The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella

00:00:00.000 Vacation, though.

00:00:00.000 With your family.

00:00:01.000 Yeah, we're going to Lanai.

00:00:02.000 Oh, that'll be fun.

00:00:03.000 Yeah.

00:00:05.000 Boom.

00:00:06.000 And we're live.

00:00:07.000 Speaking of vacations, tell me about Guyana.

00:00:10.000 Yeah, that was a good segue.

00:00:11.000 Dude, you've been there a bunch.

00:00:12.000 How many times now?

00:00:14.000 I thought it was three.

00:00:15.000 No, I was in...

00:00:16.000 No, I've been to...

00:00:18.000 Guyana twice, but between there I went to Bolivia.

00:00:21.000 Oh.

00:00:21.000 And did like very similar, very similar kind of trip.

00:00:24.000 Like doing a river trip with Amerindians. 1.00

00:00:28.000 Are those people weirded out by Americans because of the Jonestown massacre thing?

00:00:34.000 Dude, it's so funny you bring up Jonestown because there's a couple things I've been...

00:00:41.000 So, the main group I was with in Guyana is the Mikushi. 1.00

00:00:48.000 And I was surprised one day when I was...

00:00:50.000 They make a dish.

00:00:51.000 They make a dish with cassava, which is a root, like, manioc.

00:00:55.000 They make a dish with that.

00:00:56.000 They make a flower from it and make a dish.

00:00:58.000 And I was one day saying that, hey, that looks like pizza.

00:01:02.000 Right?

00:01:03.000 No.

00:01:04.000 Right?

00:01:05.000 No comprehension, but no thought of what pizza is.

00:01:08.000 I remember thinking, wow, man, something you take such a part of everyday life is pizza.

00:01:14.000 They didn't know what it was.

00:01:15.000 Yeah, and they don't know about Georgetown.

00:01:17.000 Whoa.

00:01:18.000 Even though it was in their own country.

00:01:20.000 They don't know about it at all?

00:01:22.000 No, it's just not.

00:01:24.000 We'll get into this, but you've got to realize how insular the Amerindian communities are.

00:01:34.000 Who live in the jungle in Guyana.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, did they have communication?

00:01:39.000 Any cell phones?

00:01:40.000 Yeah, they do.

00:01:40.000 Yeah, more and more now.

00:01:41.000 And there was a lot change from the two times I went there.

00:01:44.000 They were five or six years apart.

00:01:46.000 They discovered sunglasses.

00:01:47.000 And I remember the first time I was down there trying to turn them on.

00:01:53.000 They bow hunt for fish, which is one of the main ways they get fish, is bow hunting for fish.

00:01:57.000 And when you're looking into the water, polarized lenses are invaluable.

00:02:02.000 I feel lost without them, trying to spot fish underwater.

00:02:06.000 And I kept saying, man, you gotta get on board with polarized sunglasses.

00:02:10.000 And I'd hand them to him.

00:02:11.000 He didn't like this guy Rovin.

00:02:13.000 He didn't like anything about having them on his face.

00:02:15.000 He just couldn't do it.

00:02:16.000 But then I go down there five years later and every one of those boys is rocking polarized glasses.

00:02:21.000 So you see changes.

00:02:23.000 But yeah, that's the thing.

00:02:25.000 I've brought up Jonestown a number of times because in the U.S., if you say, hey, I'm going to Guyana, all anybody says is don't drink the Kool-Aid.

00:02:32.000 Right.

00:02:33.000 You know, it wasn't really Kool-Aid?

00:02:35.000 It was some like...

00:02:36.000 Kool-Aid, no. 0.55

00:02:36.000 It was a Kool-Aid type drink. 0.55

00:02:38.000 No?

00:02:39.000 So when people look at...

00:02:41.000 We had this conversation, because there's a couple of things that are important here.

00:02:44.000 What the poison was, right?

00:02:46.000 So we had a conversation.

00:02:49.000 Let me back up.

00:02:50.000 The root.

00:02:51.000 I mentioned earlier they make a root.

00:02:52.000 Cassava.

00:02:53.000 Yeah, so there's a root cassava.

00:02:54.000 Is that the poisonous stuff?

00:02:55.000 Yeah, so it's the root that gives all life.

00:02:58.000 That's what they call it?

00:02:59.000 No, but I mean, they eat fish and game, okay?

00:03:04.000 River fish and wild game.

00:03:06.000 And then that's like a staple that they eat every day.

00:03:08.000 And the other thing they eat every day is a half dozen things all produced from cassava, which is kind of like a yam.

00:03:17.000 And it's cultivated with slash and burn agriculture.

00:03:19.000 And they cultivate these yams.

00:03:21.000 And from it they make a flour.

00:03:24.000 They make a type of grain that's like couscous.

00:03:28.000 They make a syrup.

00:03:44.000 Wow.

00:03:49.000 Wow.

00:03:53.000 In its raw form, when you shred the root and squeeze the shredding, so it'd be like, imagine you took a yam and shredded a yam and then squeezed the yam between your hands and dripped out a liquid.

00:04:04.000 That liquid is deadly poisonous.

00:04:06.000 Okay?

00:04:07.000 Dogs, chickens, people, anything that drinks that liquid dies.

00:04:11.000 Jesus.

00:04:12.000 And it's cyanide.

00:04:14.000 So, the Jonestown Massacre was a cocktail of The best people think that it was Kool-Aid, Flavor-Aid, Valium, and Potassium Cyanide.

00:04:32.000 My question coming home from Ghana was, was the cyanide from the root?

00:04:39.000 Were they doing homemade cyanide?

00:04:41.000 When I got home, I looked into this, and it seems that that commune, Jonestown commune, Had been ordering actual potassium cyanide, which is used in a number of mining practices and other stuff.

00:04:56.000 So it's an available compound.

00:04:59.000 And that's what they lace the Kool-Aid with.

00:05:01.000 I'd heard about this cassava stuff.

00:05:03.000 Do they know what the process is?

00:05:05.000 Did they know how people figured out how to make it non-poisonous?

00:05:09.000 No.

00:05:10.000 Wow, it's just been done so long?

00:05:12.000 Yeah.

00:05:12.000 Yeah, and the same stuff with different poisons that people use to poison fish.

00:05:19.000 What strikes me about it is how, in the village, the Mikushi village I was in is mostly Mikushi, but there's also Wapashana, which is another tribe.

00:05:32.000 Carib is another tribe, but it's predominantly a Mikushi village. 0.99

00:05:35.000 And there's about 300 people that live in this village.

00:05:39.000 And how careless they are with the liquid.

00:05:43.000 Like, if you nowadays, like, picture, like, the type of person that, like, you and me are married to and raise kids with, right?

00:05:52.000 If you had that type of mom, and you had a big bowl of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a bit, how that bowl would be monitored in your household? 0.98

00:06:05.000 Jesus Christ.

00:06:06.000 There'd be, like, barbed wire around it, electrical fence.

00:06:09.000 Yeah.

00:06:10.000 And how do they do it? 1.00

00:06:11.000 But this shit just lays out. 1.00

00:06:12.000 They just lay it out? 1.00

00:06:13.000 And I said, I was asking this guy, Rovin, I'm like, hey man, I kept returning to this.

00:06:17.000 There's certain things I would always ask him, just like things that he struggled to understand by fixation on it.

00:06:23.000 But I kept saying to this Mikushi guy, Rovin, who... 1.00

00:06:29.000 I should back up, too.

00:06:29.000 I got communication.

00:06:30.000 So, Guyana is the only English-speaking country in South America.

00:06:34.000 Everyone speaks it.

00:06:35.000 No, no.

00:06:36.000 The government functions are English.

00:06:38.000 So, if you picture South America, it's northeast corner opening out onto the southern Caribbean.

00:06:46.000 That's Guyana.

00:06:47.000 It's bordered on the east by Suriname, on the west by Venezuela, to the south by Brazil.

00:06:55.000 It's 90% virgin rainforest.

00:06:58.000 And within that 90% of Virgin Rainforest is only 10% of the population.

00:07:03.000 So the coastal peoples are like Creole cultures, people mostly descended from slave trade, Europeans. 0.98

00:07:10.000 In the interior are the Amerindian groups.

00:07:16.000 The government functions, sort of the power in Guyana is the coastal peoples.

00:07:22.000 And there's not a ton of interplay, and there used to be barely any interplay, between the Amerindian communities and the government.

00:07:29.000 The government's English-speaking.

00:07:31.000 So you'll find that there's a lot of English mixed in in the Amerindian communities.

00:07:36.000 And some people, like this guy Rovin, because he's sort of a...

00:07:41.000 He's like a...

00:07:42.000 He has a leadership role in his community, and he's learned just standard English very well.

00:07:49.000 He's had a fascinating life, just how much stuff has changed for him.

00:07:53.000 So you can just, like, converse, okay, in a way that...

00:07:59.000 You can converse in the type of English we're talking right now, almost.

00:08:04.000 Which creates this weird tension between the things that you're discussing and how you're discussing them.

00:08:10.000 Like, for instance, to have a guy just in conversational English talking about problems they're having with neighboring shamans and their own shaman putting curses on each other.

00:08:22.000 There's a strange tension between how it's being conveyed to you.

00:08:27.000 You know?

00:08:28.000 Like how so?

00:08:29.000 Like, okay, if you're talking conversational English, I guess like a life, it's almost like you'd want it to be, when he's telling you this, you'd almost want to be reading it in like closed caption.

00:08:41.000 And he'd be saying it in the indigenous language.

00:08:44.000 Because it sounds weird to have an idea that's so foreign to us.

00:08:51.000 Which would be like a battle of shamans, battling over access to wild animals.

00:08:56.000 To have that delivered in conversational English just struck me as unusual.

00:09:01.000 Because usually when you're traveling, you're getting all of your information...

00:09:06.000 Like traveling in Bolivia.

00:09:07.000 A guy would tell a story.

00:09:08.000 And he'd tell a story in Simshian.

00:09:13.000 No, I'm going to say not Simshian. 1.00

00:09:14.000 Chimane.

00:09:15.000 He'd tell a story in Chimane to a person who spoke Spanish.

00:09:20.000 The person who speaks Spanish would tell it to a person...

00:09:24.000 No, no, no.

00:09:26.000 A Chimane guy telling someone who speaks Chimane in Spanish.

00:09:31.000 Then that person telling it...

00:09:42.000 Right.

00:09:47.000 Right.

00:09:52.000 Okay.

00:09:53.000 Yeah.

00:09:53.000 Do you remember I sent you a video of a guy talking about killing a jaguar?

00:09:57.000 Yes.

00:09:57.000 Right?

00:09:58.000 The language, you've never, like, when he's speaking, you're like, I've never, in all my travels, I've never heard a language that sounds anything like that.

00:10:04.000 Is the video online?

00:10:05.000 Can we play it?

00:10:06.000 Yeah, it's online.

00:10:07.000 Do you know the title of it?

00:10:08.000 I think if you type in, like, Chimane T-S-I... Chimane, Jaguar, Attack.

00:10:18.000 See if Jamie can fly.

00:10:19.000 You'll pull it up.

00:10:19.000 It's very cool.

00:10:20.000 The language is really amazing.

00:10:22.000 It seems so ancient.

00:10:23.000 Yes.

00:10:24.000 It has nothing to do with the Latin languages.

00:10:27.000 It just sounds so...

00:10:28.000 It's very unique.

00:10:30.000 So I guess what I'm getting at is to hear someone talking about something in conversational English that seems so far removed from just our understanding of things.

00:10:38.000 It takes on a weird quality.

00:10:39.000 But what's nice about it is you can go to a place where life is so vastly different than anything we understand.

00:10:46.000 And just get the straight dope right from the source. 0.99

00:10:49.000 It's kind of like what's so cool about Guyana because you can go and converse with people who are very much a hunter-gatherer culture today, but just shoot the shit with them without ever feeling like you're missing something. 0.96

00:11:06.000 Everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and painstaking to wade through. 0.94

00:11:12.000 But you can just ask.

00:11:15.000 Like, hey, what's up with the local shaman?

00:11:16.000 I'll give you the dope on the local shaman.

00:11:19.000 And so they trade spells?

00:11:21.000 Yeah, we'll talk about that.

00:11:23.000 But I feel like I was laying the groundwork for the Jim Jones poison.

