchase for them?

00:16:30.000 Right.

00:16:30.000 We petitioned, lobbied, and basically said, yeah, we went to battle saying, I mean in a peaceful way, but said, these people are the first people of Congo.

00:16:42.000 Not just that.

00:16:43.000 A lot of people say they're the first people of Africa.

00:16:45.000 They're one of the oldest people groups.

00:16:47.000 They're so peaceful.

00:16:47.000 They're so loving.

00:16:48.000 Well, if that's true, then that's the origins of humanity.

00:16:52.000 I was just reading this Bill Nye thing about humans.

00:16:55.000 It was just some quote that he had said about the human race.

00:17:00.000 It's been proven now that we are literally all one race and the only thing that's different is our exposure to ultraviolet light and different environments have changed the way we look and how our bodies react to the environment.

00:17:10.000 But if that's the case...

00:17:12.000 I didn't know that, but I love that standard effect.

00:17:13.000 Well, we know that all people, as far as we know today, you know, the knowledge kind of grows and changes over the years, but we know today that all human beings, as far as we know, came from Africa.

00:17:23.000 So if that's the case, these people you're dealing with could very well be the oldest humans in the world.

00:17:29.000 And it kind of makes sense if you really think about it.

00:17:31.000 I mean, that's where the primates evolved and came down from the trees and started experimenting and moving along and trying different environments and spreading out throughout the land.

00:17:44.000 It's pretty nuts.

00:17:45.000 You're like at the cradle of life.

00:17:47.000 It's really a bizarre place.

00:17:49.000 Yeah.

00:17:50.000 All I know is, man, the culture there, their hearts, they're such sweet people.

00:17:58.000 And I don't use that word a whole lot, but they're just...

00:18:01.000 They're sweet as can be.

00:18:02.000 And so whenever we went in with my team, basically it was like local-led.

00:18:08.000 I mean, I was in the picture, but kind of playing behind the scenes when it came to the negotiating.

00:18:15.000 And they went in there, and it was the dean of the School of Community Development.

00:18:18.000 It was my guy that's the director of Fight for the Forgotten in Congo.

00:18:23.000 And they said, these are the first people of Congo.

00:18:26.000 Why is it that they have zero land of their own?

00:18:29.000 Because shouldn't they have some land to call their own?

00:18:32.000 And we know that looking through history and whether it was you or whether it was your grandfather, we stole this land from them.

00:18:39.000 We stole it.

00:18:40.000 They have none of their own.

00:18:41.000 And don't they have a right to have some land?

00:18:44.000 And so that's kind of where, yeah, we just lobbied on their behalf and then said, so if I bought the land in Fight for the Forgotten, if we would have bought it in our name, we would have gotten a five-year certificate and we would have had to renew things and fees and everything every five years.

00:18:58.000 If we bought it in the name of the university there that we partner with, It would have been a 25-year certificate, but then at the end of the 25 years, we'd have to pay the same price that we purchased it for 25 years earlier.

00:19:09.000 Would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars every 25 years, maybe more.

00:19:13.000 And then we were thinking, it's kind of cool.

00:19:18.000 In Africa, I would say a lot of the countries, at least, my understanding is that it was the colonialists or colonists or however you say that, they were the ones that set up the boundaries of the countries.

00:19:32.000 It wasn't the tribes.

00:19:34.000 And so, like say Rwanda, the Hutu and Tutsi, they probably wouldn't have put their country together right there because they've had a long history of disputes with each other.

00:19:43.000 So they wouldn't be in the same country.

00:19:44.000 They would have been two different countries.

00:19:46.000 Same thing in Congo, there's over 200 tribes. 0.59

00:19:48.000 So, in Congo, what's very, I don't know, here we're all, America, America Pride, or Texas, and things like that, but in Congo, it's about what tribe you're from.

00:19:58.000 And so, in a lot of parts of Africa, they're really proud about their tribe.

00:20:02.000 And so, on the government level, the strongest thing in court was buying the land in the name of a tribe, because that's what they respect, that's what they value, and yet nobody was petitioned.

00:20:13.000 Petitioning and lobbying on behalf of the Pygmies. 0.98

00:20:16.000 So that's what we wanted to do.

00:20:17.000 We wanted to go in and say these people deserve some land.

00:20:20.000 What we did was buy it from the people that originally stole it from them, whether it was them or their grandfather.

00:20:25.000 And so that benefited the people that were basically oppressing them financially.

00:20:29.000 And we gave them years and years worth of salary.

00:20:34.000 To work with us.

00:20:35.000 And then on both sides, we said, so they benefited financially and the pygmies benefited by having their own land. 1.00

00:20:40.000 You can't give them a water well without them owning the land that they're on.

00:20:44.000 And so then we said, how can we give you both water?

00:20:47.000 That's what the next step is.

00:20:49.000 And the next step after that is food.

00:20:50.000 How can we start a farming project?

00:20:52.000 Teach the pygmies how to farm correctly or farm really for the first time. 1.00

00:20:56.000 A lot of them worked for their former masters and stuff like that.

00:21:00.000 But then with the makpala, which means non-pygmies, we're like, how can we teach you better farming practices? 0.97

00:21:07.000 You need to plant your seeds deeper.

00:21:09.000 You need to put your seeds farther apart because they're not producing fruit because the corn is only half of a cob instead of a full cob because your plants are basically choking themselves out.

00:21:20.000 So we have three agriculturalists.

00:21:22.000 We're interning right now.

00:21:23.000 They've already done a great job, but we're wanting to expand from three villages to ten villages.

00:21:28.000 It's just an immense sacrifice that you've done, that you've taken on, and it's probably quite difficult to find people that have the same kind of passion for it that you have.

00:21:42.000 Do you find that to be the case?

00:21:44.000 Yeah.

00:21:45.000 Your passion has got to be infectious.

00:21:47.000 I mean, a lot of people, I'm sure, like I have been, moved by it.

00:21:52.000 Thank you.

00:21:52.000 But it's got to be hard to get people to go to the Congo, though, dude.

00:21:55.000 Yeah.

00:21:55.000 Well, that's the reason we invest in the locals.

00:21:58.000 They're there.

00:21:59.000 They're there in Congo.

00:22:00.000 The people we selected to solve the water crisis, they know what it's like to go without clean water.

00:22:08.000 So if they can be the answer to that, they're going to be the ones even more passionate about it than me.

00:22:13.000 Also, it's the old adage, teach a man to fish.

00:22:16.000 Give a man a fish and just one fish. 0.89

00:22:20.000 That's it.

00:22:20.000 You're teaching these people.

00:22:22.000 Now, we got off the subject of the wells.

00:22:26.000 The tripod and the auger.

00:22:28.000 So, what kind of a machine is involved in digging this thing?

00:22:34.000 It's been developed by Water 4 and they're awesome.

00:22:37.000 An actual machine that is small enough that we can carry it into the villages.

00:22:42.000 How much does it weigh?

00:22:44.000 Maybe I shouldn't quote myself on this, but I think it's around 150, 150, 200. So you guys have to carry that for hours.

00:22:53.000 You could.

00:22:53.000 Some of the land is only like a 30-minute hike off the nearest quote-unquote road.

00:22:58.000 That's just dirt and clay and silt and big boulders.

00:23:03.000 But yeah, most of them are 30 minutes an hour, two hours, one's even three hours off the nearest road.

00:23:09.000 So yeah, we got to hike that stuff all in.

00:23:12.000 But I would say that the manual drilling method, which has been approved by UNICEF and USAID and all these other major organizations that say it can be just as clean, just as safe as the deep water wells as long as we do it to a high standard and keep a high integrity when we do it.

00:23:30.000 Which means we backfill it with a clay sanitary seal.

00:23:34.000 We put a cement plug on there so that way there's no sort of bacteria or anything else that can get down into our well.

00:23:42.000 We gotta protect the water table.

00:23:43.000 And so we do that every single time to a high standard.

00:23:48.000 But yeah, so whenever we're doing it, the machine is us.

00:23:51.000 The manual drilling method, we have wrenches and those augers.

00:23:54.000 And so those augers would look kind of like a folder.

00:23:56.000 Like an ice auger?

00:23:58.000 Yeah, very similar.

00:23:59.000 It would be almost like a coffee can with two claws on the bottom of it.

00:24:04.000 And at the top, it's got a stem that attaches to a drilling stem.

00:24:08.000 And then at the top, I mean, whenever you're starting from the first...

00:24:11.000 down the first two or three feet, like you can see the auger and you just...

00:24:16.000 So it's totally by hand.

00:24:18.000 You're just twisting.

00:24:19.000 Yeah, you just twist.

00:24:20.000 Almost like a pummel.

00:24:20.000 Good for the forearms.

00:24:21.000 Oh, yeah, man.

00:24:22.000 Dude, my forearms and my...

00:24:23.000 Well, my right bicep over here and my left tricep over here.

00:24:26.000 You've got to switch it up, dude.

00:24:28.000 I know.

00:24:28.000 We need to have the augers changing, but as of now, it's just the same way.

00:24:33.000 But yeah, so it's us just drilling, and we can go up to 150 feet deep in the ground.

00:24:40.000 And so when we're doing that, it's brutal.

00:24:43.000 I think the deepest we've gone is like 70. So when you're doing 70 feet, what kind of a pipe do you have to keep attaching a longer and longer pipe to it?

00:24:51.000 Six-meter, 20-foot-long segments of this drilling stem.

00:24:57.000 It's a square tube that's really thick, really strong, really heavy.

00:25:02.000 And then we attach that.

00:25:03.000 At the bottom we have a rope that's secured to it so we can crank it up.

00:25:08.000 So we crank it up on the way up, but we drill down.

00:25:11.000 So you're doing it all by hand.

00:25:13.000 You get to a certain distance, depth rather, and then you put another segment on and then you start from scratch?

00:25:20.000 Right.

00:25:20.000 We attach the segments the deeper we go.

00:25:23.000 So once we're 20 feet deep, we got to attach another drilling stem.

00:25:27.000 And once we're 40 foot, we have two drilling stems.

00:25:29.000 Once we're 60 foot, we have three drilling stems.

00:25:31.000 And how do you know where to drill?

00:25:32.000 Do you have one of those dudes with one of them wishbones walking around?

00:25:36.000 Did we talk about this before?

00:25:37.000 No.

00:25:38.000 I always wondered if that divining stuff is real.

00:25:40.000 I have no clue.

00:25:42.000 I hear some people say it's legit, but I haven't ever seen it in action.

00:25:45.000 I hate that expression.

00:25:47.000 I hear.

00:25:48.000 Legit.

00:25:48.000 I hear.

00:25:49.000 Yeah, no, I have no clue, to be honest, the validity.

00:25:52.000 I just don't know how it could possibly really work.

00:25:54.000 I have a friend who had a well dug out here, and they hired this guy to come over, and they had the two sticks, and he's standing there, and he's telling them where to dig.

00:26:04.000 That's not how we go about it.

00:26:06.000 We...

00:26:07.000 We have a VES machine, which is basically we hook up a car battery and some of these other electronic devices and throw it in the ground.

00:26:18.000 And then you have a laptop out there, and it shows us all this on a graph.

00:26:24.000 But the way I did it for the first 13 wells, now our team's been trained in that as well.

00:26:28.000 So that's what's so cool about...

00:26:30.000 We're good to go.

00:26:35.000 We're good to go.

00:26:50.000 Now, with the VES machine, we can see if it's sandstone, if it's quartz, if it's granite, what kind of rock is underneath, where the water table is.

00:26:59.000 We know how deep we need to drill.

00:27:02.000 But at first, for the first 13 wells, we were just trial and error.

00:27:06.000 We'd dig, and we even had one spot where we drilled for 10 or 12 days.

00:27:12.000 And we hit water, but then all of a sudden we hit a layer of quartz underneath it.

00:27:16.000 And so there was just about six feet of clean water on top of this quartz.

00:27:23.000 It was deep, but we needed more.

00:27:25.000 We needed to break through that quartz and then be able to have, hopefully, what would be right underneath that as a rushing...

00:27:33.000 Awesome aquifer for us to tap into.

00:27:35.000 That would make that well sustain a lot longer.

00:27:38.000 But we couldn't break through it at that time.

00:27:40.000 We just didn't have the right tools.

00:27:42.000 Now we do.

00:27:42.000 But we just had to pick up and move.

00:27:46.000 So we picked up, moved maybe a football field away.

00:27:49.000 And we went down the hill a little bit and said, hopefully we don't hit the courts layer.

00:27:54.000 And yeah, just a football field away.

00:27:55.000 The geology was different.

00:27:57.000 The water, the recharge rate was great.

00:28:00.000 The water kept coming into our well.

00:28:02.000 And then we have to do a lot of different things, like we have to plunge and bale and develop the well to where it'll be clean.

00:28:11.000 We put a gravel pack around it, all this different stuff to make sure...

00:28:15.000 So the gravel pack acts as a filter?

00:28:16.000 Is that how it works?

00:28:17.000 Kind of.

00:28:17.000 And what it does is it keeps...

00:28:19.000 So we put down a PVC, like, four-inch...

00:28:28.000 Sorry, but we put the pipe down there.

00:28:30.000 And the gravel pack goes around it.

00:28:33.000 And the gravel pack kind of keeps any dirt, silt, sand, depending on what layer we're in, it keeps that from coming into our well.

00:28:41.000 So that way the water that is inside of our casing, there we go, our four-inch casing pipe, that allows, it has like little slits in it.

00:28:50.000 Maybe it would be like the size of a A saw if you just kind of put a saw in there and it's every like centimeter apart from each other and that way inside of our casing and Before the water touches our pipe like it's crystal clear.

00:29:04.000 It's clean We test it all that stuff and so the gravel pack keeps the sand the the dirt the silt anything out of our well Wow That's incredible, man.

00:29:15.000 It's just incredible, the amount of thinking and planning and all that's involved in just getting people what everybody here just totally takes for granted, water.

00:29:26.000 Yeah.

00:29:27.000 It's taken us a month in one spot, a month, because we had a failed well.

00:29:31.000 And, man, it's brutal.

00:29:33.000 And sometimes, man, I'm thankful that I was a fighter, because sometimes you have to Bite down on your mouthpiece and just keep swinging whenever you want to give up and you have a team out there that's tired.

00:29:46.000 So in between the failed well and the other one, we took two days off, but we can't go back to, we call it Bunia, the town where we can kind of...

00:29:55.000 Rest and get some good food and come back out.

00:29:57.000 What we did was go to a little market and get more dried fish and some more rice and some more beans.

00:30:02.000 And we're like, hey, we're out here.

00:30:04.000 We're not stopping until we finish, until we get these people clean water.

00:30:08.000 And when you look at what they're drinking, we do the water walks with them.

00:30:12.000 I love telling my team, like, let's do the walk that they have to go on to get water.

00:30:17.000 And, man, I've gone 45 minutes, an hour.

00:30:21.000 Walking with the women because it's the women that collect the water in that culture because the men are off in the fields or they're off hunting or they're off doing stuff.

00:30:29.000 So the women go and get the water and it can be a 45 minute hour hike with these 20 liter jerry cans and 20 liters I think full is like 40 or 44 pounds whenever it's full and they're going to get dirty water. 1.00

00:30:44.000 Dirty water.

00:30:46.000 That is a 45 minute hike away from them.

00:30:48.000 And they're bringing back one or two of those 44 pound jerry cans.

00:30:53.000 So some of these Mabuti pygmy women are literally carrying their body weight or more in water. 1.00

00:30:59.000 Because they're tiny people.

00:31:00.000 Right.

00:31:01.000 Wow.

00:31:01.000 Yeah, most of the hunters, we were given this Filaria treatment.