00:11:28.000 Did you find the video?

00:11:29.000 No, I lost the word that you were spelling.

00:11:31.000 T-S-I-M-A-N-E. T-S-I-M-A-N-E. What does that mean? 0.66

00:11:40.000 Chimane.

00:11:41.000 That's how they spell it? 0.97

00:11:42.000 I could be screwed up.

00:11:44.000 You know how you spell a lot worse when you're not actually writing it out? 0.78

00:11:47.000 Yeah, I'm terrible.

00:11:48.000 I don't know how anybody wins a spelling bee ever.

00:11:52.000 Chimane is T-S-I? Yeah, so if you type in Chimane Jaguar.

00:11:57.000 T-S-I-M-A-N-E Jaguar. 0.99

00:12:02.000 The whole thing is an Amerindian hunter remembers his best dog lost to a jaguar in the jungles of Bolivia.

00:12:09.000 Alright, here we go. 0.98

00:12:09.000 Let's play this because it's fucking awesome. 0.98

00:12:12.000 Here we go. 0.96

00:12:16.000 The following is an interview with a member of the Chumani tribe of Bolivia due to their inherent difficulties of translating indigenous languages.

00:12:23.000 Subtitles are at times approximate.

00:12:37.000 So he's explaining where he's from.

00:12:40.000 He's saying he hunts for food.

00:12:42.000 I always share the meat I get with my family.

00:12:44.000 I'm a good provider of meat.

00:12:45.000 He's cutting up the meat in this video.

00:12:50.000 I also enjoy the adventure.

00:12:52.000 I love trekking through the jungle.

00:12:55.000 Once I was hunting with my favorite dog and a couple other dogs.

00:12:59.000 They ran ahead barking.

00:13:00.000 They were going after something.

00:13:04.000 All of a sudden my favorite dog just went completely silent.

00:13:10.000 They were about 50 meters ahead of me.

00:13:12.000 When I got there the other dogs had gone ahead after something.

00:13:21.000 Saying my favorite dog was lying there dead.

00:13:23.000 There was a big hole in his right side.

00:13:25.000 Almost looked like it had been arrowed.

00:13:29.000 First thing I did was pick up my dog and set him where the ants wouldn't get to his body.

00:13:33.000 That dog was the bravest one I had.

00:13:39.000 I'm not going to translate anymore.

00:13:41.000 You guys should just watch the video if you're interested, but you get a sense of how cool it is.

00:13:45.000 So, did we fully cover the poison thing?

00:13:49.000 No, not really.

00:13:50.000 So I got home, yeah, so it wasn't the same poison, but Jim Jones, he grew up in like a, he was involved in a Pentecostal church, he was involved in the Methodist church, then he kind of became a healer.

00:14:04.000 And started his own cult.

00:14:06.000 It was funny, I was reading about him, when I was trying to figure out the poison, I was reading about how he was kind of ahead of his time.

00:14:12.000 Because the Jim Jones Massacre was 1979. 78 or 79. And one thing that got him sideways with his church was that he wanted to have interracial service.

00:14:24.000 And that caused friction in his church at the time.

00:14:28.000 Earlier in his career.

00:14:30.000 And he moved out to the Bay Area and started this church, and then he got kind of paranoid and thought that his congregants shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities, but he was siring illegitimate children left and right.

00:14:41.000 They go down to Guyana, go out to the jungle. 0.88

00:14:45.000 There's a thousand of them down there.

00:14:47.000 People in the U.S. from the Bay Area are kind of like wondering what happened to their loved ones.

00:14:51.000 They send a congressman down there to try to figure out what's going on.

00:14:56.000 He shows up with a bunch of cameras.

00:14:58.000 The congressman says, you know, he's like, I'm going to help anyone who wants to go back to the Bay Area, go back to the Bay Area.

00:15:05.000 He goes to the airstrip.

00:15:06.000 There's a shootout.

00:15:07.000 The U.S. congressman gets killed in the shootout. 0.77

00:15:10.000 And then they just all start killing themselves. 1.00

00:15:13.000 With the poison and firearms and other shit. 0.99

00:15:18.000 270 some kids. 0.99

00:15:19.000 Over 900 people.

00:15:21.000 Yeah, I remember it.

00:15:22.000 It's like the defining thing.

00:15:24.000 But then, yeah, when you talk to these boys, I'm like, you know Georgetown, like the Jonestown, or the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, never drink the Kool-Aid?

00:15:32.000 They're like, no.

00:15:34.000 See, I'd heard it was budget Kool-Aid.

00:15:36.000 No, that's a debate.

00:15:38.000 Some of it was?

00:15:38.000 And that's a debate.

00:15:40.000 And in trying to dig around and find the source of the cyanide, which became very important to me to learn for some reason.

00:15:48.000 No, and I think Kool-Aid even tried to distance himself from it.

00:15:51.000 That probably was Kool-Aid.

00:15:52.000 But there's some archival stuff.

00:15:54.000 And I guess in this archival stuff...

00:15:57.000 Images, like footage taken around and photographs around, people have found out that they had both Flavor Aid and Kool-Aid on hand.

00:16:06.000 That's hilarious.

00:16:08.000 What was Kool-Aid propaganda that was trying to pass the buck on the Flavor Aid?

00:16:11.000 So, yeah.

00:16:12.000 No thing there.

00:16:13.000 So, if you go up...

00:16:16.000 The main river that drains Guyana is the Essequibo.

00:16:22.000 And if you go way up the Essequibo, you'll get to a stream that comes in from there called the Rupanuni, and you go up the Rupanuni, and then you get to the Riwa.

00:16:30.000 And at the mouth of the Riwa in Rupanuni is Riwa Village.

00:16:35.000 And in Riwa Village, you're isolated enough where you don't know about 900 Americans and some other people from other areas dying in a mass suicide.

00:16:49.000 Wow.

00:16:50.000 That's fascinating.

00:16:51.000 Around the time you were born.

00:16:52.000 That's fascinating.

00:16:53.000 It makes sense, though, that they're just so removed from it.

00:16:57.000 Yeah.

00:16:57.000 Do they use agriculture?

00:17:00.000 Like, how are they getting this cassava?

00:17:01.000 They grow peppers, and then they grow the cassava.

00:17:05.000 And the cassava, like, it's kind of amazing.

00:17:08.000 You know, we always hear about slash and burn agriculture.

00:17:11.000 So, they'll...

00:17:13.000 They'll go into a slash and burn in a spot out in the jungle.

00:17:18.000 But it's like a recycled sort of slash and burn agriculture.

00:17:21.000 And I'll break down what that means.

00:17:23.000 So they'll go into an area and slash everything and burn it. 0.51

00:17:25.000 Just to clear the...

00:17:26.000 Just so sunlight can make it through to the ground.

00:17:28.000 So they chop the jungle down and burn everything.

00:17:31.000 Then the cassava, like I said, looks like big yams.

00:17:36.000 When you grow it, you just take a stalk of an existing plant.

00:17:42.000 And just bury that stalk in the ground. 0.96

00:17:44.000 And it'll sprout up a new crop.

00:17:48.000 And so, you know, you're close to the equator, so you don't have seasons.

00:17:53.000 There's some seasonal variation.

00:17:55.000 They do have their wet season and dry season, but you always get about the same amount of darkness as daylight, and they don't have the wild fluctuations that we have in the temperate zone.

00:18:05.000 So they can grow year-round.

00:18:07.000 And they stage it.

00:18:08.000 So you have a crop that's coming in, you have a crop that'll be coming in in three months, you have a crop that'll be coming in in six months, you have a crop that'll be coming in nine months.

00:18:16.000 And once you get a certain number of cycles, I can't remember how many cycles you get off a piece of ground, you let the ground go feral.

00:18:23.000 Give it a few years and then come in and burn it again.

00:18:40.000 And that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the surrounding just detritus scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it.

00:18:49.000 And it is a staple of life.

00:18:52.000 That and a river fish and game.

00:18:55.000 It's just such a wild thing that it's such a poisonous plant.

00:18:58.000 I don't get it.

00:19:00.000 I don't get it.

00:19:01.000 There's other poisons that are extracted.

00:19:06.000 People in South America, in the jungles, people that use blow darts, so people that hunt with blow guns, it's generally understood, even talking to the Mikushi who hunt with bows and arrows, I asked him, why don't you guys hunt with blow darts, 0.78

00:19:21.000 blow guns?

00:19:22.000 And he explained to me, we don't need to, because we have arrow plant, which gives arrows.

00:19:28.000 Now, if you were in this other area, you know, more up in the mountains, and there's no arrow plant, then you'd hunt with a blow dart.

00:19:36.000 So is arrow plant just a plant that makes like a shaft-like...

00:19:39.000 Makes the arrow.

00:19:40.000 What is it?

00:19:41.000 What is the actual...

00:19:42.000 It's like a cane.

00:19:45.000 You know what it looks like?

00:19:46.000 It looks like a palm, and the palm leaf puts out these long pieces, and when one of those is ready, you cut it green...

00:19:55.000 They can make an arrow in no time.

00:19:57.000 So you go out in the jungle, find this piece, and you know one of the theories on how we domesticated plant species would be that it was a very gradual, unintentional domestication where you would go out.

00:20:12.000 I'm going to just take something simple.

00:20:14.000 Let's say you eat a lot of raspberries.

00:20:15.000 You go out and you gather raspberries and you bring them home.

00:20:19.000 And you eat them near home. 0.94

00:20:21.000 And then people are eating these seeds and shitting these seeds out.

00:20:24.000 And pretty soon, there's a lot more grassberries growing around your home village.

00:20:30.000 Just for the simple fact that you're always bringing the seeds home and discarding them around and creating it.

00:20:36.000 So, they have...

00:20:40.000 Except for Maniac, which people don't even really, I don't think it's really well understood what it came from.

00:20:45.000 It's been domesticated for a long time.

00:20:47.000 All the plants they use are widely available in the jungle, but tend to also have some around home too, that they've brought home and planted nearby, or they just grow up there now because they've been bringing the stuff into their village for so long.

00:21:01.000 So Aeroplant is readily available.

00:21:05.000 They cut the arrow shaft green, and it looks like just a green dowel, but it has some curvature to it.

00:21:12.000 Then they'll come home and they start a fire, and they heat the green thing just by twirling it over the embers or over the flame.

00:21:22.000 Twirling it and getting it hot, and it'll let off a little steam, and then you bend it.

00:21:28.000 And then you twirl it and get it hot and bend it and you'll eventually make it, well, arrow straight.

00:21:34.000 Then they make four different kinds of arrows depending on what they're hunting for.

00:21:40.000 So let's say you were making an arrow to...

00:21:44.000 Let's say you're making a big game arrow.

00:21:50.000 In the big game they hunt would be red-brocket deer, white-lip peccary, which is a favorite, Collard peccary, which we call javelina, and sometimes tapir.

00:22:05.000 The arrow they use for that, so they would take that, so let's say they're going to build one of those.

00:22:09.000 So they take that green shaft and straighten it.

00:22:11.000 The next step is they find a wood called bullet wood, and they cut what would be like, what's going to form the base of your Tip.

00:22:24.000 The base of your spear.

00:22:25.000 And that bullet wood, they fit into the end of the green shaft, which is almost like a picture of having the consistency of bamboo.

00:22:33.000 And they shove that bullet wood in there, and it forms like a base.

00:22:37.000 And to that, they take an old machete blade that they cut out and file down to be about a four-inch steel knife.

00:22:45.000 And that goes into the bullet wood that forms the junction between the arrow shaft and the steel piece.

00:22:54.000 That's the only man-made material they use in their arrows.

00:22:57.000 Then they take a plant that looks like yucca.

00:23:00.000 And they make their own string.

00:23:02.000 And they got little bits of rubber from rubber trees that they wax the string with.

00:23:07.000 And they put a bullet wood knock in the part that your bow string actually pushes on.

00:23:13.000 And that gets tied in to the arrow shaft.

00:23:16.000 And then they fletch the arrow with feathers from Guan... 0.65

00:23:22.000 Or Black Curacao or Crestless Curacao.

00:23:25.000 And that's what they fletch their arrows with because they're very water resistant.

00:23:28.000 So their broadheads are made out of machete blades.

00:23:31.000 Yeah.