00:31:06.000 A filarial worm is this crazy kind of...

00:31:09.000 It comes from black fly bites, but it's from contaminated water that the flies go to and breed in.

00:31:14.000 They come and they bite you, and then you can get river blindness from it.

00:31:18.000 What's river blindness?

00:31:20.000 River blindness is a disease that...

00:31:22.000 There's a pygmy woman named Mama Miriamo, and I love her to death, and she's so great.

00:31:28.000 But she's lost five of her seven children.

00:31:31.000 Due to this illness and her husband.

00:31:34.000 There's a video on it too.

00:31:37.000 I think it's called the Opportunity at Freedom or something that's on the Waterfore site.

00:31:41.000 But five of seven children are gone and her husband and it's all waterborne disease and she has river blindness.

00:31:47.000 So not only has she lost all her, not all of her children, but five and her husband, but she's blind and she's blind because of river blindness.

00:31:56.000 And so the worms get in your body and there's five different kinds.

00:32:00.000 Of filarial worms and one kind of the worms, like the babies, go to your retina, I think, and they attack and eat and live and sleep in the retina of your eyes until you have no vision left. 1.00

00:32:14.000 Fuck. 0.99

00:32:15.000 And four of the five don't do that. 1.00

00:32:18.000 But what it does is it irritates your skin.

00:32:21.000 Supposedly, I've had it.

00:32:22.000 I've had to take the treatment.

00:32:24.000 Whenever I took the pill, it made my body itch, and that's how you know if you had it or not, is if your skin itches.

00:32:30.000 Because it's killing the parasites?

00:32:31.000 Right, it's killing the worms, killing the parasites.

00:32:33.000 And so I was like, man, if I have this, and if our team has it, because we treated our well drillers first, and some of them broke out in rashes and hives and really were itching.

00:32:43.000 And it's just a part of it.

00:32:44.000 If you go to that region, you're going to get it, if you're out there long enough.

00:32:49.000 Maybe not if you go for a week, but if you go for an extended period of time, you need to at least take the treatment to make sure you don't have that.

00:32:57.000 And so I was like, man, if I supposedly had it and if my team has it, then I know the pygmies, it's like ravaging them, you know? 1.00

00:33:05.000 And so we went to the different villages and took a scale and from that we knew how much medicine we should give them.

00:33:11.000 I talked to this guy, Dr. Peter Hotez.

00:33:14.000 He's an expert in tropical diseases.

00:33:19.000 Okay.

00:33:19.000 And he said that, this blew me away, he said that 100% of people that live in tropical climates have parasites.

00:33:28.000 Oh yeah, I totally 100% believe that.

00:33:31.000 That's insane.

00:33:33.000 I know it's insane.

00:33:33.000 You live there, you know it.

00:33:35.000 This environment that you're in, that you're going and you're digging these wells, describe to us, if you could, what is it like?

00:33:45.000 You're talking about intensely dense vegetation.

00:33:48.000 What kind of animal life and what kind of wildlife is around you and bugs?

00:33:53.000 Oh yeah, bugs, it's nuts.

00:33:55.000 Yeah, my wife's first camping trip ever was in the Congo. 0.76

00:33:59.000 You showed us photos of it.

00:34:01.000 It's hilarious.

00:34:02.000 Last time you were here.

00:34:03.000 Yeah, so it was a big eye-opening experience for her, but the vegetation, it's nuts.

00:34:09.000 So the Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world, but the Congo is the second largest, but it is the densest, the thickest.

00:34:17.000 It's the hardest to navigate through.

00:34:21.000 There's parts in Uganda that barely touch the stuff in Congo, but they call it the impenetrable forest because there's sayings that it's harder for a fish to swim through the rivers there because even the rivers are thick vegetation and all this stuff.

00:34:39.000 Um, in some parts, but dude, it's, it's crazy.

00:34:43.000 Like walking through and hiking through, I have a picture that's going to be in my book of, of Ben walking.

00:34:47.000 And I was like, how much of this do we have to walk through?

00:34:50.000 It was, we were literally macheting, uh, using a machete to get through, um, to this pygmy village. 1.00

00:34:56.000 And I'm like, dang, they walk through this every day where it's like the, you're just walking through the thicket that's going across your face, going across your arms.

00:35:04.000 There's bugs latching onto you while you're doing that.

00:35:06.000 There's mosquitoes like crazy at all times.

00:35:10.000 There's the ants.

00:35:12.000 The ants will literally look like a small creek or rushing river.

00:35:17.000 I've seen them at least, literally at least two foot wide, and you can hear them.

00:35:23.000 You can hear them.

00:35:24.000 It's two foot wide of ants.

00:35:26.000 And it's just a black river because it's these ants that are just rushing, running in and out of things.

00:35:33.000 And, yeah, so there's bumblebees there that are, like, bright, or they have a bright blue or purple on their back.

00:35:41.000 I'm kind of partially colorblind, but I can see them.

00:35:44.000 And literally, they're the size of a golf ball.

00:35:46.000 They're, like, perfectly round.

00:35:48.000 They're perfectly round.

00:35:50.000 A golf ball?

00:35:50.000 A golf ball for a bumblebee.

00:35:52.000 Oh, my God.

00:35:53.000 For a bumblebee, 100% like a golf ball.

00:35:56.000 And what we would do is Emily and my wife brought a racket that had It's like a little taser for bugs. 1.00

00:36:05.000 And it's in the shape of a tennis racket.

00:36:07.000 There's one village, Andy Quaqua, and it's got tons of those golf ball bumblebees.

00:36:15.000 And they're vicious, too. 0.78

00:36:16.000 The butt on those things looks wicked. 0.86

00:36:18.000 You don't want to get stung by it. 0.91

00:36:20.000 And whenever you do, it leaves like this.

00:36:22.000 It looks like you got shot by buckshot and a little bitty...

00:36:25.000 A little bitty golf ball size whelp.

00:36:27.000 Wow.

00:36:28.000 But yeah, we just smack those things with that little taser racket thing. 0.99

00:36:33.000 It's got to be one of the wildest places on earth, right?

00:36:35.000 I mean, next to the Amazon, it's probably like right up there.

00:36:38.000 Yeah.

00:36:39.000 It's nuts.

00:36:42.000 You know what?

00:36:42.000 Maybe this would give you an idea.

00:36:45.000 Jamie, maybe we get those pictures.

00:36:47.000 You can start with that.

00:36:48.000 What is this right here?

00:36:49.000 I wanted to bring you a gift, man, from the Congo.

00:36:54.000 But actually, go behind those pictures first and check out...

00:36:57.000 But if you leave them, that'll be great.

00:37:00.000 But that's Sangee, and I knew you would really connect with this little dude.

00:37:05.000 We should have a picture up of this.

00:37:07.000 Do you have it, Jim?

00:37:08.000 The first one.

00:37:11.000 And San Gi here is from, we call it Tundu, and Tundu just means hole, but we call it the hole in the forest.

00:37:20.000 And he's a little dude, and in that village they make those little handprints, or actually the cloth.

00:37:29.000 So the cloth is this like bark cloth, and it's like a traditional way that the Mubuti pygmies make stuff for artwork. 1.00

00:37:36.000 So that cloth that he's holding is made out of bark?

00:37:38.000 Yes.

00:37:39.000 Actually, reach in there and you'll see the actual cloth that's his.

00:37:43.000 So this is kind of a thank you way that they kind of gave me a few things to remember them by and to say, like, tell your friends and people that supported this, like, thank you.

00:37:55.000 But San Gi is, he's probably 12, I would say.

00:37:58.000 This is bark?

00:37:59.000 Yeah, it's bark.

00:38:01.000 It's bark cloth.

00:38:02.000 So it feels kind of like a canvas.

00:38:05.000 And sorry on the plane it got bent up a little.

00:38:08.000 How do they do this?

00:38:09.000 What are they doing?

00:38:10.000 I'm actually not sure.

00:38:11.000 It's the bark and they beat it down.

00:38:13.000 They beat it down, pressurize it or something, or put a lot of pressure when they're doing it.

00:38:19.000 What kind of tree is this?

00:38:21.000 Do you know?

00:38:21.000 I actually don't know.

00:38:23.000 It's wild.

00:38:24.000 There's so many trees out there.

00:38:25.000 It feels like a flexible cardboard.

00:38:27.000 Yeah.

00:38:30.000 So they'll do like their own kind of paintings and stuff.

00:38:32.000 It's really like traditional and you can like even Google bark cloth and I think it comes up with the pygmies.

00:38:38.000 I'm gonna get this framed man.

00:38:39.000 That's awesome.

00:38:40.000 Thank you very much.

00:38:41.000 That's amazing.

00:38:42.000 Dude, that's his handprint.

00:38:43.000 Wow.

00:38:44.000 God, his hands are so tiny.

00:38:45.000 Yeah.

00:38:46.000 He's probably 12. None of them really know their age just because they don't really have a calendar and don't keep up with it and don't have school or anything like that.

00:38:55.000 No iPhones?

00:38:56.000 No iPhones.

00:38:57.000 No iPhones.

00:38:58.000 No whatever it is.

00:39:00.000 Google calendars.

00:39:01.000 Wow.

00:39:01.000 But the next picture, that's right there with you, but it's their village.

00:39:08.000 And there you go.

00:39:11.000 On my right, so if you're looking at the picture on the left, that's Laringa, and he's my translator and our director of implementation.

00:39:19.000 To his right, the guy with the hat, That is Leo May.

00:39:24.000 That's a dope hat, by the way.

00:39:25.000 Yeah, he's awesome.

00:39:26.000 That's the chief?

00:39:27.000 Yeah.

00:39:27.000 Chief Leo May.

00:39:29.000 And he's such a great dude.

00:39:30.000 And he's the grandfather of Sanghee.

00:39:33.000 Two over from me, the lady that I have my arm around him.

00:39:37.000 And then, yeah, right there.

00:39:38.000 That's Chief Leo May's wife. 1.00

00:39:40.000 And they're basically the parents of Sanghee. 0.92

00:39:42.000 Sanghee's right in front of me, squatting down.

00:39:44.000 Right.

00:39:45.000 Right in front of my right leg.

00:39:47.000 And so they're raising him because his parents passed away.

00:39:52.000 But what I want to show you about Sangy is he has a passion that's common with you, and I got to be there for two really cool things.

00:39:59.000 If you can go to the next picture, and that's the stack in your thing too.

00:40:04.000 But here's the village at night, and that dude's got a sweet little guitar thing he made.

00:40:11.000 He used wire from a tire to make the strings of the string instrument. 0.99

00:40:18.000 Like steel-belted radial tire, like that kind of shit? 0.99

00:40:21.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:40:21.000 I think so. 0.99

00:40:22.000 I mean, it was like an old abandoned tire and he just made this thing out of wood to make a guitar.

00:40:27.000 So he got the wire, like stripped it out of the rubber?

00:40:30.000 Stripped it out of the rubber and made himself a stringed instrument.

00:40:34.000 But if you sand geese over my back and this is just us, this is...

00:40:38.000 How we learn the most about how we can help them.

00:40:41.000 When we sit around the campfire with them, we've kind of made a goofy name for it, but we call it Campfire University because that's where they take us to school.

00:40:50.000 Whenever we're sitting around, that's where we can hear the truth about how they're really treated.

00:40:56.000 No one else is around, like any of their oppressors and stuff.

00:40:59.000 They're able to just be themselves.

00:41:01.000 Sometimes we would pretend to be asleep.

00:41:03.000 Um, so other people would leave, but now this is on their own land and they have like freedom to, to just chill and relax.

00:41:10.000 Um, and then if you go to the next picture, but, uh, I just, okay.

00:41:18.000 So you got that picture also, but that's, uh, one of the first antelope wild kind of bush meat that I got to eat.

00:41:25.000 Um, So they call everything bushmeat, right?

00:41:29.000 Yeah, basically.

00:41:30.000 I've had monkey, which now I realize I probably shouldn't do that again.

00:41:35.000 It's probably not healthy, right?

00:41:36.000 Yeah, you can get Ebola.

00:41:38.000 And so that's how Ebola from monkey and bats.

00:41:42.000 And I shouldn't laugh, but I didn't know.

00:41:44.000 I didn't know about that's how you get Ebola.

00:41:46.000 And then all of a sudden the Ebola virus broke out like literally a month or two after I ate the monkey.

00:41:50.000 And all of a sudden I'm like, oh jeez.

00:41:53.000 So this Antelope, did they shoot this with bow and arrow?

00:41:56.000 Yep.

00:41:56.000 They got that one with the bow and arrow.

00:41:58.000 Sangi got his, in the next picture, he got his with a spear. 0.87

00:42:03.000 And this is his...

00:42:04.000 Jesus Christ.

00:42:05.000 Yeah.

00:42:06.000 This is his fur...

00:42:07.000 What they do is they chase it into a net.

00:42:08.000 So they string these nets up through the trees...

00:42:13.000 And then the men and the women sometimes, too, they go through with leafs and other things and make sounds, and they scare the antelope into their nets.

00:42:22.000 I've seen how they string this out.

00:42:23.000 These nets can be, man, they can be a football field in length, and then they scare the antelope into it, and then they have to catch up to it before it escapes, and they spear it.

00:42:35.000 Sangee speared that. 1.00

00:42:37.000 That's your little dude.

00:42:38.000 Wow.

00:42:39.000 And then the next one's pretty cool.

00:42:43.000 Just holding the head.

00:42:44.000 So they probably cook that head too, right?

00:42:46.000 Cook the brains.

00:42:48.000 Eat every part.

00:42:48.000 Cook the tongue, the eyes.

00:42:50.000 Yeah, you don't waste anything.

00:42:51.000 And that village was the first time I saw them eating a turtle.

00:42:54.000 And, like, not that turtles that strange to eat, but they even eat the shell.

00:42:59.000 What?

00:42:59.000 Yeah, I know that sounds crazy.

00:43:00.000 I saw them, I'm like, doesn't that hurt?

00:43:03.000 But they would cook it over the fire, and I guess it would weaken the shell, I think.

00:43:09.000 But it still sounded really crunchy.

00:43:11.000 So they're chewing on the shell.

00:43:12.000 Eat the shell.

00:43:13.000 Eat every part of it. 1.00

00:43:14.000 What the fuck, man? 1.00

00:43:15.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:43:16.000 But, I mean, for them, though, it's...

00:43:18.000 If that's the only food they got, you know.

00:43:20.000 Wow, I had no idea. 0.97

00:43:22.000 I saw a crocodile once eat a turtle, and I thought that that crocodile was fucking crazy, but that's a crocodile. 0.94

00:43:30.000 I didn't think a human ate a turtle. 0.98

00:43:33.000 A shell, at least.

00:43:34.000 Yeah, and I've been out in Louisiana with my grandpa fishing.

00:43:37.000 Turtle soup.

00:43:37.000 Yeah, and a Cajun guy just came over because we kept catching turtles, and he would cut off the head because you can't really get your hook back.

00:43:46.000 And then he would just open it up and see if they had eggs in them.

00:43:49.000 And right there, without cooking it, without really cleaning it, he would just pop the eggs in his mouth. 0.90

00:43:54.000 And I was like, this guy's crazy.

00:43:55.000 So that was in Louisiana. 0.94

00:43:56.000 It was down in the bayou.

00:43:58.000 But we can go to the next picture.

00:44:00.000 So do these people have a hard time finding food?

00:44:02.000 Or is this fairly common to eat all these different antelopes and whatever this is?

00:44:07.000 What is this, a cat?

00:44:09.000 This is Sangee's second kill.

00:44:11.000 So I was there for his first kill and his second kill.

00:44:14.000 And they were months apart, though.

00:44:17.000 This is, I think they call it a large spotted genet.

00:44:21.000 Or I think I'm pronouncing that right.

00:44:23.000 It's G-E-N-E-T. And it looks like a cross between, I don't know, a mongoose and a baby leopard or something like that.

00:44:32.000 But I've been, someone tried to sell me okapi meat.

00:44:35.000 Have you ever seen that animal?

00:44:36.000 It's got the butt of a zebra.

00:44:39.000 It's got the body of an antelope and the head of a giraffe. 0.56

00:44:43.000 I know it sounds crazy.

00:44:44.000 It's only in the Congo, and that's what it looks like at least, but it's in the Giraffidae family, and so it's the only other surviving animal in that family.

00:44:53.000 It's actually with an eye. 0.99

00:44:54.000 Whoa, look at that freaky fucking thing. 0.99

00:44:57.000 Yeah, I have seen these things before. 0.99

00:44:58.000 They look fake.

00:44:59.000 It looks like a mythical creature.

00:45:03.000 In the giraffe family, and someone's tried to sell me the meat of it.

00:45:07.000 It's an endangered species.

00:45:09.000 It wasn't a pig meat.

00:45:09.000 It is?

00:45:10.000 Yeah, endangered species, and I would have gotten in a lot of trouble if I got caught doing that.

00:45:15.000 If you got caught bringing the meat back?

00:45:16.000 Probably even try to put me in life in prison or something.

00:45:19.000 Really?

00:45:20.000 Probably, yeah.

00:45:21.000 If you had the meat.

00:45:22.000 But how would they know where you got the meat from?

00:45:24.000 How would they know that it was an okapi? 0.99

00:45:27.000 He was selling me the butt. 0.99

00:45:28.000 Oh, I see. 0.99

00:45:30.000 People eat zebras too, right?

00:45:33.000 I believe so.

00:45:34.000 That's gotta be insanely tough meat.

00:45:36.000 So, back to my original question, is it difficult for these people to find meat or is it like a really rich environment?

00:45:43.000 A lot harder than it used to be.

00:45:44.000 A lot harder because a lot of the deforestation is happening.

00:45:47.000 And so I've literally been able to look up, see the sun, see that the sky is clear through the canvas and stuff.

00:45:56.000 And then it sounds like thunder.

00:45:58.000 And it's because they're cutting down these huge trees.

00:46:01.000 And so that makes it really hard for the pygmies.

00:46:03.000 To hunt because the animals are skittish.

00:46:05.000 They get scared.

00:46:05.000 They get frightened.

00:46:06.000 They're a lot tougher to get.

00:46:08.000 Wow.

00:46:09.000 So yeah, that's when he came back and first showed me.

00:46:13.000 This tiny little cat thing.

00:46:15.000 And so how do they cook that?

00:46:18.000 They skin it.

00:46:19.000 They keep the skin to make a hat or a little trophy out of.

00:46:25.000 And then that's the spear he got it with.

00:46:27.000 That was a smaller one.

00:46:28.000 His grandpa has one that he killed an elephant with.

00:46:32.000 But yeah, they put it over a tripod of sticks and then they wrap the meat and leafs and they kind of smoke it.

00:46:41.000 So that it seems to last, I mean they smoke it and it lasts longer.

00:46:46.000 So they dry it out.

00:46:48.000 And then they'll soak it again and like boil it so that it kind of gets back, it's not so dry.

00:46:54.000 Huh.

00:46:55.000 At times.

00:46:56.000 Like, I mean, as soon as they do a fish, too, and other things.

00:46:59.000 So it's a method of preserving.

00:47:01.000 It's sort of like the Native Americans did that with buffalo, and they do that in Mexico, too.

00:47:07.000 They take the buffalo, and they make really thin slices, and they dry it in the sun, and then they rehydrate it again and cook it.

00:47:17.000 And so kind of like with their situation of them being the first citizens of Congo, that's what we always use with them, the terminology, similar to the Native Americans and what we did here.

00:47:28.000 Pushed them off their land, took their land from them.

00:47:30.000 That's what happened to the pygmies. 1.00

00:47:31.000 And so that's kind of, it's similar to...

00:47:34.000 To something that I was thinking is, hey, we could get these people these little kind of reservations.

00:47:39.000 We have 10 different plots of land.

00:47:40.000 All of them are 247 acres, or eight of them are.

00:47:45.000 One's like half a square kilometer, so like 120, and the other is like close to 500 acres.

00:47:50.000 And so, but that's their land.

00:47:52.000 They'll pass down.

00:47:53.000 And what we want to do is, on one of them, we started replanting trees that are targeted for deforestation.

00:47:58.000 So one of our agriculturalists that we're interning, we gave him a goal.

00:48:02.000 His name's Dramani.

00:48:03.000 Great dude.

00:48:04.000 We want him to replant a thousand trees.

00:48:07.000 We're like, hey, you can feed anyone that helps you.

00:48:10.000 The pygmies, give them breakfast, lunch, dinner, and we'll give them a day's wage and teach them how to make money and how to work for the first time making money. 1.00

00:48:22.000 When he came back, we were blown away because he had replanted 3,500 trees.

00:48:27.000 Wow.

00:48:28.000 3,500.

00:48:29.000 That's also what we want to do, too.

00:48:31.000 Preserve their culture.

00:48:32.000 They love the trees.

00:48:33.000 They don't cut down the big ones.

00:48:35.000 So the market, where are these trees going to?

00:48:38.000 Because this is an issue that's going on in the Amazon as well.

00:48:41.000 There's like mahogany that's out there.

00:48:43.000 Yeah, big, heavy, heavy hardwoods.

00:48:45.000 And they take a long time to grow too, right?

00:48:48.000 Yeah.

00:48:49.000 Yeah, they take a long time.

00:48:50.000 So they're chopping down 100, and then they're doing it on a daily basis.

00:48:53.000 Like trees that you could drive an 18-wheeler through.

00:48:55.000 So that's why there's times that a tree falls, and I'm like, is it about to rain?

00:48:59.000 Is it thunder?

00:49:00.000 Because it's this huge, massive, old tree that's being cut down.

00:49:05.000 You could literally drive it.

00:49:06.000 Like the redwoods they have?

00:49:08.000 Yeah.

00:49:09.000 Yeah, I would say they're not as big as the Redwoods, and some of them are that big, but some aren't.

00:49:14.000 I mean, some you could drive a Mini Cooper through.

00:49:17.000 Wow.

00:49:19.000 But yeah, some are massive, and they're just cutting them down.

00:49:21.000 Just the perspective that you must gain from being in this insane environment, it's got to be a really, for lack of a better word, enriching experience.

00:49:32.000 Yeah, I mean, it's so good for the soul, I would say.

00:49:36.000 Just your heart, you feel like you're a part of something greater than yourself, something bigger than yourself.

00:49:42.000 And I would say that that's where a lot of my struggles in life came from was when I was so focused on something small, which is myself.

00:49:52.000 I was like magnifying glass or putting myself under a microscope in my life.

00:49:56.000 And it's like whenever I took the focus off of me, And put it on others like it gave me such a Greater sense of purpose in life of man.

00:50:06.000 I don't need to live for myself Like this problem like what if I could be part of a little a little part a little link in the chain To help to be in the in the problem in whatever small problems anybody here has in comparison to the issues that they have there It's it's one of the things that happens to people when crisis It takes place when there's any sort of a crisis like after 9-11 One of the weirdest aspects of being in New York was how friendly everybody was

00:50:37.000 like everybody kind of had this newfound perspective They had this new instead of dealing with the stress and the the grind of the big city in the traffic and all the nonsense and all the Agro behavior that people normally had it wasn't there.

00:50:49.000 It was like people were friendly and they were nice and kind it's like they had put it in perspective and Because of the attack.

00:50:55.000 Right.

00:50:56.000 And it's just, it's a shame that human beings are like that, that we have to have something kind of crazy happen to us for us to...

00:51:03.000 To unite us.

00:51:03.000 Yeah, to unite us and to appreciate.

00:51:05.000 Right.

00:51:06.000 Yeah, and I would say there, it's almost like they are like that, like kind of what you were saying about New York, and not that...

00:51:14.000 They're constantly like that, right?

00:51:15.000 They're constantly like that.

00:51:16.000 Yeah.

00:51:16.000 They're constantly like appreciative for anything that they get.

00:51:19.000 Yeah.

00:51:19.000 Anything that they get for that day, even whenever they're working underneath their slave masters and they're getting a minnow for a full day's labor or two bananas for a family of four or five that are literally working from sunup to sundown,

00:51:36.000 they get two bananas to share.

00:51:39.000 Like, whenever we talk to them about it, yes, they'll say, we need more.

00:51:44.000 This is slavery.

00:51:45.000 This is slave labor. 0.96

00:51:46.000 Like, it's terrible.

00:51:47.000 It's, you know.

00:51:48.000 But whenever they get that food at the end of the day, like, they're thankful for it.

00:51:52.000 Like, because they gotta have it.

00:51:54.000 But the oppressors use that as a way to keep them hungry so that they have to come back the next day and work.

00:52:01.000 Yeah.

00:52:01.000 Similar story.

00:52:02.000 Yeah.

00:52:03.000 That's the story as old as time, right?

00:52:04.000 Yeah.

00:52:05.000 Hey, could we show that next picture in that?

00:52:08.000 Sorry, I'll try to bust this out.

00:52:10.000 So this I love.

00:52:12.000 This is Sangie's grandmother.

00:52:14.000 She's wearing Ben's.

00:52:15.000 Ben's on the right with the blue shirt.

00:52:17.000 He's our director.

00:52:19.000 And Kakura is behind him in the blue shirt and right in front of him with the sunglasses on is Mama Leomay.

00:52:26.000 What is she wearing around her waist? 0.99

00:52:28.000 Leaves.

00:52:29.000 Yeah, leaves.

00:52:30.000 So she tied vines and leaves together.

00:52:34.000 And yeah, whenever...

00:52:35.000 If cameras probably weren't out, it's not a big deal, like clothes or not clothes or anything like that, but...

00:52:43.000 Whenever we bust out a camera because it's like, hey, this is going to be a cool celebration.

00:52:47.000 So why we bust out cameras is different than the show up, blow up and blow out so that we have pictures.

00:52:52.000 What's so cool?

00:52:53.000 One of the greatest gifts I've ever given Mama Leomay is a picture of herself, a picture of her and Sangee, a picture of her and Leomay.

00:53:04.000 What we do is we print up these pictures.

00:53:07.000 We get them laminated and they've never had a picture of themselves ever.

00:53:10.000 And so we're able to go back and give them these pictures and they'll always be able to cherish and remember this moment.

00:53:16.000 Do they have mirrors?

00:53:17.000 There might be A half-broken mirror that's very tiny.

00:53:24.000 Like a woman's compact? 0.99

00:53:27.000 Yeah, right.

00:53:27.000 It might be crushed or broken, and they might have that for the whole village.

00:53:31.000 Wow.

00:53:33.000 But some places, no.

00:53:35.000 Some places, not at all.

00:53:36.000 Some places, I give them my iPhone, and they get to look at themselves, and they're just like, oh my goodness, because they've only seen themselves really in reflection of water and stuff like that.

00:53:46.000 How long before they start taking selfies?

00:53:49.000 Is it immediate?

00:53:52.000 Does it make the kissy face or no?

00:53:54.000 Right.

00:53:55.000 No, I've even had the duck face.

00:53:58.000 Or duck lips.

00:54:00.000 But, man, on my Instagram at the Big Pygmy, there's some pictures of me actually giving this village Pictures.

00:54:09.000 And dude, some of their expressions whenever they get to see a picture of themselves for the first time, it's like the craziest looks in their eyes seeing themselves on a piece of paper.

00:54:19.000 Yeah, I could only imagine seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time.

00:54:24.000 Yeah.

00:54:25.000 Wow.

00:54:26.000 Another thing that we just completely take for granted.

00:54:29.000 Right.

00:54:29.000 Oh, I also brought you something that's inside that bag.

00:54:35.000 I know you're a hunter.

00:54:37.000 That's why I got you those hunting pictures.

00:54:39.000 I also got you some handmade knives that are from there, from the Congo.

00:54:46.000 How do they make these?

00:54:48.000 By hand, they hammer on them.

00:54:51.000 Where do they get the metal?

00:54:52.000 Yeah.

00:54:53.000 Oh, so they're like butter knives.

00:54:55.000 Yeah, it looks just like an American... 0.99

00:54:58.000 They made this?

00:54:58.000 Yeah.

00:54:59.000 How?

00:55:02.000 Actually, Josh helped me come up with a joke to try to...

00:55:06.000 This is a joke?

00:55:07.000 Yeah, that one's a joke because...

00:55:09.000 I was like, what?

00:55:10.000 I try to get a joke on the comedian.

00:55:12.000 This is the real one. 0.96

00:55:13.000 You rascal, you. 0.94

00:55:15.000 I was like, dude, there's a copyright on this. 0.94

00:55:18.000 That one looked too pretty.

00:55:19.000 It was from our hotel.

00:55:21.000 But this one's the real deal.

00:55:23.000 So they made it out of a nail.

00:55:26.000 Some of the people that were working on doing deforestation and cutting down the trees, they'll build themselves ladders.

00:55:36.000 And so they're able to take the old nails out of these ladders and stuff and make themselves a knife.

00:55:45.000 And so that's actually handmade from Sangee's grandfather, the chief, Chief Leome.

00:55:51.000 Is his hand so small that he can actually use that?

00:55:53.000 Or do they use it with like a few fingers?

00:55:55.000 He might use it with like three, but yeah, the dude might be four foot eight, four foot nine.

00:56:02.000 The average height of a Mubuti pygmy man is four foot seven. 1.00

00:56:06.000 So yeah, their hands are smaller and stuff like that and so they I think this into a piece of wood somehow Grab the other one.

00:56:14.000 I'm not actually they push it down on that wood.

00:56:17.000 That's that's the original way.

00:56:19.000 See how it's a nail This is nuts Yeah.

00:56:23.000 So...

00:56:24.000 Wow.

00:56:25.000 So this nail flattens out to be that wide.

00:56:27.000 That's incredible.

00:56:28.000 And what he found was the old piece of...

00:56:31.000 So in Congo, the Belgian Congo with like King Leopold II, who was due to as evil as Hitler... 0.84

00:56:42.000 I mean, they say during his reign of Congo, he said in Europe that he was like the savior of Congo, that he was helping all the Congolese, but really he was extorting them for mainly rubber and ivory.

00:56:55.000 Wow.

00:56:55.000 And there was an estimated 20 million people, and there's a book called King Leopold's Ghost, and the guy had a big old beard, kind of like I have in one of those pictures with Sanghee.

00:57:07.000 But what they say is that it's an estimated 10 million people, half the population of Congo, that he was responsible for killing and murdering.

00:57:17.000 Jesus Christ.

00:57:18.000 So they call that like the African Holocaust or one of the first Holocaust because there was, you know, six, some, I mean, I'm not sure about the Jewish Holocaust, six million or something like that.

00:57:29.000 But this was eight to 10 million people.

00:57:32.000 Half the, half of the Congo was, was murdered and everything else just over rubber, the rubber boom and, and ivory.

00:57:41.000 And I had, I had a slingshot for you from like the original rubber, but it kind of like rotted and broke.

00:57:46.000 So anyways.

00:57:47.000 The original rubber.

00:57:49.000 Yeah, it's like white whenever it first comes out.

00:57:52.000 They just made a slingshot. 0.91

00:57:55.000 It was sand-gee. 0.99

00:57:56.000 And so I brought it.

00:57:57.000 So they hunt with those? 0.71

00:57:58.000 Yeah, like birds and stuff and trees.