00:23:31.000 And is this a recent innovation for them?

00:23:33.000 Yeah, they used to use wood.

00:23:35.000 And how long have they been doing it with machete blades?

00:23:37.000 In his lifetime, it's always been...

00:23:39.000 They don't call them machete, they call them cutlasses.

00:23:41.000 In Roven's lifetime, Roven's 32. He's kind of my main friend down there that I hung out with both times I was down there.

00:23:46.000 In his lifetime...

00:23:48.000 He remembers people using wood blades, which is made from a bamboo-like material, so it would be like a convex spear point cut out of bamboo and sharpened.

00:24:01.000 He remembers people using those, but he had always used cutlass blades.

00:24:07.000 Wow.

00:24:08.000 Now, in Bolivia, you'd see people who are just using the old form.

00:24:14.000 There are other arrows, when they make arrows for hunting birds and they make arrows for hunting fish, the only man-made material on those arrows is hog wire fencing.

00:24:22.000 So basically wire fencing, they snip out the hunks of wire, smash it down until it's flat, and then they can cut barbs in there to hunt birds and hunt fish.

00:24:33.000 Wow.

00:24:34.000 The bow is, it's not a laminate bow, so they make a bow by just cutting a tree.

00:24:41.000 Single piece, a single stem tree, shaving it down to what they're after, and then take that same yucca plant, pull out the fibers out of the yucca strands, and make bow strings.

00:24:52.000 That goes very quickly as well.

00:24:53.000 We made a bow string one day.

00:24:55.000 Wow.

00:24:56.000 Yeah.

00:24:58.000 You take the strands and twist them.

00:25:00.000 Imagine you're rubbing your hands to warm them up.

00:25:02.000 You've got all those strands in your hands, and you roll them.

00:25:06.000 And it makes strands that are comprised of a dozen fibers.

00:25:11.000 Then you start braiding up from there until you braid up a big long bowstring.

00:25:16.000 And that's how you string your bow.

00:25:18.000 So when they're shooting their bow, what's a long shot for them?

00:25:21.000 Like 15, 20 yards?

00:25:22.000 20 yards is a long shot.

00:25:23.000 Long shot.

00:25:24.000 And the length of shot you're going to take sort of depends on...

00:25:27.000 Well, they don't really think...

00:25:33.000 The idea that you're going to wound it and it's going to get away doesn't weigh on them very heavily.

00:25:38.000 In our culture, in our hunting culture here, we've come to really...

00:25:43.000 The wound loss is something we do a lot to avoid.

00:25:49.000 There's a lot of talk.

00:25:51.000 We're always talking about, you know, you shouldn't be surprised to get a good hit.

00:25:54.000 You should know what's going to happen.

00:25:57.000 Don't take shots that are too far away. 0.97

00:25:59.000 We really put a strong value on when you let the arrow go or when you let the bullet go, you damn sure know that you're going to have a quick, clean kill.

00:26:09.000 At least we put a lot of value on that.

00:26:11.000 In practice, sometimes that stuff goes out the window, but anyone would say that that's your goal.

00:26:17.000 Not on their mind.

00:26:18.000 You see them take some Hail Marys, right? 0.99

00:26:21.000 And they can shoot...

00:26:23.000 If you're trying to shoot a bird, all they're trying to do is get a wire point.

00:26:28.000 So one of those arrows I described, fitted with a long wire on the end, cut out of a piece of steel fence, with a barb, with a couple barbs filed into it.

00:26:38.000 And that head...

00:26:43.000 We're good to go.

00:26:57.000 So when they shoot, all they really need to do is prick that thing with that wire barb, knowing that the bird, or they hunt for a large aquatic rodents, knowing that the bird is going to get tangled up in the trees overhead, and that they can then climb up to go get it.

00:27:14.000 Even then, I think, even shooting like that kind of thing where you're just trying to prick the thing, 30 yards would be very long.

00:27:22.000 Shooting fish, you're not shooting that...

00:27:23.000 I mean, shooting fish, you're not really...

00:27:25.000 Like, bow fishing, which I've done a lot of in my life, a 10-yard bow fishing shot is very far.

00:27:30.000 Yeah, you're right above them, right?

00:27:31.000 Yeah, because you're shooting down into the water.

00:27:33.000 Now, do they have...

00:27:34.000 You have to judge...

00:27:35.000 When you're shooting into the water, you have to judge differently, right?

00:27:38.000 Way different.

00:27:40.000 Unless that thing... 0.99

00:27:41.000 Unless that fish is sunning...

00:27:43.000 Unless that fish is sunning and its back is at the surface or breaking the surface...

00:27:49.000 You need to account for refraction.

00:27:51.000 So you're aiming way low.

00:27:53.000 Now, if you've got a fish that's...

00:27:54.000 A fish two feet below the water surface is extremely hard to hit.

00:27:58.000 Because it's so deep.

00:27:59.000 You're aiming at your boot.

00:28:02.000 Really?

00:28:02.000 Well, I mean, it feels like that.

00:28:03.000 You're aiming so low.

00:28:04.000 There's an equation for it.

00:28:06.000 It's always low?

00:28:07.000 You're aiming way below the fish because of refraction.

00:28:09.000 Like anyone who's ever taken a fishing pole and stuck it in the water, right?

00:28:12.000 Right, you see the...

00:28:13.000 Yeah, it hooks.

00:28:14.000 So that's like the trick of bowfishing.

00:28:17.000 But where they bowfish, for some of the stuff, my favorite thing to bowfish down there is also dealing with current. 0.99

00:28:26.000 And again, they're shooting a hollow arrow that doesn't weigh shit. 0.95

00:28:29.000 It doesn't cut through the water at all. 0.83

00:28:31.000 So they're holding way low for refraction and holding way upstream because their arrow is so buoyant.

00:28:39.000 Oh, wow.

00:28:40.000 Now, an American bow fishing rig, which I shoot, has a fiberglass arrow.

00:28:45.000 So the current isn't as much of an issue because that arrow is so heavy that it can cut through the water.

00:28:51.000 But refraction is the same.

00:28:54.000 So that's why a point-blank shot bowfishing is still very difficult.

00:28:59.000 And then you've got to factor that you still need to hit the thing pretty good in a place where the arrow's not going to pop out.

00:29:05.000 There's a fish they bowhunt for, that they used to bowhunt for, for salted fish, called the arapaima.

00:29:13.000 And arapaima is the biggest freshwater fish in the world.

00:29:17.000 Bigger than a sturgeon?

00:29:18.000 Yeah, the largest freshwater fish.

00:29:20.000 The largest, okay, the largest scaled, yeah.

00:29:22.000 And arapaima is the largest scaled freshwater fish.

00:29:26.000 How big is it?

00:29:27.000 Oh, I mean, they'll get them up into the hundreds of pounds.

00:29:30.000 I've never even heard of it.

00:29:31.000 It looks like...

00:29:32.000 How do you spell it?

00:29:34.000 A-R-A-P-A-I-M-A. Oh my god! 1.00

00:29:38.000 Yeah, that's an arapaima.

00:29:39.000 Jesus Christ!

00:29:41.000 That looks completely prehistoric.

00:29:43.000 They have a bizarre relationship with these fish.

00:29:47.000 The makushidu in Guyana.

00:29:50.000 That's amazing.

00:29:51.000 What an amazing looking critter.

00:29:53.000 They used to hunt them to export the salted meat.

00:29:56.000 They used to hunt them to sell salted meat to markets.

00:29:59.000 Okay.

00:30:01.000 Now, one of those is worth $7,000 to them alive. 1.00

00:30:06.000 Holy shit! 1.00

00:30:07.000 Because that's how much a white guy will pay to catch one and let it go. 1.00

00:30:11.000 Oh my god.

00:30:12.000 Yeah.

00:30:13.000 Oh, so it's all about guides?

00:30:16.000 A guy will pay more. 0.87

00:30:17.000 The Mikushi will make more to take a guy out to catch an arapaima and let it go than what you'd pay to hunt for elk in the U.S. on a guided trip. 0.99

00:30:25.000 Holy shit. 0.97

00:30:26.000 They get seven grand to catch an arapaima. 0.99

00:30:29.000 And when Rovin was a kid, they would go on two-week hunting trips where they're gone for two weeks with their father.

00:30:41.000 They would go for two weeks to hunt saltfish.

00:30:44.000 So they were operating out of dugout canoes that they would have to paddle.

00:30:48.000 And they would make a dugout canoe themselves, paddle the dugout canoe upriver for a week to get to the good hunting and fishing grounds.

00:30:56.000 Then they would hunt and fish for one week until they would get 100 pounds of salted fish.

00:31:05.000 Then you'd go back downriver, which would take a day or two days, And then get to the mouth of the Rupinuni River and paddle up the Rupinuni River for two days to another town.

00:31:17.000 And then they would haul the salt fish, including arapaima flesh, and sell that 100 pounds of salted fish for $75.

00:31:29.000 So two weeks plus work for a family for $75.

00:31:34.000 And now they will not touch those fish because they make a handful of people every year go down and give them seven grand to catch one and let it go.

00:31:44.000 So seven grand to them must be just an enormous fortune.

00:31:47.000 It's changed everything. 0.80

00:31:47.000 When I was talking about, like, that they discovered sunglasses and shit, there's been a lot, like, they were already on to this arapaima thing the first thing I went down, and it's changed everything about, it's changed that village. 0.80

00:31:58.000 The arapaima fishery. 0.87

00:31:59.000 The way they used to hunt arapaima is they would hunt them out of trees. 1.00

00:32:03.000 They would, so, you're familiar, like, when a river, you know a river flows in an S pattern?

00:32:07.000 Yeah.

00:32:07.000 Like, repeating S's.

00:32:09.000 Now and then, during high water, a river will jump one of the S's.

00:32:15.000 You picture what I'm saying?

00:32:16.000 Yes.

00:32:16.000 So the river jumps an S and it abandons, and the main channel abandons the curves of the S. Okay.

00:32:24.000 Those curves become what's called Oxbow Lakes.

00:32:27.000 Where during high water, during a flood, those oxbow lakes are connected to the main river system.

00:32:32.000 When the water goes low, the oxbow lakes become isolated.

00:32:36.000 Arapaimas live in those oxbow lakes and they feed on peacock bass and other stuff.

00:32:41.000 So when the water got low and the arapaimas were all kind of restricted to very small little spots in the river, they would climb up in trees Overlooking these places and wait for the arapaima to come up near the surface and shoot it with an arrow. 1.00

00:33:01.000 That was a detachable, basically a harpoon head arrow and shoot it with the arrow. 0.97

00:33:07.000 The harpoon head would detach from the arrow and the arrow would float on the surface connected by string to the arrow shaft.

00:33:14.000 You would then go take a hand line with a hook.

00:33:17.000 And follow that fish in your dugout canoe until you could cast your hook out and catch your arrow.

00:33:24.000 And then you're connected by your fishing line to your arrow.

00:33:29.000 And your arrow is connected by the tether to the harpoon head.

00:33:34.000 And you would hand line in and slaughter the arapaima. 1.00

00:33:38.000 Jesus. 0.99

00:33:39.000 And then dry the arapaima.

00:33:43.000 And they still have salt fish today.

00:33:45.000 When we're out fishing, they're salt and fish all the time.

00:33:47.000 They would salt that fish and then sell it.

00:33:49.000 And then that became a very threatened species under that thing.

00:33:56.000 And the other thing that they would hunt for is they would hunt for giant river turtles and sell the meat.

00:34:01.000 And greatly depleted.

00:34:03.000 Because their whole lives occur on this one river.

00:34:06.000 And once those market influences came in and they had moved beyond...

00:34:11.000 Subsistence hunting and fishing and they moved into market hunting and fishing.

00:34:15.000 They did the same thing that we did to our own country in the late 1800s and early 1900s is they were on course to entirely deplete the resource through market demands because their village gets more and more people all the time.

00:34:29.000 It grew considerably in the five or six years between my two visits and their environment just couldn't support that level of market hunting.

00:34:38.000 So this arapaima thing It gives them a way to make money, to buy staples and run a school and stuff like that.

00:34:50.000 It gives them kind of an out.

00:34:52.000 And it's funny because I'm a lot more interested, like personally, I'm a lot more interested in a guy shooting fish out of a tree and salting the meat than I am a dude like me going down to catch an arapaima and let it go.