00:58:02.000 So I've seen them eating parrots and African gray parrots and stuff.

00:58:06.000 Anything they can get, man.

00:58:07.000 They'll knock, and it might sound bad to our culture or whatever, but this is their food, you know, so...

00:58:14.000 But they'll shoot like a nest and whatever comes down, you know, if it's baby birds or mama bird or eggs or something like that, that's free game.

00:58:24.000 Yeah, I mean, we are very privileged that we can just go to a supermarket and buy food.

00:58:28.000 So we have these ideas of what you should and shouldn't do.

00:58:31.000 But when you're starving to death, you will eat whatever you can get a hold of.

00:58:34.000 Yeah, and whenever the outsiders make it so much even harder for you to hunt because they're cutting down the trees and it's making the animals skittish and scared and so much harder for you to find them.

00:58:43.000 Yeah, so there's no regulation whatsoever on how many trees they can chop down.

00:58:47.000 Not at all.

00:58:48.000 I would say, I mean, this might not be a real stat, but in my mind, 80-90% of the logging in Congo has got to be illegal.

00:58:57.000 They just go out there, here's a big old tree, let's cut it down because it's worth so much money.

00:59:02.000 And who was doing this?

00:59:03.000 What country?

00:59:05.000 People all over.

00:59:06.000 And they'll bring in trucks from Kenya and Tanzania and Rwanda.

00:59:11.000 And there's some, like, big businessmen that then sell these hardwoods to China, the U.S., Brazil.

00:59:17.000 I mean, just different big countries that they send it out.

00:59:20.000 And I've seen these hardwood on these roads sometimes...

00:59:25.000 Three-fourths of an 18-wheeler or a lorry is what we call them there.

00:59:31.000 It can be completely sunk in mud or it can just be fallen off of a face of a cliff because it's so overloaded.

00:59:39.000 They fill up these containers just so full with this heavy, heavy, heavy wood because if they can get it back, then they're going to make a ton of money off of it.

00:59:49.000 So they just overload it because it's so hard to get from point A to B to like Mombasa and Kenyatta where they can ship out this stuff.

00:59:57.000 It's just so depressing sometimes you think about the damage that people are capable of and the insensitivity that people can exhibit.

01:00:04.000 Yeah.

01:00:05.000 It's just that... 1.00

01:00:07.000 that they just go there and just take all that wood, chop it all down, fuck all these people over. 1.00

01:00:14.000 Just... 0.99

01:00:16.000 The fact that it's a small amount of people that are doing it, too, but yet it affects an enormous amount of people worldwide.

01:00:22.000 Absolutely.

01:00:23.000 Absolutely.

01:00:23.000 I think they said, I forget where I got it, it was a reputable source, but the size of Texas has been cut down from the Congo rainforest in the last, like, just 20 or 25 years.

01:00:38.000 Last 20-25 years of the rainforest in Congo, the size of Texas, which that's where I'm from.

01:00:43.000 I mean, it's huge.

01:00:44.000 It's 13 hours from east to west, maybe more in Texas, on good roads.

01:00:49.000 So just to imagine, like, the size of the impact.

01:00:53.000 That's insane.

01:00:54.000 Yeah.

01:00:55.000 That's insane.

01:00:56.000 And then to think about the fact that it takes hundreds of years to replenish those forests if they do get replenished, because the environment that they're growing in, it gets changed as soon as you chop everything down, then the sun bakes the land, and then there's less rain. 1.00

01:01:08.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

01:01:10.000 Absolutely. 1.00

01:01:10.000 That's got to be such a strange place to go while you're there and you're trying to help and you're trying to replenish and help these communities and give them water and help them sustain. 1.00

01:01:23.000 And then you're hearing these trees fall and knowing that there's just these insensitive people just chopping down trees left and right and fucking the whole thing up. 0.96

01:01:33.000 Yeah, it's nuts. 0.95

01:01:34.000 When my wife came, we walked through a field that had been just ravaged by the illegal loggers and stuff.

01:01:43.000 And she was blown away because these trees were so much...

01:01:47.000 Fallen on their sides.

01:01:49.000 They were so much taller than I was.

01:01:51.000 It made me look like a dwarf by them. 0.52

01:01:53.000 Just enormous, enormous old trees.

01:01:55.000 Yeah.

01:01:56.000 And literally the first trip she came on, which was only like...

01:02:03.000 Six months before that, like all those trees were there.

01:02:07.000 All those trees were there and it was and now we walk into it and it's probably like 10 or 20 acres of trees that were just leveled in that amount of time and the way that they were doing it there wasn't by these guys weren't using the big chainsaws and everything else.

01:02:23.000 They were just like going at it with axes and stuff.

01:02:25.000 And a lot of it actually isn't just for the hardwoods.

01:02:30.000 I mean, I would say that's the majority of the problem, but another big problem in Congo or Sub-Saharan Africa is the charcoal everyone uses for cooking.

01:02:41.000 They get it from these trees.

01:02:43.000 They cut them down, they chop them up into little bits, and then they throw...

01:02:48.000 I think?

01:03:09.000 You know, there's a photograph of a tree somewhere in California.

01:03:12.000 I forget where it was, but one of the captions was this tree is somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hundred years old or something like that.

01:03:23.000 They were talking about when this tree first came up, Columbus was sailing.

01:03:29.000 Wow.

01:03:30.000 And this is a tree that you could see today.

01:03:32.000 And there's trees that are...

01:03:33.000 I don't know, what is the oldest tree?

01:03:35.000 I mean, how old are trees?

01:03:37.000 Nah, man, I'm not even sure.

01:03:39.000 I bet there's a thousand-year-old tree somewhere.

01:03:41.000 Yeah, I mean, in the Congo, it's got to be the oldest. 0.73

01:03:43.000 I mean, that's got to be the oldest, right?

01:03:45.000 Yeah, probably.

01:03:47.000 Or up there.

01:03:47.000 Because it's crazy.

01:03:50.000 And then there are times that the trees, just the cycle of the forest, these trees can fall over.

01:03:57.000 But, like, we took a family of five to the hospital.

01:04:01.000 Here's one right here.

01:04:03.000 Methuselah.

01:04:04.000 5,000 trees.

01:04:04.000 5,000 years old?

01:04:05.000 Yeah.

01:04:06.000 A Bristol cone pine tree from California's White Mountains is thought to be almost 5,000 years old.

01:04:12.000 Oh my goodness.

01:04:13.000 The oldest non-clonal tree in the world.

01:04:17.000 The exact location that Donald Twisted Methuselah is a Forest Service secret for its protection.

01:04:23.000 Wow.

01:04:24.000 Wow.

01:04:24.000 That's insane.

01:04:26.000 That's crazy, man.

01:04:27.000 I had no idea they could be 5,000 years old. 1.00

01:04:30.000 And then some asshole can just come along and... 1.00

01:04:32.000 Just cut it down, man. 1.00

01:04:33.000 Make charcoal with it.

01:04:34.000 Yeah.

01:04:35.000 And something nuts, like, I came in here and remember I had gotten sick.

01:04:40.000 Yeah.

01:04:41.000 And I had to postpone on you.

01:04:44.000 And anyways, I went to a hospital down in, or up in Valencia, I think.

01:04:50.000 And they had thrown me in a room for three hours, and they were thinking about getting hazmat suits out and all this stuff.

01:04:56.000 Because they thought you might have had Ebola because you came back from Africa, right?

01:04:58.000 Yeah, right after the Ebola crisis.

01:05:00.000 But I had been back for like two months or something, or maybe even close to three.

01:05:06.000 And yeah, they were going all crazy and stuff.

01:05:11.000 And this is just a stat that I like to...

01:05:14.000 It's something that grips my heart, so that's why I want to say it now.

01:05:17.000 But...

01:05:18.000 Man, I think I looked it up right before I got in here, and it was around 11,000 people that Ebola took out.

01:05:26.000 11,000 people, that's a ton.

01:05:27.000 It's a ton.

01:05:28.000 It's a brutal crisis.

01:05:29.000 But I just remember the uproar and the fear.

01:05:35.000 Like, the outcry that happened publicly all over the United States, and only a couple people got it here.

01:05:41.000 And then, still, that's terrible.

01:05:44.000 But whenever I compare that, 11,000 people total in this Ebola crisis, and then the stat for children, and this is on Water4's website and stuff, and on ours, and, dude, it's what I want to fight and let people know, because there should be a real public outcry and uproar that 5,000 kids 5,000 kids under the age of 5 years old die every single day.

01:06:10.000 Every single day because of dirty water.

01:06:13.000 Because of waterborne disease.

01:06:15.000 Because of waterborne illness.

01:06:16.000 That's a legit stat from like UNICEF or one of those like legit places.

01:06:21.000 5,000 every day.

01:06:24.000 It fluctuates from like 4,700 or something to 5,000 a day.

01:06:29.000 And like for me, man, I've held two of those children, you know?

01:06:32.000 I've dug the grave.

01:06:33.000 I've had blisters on my hands.

01:06:35.000 I've had a little dude named Andy Bowes blood on my hands.

01:06:39.000 And like, bro, it wrecks me.

01:06:44.000 And like, that's why I'm so passionate about this thing.

01:06:46.000 And like, I come back and I get it.

01:06:50.000 Ebola's terrible.

01:06:51.000 And we need to knock it out because it can take out so many people.

01:06:55.000 But why?

01:06:56.000 Why are people not...

01:06:58.000 Why don't they have their eyes open, their ears open, their heart open to hearing about 5,000 kids dying every day?

01:07:06.000 I've been to the funeral of five other kids.

01:07:07.000 I've seen the grave of nine or ten others besides that.

01:07:10.000 And these are just among the pygmies. 0.97

01:07:12.000 I've seen the funerals going on of their oppressors, like the slave masters and the makpala, the non-pygmies that surround them. 1.00

01:07:20.000 Their kids are dying in the dirty water.

01:07:21.000 And it's not...

01:07:23.000 I don't I don't mean to go crazy, but no, it's not crazy at all It's and that statistic is crazy 5,000 a day a day and they're under five years old So I mean, I don't know how many with the six seven eight nine-year-olds, you know I've been to the funerals of those kids.

01:07:37.000 We are very strange about what we have What we focus our attention on and the Ebola thing is just something that was over here because we were worried about it coming over here We don't see a problem over here.

01:07:49.000 We It's so convenient for people to not look at impoverished third-world countries, people that are just, they've always been in this sort of state of poverty, so we just sort of accept them at being like that. 0.98

01:08:02.000 We don't think that they necessarily, that they have to live the way we live or have access to clean water and medical.

01:08:09.000 We just don't even think about it.

01:08:10.000 We worry about Cecil the Lion. 0.99

01:08:14.000 The fucking outrage about Cecil the Lion, where everybody's going nuts and freaking out. 0.99

01:08:19.000 Yeah, I mean, look, poaching's terrible. 0.99

01:08:21.000 It's awful.

01:08:22.000 Animals are beautiful.

01:08:25.000 I get it.

01:08:26.000 But the way we reacted to that, to know your statistic, to know that what you just said, that 5,000 little kids die every day from dirty water, and people aren't freaking out about that.

01:08:38.000 I think it's like every 20 seconds.

01:08:40.000 That's insane.

01:08:41.000 I think it's every 20 seconds.

01:08:43.000 That's really hard to swallow.

01:08:44.000 Yeah, and bro, like, I... Wow.

01:08:47.000 That was my second...

01:08:48.000 5,000 is...

01:08:49.000 That's...

01:08:49.000 That's so crazy.

01:08:52.000 Just think about 5,000 dead bodies every day and have them being little kids.

01:08:56.000 Yeah.

01:08:57.000 Wow.

01:08:58.000 And the thing that really wrecked me with that was, so I spoke at this university in Oklahoma, it's slipping my name, or the name's slipping me, but their students, this is right when I got back from Congo, and they had heard about what I was doing.

01:09:14.000 It was Southern, it's in Oklahoma City, SNU, and they said, come speak to our students, we want to try to raise enough for a water well.

01:09:28.000 And dude, they set out in their courtyard.

01:09:31.000 They set out in their courtyard 5,000 white flags.

01:09:35.000 And this is a massive courtyard.

01:09:36.000 They set out 5,000 little white flags and on it said the stat that's 5,000 kids every day die of dirty water.

01:09:44.000 And so I saw that right before I went up and spoke and I went and saw the courtyard and it just wrecked me because like for me, like the people that see that, like the stat can go in one ear.

01:09:54.000 It can it can jack with you for a little bit.

01:09:57.000 It can mess with your mind.

01:09:58.000 It can mess with your heart.

01:10:00.000 Um, but it's so easy to go in one ear and out the other, or once you sleep, you know, you're not going to wake up thinking about that just from seeing those white flags.

01:10:08.000 And so I grabbed one of those white flags and I, and hopefully some of the people just from seeing those flags will get it.

01:10:14.000 But like, I had to write Andy Bo on the back.

01:10:17.000 And, and then when I got up and spoke, I showed him, I'm like, Hey, every one of these white flags, you see it, you saw it, like it's a terrible statistic, but this, the real statistic is that each and every one of those flags has a name.

01:10:30.000 Like, it's a person.

01:10:31.000 It's a human being.

01:10:31.000 It's a little kid.

01:10:33.000 And, like, he didn't have to die of dirty water.

01:10:35.000 Not in today's age.

01:10:37.000 Not in today's age when we have the answer to the problem.

01:10:40.000 When we know what we can do about it and just people decide not to or, like you said, make the uproar about Cecil the Lion.

01:10:47.000 I mean, every American probably knows the name Cecil the Lion.

01:10:51.000 Or at least 90% probably do.

01:10:52.000 And, like, I bet not even 10%, not even 5% know that 5,000 kids every day are dying just because of 31. I don't even think it's 1%.

01:11:02.000 I didn't know it was that many.

01:11:03.000 That's nuts.

01:11:04.000 Yeah.

01:11:05.000 It's hard to internalize those numbers, too.

01:11:08.000 Even if you hear that number, it goes in your head and it sort of bounces around.

01:11:11.000 There's no point of reference.

01:11:15.000 For me, man, I absolutely 100%.

01:11:18.000 So that was when I gave the chief, Andy Bo's chief, my first promise I ever made the Pygmies, which was...

01:11:28.000 We had buried him and he had told us that he was rejected hospital treatment twice.

01:11:34.000 So he didn't just die of waterborne disease, but his other brother, his father had died of waterborne disease and his mom was all alone now.

01:11:43.000 And she couldn't even cry, bro, whenever I met her or whenever I saw her at this time.

01:11:49.000 Like, she was topless and I could see every single bone in her sternum, like every single rib attached to her sternum because she was so hungry and she was so malnourished and she was so thirsty. 0.99

01:12:03.000 And so our team went and we got mangoes and passion fruit juice, rice, and tilapia.

01:12:12.000 And we brought it back and fed it to her.

01:12:14.000 And it wasn't maybe 10 minutes.

01:12:16.000 And I was wondering, is she in shock?

01:12:18.000 Why is she not crying?

01:12:20.000 Like, why am I messed up from this so much more than the mother?

01:12:25.000 And it was because she was so malnourished.

01:12:27.000 She just didn't have the energy to produce a tear over her son's death.

01:12:31.000 So she got the mango.

01:12:33.000 She drank the passion fruit juice.

01:12:34.000 It wasn't 10, 15 minutes later that then she started sobbing.

01:12:39.000 Because she had, like, that sugar and that energy a little bit.

01:12:42.000 And then after that, like, dude, the next day was so brutal.

01:12:44.000 And I had blisters on my hand from digging the grave.

01:12:48.000 And that's when the chief came up and said, the first time we went and got treatment, they told the mother, you're too dirty to come in here. 0.97

01:12:55.000 And she said, well, can you give them treatment?

01:12:57.000 I know it's just a pill or a shot.

01:13:00.000 And they said, do you have money?

01:13:01.000 She said, I'm a slave.

01:13:02.000 I don't get paid in money.

01:13:03.000 And they said, well, then go away.

01:13:05.000 And then the second day, the whole village, and this is like 85 or 100 people, they grab everything they can, which was like almost two dozen eggs.

01:13:17.000 They brought a chicken and They brought a bag of charcoal.

01:13:22.000 They brought firewood.

01:13:24.000 And then they were able to beg because they don't make money.

01:13:26.000 These ones hadn't at this time.

01:13:28.000 And they were able to beg enough for three and a half dollars worth of Congolese franc.

01:13:36.000 And $3 was the treatment.

01:13:38.000 $3 was, I think it was a dollar for the pills that would have helped Andy Bo.

01:13:43.000 They were probably too late for the pills to work, but maybe $3 for the shot, the injection that would have helped him quicker.

01:13:50.000 And it was something like $45.

01:13:54.000 It's in the book, I got the real number.

01:13:57.000 $45 for his casket that I buried him in.

01:14:00.000 And it just blew my mind that the oppressors, the people, the makpala, the non-pygmies that surround the pygmies were thinking like, These people are so worthless or they're like animals or whatever that it's easier for us to let them die or cheaper for us to let them die than to take care of them. 0.97

01:14:20.000 And so that's when the chief grabbed me and pulled me to the side and said, Efe, which Efeosa is my first pygmy name.

01:14:29.000 It means the man who loves us.

01:14:31.000 And he pulled me aside and said, Efe, we don't have a voice.

01:14:36.000 Nobody knows about our suffering.

01:14:38.000 Can you help tell people?

01:14:39.000 Can you be a voice for us?

01:14:41.000 And that was when I said yes.

01:14:43.000 Because I couldn't promise them clean water.

01:14:45.000 I couldn't promise them land.

01:14:47.000 I didn't know how all of that stuff was going to go.

01:14:48.000 But I knew that through MMA and through some of the other stuff, like a platform, that, hey, I can at least help these people have a voice of some sort, even if it's just with 100 people.

01:15:00.000 You know, maybe I can help them have a voice.

01:15:03.000 Wow.

01:15:04.000 Dude.

01:15:06.000 Whew.

01:15:07.000 Boy, Justin.

01:15:09.000 Sorry, bro.

01:15:09.000 I ain't heavy.

01:15:10.000 No, but I don't apologize at all.

01:15:12.000 Thank you.

01:15:12.000 Thank you for...

01:15:14.000 Thank you for just being you, man.

01:15:16.000 But what you've experienced and what you're talking about is so removed from almost everyone that lives here.

01:15:27.000 When we talk about poverty in America, our poverty...

01:15:31.000 It's almost ridiculous in comparison to the poverty that these people are experiencing.

01:15:37.000 Right. 0.77

01:15:37.000 What you're talking about is just, it's not even human. 0.77

01:15:41.000 I mean, it's so outside of the realm of our imagination, to even imagine...

01:15:47.000 Living in a world where someone won't give someone a $3 shot or whatever it costs to treat a baby that's dying and this woman can't even cry because she doesn't have any food. 1.00

01:15:59.000 She doesn't have enough energy for tears. 0.59

01:16:01.000 I can't, I can't imagine that world.

01:16:05.000 And you continue to go back there to try to help these people.

01:16:11.000 Now you're going to fight, not just try to build them wells, not just try to help them and get them food, but now you're going to fight in Bellator and try to raise more awareness for this.

01:16:33.000 You make this decision.

01:16:35.000 You decide to come back to America.

01:16:37.000 You're training in Dallas, right?

01:16:39.000 You're training a team takedown where Johnny Hendricks, former welterweight champion trains big giant modern facility one of the best places in the world and you are preparing for this fight But your main goal, you love the sport,

01:16:55.000 but your main goal is to try to bring awareness to the Pygmies.

01:16:59.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:17:01.000 So it's kind of a crazy way of a roundabout sort of a way of getting attention to them to compete in a sport and arguably the most brutal sport in the world.

01:17:11.000 Yeah.

01:17:12.000 Yeah, I think for me, I always thought I could only do, or for the last four years, I thought I could only do one or the other.

01:17:22.000 First and foremost, My family, the people there, I'm not ever going to give that up.

01:17:30.000 So it's worth it to me.

01:17:32.000 If I never had to fight again, fine.

01:17:34.000 So be it.

01:17:36.000 That's okay with me.

01:17:39.000 So I was just so focused on that and building the team and getting something legitimately started that will really Impact them long term, not just a flash in the pan.

01:17:51.000 But I saw fighting as something that is a platform.

01:17:56.000 I mean, I'm here with you now just because I was a fighter and then the other stuff that came about, but that's the link together.

01:18:08.000 And my wife started talking to me and other people started talking to me and kind of said, well, what if you could do both?

01:18:13.000 And yeah, fighting the lifespan of it, that's kind of like a flash in the pan.

01:18:17.000 It's just, it's a short, limited window.

01:18:20.000 And the thing, the problem there is going to take a lifetime worth of dedication.

01:18:27.000 And so what if...

01:18:29.000 What if for a season in my life, it could just be a year or two.

01:18:33.000 I'm planning on it being five to seven years.

01:18:35.000 That way I can really make a run if I can.

01:18:39.000 That's what I want to do.

01:18:41.000 And what if that can set it up in a way that the long-term solution and impact is bigger, better, greater, more sustainable.

01:18:53.000 People know about it more.

01:18:55.000 And people want to get involved.

01:18:57.000 I think that...

01:18:59.000 It's hard kind of living in the two different worlds, going back and forth because they're so different.

01:19:05.000 I kind of feel like I go there and I see what's wrong and I'm like, oh, it shouldn't be like this.

01:19:12.000 But then I come back here and I'm like, ah, what's wrong here?

01:19:14.000 And it shouldn't be like this.

01:19:16.000 And so I feel like I kind of don't necessarily belong in either one.

01:19:19.000 And if I do, I belong more in the forest with them.

01:19:22.000 Wow.

01:19:23.000 Our hearts are so connected, and so it's like culture shock here, and I don't get culture shock there at all.

01:19:29.000 I love it.

01:19:31.000 But what if...

01:19:31.000 You get culture shock when you come back to America?

01:19:33.000 Yeah, absolutely, man.

01:19:34.000 Absolutely.

01:19:35.000 From being in the Congo?

01:19:37.000 Mm-hmm.

01:19:37.000 The culture here messes with me.

01:19:39.000 In what way?

01:19:40.000 Kardashians? 1.00

01:19:41.000 That kind of shit? 1.00

01:19:42.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:19:43.000 Yeah.

01:19:44.000 Yeah, that.

01:19:45.000 And I went to Popeye's right when I got back, and it was after I had...

01:19:51.000 Buried Andy Bo and it was my second trip back coming back that was in like 2011 I think or maybe 2012 and I get back and I'm in a I go straight to Popeyes and it's in Atlanta and I Walk inside,

01:20:08.000 and there's this mom and daughter, and they're there with a group that's going to do some kind of international aid in Haiti.

01:20:14.000 They got their Haiti shirts on, and it wasn't too long after the earthquake and stuff, maybe a year and a half, two years after Haiti.

01:20:22.000 And the daughter is sitting there and she's saying, uh, I'm gonna get a Coke and I'm waiting behind them at the Coke machine.

01:20:29.000 And so she starts filling up with the Coke.

01:20:31.000 Her mom goes, pour that out. 1.00

01:20:32.000 You're not going to have that.

01:20:33.000 And she goes, mom, they don't have Coke in Haiti, which Coke's in Congo, Coke's everywhere.

01:20:38.000 Coke's like, that was the first thing I wanted to say.

01:20:40.000 Like, Hey, there's, don't worry guys, there's Coke there.

01:20:43.000 Um, but, but right after that, like the mom's like, if you drink that, you're grounded.

01:20:48.000 She goes, mom, you're going to ground me over a Coke. 1.00

01:20:51.000 And then they just went back and forth bickering.

01:20:53.000 And then all of a sudden turned into, you are grounded.

01:20:56.000 Two weeks when we get back.

01:20:58.000 Then all of a sudden the girl got pissed. 1.00

01:21:01.000 Looked at her mom and said, Mom, I hate you. 1.00

01:21:04.000 I hate you. 1.00

01:21:05.000 And she stormed out. 0.99

01:21:06.000 And this is at the airport.

01:21:08.000 They got their shirts on.

01:21:09.000 They haven't even gone on their trip yet.

01:21:10.000 And I'm just thinking like I wanted to grab them, not in a mean way, but grab them and just say, look, love each other.

01:21:16.000 Like you're fighting over a Coke.

01:21:18.000 You're fighting over sugar water.

01:21:20.000 Like stop.

01:21:21.000 Like stop it.

01:21:22.000 Like love each other.

01:21:24.000 Like you're about to get a rude awakening when you go to Haiti and I've been there and I've seen the people walking through snow drifts of garbage to take a bath and walking back out and having to climb up that snow drift of garbage to get out after they took their bath.

01:21:39.000 And I've seen them digging in the trash to find food.

01:21:42.000 I've seen kids sniffing glue to fall asleep.

01:21:44.000 Like, I'm like, you guys are about to get wrecked.

01:21:46.000 And like, it wrecked me too, because I'm like, I just buried a kid over dirty water.

01:21:51.000 And now you guys are fighting over sugar water.

01:21:56.000 This is one thing.

01:21:57.000 I don't want to offend people in a way of saying our culture is terrible or bad, but I want to point out certain things that life's bigger than our small problems.

01:22:06.000 If we can get our eyes off of those small problems and get our eyes onto the big picture, it'll do a lot of good.

01:22:12.000 It'll change a lot of things in our own lives, our own hearts, our own relationships.

01:22:18.000 I think with people, it's just simply a matter of perspective.

01:22:20.000 And when we don't have real problems, small problems become real problems, like this Coke thing for this little girl.

01:22:26.000 I mean, it's probably, you know, it's just a natural thing that human beings do in some sort of a weird way.

01:22:34.000 We just lack perspective if it's not right in front of our face.

01:22:39.000 God, that's so crazy.

01:22:41.000 Yeah, so I went into a long story there, but...

01:22:42.000 No, it's a great story, and I can imagine that.

01:22:44.000 I mean, that would cause culture shock for you.

01:22:47.000 You must be just, like, so baffled by it all.

01:22:50.000 Yeah, and I went to...

01:22:51.000 One thing, Water4 has been an organization that is, like...

01:22:57.000 Believed in us since the very beginning kind of like you Whenever I had come back and I'd seen you know the two things but practically I hadn't done anything yet I hadn't like gotten land to start a water I didn't know I just had the passion and the dream and you put me on here and let me tell people that water for kind of did the same thing and They they gave me the tools when I had none the the training and knowledge when I didn't know anything and And just got behind me but I got back and three days later I was at their gala and

01:23:28.000 it was awesome.

01:23:31.000 It was a great event and man I was crying because they did a video of me in the Congo and then I had to get up and speak.

01:23:39.000 And it was real tough, but I go right from there, and three days later, I'm at kind of like a black tie event, and women are wearing fur and all this stuff.

01:23:49.000 And so it just was like, whoa, from one world to the other.

01:23:54.000 But I see it as a way to, like there, they did so much that night for this project, for the people, for my family.

01:24:06.000 With their furs.

01:24:06.000 Yeah.

01:24:06.000 With their furs and their tuxedos.

01:24:08.000 Wow.

01:24:09.000 Wow.

01:24:09.000 But yeah, honestly, though, they were people with hearts in the right place.

01:24:12.000 And I get it.

01:24:13.000 It's just cultures are different.

01:24:14.000 We live different.

01:24:15.000 And so I don't want people running around here in leafs and stuff like that.

01:24:20.000 I don't want them sleeping on the ground.

01:24:21.000 Well, you don't want anybody doing that.

01:24:23.000 Yeah, no.

01:24:23.000 No, not at all.

01:24:25.000 But it's been cool, man.

01:24:27.000 The Water 4 thing, a little update for you, Fight for the Forgotten has gone into a dormant stage in our nonprofit.

01:24:37.000 And we have officially partnered with Water4.

01:24:40.000 We joined forces with them because when it comes to the reporting, the business...

01:24:45.000 Anyways, even the logistics and the training, their water engineers, their hydrologists, the different kinds of things that they can add to us are so great.

01:24:55.000 They've given us a truck, all the tools, all the training.

01:24:58.000 They've really been a huge component behind us.

01:25:03.000 But one of the things I love most about them is...

01:25:06.000 Yeah, we're partnering in a way that...

01:25:08.000 How would I explain it?

01:25:10.000 We see the eye-to-eye on something.

01:25:13.000 Like, the founder, he says, Water 4 isn't about charity.

01:25:18.000 It's about opportunity.

01:25:20.000 Dude, I love that because when you just do charity, you just help for such a short amount of time.

01:25:27.000 But the Water 4 method is like, hey, we're going to put the tools in their hands, the knowledge in their heads, and then we're going to look to create an opportunity for them that goes beyond what we can do from the West or from our short-term mission humanitarian trip.

01:25:45.000 We want to give this thing a life of its own, that it becomes a breathing, living thing, or even a business.

01:25:54.000 They're in 31 different countries, and they're helping these entrepreneurs do social good.

01:26:01.000 They get paid to drill water wells and to train nationals, and the jobs don't have to go outside.

01:26:07.000 They can stay inside the house.

01:26:10.000 I've loved that about them.

01:26:12.000 The cool thing that I love is that it's not about us being the heroes.

01:26:17.000 It's about the locals being the heroes.

01:26:21.000 That's the thing.

01:26:22.000 I don't want to be the hero of this.

01:26:23.000 I want to be a spark plug, if that makes sense, in the engine.

01:26:29.000 I want to get it started, get it running.

01:26:31.000 But the people are the strength, the engine, the thing that makes it run.

01:26:37.000 The spark plug gets it started, but but the locals and investing in them telling them you can do it fly on your own wings like You just need the training.

01:26:46.000 You just need the knowledge.

01:26:47.000 You just need the tools once you have that you're golden You know once they have fresh water though, there's still gonna be the issue of food though, right?

01:26:55.000 I mean it seems like with the logging you're saying it's more difficult to hunt Yeah, so what we've been doing is we're interning the three agriculturalists right now and we're about to hire them.

01:27:05.000 It's awesome.

01:27:05.000 I'm so pumped But the guy that did the 3,500 trees, he's great at farming.

01:27:12.000 And so in three of the villages, we wanted to kind of start on a smaller scale first because it is land, water, and food.

01:27:20.000 And there's kind of a process to it.

01:27:21.000 You know, you can't start growing food or having water without the land.

01:27:25.000 First, you need, I mean, you can't live without water for more than three days, I think, right?

01:27:30.000 Or at least some of it.

01:27:31.000 And then food, you can live for like three weeks without.

01:27:34.000 And so, or something like that.

01:27:36.000 And so, with the food, we start in three different areas, three different villages.

01:27:42.000 One's Tundu, and they're the ones.

01:27:44.000 Sange's grandfather, Leo May, he's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met.

01:27:48.000 Maybe he's never gone to school.

01:27:52.000 But I promise, the dude is just a problem solver.

01:27:56.000 And he inspires his people, the whole village, to get around the vision and let's do this.

01:28:03.000 And so we basically said, start with what you have.

01:28:05.000 That's kind of the Water 4 method too.

01:28:08.000 Start with what you have and we're going to come and we're going to fuel it.

01:28:11.000 We want to empower you to be able to do it for yourself.