00:35:07.000 So in some ways it's sad.

00:35:10.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:35:11.000 It's sad just because it's great that they're saving the fishery, but it's just sad to see shit change, man. 0.98

00:35:19.000 And why do they let it go? 0.98

00:35:20.000 Why don't they give it to the people that live there so they can use it for the meat?

00:35:23.000 Do they let it go so they can catch it again?

00:35:25.000 Mm-hmm.

00:35:25.000 Because they want to make sure that the population stays healthy?

00:35:29.000 So here's the thing that recently happened.

00:35:31.000 One of those oxbow lakes.

00:35:35.000 Got lower and lower and lower and one of these Mikushi guys realized there's 26 arapaima stranded in Oxbow Lake. 0.73

00:35:43.000 And the arapaimas are running out of water.

00:35:44.000 And when the water goes down, the arapaima will excavate. 0.94

00:35:47.000 He'll keep excavating in the bottom to even just save a little spot for himself.

00:35:52.000 Okay.

00:35:53.000 And a guy found them and they're all in there, but there's not enough water to cover them up.

00:35:58.000 They can sip air is the thing that makes them peculiar.

00:36:00.000 So you can always find arapaima because they come up to gulp air. 1.00

00:36:03.000 Jesus.

00:36:04.000 So they can breathe air and they can also breathe with their dills.

00:36:07.000 They have a very loud noise they make when they come up to gulp air.

00:36:10.000 So they can live in low oxygen environments. 0.99

00:36:13.000 Like, if you took most fish and threw them in a stagnant oxbow that's got six inches of water in it, I mean, they're dead as shit, right? 1.00

00:36:19.000 Right. 0.98

00:36:19.000 But these arapaimas, they can just keep excavating a little spot in the bottom and just wait, praying, or their equivalent of praying, that the water level comes back up and liberates them from the oxbow they're stuck in. 0.98

00:36:31.000 And these are huge fish.

00:36:32.000 Yeah, giants.

00:36:33.000 So, they found 26 that were out of the water and their backs were all messed up from birds and other predators grabbing the arapaimas, trying to grab the arapaimas.

00:36:42.000 Wow.

00:36:43.000 And then they went and spent four days.

00:36:45.000 These are 26 arapaimas between 50 inches and upper 80s in length.

00:36:51.000 They spent four days moving these 26 arapaimas into the river in a canoe full of water. 1.00

00:37:01.000 Jesus Christ.

00:37:03.000 That's how valuable those fish are to them now.

00:37:05.000 Wow. 1.00

00:37:05.000 In the old days, they would have been dead as shit, right? 1.00

00:37:06.000 Right. 1.00

00:37:07.000 And you'd be like, you just sold them.

00:37:08.000 Yeah.

00:37:09.000 So they realize there's just like a finite, they have like on their river, the river that they call home, the river they kind of control, there's like a finite resource.

00:37:16.000 But the thing is, other groups, so they're mostly Mikushi, and my friend Rovin's Mikushi.

00:37:25.000 His wife is Wapashana.

00:37:27.000 And there are other Wapashanas in other places who will come down to hunt. 1.00

00:37:51.000 How big are they?

00:37:58.000 They get bigger.

00:37:59.000 Like American alligator big?

00:38:00.000 Like 15 feet?

00:38:01.000 Yeah, they get giants.

00:38:02.000 Some black caimans do.

00:38:03.000 There used to be a market for those.

00:38:05.000 They used to market hunt those for the hides. 0.99

00:38:08.000 For bags, boots, and shit. 0.98

00:38:10.000 So they have the giant river otter, which is a river otter. 0.99

00:38:14.000 River otters get up to 100 pounds.

00:38:17.000 We're good to go.

00:38:33.000 The harpy from there, and then there's another harpy that's a giant, like the Papuan, the Papua New Guinea harpy.

00:38:41.000 The harpy is that one that eats sloths and monkeys? 1.00

00:38:44.000 Eats monkeys and shit, yeah. 1.00

00:38:45.000 That thing's fucking crazy. 1.00

00:38:46.000 We saw one. 1.00

00:38:48.000 Really?

00:38:48.000 So I'd been down in harpy country three times and finally saw my first harpy.

00:38:52.000 Wow.

00:38:53.000 Yeah, just like...

00:38:54.000 Majestic?

00:38:55.000 Just piercing, kind of unforgettable.

00:39:00.000 Just the face on it.

00:39:02.000 The male face, you're looking at it, it just is like a... 1.00

00:39:06.000 It reminded me of the first time I saw Lynx, where you're just looking at it, and it's just so freakishly different than anything you'd looked at, like that Harpy's face. 0.86

00:39:17.000 So they have that.

00:39:18.000 It is.

00:39:21.000 Oh, so he's going up the river.

00:39:23.000 He's telling me this story, how the Wapashana will come down and hunt, and they hunt different than the Mikushi. 0.98

00:39:27.000 Like, the Mikushi aren't that big on killing tapirs, but the Wapashana will come down in their area, and he says they come down with arrows that got 12-inch steel tips on them. 0.98

00:39:36.000 He's like, you know those boys are hunting tapirs.

00:39:40.000 But he said one time he was going up the river, and he sees a green anaconda.

00:39:44.000 And he goes to look, and it's got an arrowhead stuck into it.

00:39:49.000 And he said, and I told my companion, the Wapashana are here.

00:39:54.000 And they go up the river a little bit, and of course they come to a Wapashana camp.

00:39:58.000 Because the Wapashana, he said, he's like, talking about this particular, there's Wapashanas all over, but he's like, this particular group of Wapashanas that travel ahead of Christmas.

00:40:09.000 Because they're like, they have animist...

00:40:14.000 You know, mystical systems, but it's also infused with a certain level of Christianity.

00:40:20.000 So, ahead of Christmas, the Wapashana will go on a couple-month-long hunting trip to get food for Christmas celebrations.

00:40:29.000 And they'll travel overland and by river to come down and hunt the Mikushi River.

00:40:35.000 And when they come down, they're there.

00:40:37.000 They're playing for keeps.

00:40:38.000 So they come down, they're hunting arapaima, which the Rewa, Mikushi do not. 1.00

00:40:45.000 They're hunting anacondas.

00:40:47.000 They hunt everything.

00:40:48.000 They eat the anacondas? 1.00

00:40:49.000 Yeah, they dry all that shit. 0.99

00:40:50.000 And the fat, they like to render the fat down because they feel that it's helpful for arthritis. 0.99

00:40:58.000 We pulled up on an anaconda one time that was 13 or 14 feet long.

00:41:05.000 You're sitting on the bank.

00:41:06.000 You can walk right up to it.

00:41:08.000 Rovan was telling me, again, a type of mysticism.

00:41:14.000 I mean, we have our own beliefs that would seem absurd, right, to an outside perspective.

00:41:17.000 But he was telling me, if I were to touch that anaconda with my bow, it would die a very painful death if I just laid my bow limb on it.

00:41:34.000 And I go, how long?

00:41:35.000 He thought about something at about 45 minutes.

00:41:39.000 Just the belief they have.

00:41:41.000 If you touch it with a hunting bow, it will die in 45 minutes, but it's painful.

00:41:45.000 How bizarre.

00:41:48.000 I asked about that a thousand times and never got any more clarity on it than that.

00:41:52.000 I say, can you touch it with a stick?

00:41:54.000 Oh, that doesn't matter.

00:41:55.000 Go ahead. 0.98

00:41:57.000 Touch it with a bow, it will die.

00:41:59.000 But yeah, they don't eat them.

00:42:00.000 But he was telling me, if you're really hard up and have really bad arthritis, you can take the fat from an anaconda and help cure the arthritis.

00:42:07.000 How much fat does an anaconda have? 1.00

00:42:08.000 I don't know.

00:42:08.000 I never cut into one.

00:42:10.000 I've seen a rattlesnake skinned. 0.99

00:42:12.000 They seem like they don't have any fat.

00:42:13.000 You've got to understand how big these things are, though.

00:42:15.000 They're so big.

00:42:17.000 I mean, way bigger than your leg.

00:42:18.000 Yeah.

00:42:19.000 It's 14 feet long.

00:42:20.000 14 feet long.

00:42:21.000 It probably weighs hundreds of pounds, right?

00:42:23.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:24.000 No, hundreds of pounds.

00:42:25.000 Have you eaten rattlesnake?

00:42:26.000 Yeah.

00:42:27.000 It's not bad, right?

00:42:28.000 It's not bad, but... 0.99

00:42:29.000 Look at the size of that sucker. 0.96

00:42:30.000 Yeah, there's a good one. 0.99

00:42:32.000 Jesus. 1.00

00:42:33.000 That's a heavy fucker. 1.00

00:42:36.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:42:36.000 Look at those guys struggling. 0.99

00:42:37.000 Four dudes struggling.

00:42:39.000 Oh, that's out of Guyana.

00:42:41.000 Did you ever see that movie with Jennifer Lopez?

00:42:44.000 Nope.

00:42:46.000 It's a giant one, like 100 feet long.

00:42:47.000 Yeah, so that's the biggest snake.

00:42:49.000 And they'll eat caimans. 0.97

00:42:52.000 Anacondas will. 0.87

00:42:53.000 Yeah.

00:42:54.000 And then caimans will eat them when they're younger.

00:42:56.000 Yeah.

00:42:57.000 You know, it's a vicious amount of everything, eating everything.

00:43:00.000 Um...

00:43:01.000 So these gentlemen, the Mikushi, come down. 1.00

00:43:05.000 No, the Wapashana.

00:43:06.000 The Wapashana come down. 0.99

00:43:07.000 Yeah, and have different hunting practices and different things that are acceptable to eat.

00:43:13.000 And this is like a group of Wapashana who come from an area where the hunting and fishing sucks. 1.00

00:43:19.000 Are going after each other?

00:43:20.000 No, that was a different story.

00:43:21.000 Okay.

00:43:22.000 Now...

00:43:23.000 It's a different piss match with someone else.

00:43:27.000 So... 1.00

00:43:29.000 So their hunting area sucks. 0.98

00:43:31.000 What's that? 1.00

00:43:32.000 Their hunting area sucks. 1.00

00:43:34.000 This group of Wapashana that come down to rape and pillage on the Rewa, yeah, Rovan explained to me their hunting area is a piss-poor hunting area. 1.00

00:43:42.000 So why do they stay there? 0.88

00:43:43.000 I don't know.

00:43:44.000 I don't know why they stay there.

00:43:47.000 And I asked him, like, does it make you guys mad that they come down?

00:43:51.000 Because now, like, the people in Rewa Village, the predominantly Mikushi Rewa Village, We're good to go. 0.99

00:44:17.000 The Wapashana are... 0.99

00:44:18.000 This group of Wapashana are not. 1.00

00:44:20.000 And when I ask them, does it piss you off that the Wapashana come down here? 1.00

00:44:23.000 Oh, they also...

00:44:24.000 The Wapashana fish with poison.

00:44:26.000 The Mikushi don't fish with poison.

00:44:27.000 Do they use the poison from the cassava?

00:44:30.000 No.

00:44:30.000 They use a poison...

00:44:32.000 They use a...

00:44:33.000 There's a root and a leaf that are both poisonous.

00:44:38.000 The root...

00:44:40.000 It's a thing used here in the United States when they have to do a fish kill.

00:44:42.000 If you get a big population of invasive fish in a waterway and you just need to wipe the whole thing clean...

00:44:48.000 Snakeheads? 1.00

00:44:49.000 Yeah, shit like that. 1.00

00:44:50.000 When you're trying to do a fish kill, we in the U.S. use a thing called rotenon. 1.00

00:44:53.000 It's derived from a South American plant.

00:44:55.000 And then there's another plant called barbos...

00:44:57.000 Well, some people...

00:44:58.000 It's like different people in different areas.

00:45:01.000 In the Amazon drainage, there's a thing they call barbosco.

00:45:04.000 And that is a leaf that you just pulp.

00:45:07.000 And it would look like you're just like taking, if you just imagine if you took a bunch of thyme or rosemary and put it in a mortar and pestle and pulped it, and then you take and spread that in the water.

00:45:18.000 That'll kill fish. 1.00

00:45:19.000 I think they act in two separate ways.