01:28:14.000 And and that's what people need they need a little little jump start and so So anyways in this village and just Liam is I wish I would have brought in the list of what it is but From the time I came back and got married and went back about 10 weeks ago.

01:28:31.000 I Got to celebrate the 20th water well that was dug and drilled and it was such an awesome celebration of But one of the most exciting things to me was that I walk into Tundu and at first I was like,

01:28:49.000 no way.

01:28:50.000 How is this happening?

01:28:51.000 All of a sudden I was walking through a forest of bananas.

01:28:57.000 And they had planted on their own.

01:28:59.000 We had helped too.

01:29:01.000 We help when we can and we want to help so much more.

01:29:04.000 But they had planted over 250 banana trees out there.

01:29:08.000 Over 250 surrounding their village.

01:29:11.000 They had done corn, whole field, huge field of corn, cassava, which is kind of like a spinach type, tastes kind of like spinach.

01:29:20.000 They make sambay out of it.

01:29:23.000 They had done potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, Maracuja or passion fruit and yams.

01:29:34.000 That's eight.

01:29:34.000 I think the list might have nine or ten.

01:29:36.000 But they had done that all from, hey, if we get you your own land, do you think we could help you with water and you could help us with the labor, some of it, like taking the tools inside the village?

01:29:48.000 They love that.

01:29:49.000 They come and help us.

01:29:50.000 Then it's like, hey, if we want to get a farming project started, can we empower you to do that?

01:29:55.000 We gave them some tools, we gave them some seeds, we gave them some banana trees, and they just ran with it, man.

01:30:00.000 And so, I don't know, I just love seeing that if you empower someone instead of treat them like a charity case.

01:30:08.000 If you give them an opportunity instead of saying, you can't do this for yourself, get out of the way, I'll do it for you.

01:30:15.000 It's definitely a much more intelligent approach and it's definitely better for them in the future, for now.

01:30:20.000 It gives them that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that they're improving and that their life is getting better because of their efforts.

01:30:27.000 Almost dignity.

01:30:28.000 It gives them something to be proud of instead of something to be sad about.

01:30:32.000 Like, oh, I can't do this for myself.

01:30:33.000 Oh, I can do it!

01:30:35.000 Yeah.

01:30:35.000 You know?

01:30:35.000 That's got to be cool for you to see.

01:30:37.000 Yeah, dude, I love it.

01:30:38.000 And one of the other villages that we call it Mapinda, and it's, anyways, at first my heart sank because they really loved their, in nine of the ten villages, they really loved their huts.

01:30:53.000 It's very culturally important to them, the twigs and leaves.

01:30:57.000 But whenever I walk in onto their land, all of a sudden I saw huts that were just like the Makpala, just like the non-pygmies. 1.00

01:31:04.000 It was the mud huts that were, I don't know, four to six inches thick walls.

01:31:09.000 They had the leafed roofs, but they were much stronger houses.

01:31:13.000 And all of a sudden I'd come back, I'd gone back, and then all of a sudden to that village, what was important to them, the other one, the farming.

01:31:21.000 And yes, this village, also Mipenda, started farming for themselves as well, corn and beans.

01:31:27.000 But they started doing the huts because they were like, hey, if we're really equal now, we're equal to our neighbors, then we can live in the same kind of houses that they have.

01:31:37.000 We can stay out of the rain better.

01:31:38.000 We can keep our kids warmer at night.

01:31:41.000 And so to them what was Of value to them was one of the reasons they get called animals and subhuman and other things is because of their twig and leaf huts.

01:31:52.000 And their neighbors will say they live just like animals or they live in a nest or different things like that.

01:32:00.000 Well, now this place is, now they have houses just like the others.

01:32:04.000 We're equals now.

01:32:05.000 Like, that's kind of their motto.

01:32:07.000 Like, we're equals now.

01:32:09.000 And so that blew me away.

01:32:11.000 At first, my heart sunk.

01:32:12.000 Then all of a sudden, they told me they're proud.

01:32:13.000 They walked me into every single hut.

01:32:15.000 Why did your heart sink?

01:32:16.000 Because I thought they maybe had gotten pushed off their land and that the Makapala had taken the land back. 0.99

01:32:23.000 And we have strict agreements and paperwork and like stamped in the courts and law that, hey, this is the agreement that is going to be a peaceful way of doing this and we're going to help the community come up together.

01:32:38.000 So it'd be dumb of us to go in and say, we're just gonna help the Pygmies. 0.99

01:32:41.000 So we helped the community all together.

01:32:44.000 I thought these guys had gone back on their word, but then all of a sudden it was, whoa, they're living just like everybody else now.

01:32:50.000 Do these people have any idea of the impact of your work?

01:32:55.000 Like, did they understand, like, that you could reach, I mean, you're probably gonna, a million plus people are gonna hear this podcast.

01:33:02.000 The impact that you're gonna have when they talk about it on Spike TV, probably just as much.

01:33:08.000 I mean, I don't know what the number Spike's been getting for fights, but it's got to be probably close to a million or at least...

01:33:13.000 Yeah, I think it's over. 0.99

01:33:14.000 There's a lot of fucking people that are going to be... 0.99

01:33:17.000 Did they understand that? 1.00

01:33:18.000 Did they have this idea of who you are?

01:33:23.000 They know me as Afeosa Mabutimangbo.

01:33:26.000 That's my name.

01:33:27.000 But to like...

01:33:29.000 I don't mean to interrupt you.

01:33:31.000 No, you're fine.

01:33:32.000 To you or to me, okay, like you tell me that 5,000 people, 5,000 children die every day because of lack of water.

01:33:39.000 I can't get that in my head.

01:33:40.000 I mean, I know I... I'm trying.

01:33:43.000 I know it's horrific, but my head is like, what?

01:33:47.000 It's almost like there's no place for it.

01:33:49.000 It's moving around in my head.

01:33:52.000 You tell me your grandfather died. 1.00

01:33:53.000 I'm like, fuck, man. 1.00

01:33:54.000 Dude lost his grandfather. 1.00

01:33:55.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:33:56.000 It fits.

01:33:57.000 It makes sense.

01:33:58.000 You tell me 5,000 kids die every day because of a lack of water.

01:34:02.000 And I'm just blank.

01:34:03.000 I'm trying to find a place for it.

01:34:06.000 When you tell them that you are going to fight on Spike TV, and they're going to show a video of why you're doing this, and they're going to show a profile on you, do they understand what you do?

01:34:17.000 Do they understand that these people are going to see you?

01:34:20.000 Have they ever seen you fight?

01:34:22.000 Have they seen a video of you?

01:34:24.000 We've seen a Topps card.

01:34:25.000 A Topps card, that's it.

01:34:26.000 Yeah, a Topps card.

01:34:27.000 Do they know what you do?

01:34:28.000 Do they know that you were on The Ultimate Fighter?

01:34:31.000 Do they know about the UFC? Do they understand?

01:34:34.000 My drilling team does.

01:34:36.000 The well drilling team.

01:34:37.000 Right.

01:34:38.000 And sometimes we'd put on little entertaining things where the pygmies would come around and I'm not going to wrestle one of those guys, but I'll wrestle some of our well drillers. 1.00

01:34:46.000 There's one guy that's at least 6'5 on our team.

01:34:48.000 And so I'm wrestling with them and throwing them around a little bit.

01:34:51.000 And I think Ben will tell them sometimes that, you know, hey, in the United States, he was a wrestler, he was a fighter, and people know who he is.

01:35:00.000 But for them, for a frame of reference, kind of like you're saying you don't have the frame of reference for 5,000 kids dying every day.

01:35:07.000 I don't think they really have a reference for professional sports, television.

01:35:12.000 I've never met a Mabuti Pygmy that has a cell phone, that has electricity. 1.00

01:35:18.000 I've met someone with a flashlight, or a couple guys with a flashlight.

01:35:22.000 That's like the cool dude.

01:35:23.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:35:26.000 And we've left behind some of the cheaper radios, and they can get two stations or one.

01:35:34.000 But for them, I mean, soccer, I don't even think they really know that that's a professional sport.

01:35:39.000 Maybe they do, but they don't have a reference because they don't know any of the players.

01:35:43.000 They don't watch any of the games.

01:35:45.000 They know kick a ball around.

01:35:46.000 And a lot of times it's just in a big circle.

01:35:49.000 But there's...

01:35:50.000 I should not misspeak because there's a couple places that...

01:35:54.000 With Makpala, they have some teams and have some fields and stuff, but that's only in two of the places.

01:36:01.000 Other than that, it's just a circle and you kick the ball around.

01:36:03.000 So no, I wouldn't say that they...

01:36:06.000 They have a reference for what I'm trying to do for them, but that's not what it's about for me.

01:36:12.000 No, I know it's not about that for you, but for them, it's got to be so odd.

01:36:17.000 This guy, the first white person they've ever seen, and there's a video of you that was going around Reddit a long time ago of you meeting them and them touching you and they can't believe you're white and they're freaking out.

01:36:29.000 But this guy who shows up out of nowhere, like a mythical creature.

01:36:37.000 If no one else could ever reach them, and if you stopped going there, and if all contact with the outside world ceased, you would be like a part of their religion.

01:36:49.000 I mean, do you understand that?

01:36:51.000 You'd be like some Jesus Christ type character that comes out of nowhere.

01:36:56.000 Some magical man from another world who shows them how to get water, who loves them and cares for them.

01:37:01.000 Here's a video of you where they're grabbing you and touching you.

01:37:05.000 And that's actually the Makapala.

01:37:07.000 That's the non-pygmy kiddos. 1.00

01:37:09.000 So their parents, most of them, were kind of the slave masters.

01:37:14.000 Even from that village where the reason Andy Bowe was denied hospital treatment.

01:37:22.000 But really, I believe this was a moment used in my life, especially how it blew up.

01:37:28.000 I just put it up for a couple of my friends to look at, and it had like literally 40 views before all of a sudden it went viral.

01:37:34.000 And it was up for like four months.

01:37:36.000 Three months, four months.

01:37:38.000 But dude, look at their beautiful smiles.

01:37:40.000 There's got to be millions now, right?

01:37:41.000 Yeah.

01:37:42.000 On YouTube, it's 1.8, I think.

01:37:45.000 But on Facebook, a bunch of people ripped it and posted it, and it was over 12 million.

01:37:50.000 So 12 million on Facebook.

01:37:51.000 You literally are like a religious character.

01:37:55.000 I mean...

01:37:56.000 I don't know about that, but...

01:37:57.000 No, I mean, I know you don't know about that because you're humble and you're not looking at it like that, but just the sheer perspective...

01:38:06.000 For them to be living in that world where their number one concern is feeding themselves parasites, trying to get some clean water, and some guy comes from a place on the other side of the planet, and this guy does this thing called mixed martial arts,

01:38:25.000 and he fights, and they broadcast it on television, something they've never seen before in their life.

01:38:31.000 They've never seen a video.

01:38:33.000 They have no idea what MMA is.

01:38:35.000 They have no idea the impact.

01:38:36.000 Right.

01:38:37.000 And then you're going on podcasts and talking about it, and you have websites to help people contribute.

01:38:43.000 I mean, this is a...

01:38:44.000 I mean, I can't imagine that they would understand what this is.

01:38:49.000 It's so funny.

01:38:50.000 They're rubbing your head.

01:38:51.000 Yeah.

01:38:51.000 They're going crazy rubbing your hair.

01:38:52.000 They were doing my beard a minute ago.

01:38:54.000 But...

01:38:55.000 It's so funny, too, couldn't you see when you backed up?

01:38:57.000 They're all like, back up!

01:38:59.000 He's standing up straight, run away!

01:39:01.000 Like, they didn't know what to do with you.

01:39:03.000 Well, I've gone into some villages before, and literally, the women grab their children and dive into the huts. 0.99

01:39:09.000 The men run and hide behind trees.

01:39:13.000 And grab their bows and arrows and spears and stuff.

01:39:16.000 And it's funny because in those cases, it's only happened a few times, like three or four times.

01:39:23.000 Actually, pretty much every new village, so maybe ten times.

01:39:25.000 But whenever I go in, it's funny because it's normally the women. 1.00

01:39:30.000 That are the brave ones that come up to me first and then touch my arm or touch my...

01:39:36.000 I've heard once before, it was because I'm the first Waikea they're seeing, or is he real? 0.95

01:39:43.000 Because we didn't give this village a heads up that we were coming or that I was coming.

01:39:47.000 The abominable snowman is on the way.

01:39:49.000 Yeah.

01:39:49.000 At one time they were like, is that a lion man?

01:39:52.000 Another one was like, is that a spirit?

01:39:55.000 Is that like a ghost kind of guy? 0.94

01:39:58.000 I'm telling you, you're like an alien. 0.95

01:40:01.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:40:01.000 Well, and then look at me, dude. 0.95

01:40:03.000 I'm this crazy wild looking guy here with all this hair.

01:40:07.000 And then there I just let it go wild.

01:40:09.000 That's so strange, man.

01:40:11.000 And with the pygmies and the makpala that's there, most of them, even our well-drilling team, everyone is fascinated with my body hair, the arm hair, because they don't have arm hair or leg hair, and then I'm just covered in it. 1.00

01:40:24.000 So they think you're like some kind of a white gorilla or something.

01:40:28.000 My buddies would call me the great white Sasquatch or the vanilla gorilla.

01:40:33.000 That's so strange.

01:40:34.000 I just can't imagine how odd it must be to them and they don't even really know how odd it is.

01:40:42.000 Like for them to not have the preference of television, not understand, like if you could take them, I mean if Spike TV wants to really make an impact, what they need to do is go to the Congo, take some of those little fellas and fly them out to your fight. 0.98

01:40:57.000 That would be fucking nuts, man. 0.90

01:40:59.000 What would I mean, at a grocery store, I wonder what they'd think us using. 0.99

01:41:03.000 I always thought using a credit card, because for that transaction, it looks like they give it right back to you.

01:41:09.000 Yeah.

01:41:10.000 So it's like you get all this food, you give the cashier the card, they smile at you, give it back, and then you take all the food out.

01:41:17.000 It's like food's free.

01:41:18.000 You think it's free.

01:41:19.000 Right.

01:41:20.000 Trying to get them to understand what the internet is.

01:41:23.000 Yeah, or the moving sidewalks at the airport. 0.99

01:41:26.000 How about fucking Times Square? 0.99

01:41:28.000 How about fly them into New York City or Vegas? 0.99

01:41:31.000 Yeah, sometimes I think about it and I think it would be awesome.

01:41:33.000 Other times I think about it and I think it would be torture.

01:41:36.000 I don't know.

01:41:37.000 Maybe that sounds crazy, but also like giving them a place where all of a sudden they have everything at their fingertips and take them into a grocery store.

01:41:47.000 And then they missed their family right away.

01:41:50.000 Taking them out to go to Benjamin or Laryngo's wedding, they started missing the forest, like deeply missing their friends and family.

01:41:59.000 Deeply missing.

01:42:00.000 I've never seen it before, getting so homesick for something in two or three days.

01:42:03.000 Well, I can only imagine the bond because their struggle is so difficult.

01:42:07.000 It's so difficult to stay alive.

01:42:08.000 And then when they were with us, they had the food everywhere.

01:42:11.000 We were cooking the meals for them and everything when they came to the town.

01:42:14.000 And I took...

01:42:16.000 His name's Kaptula.

01:42:17.000 And he's on the video that's on Kickstarter that launched today.

01:42:22.000 But he passed away recently and messed me up.

01:42:27.000 But he's one of my favorite dudes.

01:42:29.000 And...

01:42:31.000 Anyways, I took him to the hospital like seven times and...