00:45:23.000 There's two types of fish poison. 0.99

00:45:24.000 One inhibits the fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.

00:45:28.000 So I watched them apply this poison.

00:45:31.000 And you need to get an area where there's not much current because it'll just wash the poison away.

00:45:35.000 So you get into one of these oxbow lakes, apply the poison, kick back 20 minutes, and pretty soon all the fish are up gulping at the surface.

00:45:44.000 And then you shoot them with bows and arrows.

00:45:46.000 Wow. 0.99

00:45:47.000 And what's the other way of doing it?

00:45:49.000 And rotenon, and I can't remember which category rotenon falls in, but there's another one that has some kind of neuro effect.

00:45:55.000 It has some kind of brain.

00:45:57.000 It somehow impairs some other aspect of their body.

00:46:00.000 But these fish poisons are classed.

00:46:02.000 In two categories.

00:46:03.000 I'm sorry I'm not more clear on what the two are.

00:46:05.000 But I know the ones that prevent it from being able to get air.

00:46:09.000 It suffocates the fish.

00:46:09.000 And the other ones that poison them, the ones that don't suffocate them, does that come up when they eat it?

00:46:15.000 No, but they were telling me that if you're poisoning a pond...

00:46:23.000 You need to watch it and make sure dogs or any livestock don't come down.

00:46:28.000 It doesn't last long.

00:46:29.000 And they were telling me usually the fish you don't shoot will recover.

00:46:34.000 If there's some amount of water flowing through it.

00:46:37.000 So they might go in and build a temporary dam to block whatever inlet.

00:46:42.000 Let's just say it's an isolated channel off to the side of a river.

00:46:46.000 They'll go in pretty carefully with rocks and logs, block the flow coming into it, poison it, and then once they've gotten whatever they want, they unblock it and let the clean water come in and it'll resuscitate the fish.

00:47:00.000 Whoa.

00:47:00.000 But, yeah, if they said of livestock, dogs, people, drink that water, it can kill that.

00:47:06.000 It can kill that thing. 1.00

00:47:07.000 How many...

00:47:07.000 Do they lose people every year to that cassava water?

00:47:09.000 Man, in talking to me, you realize they lose...

00:47:11.000 There's like a handful of things that people get lost to.

00:47:14.000 They had mentioned people dying from anacondas.

00:47:17.000 They had mentioned people dying from black caimans.

00:47:21.000 I know that...

00:47:23.000 Injuries from piranhas are common.

00:47:26.000 Snakes are everywhere.

00:47:30.000 I remember we were sitting in Rovin's friend's house, his outdoor palapa kind of house with hammocks strung in it, and there was just being a giant tarantula, like a two-and-a-half-inch diameter tarantula, and not even doing anything to it.

00:47:44.000 Well, tarantulas, they just hurt.

00:47:46.000 Yeah, they hurt. 0.99

00:47:47.000 They don't really fuck you up like a black widow or something along those lines, right? 0.97

00:47:50.000 Yeah, before we found a kid who'd been hit by a scorpion, a young kid. 0.97

00:47:54.000 And some scorpions can be fatal.

00:47:56.000 He was vomiting.

00:47:57.000 He was very sick.

00:47:58.000 But just a fact of life.

00:48:00.000 So when they get bit by snakes, are they getting bit by poisonous snakes?

00:48:04.000 Yeah, there's one, I think the deadliest snake in the western hemisphere, the coral they have.

00:48:09.000 Yeah.

00:48:10.000 They have other ones.

00:48:11.000 He mentioned their chief...

00:48:12.000 Getting hit by a venomous snake and them having to call a medevac.

00:48:18.000 I think the Air Force came in with a helicopter and got him out of there and he was fine.

00:48:23.000 Wow. 1.00

00:48:24.000 That shit's everywhere, man. 1.00

00:48:26.000 But they got an eye for it and you don't. 1.00

00:48:32.000 The non-local is always the one getting stung and bit and shit. 0.99

00:48:36.000 Yeah, I can only imagine. 0.99

00:48:38.000 Like, the first time I was down there, I got hit by an electric eel a couple times, right?

00:48:41.000 That scared the shit out of me, but it's like, you don't even know what's happening.

00:48:44.000 You're in the water, and all of a sudden, you're kind of getting, like, electrocuted. 0.62

00:48:47.000 There's more in tune with all that stuff.

00:48:49.000 That's a strong blast, too.

00:48:51.000 Yeah, it hurts.

00:48:52.000 We had those on Fear Factor.

00:48:53.000 People had to grab them.

00:48:54.000 It's like grabbing a hot wire.

00:48:57.000 It's amazing that an animal or a living thing can generate that kind of electrical charge.

00:49:01.000 So you just did it voluntarily?

00:49:02.000 For a joke, just to see what it's like.

00:49:05.000 Yeah.

00:49:05.000 It's not fun.

00:49:06.000 No.

00:49:06.000 I was shocked.

00:49:07.000 I was like, it's probably just annoying.

00:49:10.000 But I reached in and grabbed it and was like, whoa.

00:49:12.000 Yeah.

00:49:12.000 That's legit.

00:49:14.000 It's like grabbing a hot wire fence with cattle in it.

00:49:18.000 Yeah, I watched...

00:49:19.000 There was some sort of a nature documentary where something tried to eat it, and the electrical eel zapped it, and you see this animal just lock up and fall over sideways.

00:49:29.000 Oh, really?

00:49:30.000 Yeah.

00:49:30.000 Repelled it.

00:49:31.000 Yeah, just completely electrocuted it.

00:49:34.000 Yeah.

00:49:34.000 You know, got it to the point where it just couldn't stand up.

00:49:37.000 Have you...

00:49:38.000 I know you like...

00:49:41.000 You'll pull up some stuff.

00:49:42.000 Have you seen the video of the jaguar killing the caiman? 0.62

00:49:45.000 Yes.

00:49:45.000 I've seen a bunch of them.

00:49:46.000 That's solid shit right there. 1.00

00:49:47.000 Amazing. 1.00

00:49:48.000 Because you can sense he's done that a thousand times, man.

00:49:50.000 There's quite a few of them online.

00:49:52.000 And here's what's fascinating.

00:49:54.000 What is this?

00:49:55.000 A caiman with an electric eel?

00:49:56.000 An alligator ate electric eel.

00:49:57.000 Oh, wow.

00:49:58.000 And it starts just frying.

00:50:00.000 Yeah, it's just cooking them.

00:50:01.000 Oh, really?

00:50:01.000 Yeah, wow.

00:50:02.000 No, that's not...

00:50:03.000 Oh, you asked about eating snakes.

00:50:04.000 Electric eel meat is not good.

00:50:06.000 That's one of the many things that the...

00:50:08.000 That's one of the many things that Mikushi, like, do not eat. 1.00

00:50:11.000 Look at his body just twitching.

00:50:13.000 God, that's amazing.

00:50:15.000 Obviously, that's a little alligator.

00:50:17.000 But still, boy.

00:50:20.000 What a crazy animal.

00:50:21.000 Yeah, it's brutal.

00:50:22.000 I never saw anything about jaguars killing caimans until about three or four years ago, and then there's like a whole slew of these videos coming out.

00:50:30.000 This makes you wonder.

00:50:32.000 I guess maybe the advent of GoPros and all these different video cameras that people take down there and finally started catching it on film.

00:50:38.000 Yep.

00:50:39.000 We missed the sighting by, we missed the sighting, you know, narrowly missed the sighting when we were down there.

00:50:43.000 Tracks are everywhere.

00:50:44.000 So, particularly because the time I was just down there now, the giant river turtles, We're good to go.

00:51:22.000 And jaguar tracks all over.

00:51:24.000 Because the jaguars come down to wait for the turtles to come up.

00:51:27.000 Wow.

00:51:28.000 So you're seeing a lot of that.

00:51:29.000 And one of the more surreal...

00:51:31.000 That's a perspective shot, but I bet they're pretty big, right?

00:51:34.000 Big, but that's an oceanic.

00:51:36.000 That's not a jaguar or a turtle. 0.99

00:51:37.000 Whoa, look at that sucker. 1.00

00:51:38.000 So... 1.00

00:51:40.000 How old is that fucker? 1.00

00:51:41.000 I have no idea. 1.00

00:51:42.000 God, they live hundreds of years, right?

00:51:45.000 Yeah, they're ancient.

00:51:46.000 That thing might have been around when Columbus was around.

00:51:48.000 You know, the...

00:51:50.000 Are you from the CITES Treaty?

00:51:52.000 So...

00:51:53.000 Things that ban international wildlife traffic.

00:51:57.000 There's a couple turtles that the Mikushi eat. 1.00

00:51:59.000 They traditionally ate giant river turtles, and many people still do.

00:52:03.000 But they call that one the Cites turtle.

00:52:06.000 Oh, wow.

00:52:07.000 Because they now know they can't traffic in this turtle anymore.

00:52:09.000 So they got the eating turtle and the Cites turtle.

00:52:12.000 But an image that will forever burn in my mind.

00:52:16.000 There's two things that...

00:52:18.000 There's two, like, sights that'll forever be stuck in my mind, and one of them is a Wapashana woman in a DKNY t-shirt up to her armpit in a riverbank digging out 150 turtle eggs,

00:52:35.000 giant river turtle eggs, putting them in a handmade woven basket.

00:52:41.000 Wow.

00:52:43.000 Because, you know, like...

00:52:45.000 Like donated clothes, like cast off clothes wind up.

00:52:50.000 You know, getting bundled.

00:52:52.000 So you see people with, like, crazy American t-shirts and stuff on, where, like, I have, like, a Bob's Pizza, Santa Cruz, California, or whatever, you know, and it's just, like, something sent down there through Goodwill Donation Centers, whatever.

00:53:04.000 So they'll have, like, brands, you know, like, famous brands that you see, like, people, you know, in our culture wearing, but there'll be, like, hunting monkeys in them, like, And like the Langer thing, it creates that kind of tension,

00:53:21.000 you know?

00:53:21.000 So do they recognize the CITES regulations?

00:53:26.000 Do they not eat those turtles?

00:53:28.000 Yeah, so you gather that it's kind of loose.

00:53:31.000 They don't traffic in them.

00:53:33.000 But they will eat them.

00:53:34.000 But they will eat them.

00:53:35.000 Yeah.

00:53:36.000 So they will collect the eggs, but they won't kill the turtles to sell.

00:53:39.000 So as they become more aware of conservation, like with this giant fish, what's the fish called again?

00:53:43.000 The arapaima.

00:53:45.000 As they become more aware of conservation, do you see them recognizing, like, hey, there's some stuff that we have to leave alone, we've got to let it recover?

00:53:53.000 I mean, obviously they're aware of the cycle of life when it comes to their slash-and-burn agriculture and leaving spots alone.

00:54:00.000 Are they becoming more aware of what animals they've kind of...

00:54:04.000 Push to the brink of extinction?

00:54:06.000 Yeah, and it's like, I don't even know how much is coming from the younger generation, because talking to guys, talking to a guy who's, I'm 43, this guy just a couple years older than I am, and talking to him, and he was a market hunter.

00:54:20.000 He's glad to see what's happened because he, in his own lifetime, saw how much they had depleted everything.

00:54:29.000 So he, in his lifetime, saw it from market hunting, not just from subsistence stuff, but as that village grew, because the village was a handful of families, right?

00:54:37.000 Now it's 305 people.

00:54:39.000 As that village grew, he watched the giant river otters.

00:54:45.000 They were hunting giant river otters to sell the hides into Brazil.

00:54:50.000 And they would smoke them out of their dens.

00:54:53.000 So he watched their numbers go down.

00:54:55.000 This is a hundred pound otter.

00:54:56.000 Yeah.

00:54:57.000 Wow.

00:54:58.000 Freaking giants.

00:54:59.000 Just as the name would let you know.

00:55:00.000 And very vocal.

00:55:01.000 A large vocabulary of crazy sounds that giant river otters make.

00:55:05.000 When they see you, they're pissed.

00:55:06.000 And they start making crazy noises.

00:55:08.000 Do you see them?

00:55:08.000 Oh yeah, you see them all the time.

00:55:09.000 And they're squawking at you?

00:55:10.000 Yeah.

00:55:10.000 Like, what does it sound like?

00:55:12.000 It's like a...

00:55:13.000 Wow.

00:55:15.000 But a lot better than that. 0.99

00:55:16.000 Look at that sucker. 1.00

00:55:17.000 Oh, there he is eating some kind of snake. 0.99

00:55:19.000 Or eel.

00:55:21.000 Yeah, they have an alarm noise and a number of barks and crazy sounds.

00:55:25.000 So he watched those get depleted from hide hunting.

00:55:29.000 Giant river turtles from hunting eggs.

00:55:32.000 He said he could see that the arapaimas were disappearing. 1.00

00:55:36.000 And so he was really glad.

00:55:39.000 This guy was really glad that they'd gotten on to some other way to bring some cash into the village.

00:55:44.000 Wow.

00:55:45.000 And the arapaima fishing, how do they find out about this?

00:55:48.000 Like, people from the United States, or where are they coming from?

00:55:51.000 You know, I'm not sure.

00:55:52.000 I know that there's been a number of companies.

00:55:56.000 Costa, you know the sunglasses company?

00:55:59.000 Costa invested pretty heavily through a conservation program they have.

00:56:04.000 Costa Sunglasses invested pretty heavily in helping them establish A guiding system down there to take people out to fish arapaimo.

00:56:14.000 So these people that come down...

00:56:16.000 And trained some of the Makushi on how to just deal with Westerners. 1.00

00:56:19.000 Like, for instance, in the time...

00:56:23.000 And we were out...

00:56:23.000 We were out...

00:56:25.000 When I'm with them on the river, we're out...

00:56:29.000 I'm with them...

00:56:33.000 Participating in the hunting and fishing activities that they do year-round on the things that they identify to be sustainable resources.

00:56:41.000 Because they still hunt several days a week.

00:56:46.000 Roven, they live off fishing game.

00:56:50.000 Everyone in that village, all their protein is hunting and fishing protein and some chickens that they raise.

00:56:56.000 But that's all their protein.

00:56:57.000 So they're engaged in a daily sense.

00:57:00.000 Like Rovin says, he spends about two days a week farming.

00:57:03.000 He spends two or three days a week hunting and fishing.

00:57:06.000 And then he has other obligations he had to take care of.

00:57:09.000 But he hunts and fishes constantly year-round.

00:57:11.000 And if he kills a white-lip peccary, he says that's good for a week.

00:57:16.000 Did you bring your bow?

00:57:17.000 Yeah.

00:57:17.000 I brought my bow-fishing bow, and I brought a regular bow.

00:57:20.000 Now, when they saw your bow, were they like, Jesus, can you get us some of these?

00:57:24.000 You know, surprisingly not that excited about it, because I think that they know they would run up against sourcing problems.

00:57:29.000 With the arrows and broadheads.

00:57:31.000 At one point in time, Roven had a recurve, but he lost it.

00:57:35.000 His house burnt down, and he lost his recurve anyways.

00:57:38.000 So just for the simple fact that you can make them and make arrows very quickly, they don't need to worry about how you'd ever source parts.

00:57:44.000 Right, but they have all this other stuff, like machete blades and all these different things.

00:57:48.000 It seems like they would, I mean, if you could get a good compound bow, Jesus Christ.

00:57:53.000 Yeah, I think if you brought one down and left it there, I think if you brought one down and left there, it would get a lot of use.

00:58:00.000 Absolutely.

00:58:01.000 Would it be too effective?

00:58:03.000 Would they run into problems with, you know, like they have kind of a sustainability issue, right?

00:58:08.000 I'll say yeah.

00:58:09.000 I think that if you went down, this is speculation, I would think if you went down and gave, if you went down with a dozen of these things and left them there, I think that along that river corridor,

00:58:26.000 You would see a diminishment of a handful of bird species for sure.

00:58:32.000 Yeah, I would think that.

00:58:33.000 But here's the thing.

00:58:35.000 Here's why it's a little bit tricky.

00:58:37.000 Because I think that you would also be reducing demand.

00:58:40.000 Because one of the things about the birds, the guans and curasows, is that they want them to fletch arrows.

00:58:47.000 But they're hard to get.

00:58:49.000 So they really want them because they classify them under this broad category that you hear in other places called poies.

00:58:56.000 And basically it's like a term.

00:58:59.000 Some people say poies refers to a specific curacao, but some people use poies like a turkey-like bird.

00:59:07.000 Like a turkey, meaning a good edible bird.

00:59:10.000 So the birds that they fletch arrows with are also coveted food items.

00:59:15.000 All right?

00:59:18.000 I feel that, yeah, if you were to bring conventional archery tackle in, you would see that diminish.

00:59:25.000 Now, other people will have shotguns, but the limiting factor there is how expensive the ammunition is.

00:59:30.000 So they'll have, like, the shotgun shell.

00:59:33.000 Or they might have a handful of shotgun shells that would last them a long time because they would only use when absolutely necessary.

00:59:39.000 Like the village, they've been having a Jaguar problem.

00:59:42.000 When we were there, they had...

00:59:46.000 Over the previous two months lost 24 dogs, including a dog while we were there, to a jaguar who comes in at night and kills dogs and chickens.

00:59:54.000 He was speculating that at some point in time they'll probably have to get rid of that jaguar and that it would be a firearm issue they would have to figure out a solution for with a firearm.

01:00:06.000 So even people that might have a firearm...

01:00:11.000 Have limited ammunition, and it's sort of a tricky spot in a legal situation for them to have a firearm. 0.86

01:00:19.000 But bows, I think they would knock the shit out of curasows and guans if they had good bows. 1.00

01:00:24.000 But they might not hunt them as heavily because they didn't need the fletching.

01:00:28.000 For fishing, I think their tackle's superior.

01:00:31.000 Close to superior for bow fishing.

01:00:33.000 Why is that?

01:00:34.000 Um...

01:00:36.000 Because the shots are so close, it just isn't really necessary.

01:00:39.000 It's just not necessary to have that kind of investment.

01:00:42.000 And you just tend to lose arrows bow fishing.

01:00:45.000 So it wouldn't make sense to have very expensive fiberglass arrows when you can make an arrow in 15 minutes, 20 minutes.

01:00:51.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:00:52.000 And then you're still limited to very close range shots.

01:00:56.000 When I was in Bolivia, where they hunt for a bigger variety of stuff, including monkeys, compound bows would be a real game-changer on monkey hunting.

01:01:08.000 So they're not monkey hunting?

01:01:10.000 They won't touch them.

01:01:12.000 Really?

01:01:13.000 There's a couple things that are really hard to talk about.

01:01:16.000 Earlier I was saying you have this luxury of being able to have good conversations in English and get your questions answered.

01:01:23.000 Right.

01:01:24.000 Some things, you hit a wall.

01:01:28.000 Now, one of the things you hit a wall on is if you say to someone, how many days out of the year would you guess you do X? Right.

01:01:37.000 It's just like you never get there.

01:01:39.000 You never get there.

01:01:40.000 Do they not understand years?

01:01:42.000 No, they do, but it's just like...

01:01:44.000 Because we speak in that way, it's hard for me to understand why that's such a hard question.

01:01:50.000 But it would be very hard to get satisfactory answers about how often do you do something.

01:01:58.000 Another thing is, how much do you like...

01:02:01.000 Do you like hunting or fishing more?

01:02:04.000 Isn't something that's thought about.

01:02:06.000 Because it'd be like, do you like to hunt more or farm more?

01:02:10.000 You have to do both.

01:02:12.000 So it's not the luxury that we have of recreation.

01:02:15.000 I'm like, but what do you like?

01:02:16.000 But you have to do both.

01:02:18.000 You can't just do one.

01:02:19.000 But he was telling you, he hunts two days a week, he farms two days a week, so you've got seven days a week.

01:02:26.000 Yeah, but that was after me asking the same question a thousand times and finally kind of getting...

01:02:31.000 Finally kind of getting to a spot because they contradict.

01:02:34.000 Because one time I pushed him and pushed him and pushed him.

01:02:36.000 How many days a year do you hunt and fish?

01:02:37.000 And we talked about this for forever.

01:02:39.000 And he came up with the figure maybe 200 or 250. Then later I'm like, how many days a week do you hunt and fish?

01:02:46.000 And I asked him that a thousand times and got two.

01:02:48.000 Now if you do the math, one of those numbers is wrong.

01:02:51.000 It's just not.

01:02:52.000 And also like what you like most.

01:02:55.000 Do you like this most?

01:02:56.000 Like that most?

01:02:56.000 Another thing is why don't you eat X? Right.

01:03:00.000 But, if I think about it, imagine if someone came from another country to here, and you're driving them around, and every single thing they see that's alive, if they said to you, why don't you eat that?

01:03:14.000 Right.

01:03:15.000 Why don't you eat that spider?

01:03:16.000 Right.

01:03:17.000 I don't know, bro.

01:03:18.000 We just don't eat those spiders. 0.54

01:03:20.000 Why don't you eat that cat?

01:03:21.000 That's a really complicated question.

01:03:25.000 We don't eat house cats.

01:03:27.000 Let me count the reasons why we don't eat house cats, you know?

01:03:32.000 So when I'm like, why don't you eat monkeys?

01:03:34.000 He's not like, oh, silly, we don't eat monkeys because it's just like, we just don't eat monkeys.

01:03:39.000 But they don't have any weird relationship with monkeys, right?

01:03:41.000 No, and the more I press him on it, it wound up being, he would say, because we have so many fish and they're so easy to get.

01:03:47.000 Uh...

01:03:47.000 But you hunt white-lip peccary.

01:03:49.000 Now, white-lip peccary, for folks who don't know, does that look like a javelina as well?

01:03:55.000 Yeah, so it's a little bit bigger than a javelina.

01:03:56.000 The main difference from a human perspective looking on the two, what you would jump at is the gregarious nature of the white-lip peccary.

01:04:11.000 So there's three peccaries.

01:04:13.000 There's like the chicoan, I think it's Choco and Peccary, which I've never laid eyes on, White Lips and Collard.

01:04:20.000 And the Collard Peccary, a dozen is a giant group of Collard Peccary. 0.99

01:04:25.000 That's like a big-ass group of Collard Peccary. 0.99

01:04:27.000 And that's what we have in West Texas, Arizona, parts of New Mexico, right?

01:04:35.000 So it's essentially the same thing as a Javelina?

01:04:37.000 The Collard Peccary is the Javelina. 0.98

01:04:40.000 Same exact thing.

01:04:42.000 The white-lip packery, now remember I said like a dozen is a bunch of collards, javelina.

01:04:47.000 I've hunted those in the U.S. and I've hunted those in Mexico. 0.99

01:04:50.000 White-lip packery will run in a group of 100 to 200. Whoa.

01:04:56.000 And white-lip packery, I was mentioning cassava.

01:05:00.000 White-lip peccaries are hell on cassava patches.

01:05:03.000 They eat them?

01:05:04.000 They come in and eat the stalks.

01:05:06.000 Not the root.

01:05:07.000 They'll destroy the cassava patch.

01:05:09.000 And they'll dig, but they particularly like to eat the...

01:05:11.000 They'll come in and they like to eat the young shoots growing up.

01:05:13.000 Now, can they eat the cassava, the root?

01:05:15.000 Or is it poisonous to them as well?

01:05:17.000 I don't know.

01:05:18.000 Huh.

01:05:19.000 That's a good question, though.

01:05:20.000 I wish I would have asked that.

01:05:22.000 If I had a week, I would get a satisfactory answer out of that.

01:05:25.000 So, the white-lip peccaries will come into the village... 1.00

01:05:29.000 And raise holy hell. 0.98

01:05:31.000 Everyone run and grabs their bows.

01:05:34.000 And then they start shooting, and then they'll chase them into the jungle and maybe even track them for a day, trying to whittle away at them because it's a great meat.

01:05:42.000 It's like the favorite game meat is whitelit peccary.

01:05:46.000 They like it better than collard peccary because they're bigger.

01:05:49.000 But is it like a pork or something like that?

01:05:51.000 Well, yeah, but they have that scent gland. 1.00

01:05:53.000 Yeah, looks like pork has a very strong off-putting.

01:05:57.000 The animal has a very strong off-putting smell.

01:06:00.000 But the meat doesn't.

01:06:02.000 No.

01:06:02.000 If you handle it properly and keep it clean, it would never be regarded as good as pork to the American palate.