01:42:35.000 What is this, Jamie?

01:42:37.000 What are you putting up?

01:42:38.000 This is the Kickstarter?

01:42:39.000 Yeah.

01:42:39.000 And how does someone get to this?

01:42:42.000 It's kickstarter.com and then it's fighting for freedom.

01:42:45.000 It's a new...

01:42:45.000 It's going to be a documentary.

01:42:46.000 We want to tell the story.

01:42:48.000 I don't know if we got five minutes.

01:42:50.000 Yeah, yeah, sure.

01:42:51.000 Play it.

01:42:52.000 Play it.

01:42:52.000 Maybe we could do it with the volume?

01:42:53.000 Yeah.

01:42:54.000 In my American bubble.

01:42:55.000 Can we restart?

01:42:56.000 Yeah.

01:42:57.000 Okay.

01:42:59.000 There are two people groups in the rainforest.

01:43:02.000 The Makpala, meaning non-pygmies and pygmies.

01:43:04.000 The pygmies are the Makpala slaves. 1.00

01:43:07.000 God, look at that forest.

01:43:08.000 Slavery exists now.

01:43:10.000 That was a drone.

01:43:10.000 Today, it's not just a thing of the past.

01:43:13.000 I mean, that's what I thought.

01:43:14.000 You know, living in my American bubble.

01:43:17.000 You know, there's no slaves today.

01:43:19.000 Got rid of that in the 1800s.

01:43:22.000 Slavery in today's age?

01:43:24.000 Why?

01:43:31.000 Communities torn apart for generations.

01:43:32.000 They would call us monkeys or jungle people.

01:43:35.000 The Makpala would tell us we were nothing.

01:43:38.000 After that, they'd call us nothing.

01:43:40.000 And we would think, did God create us or are we human?

01:43:47.000 Their slave masters would come up to me and say, what are you here doing with my animals?

01:43:52.000 Or what are you here doing with my property?

01:43:54.000 I own these people.

01:43:58.000 We work hard from morning until night.

01:44:01.000 And we would get paid in two bananas to share.

01:44:04.000 Two bananas for our whole family.

01:44:06.000 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.

01:44:12.000 So that they're hungry enough that they have to come back and work the next day.

01:44:16.000 If we made even a small mistake, we would be beaten.

01:44:22.000 God created us.

01:44:23.000 We're human.

01:44:24.000 We have to fight this.

01:44:25.000 People are worth fighting for.

01:44:33.000 My name is Justin Wren.

01:44:35.000 13 years old.

01:44:36.000 I want to be a UFC fighter.

01:44:37.000 I started fighting professionally.

01:44:38.000 I was 19 years old.

01:44:39.000 I was on a reality TV show called The Ultimate Fighter when I was 21. It was the main event at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas when I was 23, and that was what I always thought was going to be my significance.

01:44:52.000 My purpose was to be a champion fighter, if I could be that.

01:44:57.000 Since then, I've come here to Congo.

01:45:03.000 Why should these sweet, loving, amazing people be literally thought of and believed to be animals whenever they're these sweet, loving, amazing people?

01:45:14.000 And so if there's something we can do, if there's something I can do, I'm going to do it.

01:45:19.000 I was fighting against people, but really I was just supposed to be fighting for people.

01:45:24.000 And even whenever we feel like the last ounce of strength is leaving, we still got to choose to fight.

01:45:29.000 And we'll see something amazing happen.

01:45:34.000 I've seen people set free, bro.

01:45:36.000 I've seen people set free.

01:45:41.000 My name is Derek Watson and I'm a filmmaker and this story has dramatically changed my life.

01:45:48.000 What inspires me about Justin is here's a guy who's at the top of his game and he leaves everything behind to go and serve and love someone else.

01:45:59.000 So we really want to tell the story through film because it's a story that really can inspire an entire audience to fight for something other than themselves and to fight for freedom.

01:46:10.000 So what I love about Derek and I choosing the crowdfunding route and being on Kickstarter is that we get to involve passionate people to be part of the story, be part of the solution.

01:46:19.000 And that's why we're inviting you along.

01:46:21.000 We could have gone different routes for funding, but we wanted to involve people in this process.

01:46:27.000 This is an awesome opportunity to really give my Pygmy family a voice.

01:46:32.000 And that was my first promise that I gave them, that I could try, at least try to give them a voice.

01:46:37.000 And now I'm asking you, help me, help me Give them a voice.

01:46:41.000 So this Kickstarter campaign really is trying to help us get just the hard cost for this film to finish it out.

01:46:47.000 Things that you have to do to get a film out on the biggest stage possible, that's what we're asking you to do.

01:46:52.000 So this money is not going to me as the filmmaker.

01:46:55.000 I am literally giving up all of my time and the time of my production team for free to do this because we really believe in the story.

01:47:03.000 And we hope you do too.

01:47:04.000 And we're going to have some amazing kickbacks.

01:47:05.000 We're going to be talking to you guys.

01:47:06.000 We want to make sure that you guys feel as involved as we do as the filmmakers and as Justin does as a subject in going down this journey with us.

01:47:16.000 So you may be asking, why don't we just give money to Fight for the Forgotten, which is Justin Wren's organization that he works with.

01:47:24.000 The answer to that is, yeah, that would be awesome.

01:47:26.000 In fact, if you feel like that's what you want to do and you want to give directly to help free pygmy slaves through water, I would say go for it. 1.00

01:47:35.000 Absolutely.

01:47:36.000 Go to fightfortheforgotten.com and give there.

01:47:38.000 Think of this though as an opportunity to see just a dramatic impact in the lives of the pygmies and honestly in the lives of our audience as well.

01:47:47.000 So that's this project and we hope you get behind us.

01:47:55.000 That's awesome.

01:47:56.000 I just tweeted that out.

01:47:57.000 Oh, wow.

01:47:57.000 So if anybody wants to check that out, go to my Twitter page and it'll be up there right now.

01:48:03.000 Today is, what was today's date?

01:48:06.000 The 24th.

01:48:08.000 Monday the 24th.

01:48:09.000 So it'll be, if you're hearing this in the future, just go back to Monday the 24th and look for my Twitter page or go to Fighting for the Forgotten.

01:48:16.000 Just do a Google search for Kickstarter, Fighting for the Forgotten.

01:48:22.000 Yeah.

01:48:23.000 Or the Kickstarter is actually, what was it?

01:48:26.000 Fighting for Freedom.

01:48:27.000 Oh, did I say Fighting for the Forgotten?

01:48:29.000 Fighting for Freedom.

01:48:30.000 Fighting for Freedom.

01:48:30.000 But the book is Fight for the Forgotten.

01:48:32.000 That comes out on September 15th.

01:48:35.000 There's a book with Loretta that helped me write that.

01:48:39.000 Loretta Hunt.

01:48:39.000 Yep.

01:48:40.000 New York Times bestselling author with Randy.

01:48:43.000 Wrote Big John's book and she helped me write this book.

01:48:46.000 It was cool.

01:48:47.000 It turned into something like a passion project for her and that's going to be one of the The kickbacks on the Kickstarter.

01:48:54.000 If you go support the Kickstarter, you can get one of the books and I'll sign it and stuff.

01:48:59.000 And then if people just want to go on Amazon, they can get the book.

01:49:02.000 And it's like half price right now until it actually releases.

01:49:05.000 It's like $12.

01:49:06.000 And when it releases, it'll be like $24.

01:49:09.000 And the cool thing about that is 33% of my portion of anything from the book, 33% goes to the pygmies, goes to water wells and stuff like that.

01:49:21.000 When you decided to get back to MMA to try to bring awareness and try to bring more attention to these people, how long had it been since you had trained?

01:49:30.000 The entire time.

01:49:32.000 Five years?

01:49:33.000 Yeah.

01:49:33.000 Nothing?

01:49:34.000 Yeah, nothing.

01:49:34.000 I mean, I was hiking through the forest.

01:49:37.000 But no martial arts?

01:49:39.000 Absolutely none.

01:49:40.000 What did it feel like to get back to the gym the first day back?

01:49:44.000 Like I should have been training.

01:49:48.000 No, my body had hurt for a while.

01:49:51.000 And I only really started training two or three months before I went this last time, which was 10 weeks ago.

01:49:59.000 And then I've been training this entire camp too.

01:50:02.000 Well, the last 10 weeks or so.

01:50:06.000 But it kind of was crazy.

01:50:07.000 They bumped me up on a card quicker. 0.91

01:50:09.000 And so from going to the Congo to celebrate the 20th water well, plus like visa issues, they wanted to try to take it because they're corrupt.

01:50:16.000 My five-year visa.

01:50:18.000 And they were trying to take it like how so yeah, they so when my wife and I left Congo last time Or basically they marked it down.

01:50:27.000 They wrote it down That we left six months earlier than we had no nine months earlier than we had and I have to go back at least every 11 months To check in to show them like hey, I'm I'm actively coming into Congo and doing stuff and So,

01:50:43.000 all of a sudden, my time, they said, literally, I got a call, and it was from the university and from our team, the drillers, and they said, F.A., we heard that you're going to lose your visa in three weeks.

01:50:56.000 I was like, what?

01:50:56.000 Why?

01:50:57.000 They're like, go look at your passport.

01:50:59.000 Did they write down the wrong date?

01:51:01.000 And so they literally wrote down the wrong date of me, my exit visa.

01:51:05.000 Just so that they could try to get another $1,200 or $1,400 out of me for a new visa.

01:51:12.000 And I would have lost it.

01:51:14.000 And when I went in, they would have a way to say, Oh, you came in illegally and you lost your passport and your visa.

01:51:20.000 And we're going to arrest you and try to get even more money out of me.

01:51:24.000 And when I got my visa the first time, literally, I didn't have a passport for over three months in the Congo.

01:51:30.000 I had to send my visa or my passport to the capital.

01:51:35.000 And people I didn't even know, I still have never met, were handling my passport while I'm in the forest.

01:51:42.000 And you could have been stuck there.

01:51:43.000 Yeah, I could have been stuck 100%. 1.00

01:51:44.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:51:45.000 And I would have had to do that again whenever I'd gotten back. 1.00

01:51:47.000 I get scared of getting stuck in Canada.

01:51:49.000 Oh, dude.

01:51:50.000 Getting stuck in Congo.

01:51:51.000 I got a friend that was arrested in Congo for nine days and was thrown in basically like a dark dungeon with all these other people.

01:51:58.000 For what?

01:51:59.000 He had a GoPro.

01:52:01.000 They arrested him for a GoPro?

01:52:03.000 Yeah, they said he was a spy.

01:52:05.000 Said he was a spy. 0.95

01:52:06.000 Throw him in the embassy.

01:52:07.000 I had to get involved.

01:52:08.000 He's a great dude.

01:52:10.000 He probably wouldn't want me to...

01:52:11.000 I wish I could say what he does. 0.99

01:52:14.000 Jesus fucking Christ. 1.00

01:52:15.000 A GoPro gets you thrown in jail for nine days. 1.00

01:52:19.000 And nine days if you have help to get out.

01:52:21.000 Yeah, and the thing that's crazy about Congo prisons is you don't get fed.

01:52:25.000 You have to be fed by people on the outside.

01:52:27.000 So if you get arrested, it's up to your family and friends to feed you.

01:52:31.000 And so this dude, he was all alone, and he got thrown in prison.

01:52:36.000 And then you don't have clean water at all.

01:52:39.000 They do bring you water, but it's dirty.

01:52:41.000 And I think technically he was in prison in Goma, which is a crazy city. 0.99

01:52:47.000 Like, one of the most insane places on planet Earth.

01:52:51.000 How so?

01:52:52.000 Well, a rebel group called the M23 took it over not too long ago, or like over a year.

01:52:57.000 Maybe closer to two years now.

01:52:59.000 But a rebel group came in.

01:53:02.000 The military and police that were supposed to protect Goma...

01:53:06.000 Goma's a million-person city.

01:53:07.000 A million people, at least.

01:53:09.000 It's like the capital of the eastern Congo.

01:53:12.000 It's where Ben Affleck is...

01:53:17.000 Or Ben Affleck, or however you say his name.

01:53:19.000 He's there in Congo, has a real heart for Congo.

01:53:22.000 That's where...

01:53:23.000 Batman Ben Affleck?

01:53:25.000 Yeah.

01:53:25.000 Yeah, he's got an organization there and is trying to do some stuff.

01:53:29.000 And Angelina Jolie goes there and helps rape victims. 0.96

01:53:33.000 But... 0.98

01:53:35.000 I think?

01:53:52.000 Former rebel groups that disbanded and came on with the government And so there's like 38 different war warring rebel groups in just the Eastern Congo I think I think It was BBC in New York Times.

01:54:08.000 I'm not sure which one said which but they call it the rape capital of the world and hell on earth for a woman Because a stat had come out in like 2012 Or 2011 that said, one woman every one minute is raped in the Congo. 0.61

01:54:22.000 It's a weapon of war.

01:54:24.000 It's 1,200 women a day. 1.00

01:54:27.000 And so, yeah, it's nuts.

01:54:30.000 It's crazy there.

01:54:33.000 So this guy's in jail there?

01:54:34.000 Yeah, he was in jail there for...

01:54:36.000 At least six days and I think they took him to the Capitol from there.

01:54:39.000 The US Embassy had to get him released.

01:54:41.000 No food?

01:54:41.000 No.

01:54:42.000 So what is he doing?

01:54:43.000 Is he just starving?

01:54:44.000 I think so.

01:54:45.000 I mean, I would have to talk to the guy about it.

01:54:48.000 Him and I haven't really talked about how all of it went down.

01:54:51.000 All I know is he works in surrounding countries.

01:54:54.000 The dude's awesome.

01:54:55.000 He's got a business that works in Whole Foods and other stuff that goes to do social good.

01:55:02.000 It's a really great...

01:55:03.000 I wish I could say it.

01:55:04.000 I don't think you'd want me to tell the story.

01:55:07.000 So I won't say his name.

01:55:08.000 But he won't come back to Congo, I don't think.

01:55:10.000 Or at least I've heard that from people that surround him and his family and stuff.

01:55:15.000 I can only imagine.

01:55:16.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:55:17.000 It was for a GoPro.

01:55:18.000 All he had was a GoPro.

01:55:21.000 And they did that crazy thing to them.

01:55:22.000 I have the right people in place that they don't mess with me as bad.

01:55:28.000 Although they do mess with me a lot.

01:55:30.000 Just like that visa. 0.78

01:55:31.000 They just try to get money out of you.

01:55:33.000 Absolutely.

01:55:34.000 What a fun place Africa is.

01:55:35.000 Sounds like a terrific spot.

01:55:38.000 Jesus Christ. 0.95

01:55:39.000 Yeah, Congo's nuts. 0.99

01:55:41.000 Man, so from the time you have five years off, you start training again.

01:55:47.000 How long between that and your fight?

01:55:52.000 How long have I trained?

01:55:53.000 Yes.

01:55:53.000 I think if I put it all together, maybe four or five months?

01:56:01.000 Solid?

01:56:02.000 No.

01:56:03.000 No.

01:56:03.000 It's been split up.

01:56:05.000 Now I'm ready.

01:56:06.000 I can tell you that.

01:56:07.000 I'm ready for the fight.

01:56:09.000 I think...

01:56:10.000 How long did it take before you, like, felt fit again?

01:56:13.000 I mean, how long did you, before you went back to sparring and...

01:56:16.000 Yeah, I was, uh, for the last four or five months, I've been, I've been going in and sparring.

01:56:20.000 I helped Jared Rochalt get ready for, um, a couple fights.

01:56:24.000 And I helped Josh get ready for a couple of fights.

01:56:27.000 Um, and, yeah, so I was in there sparring with the guys and stuff.