01:06:11.000 But to the Mikushi palate, it's the best. 0.73

01:06:16.000 So their whole thing, like, we don't hunt all these animals, various animals, because we have so many fish, flies out the window with white-lip peccary.

01:06:23.000 But a lot of the white-lip peccary hunting is also related to the protecting of crops.

01:06:29.000 Now, as long as Rovin can remember, Rewa Village has had a group of white-lipped peccaries that would come through the area trying to raid the gardens.

01:06:42.000 And when it came through the area raiding the gardens, they would kill some number of them.

01:06:46.000 And then they would track them into the jungle and stick with them and kill a handful.

01:06:51.000 And when that happened, it was a very good thing.

01:06:54.000 They liked the peccaries.

01:06:57.000 There's been a number of years where no peccaries, where something happened to this group of 1 or 200 peccaries.

01:07:05.000 They haven't, for years, they have not been through the village.

01:07:08.000 It's not attrition, because he was saying, at the most, when we get, when they come through and get us, he would say, on average, we would get, actually kill between 1 and 4 when they come in and hit the crops.

01:07:25.000 If we stick with them, and a group of guys goes after them, we might kill between one and four.

01:07:29.000 And there's 200 of them.

01:07:30.000 So it's not like they slowly whittled away at them, right?

01:07:33.000 They just would never account for that.

01:07:35.000 But they vanished.

01:07:38.000 Robert never wanted to explain to me why they vanished.

01:07:43.000 But I kept pestering about it, and eventually he told me, here's the deal.

01:07:49.000 Since Rewa Village is now so wealthy, and we have so much food...

01:07:55.000 Other groups and other villages have grown very jealous of us.

01:08:00.000 And he told me that a shaman in another village got so insanely jealous of Rewa's prosperity...

01:08:13.000 Through fishing for arapaima and through all the good hunting and fishing that they have.

01:08:18.000 He got so jealous that he locked up, that this shaman locked up their peccaries. 0.83

01:08:26.000 He doesn't know where.

01:08:28.000 Perhaps in the mountains.

01:08:29.000 They're locked up.

01:08:31.000 Now...

01:08:33.000 Getting them out, getting them unlocked is difficult because at the time that this shaman locked up their peccaries, they happened to be without a good shaman in their village.

01:08:47.000 Did they have a bad shaman?

01:08:48.000 Yeah.

01:08:48.000 They have a shaman in training.

01:08:50.000 He's a bum? 0.88

01:08:50.000 He's a young shaman in training and his powers are slow to develop. 0.88

01:08:56.000 So what happened to the old guy?

01:08:58.000 Don't know.

01:08:59.000 This guy's powers have been slow to develop.

01:09:03.000 He's getting there.

01:09:04.000 And soon he will hopefully be in a position to unlock the Peccaries. 1.00

01:09:11.000 Now what's a young shaman?

01:09:12.000 Is it like a young president?

01:09:13.000 I didn't meet him.

01:09:17.000 We brought up wanting to go talk to him.

01:09:21.000 Got the sense that that wasn't the best idea.

01:09:24.000 To go visit with him.

01:09:26.000 Really?

01:09:26.000 Yeah.

01:09:26.000 There's like 300 people in the village?

01:09:28.000 305. Wow.

01:09:30.000 And I brought up a number of times, just got the sense that it wasn't the greatest idea to go talk to him.

01:09:35.000 So is there theatrics involved?

01:09:36.000 This guy like living on the outskirts of town?

01:09:39.000 No, I know that he lives in town.

01:09:41.000 But he just claims mystery?

01:09:43.000 Yeah, so here's a handful of things that was said.

01:09:45.000 Like, Robin was telling me, and I want to say, man...

01:09:52.000 If I'm here, if you told me something that I thought was outlandish, I would fucking jump on you, right? 0.99

01:09:59.000 And I'd be like, that's ridiculous. 0.99

01:10:01.000 Now, that desire to be right and to dispel wrongness, I don't have a lick of that shit when I'm talking to these guys. 0.99

01:10:13.000 Right? 0.99

01:10:14.000 Right.

01:10:14.000 I'm never like, well, I don't buy that, right?

01:10:17.000 It's just like, it's so inappropriate.

01:10:19.000 Right.

01:10:20.000 Feeling.

01:10:21.000 Right.

01:10:21.000 And it's so interesting to me, and also gives such an interesting glimpse into how most cultures and societies were structured long time ago, in pre-Christian times, right?

01:10:33.000 That it's just like, it's just educational.

01:10:34.000 So I'm not in any way, I'm never saying like, well, I don't buy that.

01:10:38.000 I'm just saying like, oh, okay.

01:10:40.000 Right.

01:10:41.000 That's great.

01:10:42.000 Thanks for sharing.

01:10:43.000 Magic.

01:10:44.000 Yeah, so I'm not in any way, I'm never like, but here's some things that were explained to me.

01:10:48.000 If you're having a problem where your archery skills go downhill, like you have a few misses, the way to correct that would be to go up and take the hand that holds the bowstring and punch a beehive.

01:11:05.000 And then hold your hand up to that hive. 0.98

01:11:09.000 Because they don't miss.

01:11:13.000 And they will demonstrate their accuracy when they bombard you.

01:11:19.000 And Rovan was saying that most of them even know to hit you between your fingers where it really hurts.

01:11:24.000 You will then absorb that accuracy in your hand.

01:11:31.000 And you will do a lot better shooting.

01:11:35.000 Huh.

01:11:36.000 And the more you can do this throughout your life, the stronger it will make you.

01:11:40.000 It's also helpful, just even with kids and other things, it's also helpful to be hit by like a bullet ant, for instance.

01:11:48.000 I had that happen to me before and it's awful, but to get hit by a bullet ant to absorb some of that ant strength.

01:11:54.000 But this shaman that fucked up their peccaries could also just be jealous of you and strip your ability to shoot accurately. 0.96

01:12:07.000 I want to point out that Rovan has an email address. 0.91

01:12:11.000 Right?

01:12:11.000 Wow.

01:12:12.000 Yeah.

01:12:12.000 You can email.

01:12:13.000 I email with him.

01:12:14.000 Wow.

01:12:15.000 And he's firm in his beliefs.

01:12:18.000 Yep.

01:12:18.000 But also, also, yeah.

01:12:20.000 But he's also rational.

01:12:22.000 He seems fairly rational outside of this.

01:12:26.000 Listen, it's like...

01:12:29.000 I'm torn even talking about it because I have such a love for him as a person that I wouldn't want to say that would dispel that idea that he's not perfectly rational.

01:12:49.000 I would go anywhere with this guy.

01:12:52.000 Extremely capable.

01:12:53.000 But you're talking about just like some long-held belief systems.

01:12:56.000 So their cultural belief systems are just deeply ingrained.

01:12:58.000 And there's probably some sort of a placebo effect attached to all this.

01:13:02.000 I'm sure.

01:13:02.000 Where they've seen it in effect.

01:13:04.000 Yeah.

01:13:04.000 Where someone has cast...

01:13:06.000 What is a...

01:13:07.000 There's a...

01:13:08.000 Some point in time, those peccaries are going to come back into town.

01:13:10.000 Yeah.

01:13:11.000 And then what?

01:13:12.000 Where will credit fall?

01:13:13.000 They'll probably say the shaman has relaxed his grip.

01:13:15.000 Awesome!

01:13:16.000 Or maybe the new shaman is going to take credit.

01:13:20.000 It's just a way of explaining the volatility.

01:13:22.000 Here's the other thing.

01:13:25.000 You could go...

01:13:28.000 Well, let me give you an example.

01:13:29.000 I'm going to make a point about the way to sort of see a culture in transition, right?

01:13:35.000 Because it's always so relative.

01:13:36.000 But there's a staff writer at The New Yorker, one of my favorite journalists of all time, John Lee Anderson.

01:13:43.000 You might be familiar with his book, Che.

01:13:44.000 He wrote sort of the definitive Che Guevara book, Che.

01:13:50.000 He's a war correspondent, writes in troubled spots around the world, John Lee Anderson.

01:13:56.000 He wrote a piece not long ago in The New Yorker about a group of people that were making first contact with the outside world, just recently, 2015. They had been...

01:14:11.000 They were initially regarded as an uncontacted group that lived in the border between Peru and Brazil in the jungle.

01:14:20.000 And for whatever reason, they started coming out to a main river where they were having some contact with other groups and they killed a couple people with bows. 0.94

01:14:32.000 So, the government was in a situation of, when dealing with a first contact group, you can't go in and just start putting people on trial and shit. 0.77

01:14:41.000 Like, it only leads to more problems.

01:14:43.000 So, they were trying to, it's an article about the difficulties of leading, of introducing a first contact people into sort of a constructive engagement with the outside world.

01:14:56.000 A trick there is some people look and some countries have a policy of isolation for uncontacted people and try to enforce isolation.

01:15:06.000 Other theorists on this or other anthropologists think that that's completely unfair.

01:15:12.000 It's the most human of tendencies.

01:15:15.000 Is to find other humans and swap ideas with them.

01:15:20.000 Right?

01:15:21.000 Right.

01:15:21.000 It would be laughable that I would come to you and say, Joe, I'd like to prevent you from meeting the French lest some aspect of Frenchness rub off on you.

01:15:34.000 Right.

01:15:34.000 Now, they're worried about other things, too, but they're worried about disease and stuff, but also a tendency that alcohol can be destructive, being lured into prostitution, all forms of exploitation, trying to protect people from this.

01:15:46.000 Wasn't there also the romance of running into these uncontacted tribes that wanted to cherish that?

01:15:51.000 That's what some people say.

01:15:51.000 Some people, yeah.

01:15:51.000 Have you seen those photos that they took from the helicopter where they see these people, they're covered in war paint, they're pointing arrows at the helicopters?

01:15:58.000 Yeah.

01:15:58.000 It's amazing.

01:15:59.000 And that's the shit that I'm guilty of. 1.00

01:16:01.000 Right. 1.00

01:16:02.000 Because even though...

01:16:04.000 That's why I was going to lead up this thing, this battle I have in my own mind.

01:16:08.000 That even though, I mean, they are far, far away.

01:16:12.000 They're far, far removed from the first contact people.

01:16:15.000 Like I said, the guy's got an email address.

01:16:16.000 I'm not trying to paint this as something it's not.

01:16:18.000 But, at the same time, they make their bows from raw material out in the jungle and hunt and fish for all their protein. 1.00

01:16:26.000 I love that shit so much. 1.00

01:16:28.000 And I like laying in bed. 1.00

01:16:29.000 Even if you told me you can never go back I want to lay in bed thinking about that occurring.

01:16:35.000 I want to lay in bed thinking about a guy having a problem with his shaman.

01:16:40.000 Because it's just so refreshing and mentally exhilarating to just know that that's going on.

01:16:48.000 So you get caught in this kind of...

01:16:54.000 It's almost like the opposite of colonialism or something, where you get caught in this thing of wanting to be like, oh, these precious, cute people.

01:17:03.000 If I could just keep them like how I like them, where they stir my imagination.

01:17:10.000 I just want them to stay like how they are, because that's how I like them. 0.79

01:17:13.000 When I come down to visit, I like to know that they're all doing the shit that's interesting to me. 0.88

01:17:19.000 But in no way are they perceiving their experience in that way. 0.96

01:17:26.000 But you go down and see like in the handful of years, as much as they've changed all the time, right?

01:17:31.000 In the handful of years to see that just like practices are different, dress is different.

01:17:40.000 Clothing very different.

01:17:42.000 So you're just seeing it happen in real time.

01:17:46.000 You're seeing it happen in a fast way.

01:17:48.000 Now you might come up and be like, oh, I was in the U.S. in the pre-internet days, and I came to the U.S. in the post-internet days, and man, is that place different.

01:17:56.000 But you're watching it like wherever you live, you're also seeing that happen too.

01:18:02.000 So you're living that transition.

01:18:04.000 But to go there and then come back five years later, And see things different, it really...

01:18:12.000 Yeah, man.

01:18:14.000 As much as I hate to admit it, and as wrong as it is, but just to be absolutely upfront, it kind of bummed me out.

01:18:21.000 So when you talk about it from a hunting perspective, because I tend to view the world through a hunting and fishing perspective, but when you talk about bringing bows down, my first thought is, oh, that's no fun.