01:56:31.000 But I'd say at first, man, it was brutal.

01:56:33.000 It was tough.

01:56:33.000 Like, my body took a beating.

01:56:35.000 And I was thinking I needed, well, I was told I needed knee surgery.

01:56:39.000 I needed my meniscus cleaned up and stuff like that.

01:56:42.000 Not a big one, but to get it scoped.

01:56:45.000 And so I was like, I don't know what I should do.

01:56:46.000 Should I fight or should I not?

01:56:48.000 And then I found some great doctors that decided to help me.

01:56:53.000 They're actually called IPI. They're in Denver.

01:56:55.000 It's called Integrative Performance Institute.

01:56:58.000 It's a new place.

01:56:59.000 One of the doctors is an Ironman competitor.

01:57:01.000 She's awesome. 0.83

01:57:02.000 Helps all the NFL, MLB, NBA guys.

01:57:05.000 But it's with, we were talking about it before, but Regenikine.

01:57:08.000 Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of that treatment.

01:57:10.000 That's great, man.

01:57:12.000 So, they started you, you start training, and then, like, did you immediately book a fight?

01:57:17.000 How did you decide when you were going to come back?

01:57:20.000 I came and I, so I flew out here three times, I think for two weeks, and was staying with Loretta Hunt working on the book.

01:57:30.000 She said, what if I could get you a meeting with Scott Coker?

01:57:34.000 Would you want to just go talk to him about exploring fighting again?

01:57:37.000 Because she asked me and said, kind of poked and prodded, are you going to fight again?

01:57:42.000 Are you going to fight again?

01:57:43.000 And I'd already been thinking about it and talked to my wife and Which my wife's never known me as a fighter. 1.00

01:57:49.000 She thought I did Taibo at first.

01:57:51.000 She didn't know?

01:57:52.000 She didn't know what MMA was.

01:57:53.000 No.

01:57:54.000 When we first started dating.

01:57:55.000 And when she found out, she was, oh, okay.

01:57:59.000 And I told her mixed martial arts.

01:58:01.000 And so she's like, Taibo or Kung Fu?

01:58:03.000 Do you do like cardio kickboxing with your friends?

01:58:05.000 No.

01:58:08.000 But she's so sweet.

01:58:09.000 She's so awesome.

01:58:09.000 And this will be her first fight to ever, well, for me, to ever be at.

01:58:13.000 She's been at Josh's two UFC fights in Austin and Dallas.

01:58:17.000 So this will be her third live MMA fight. 0.98

01:58:21.000 You keep saying Josh.

01:58:22.000 Josh Copeland.

01:58:22.000 Josh Copeland's here.

01:58:23.000 The Cully Bear.

01:58:24.000 Everybody.

01:58:26.000 So, when you were planning on doing this, you start thinking, maybe I should do it.

01:58:32.000 Loretta prods you.

01:58:33.000 You meet with Scott Coker.

01:58:35.000 What made you decide to go with Bellator and not go back to the UFC? I talked, my management and everything talked with the UFC. I would say that, man, that's a great opportunity, obviously.

01:58:46.000 I love the UFC. It's great, great, great.

01:58:50.000 Even you helping support the water wells and Nate Marquardt.

01:58:53.000 I don't know if I said that last time, did I? But from one of his performance bonuses...

01:58:57.000 He gave us two water wells worth of donation.

01:59:00.000 That's awesome.

01:59:01.000 The dude, Nate the Great.

01:59:02.000 He's seriously a great dude.

01:59:05.000 And he might not have...

01:59:07.000 I don't know.

01:59:08.000 He probably didn't want public props, but I'm giving it to him.

01:59:12.000 And then whenever I came out and met with Scott, though, I just felt like, you know, the UFC, you could get...

01:59:18.000 You could get lost in there.

01:59:20.000 I don't mean that in a bad way, but there's 560-something dudes under contract, I think.

01:59:24.000 Right.

01:59:25.000 How many does Bellator have?

01:59:27.000 Less, and then their main card guys, I think it's significantly less.

01:59:32.000 And then also, whenever I talked with Scott, it was more of an idea of...

01:59:36.000 We want to get behind this.

01:59:39.000 Before we even talked fighting, he had sent out that video you just watched.

01:59:43.000 He had sent that out to friends and family saying, look what this guy from fighting is done.

01:59:49.000 Do they even have a champ?

01:59:51.000 Who's the heavyweight champ?

01:59:54.000 I'm gonna mess it up.

01:59:56.000 It's a Russian guy Volkov was and now it's a Vitaly or something like that Nobody knows though.

02:00:04.000 I mean, it's not you know, it's gonna be me soon That's what I'm saying.

02:00:08.000 I'm like you could be the Bellator heavyweight champion.

02:00:10.000 That's like a legit possibility right and I would this is what I Like to look at it as in me for my wrestling background and in fighting sometimes you get you You don't get this perspective, but from a wrestling background, you think of a podium, and the champ's at the top, and then there's,

02:00:26.000 you know, normally there's the top eight or All-Americans or whatever.

02:00:29.000 It's a podium of eight guys.

02:00:31.000 And I look at it as, man, I want to get on that podium, and eventually I want to get to the top.

02:00:36.000 I want to get to the top of that podium, be the guy at the top, the champ, because if I'm there, I have a bigger voice, a bigger voice for my family.

02:00:44.000 So I mean people will look people will watch if I'm on the podium and I guess they already are because of You know you and great people that are getting behind the story that see that it's important, but I know that the better I do in fighting The more people will listen and I know that's cheap and shallow At times there's nothing cheap or shallow about that at all.

02:01:07.000 Did you live in like a movie?

02:01:09.000 Your life is like this crazy inspirational movie.

02:01:13.000 This is amazing.

02:01:15.000 It's amazing.

02:01:19.000 It's hard to imagine that someone could be that selfless that's doing as much as you're doing.

02:01:25.000 It's really, really inspiring.

02:01:28.000 Thank you.

02:01:28.000 Man, whenever I look at it because of the team that we've lined up, man, the 17 full-timers we got now, about to have 20, each and every one of those people on that team, like, they are such fighters,

02:01:44.000 and they're so giving, and they're so selfless, and they'll go live in the force year-round.

02:01:50.000 And drill wells and teach farming and teach all this other stuff.

02:01:54.000 So we've got a team of such great people and we've had to let guys go that just weren't with it.

02:02:01.000 We went through 20 people before we finally got to our team that we have now.

02:02:05.000 Legitimately 20 people.

02:02:06.000 I can only imagine.

02:02:08.000 The amount of dedication that you have to have to live that life and to be that selfless, to go over there and dedicate all of your time.

02:02:17.000 You don't get to go home.

02:02:19.000 That's your home now.

02:02:21.000 And so we try to give them anywhere from a month minimum to eight weeks maximum in the forest.

02:02:29.000 And then you get to come home for two weeks, rest up a little bit, and then go back out.

02:02:35.000 Wow. 0.97

02:02:36.000 Get yourself a probe for parasites. 0.97

02:02:37.000 Yeah.

02:02:38.000 Get healed up.

02:02:40.000 Get other stuff.

02:02:42.000 We're looking at ways how we can, there's no like healthcare system or insurance there, so we're trying to figure out how we can really set up our team that they're giving so much of their bodies, you know, like their health, their time.

02:02:55.000 We try to feed them really well out there, but still it's not as good as being in a city or town.

02:03:00.000 I can only imagine.

02:03:01.000 And I can only imagine what kind of medical care they even have out there.

02:03:05.000 That's why I almost died.

02:03:06.000 The four labs told me I didn't have malaria until I was almost dead.

02:03:10.000 And then I got out into Uganda and they're like, they either said 60 to 70 or 65 to 70 percent of my bloodstream was parasites.

02:03:19.000 In Congo they didn't they couldn't see it at all So sometimes like well like our head guy We you know his wife was actually poisoned like people can be just wicked there and mean Somebody tried to poison his wife and kill her did did poison it didn't didn't kill her but I almost did she was she was in a coma because they were jealous and Literally,

02:03:44.000 it was just jealousy.

02:03:46.000 They first tried to get...

02:03:47.000 I'm not going to say their names, but first tried to get our guy and then went after his wife because they knew that if they could get her, then it would affect and hurt him.

02:03:56.000 Oh my God.

02:03:58.000 And so we've sent her to Uganda for treatment and Kenya for treatment, and I think they've maybe gone through Tanzania, but...

02:04:06.000 But it's been months and months.

02:04:08.000 She has been partially paralyzed on one side of her body from it and is learning, going through rehab, everything else.

02:04:16.000 So there's lots of stuff with health.

02:04:18.000 And so we want to try to see how we can love on our team that's given so much.

02:04:24.000 Like, hey, whenever you guys got a health thing, let us know.

02:04:27.000 And we want to take care of it.

02:04:29.000 So that's what's awesome.

02:04:31.000 The backing of Water 4, they're all in.

02:04:33.000 Yeah.

02:04:34.000 Honestly, whenever I first got back, I was like, how am I going to do this thing?

02:04:38.000 How am I going to do it by myself?

02:04:41.000 And because that's how it's kind of been.

02:04:44.000 I mean, I got a lot of support after being on the show and lots of people were behind it.

02:04:49.000 But when it comes to like the business side of it and filing with US government and all that other stuff is like, man, I got a CPA. I got other people got my board, everything else.

02:04:59.000 But I'm like, man, all I want to do is go there.

02:05:02.000 Be there with them.

02:05:03.000 Fan the flames.

02:05:04.000 Teach them stuff.

02:05:06.000 Love on them.

02:05:06.000 And then when I come back here, I need to come on things like this.

02:05:10.000 Speak about it.

02:05:11.000 I need to train.

02:05:12.000 I need to fight.

02:05:12.000 I need to win.

02:05:13.000 But I don't necessarily need to do all the business side of things.

02:05:16.000 So anyways, Water 4 has been awesome on getting behind us in that route.

02:05:20.000 That's beautiful that you've formed this incredible group of people and this organization becoming a part of you, or you becoming a part of them.

02:05:28.000 Now, your Bellator fight, when is it?

02:05:31.000 And it's live on Spike, right?

02:05:34.000 Live on Spike, it starts at 8 p.m.

02:05:40.000 Well, it starts 9 p.m.

02:05:41.000 Central.

02:05:42.000 What day?

02:05:43.000 August 28th on Friday.

02:05:45.000 Oh, so it's next week?

02:05:46.000 It's this week.

02:05:47.000 This week?

02:05:47.000 This week, man.

02:05:48.000 It's Friday night.

02:05:49.000 Yeah, today's the 24th.

02:05:51.000 So it's four days from now.

02:05:52.000 Yeah.

02:05:52.000 Where are you fighting?

02:05:53.000 It's in Temecula.

02:05:55.000 Oh, okay.

02:05:56.000 It's at Pachanga.

02:05:56.000 Okay.

02:05:57.000 So I'm fighting at Pachanga.

02:05:58.000 It's 8 p.m.

02:05:59.000 Central, 9 p.m.

02:06:00.000 Eastern.

02:06:00.000 Wow.

02:06:01.000 And who are you fighting?

02:06:04.000 I'm fighting Josh Burns.

02:06:06.000 Josh Burns has fought for Bellator five times, I think.

02:06:09.000 Maybe six.

02:06:10.000 But I think this is a six fight in Bellator.

02:06:13.000 He's a tough guy.

02:06:16.000 He hits hard.

02:06:17.000 He's a finish or get finished guy.

02:06:20.000 His record's only, I think, like eight and eight.

02:06:23.000 So, the kind of...

02:06:26.000 I mean, he goes out there and either crushes guys or he gets crushed.

02:06:30.000 That's my plan, go in there and crush him, even though I hear he's a stand-up guy.

02:06:34.000 I've had so many people, even his friends, messaging me saying how great of a guy he is as a person, and that it's kind of hard for them to root against him or things.

02:06:43.000 So it's cool I'm going to fight a good dude, but he's got to go down because...

02:06:49.000 There's a lot more writing on it for me.

02:06:51.000 There's so much more at stake now than ever before.

02:06:54.000 Wow.

02:06:55.000 Well, listen, man.

02:06:55.000 I'll be watching.

02:06:56.000 Thank you, man.

02:06:57.000 Best of luck.

02:06:58.000 And give out all the information so people can contribute.

02:07:02.000 I gave out the Kickstarter on Twitter.

02:07:05.000 What else can they do?

02:07:07.000 How can they contribute to Water 4?

02:07:09.000 What else can they do?

02:07:10.000 Yeah, if they want to follow me on social media, there's on Twitter, I'm the Big Pygmy.

02:07:15.000 And on Instagram, I'm the Big Pygmy.

02:07:17.000 That's the Mabutimangbo. 1.00

02:07:19.000 It just means the Big Pygmy.

02:07:21.000 So that's what a lot of the people call me.

02:07:24.000 That's where the nickname comes from.

02:07:27.000 By the way, it's random, but there's three kiddos now.

02:07:31.000 And those three, one of them's in Tundu, that village.

02:07:33.000 His name is Mbutimangbo Justin.

02:07:35.000 And so that's his full name is the Big Pygmy Justin.

02:07:38.000 Wow.

02:07:39.000 And so that's kind of one of the reasons why I'm like, you know what, that should be my nickname, not the Viking.

02:07:44.000 Yeah.

02:07:45.000 Anyways, but how they can contribute is, man, fightfortheforgotten.org.

02:07:51.000 Fightfortheforgotten.org.

02:07:53.000 I think later today or tomorrow, also.com will be there.

02:07:57.000 Right now it's the old site on.com, but the new, improved site is fightfortheforgotten.org.

02:08:04.000 The book, I mean, I think people can really, I mean, from our talks, this is the deepest people can see into what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and my heart behind it so far.

02:08:15.000 But on September 15th, it's 28 chapters of this stuff, and I go into it real deep.

02:08:21.000 That's on Amazon, Barnes& Noble.

02:08:24.000 Well, I'll tweet that out whenever it comes out.

02:08:26.000 I'll do, thank you.

02:08:28.000 Tweet whatever you need, man.

02:08:30.000 You're an incredible person.

02:08:32.000 Thank you.

02:08:33.000 Thank you, bro.

02:08:33.000 You're incredible.

02:08:34.000 And I'm so thankful for this platform.

02:08:37.000 This platform's easy.

02:08:39.000 I'm just sitting in this room in the valley.

02:08:42.000 I literally can't tell you how many people from airplanes That I sit next to someone from San Diego that's watched it and someone at the hotel and just all over the place, man.

02:08:53.000 I walk around and people are like, oh, it's Justin from The Joe Rogan Show.

02:08:57.000 And I'm just like, what?

02:08:58.000 And they're like, oh, what you're doing?

02:08:59.000 So, man, thank you.

02:09:00.000 I'm honored that I could have you on and give you this platform because what you're doing is just, you're amazing, man.

02:09:07.000 There's not a whole lot of people like you, man.

02:09:10.000 It's incredible.

02:09:11.000 I mean, what you've done is just, it's beyond words.

02:09:14.000 So anytime you need any help, I'm here.

02:09:17.000 Dude, I love you, man.

02:09:18.000 Thank you.

02:09:19.000 Love you too, brother.

02:09:20.000 Alright, before I start crying, that's it, folks.

02:09:23.000 That's the end of this.

02:09:24.000 We'll be back tomorrow with Abby Martin, the Big Pygmy. 0.99

02:09:28.000 Follow him, Twitter, Instagram, all that good shit. 0.99

02:09:30.000 And root for him, Spike TV, Friday night. 1.00

02:09:33.000 Alright.

02:09:33.000 Facebook, fight for the forgotten.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 24, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #687 - Justin Wren

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Transcript