01:18:32.000 They shouldn't do that, because I like watching them hunt with the homemade bows.

01:18:36.000 Right.

01:18:37.000 No, it's totally rational, and it completely makes sense.

01:18:40.000 Yeah, it's just a thing.

01:18:42.000 It's longing for nostalgia, and then you find it.

01:18:44.000 You find it as it's changing.

01:18:47.000 You know, as much as you know about the American West, as much as you told me about the history of the American West and the Native Americans, to see these people that are essentially, like, in some ways, like the Native Americans before the colonial people arrived.

01:19:03.000 Yeah.

01:19:04.000 Or, like, I guess it would be...

01:19:08.000 This is a bold statement.

01:19:09.000 If there's an anthropologist or a historian listening, they're going to pull their hair out.

01:19:12.000 But it maybe would be like...

01:19:16.000 I'm so hesitant to even throw this out.

01:19:18.000 It's extremely approximate and full of holes and full of contradictions.

01:19:22.000 But some kind of post-contact scenario, and I don't know, let's say it was the 1890s or something right here.

01:19:29.000 The firearm was very much a part of stuff.

01:19:32.000 But yeah, it's complicated in the internet age.

01:19:37.000 But at that time, we had definitely established a form of tourism in the American West.

01:19:46.000 Francis Parkman was this figure.

01:19:51.000 He wrote the definitive history of the French and Indian War.

01:19:55.000 But in 1842, he was a historian.

01:19:58.000 He had health problems.

01:19:59.000 In 1842, he did a tourism trip out onto the Great Plains.

01:20:07.000 He met some fur trappers, some mountain men.

01:20:11.000 He traveled with the Oglala Sioux.

01:20:16.000 Crazy Horse, who probably wasn't Crazy Horse yet.

01:20:19.000 He was named Curly as a kid.

01:20:21.000 He was in Crazy Horse.

01:20:23.000 Curly like the Three Stooges?

01:20:24.000 Yeah, I think that was a name.

01:20:26.000 I don't even know it and have no idea what it meant.

01:20:28.000 Before he adopted the name Crazy Horse.

01:20:31.000 He would have been 13 years old.

01:20:34.000 And Francis Parkman traveled with them as a tourist, and they went into the Black Hills of South Dakota.

01:20:40.000 They went in there to get lodge poles.

01:20:43.000 Because that was a time of year when they would go and fit out their lodge poles for their teepees to replace broken lodge poles.

01:20:49.000 They went up in the Black Hills, killed some bighorn sheep by throwing rocks down on them off a cliff, went and shot a bunch of buffalo, and he was out there as a tourist.

01:20:58.000 So tourism in the American West, now you've got to remember, the last free roaming, the last non-confined Plains Indians didn't get rounded up until, depending on your definition,

01:21:16.000 1876, 1877. So he was out there way before that.

01:21:20.000 There were still what they described at the time as hostile wild Indians were running around, and he was traveling with them as a tourist.

01:21:27.000 So I just bring that up to bring this idea that here's this group of people who are very much engaged in tourism.

01:21:33.000 I was down there.

01:21:35.000 I was down there because...

01:21:37.000 I wanted to go on a river trip.

01:21:39.000 And it's something I've done a handful of times.

01:21:40.000 I wanted to go on a river trip and participate in their hunting and fishing and food gathering activities as they engage in them.

01:21:50.000 The same way they might engage in it if I wasn't there.

01:21:53.000 That's why we weren't fishing.

01:21:54.000 That's why we weren't catching aeropimers and letting them go.

01:21:57.000 So there's that in the internet era.

01:21:59.000 But there's that thing I always return to.

01:22:01.000 It's like you're still...

01:22:05.000 Hunting and fishing all your own food, or growing it in your yard.

01:22:07.000 Now, when you guys went down there, did you participate in the hunting and fishing, or did you just observe?

01:22:12.000 No, participate in it.

01:22:14.000 You participated with their traditional tackle, or did you use your own stuff?

01:22:18.000 I've done both.

01:22:19.000 I've hunted fish with my own bow, and I've hunted fish with their bow.

01:22:22.000 And in the end, I wound up...

01:22:24.000 The first time I went down, I hunted fish...

01:22:27.000 The second time, too, I hunted four fish, so bow-fished, with...

01:22:34.000 Their gear.

01:22:35.000 But then it always felt like...

01:22:37.000 Somehow funny too.

01:22:39.000 Because like...

01:22:41.000 There's a thing that happens when you're watching like goofy... 0.99

01:22:43.000 You know, you watch like goofy survival shows and shit. 0.99

01:22:47.000 There's always the part where the host, you know... 0.99

01:22:50.000 Grapples with how difficult it is...

01:22:52.000 To master ancient technologies.

01:22:56.000 But...

01:22:57.000 You're trying to just pick it up and do it from scratch.

01:23:00.000 Okay?

01:23:01.000 And...

01:23:02.000 Broven has been shooting that bow at fish for, he's 32 years old, he's been shooting that bow at fish for, let's say, 27 years.

01:23:12.000 It is not an unusual thing to him.

01:23:17.000 So when you go pick it up and you're like, man, you got to give props to these guys for being able to kill fish with this bow, it's like, well, kind of and kind of not, because if you spent 27 years doing something, you're damn sure going to be good at it.

01:23:27.000 The same way is if you took someone, like one of these first contact peoples from between Peru and Brazil, and handed them my laptop and said, hey, pull up my Gmail contacts from scratch, and He might be like,

01:23:43.000 man, I gotta give props to you guys.

01:23:46.000 I had no idea, right?

01:23:48.000 It's just like absurd.

01:23:50.000 I was having this conversation with someone the other day where the first time Daniel Boone in 1760, Daniel Boone went through the Cumberland Gap for the first time and dropped down into what's now Tennessee and Kentucky.

01:24:02.000 And he stayed there hunting hides.

01:24:04.000 He was a hide hunter.

01:24:04.000 Stayed there hunting hides for two years.

01:24:06.000 Ran out of gunpowder and made his own gunpowder.

01:24:08.000 And made it out of bat guano Your own piss, potash, right? 1.00

01:24:14.000 You can cook this shit up, right, and make your own gunpowder. 1.00

01:24:17.000 Wow. 1.00

01:24:18.000 And I always look at that as being the epitome of woodsmanship.

01:24:22.000 And the fact that he could do it makes him seem otherworldly.

01:24:27.000 How do they, what kind of formula do they have for how much piss, how much bat guano? 0.88

01:24:31.000 It's just something they knew.

01:24:32.000 Do you know that bat guano used to be something that was so cherished people would go to war for it?

01:24:36.000 Yeah, for explosives. 0.99

01:24:37.000 That's fucking incredible. 0.99

01:24:38.000 Not just for explosives, but also for fertilizer. 0.99

01:24:40.000 Oh, no. 0.98

01:24:41.000 Yeah, that's the term bat shit crazy. 1.00

01:24:44.000 Crazy or bat shit? 1.00

01:24:45.000 People would fight for bat shit. 1.00

01:24:47.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:24:48.000 They would go nuts.

01:24:49.000 It was so valuable.

01:24:51.000 That's where all the buffalo bones went after the near extermination of the buffalo.

01:24:55.000 Really?

01:24:55.000 Yeah.

01:24:56.000 The really good shit was bone china, china tableware. 1.00

01:25:00.000 And everything else is fertilizer. 1.00

01:25:02.000 Wow.

01:25:02.000 Yeah.

01:25:03.000 But you could make the same...

01:25:04.000 Some of the same characters that were involved in the slaughter were involved in picking up the bones.

01:25:07.000 They were called bone pickers.

01:25:08.000 Picked up the fertilizer.

01:25:09.000 But no, I didn't know that about Baguano.

01:25:11.000 I had no idea that bone China...

01:25:13.000 Yeah.

01:25:14.000 There's still bone China.

01:25:15.000 No kidding.

01:25:16.000 Yeah.

01:25:17.000 I thought China was always like some sort of ceramic.

01:25:20.000 There's a place in Detroit, on the Rogue River in Detroit, that the Rouge River, Rogue River, depending on what dude in Michigan you're talking to...

01:25:29.000 There's a place there called the Detroit Carbon Works that used to...

01:25:35.000 When you're watching movies, including The Revenant, you know that giant pyramid pile of buffalo skulls that turns up in everywhere, every book, every movie? 0.99

01:25:46.000 That photo was taken at the Detroit Carbon Works, and what they were producing was bone fertilizer.

01:25:54.000 Wow.

01:25:55.000 Is there more than one of those photos?

01:25:56.000 Whoa, Jesus.

01:25:57.000 That's the one?

01:25:57.000 It's everywhere.

01:25:58.000 Wow.

01:25:59.000 You can't escape that picture.

01:26:00.000 That's an incredible picture.

01:26:01.000 That's taken to Detroit, Michigan, where I'll point out it was one of a handful of states that never had Buffalo in the history in California.

01:26:10.000 There's no Buffalo in Michigan.

01:26:12.000 So they were not extirpated out of Michigan?

01:26:14.000 Nope.

01:26:14.000 Those were picked up.

01:26:15.000 Those bones were picked up in the American West, shipped by rail to Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, turned into bone fertilizer, and then shipped back out for people tilling up the Great Plains.

01:26:27.000 Go back to that photo again.

01:26:28.000 That photo is so disturbing.

01:26:29.000 Dude, it's wild.

01:26:30.000 How many skulls is that? 0.98

01:26:31.000 In my book about buffalo, I'm describing that picture, and I say that the man standing on top is like an exclamation point at the end of a long sentence about death and destruction.

01:26:44.000 Because, like, look at him.

01:26:46.000 It's like he somehow realizes the weirdness of what he's involved in, but that was post-extermination.

01:26:51.000 There's a crazy podcast from Dan Carlin on the Wrath of the Khans on Genghis Khan, and they describe how the Charisman Shah sends a group to check out Jin China, and they got there like about a year after Genghis Khan had killed everyone in the entire city, 0.79

01:27:09.000 over a million people, and they thought what they saw in the distance they thought was a Snow-capped mountain.

01:27:15.000 As they got closer, they realized it was a pile of human bones.

01:27:18.000 Really?

01:27:19.000 Yeah.

01:27:20.000 Man, those guys were hardcore back then.

01:27:22.000 It's hardcore as it gets.

01:27:24.000 Yeah.

01:27:25.000 Jonestown wouldn't even have been a blip.

01:27:26.000 It would have been nothing.

01:27:27.000 It would have been like a car crash.

01:27:30.000 He changed the carbon footprint of the human race.

01:27:33.000 Him during his time.

01:27:34.000 They don't know how many people.

01:27:36.000 Through depopulation.

01:27:38.000 Through depopulation.

01:27:39.000 Cooking fires.

01:27:40.000 They believe they killed more than 10% of the population.

01:27:44.000 Like, Genghis Khan and his people, through his orders, killed more than 10% of the population of the world. 0.96

01:27:50.000 And wasn't he the number one Land conqueror, but just never held on to anything.

01:27:57.000 But conquered more than Napoleon, conquered more than Hitler, but just didn't hold it. 0.65

01:28:04.000 I'm not sure about that.

01:28:05.000 I don't know about that, but I know that they always lived in tents, and they despised people that lived in homes. 0.99

01:28:11.000 They thought they were pussies. 0.99

01:28:12.000 They probably thought that after their life, they probably thought they were vulnerable too. 0.99

01:28:15.000 Yeah, probably, right?

01:28:16.000 Yeah, I mean, anybody listening, Wrath of the Cons, it's a five-part series, and I think Dan Carlin, he charges for them, you can buy it on iTunes, but I think it's only a dollar per, and it's the best dollar you'll ever spend in your life.

01:28:30.000 And he's done World War I. Yes.

01:28:31.000 Yeah.

01:28:32.000 And I'm not sure what else he's done.

01:28:33.000 He's done a lot of...

01:28:34.000 I mean, his podcast is just absolutely amazing.

01:28:37.000 He's an incredible and super humble guy.

01:28:40.000 Won't call himself an historian, but meanwhile has the best history educational series you can get.

01:28:46.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:28:47.000 It's a buck, a buck a piece, and they're like an hour and a half long, and they're fucking incredible. 0.98

01:28:52.000 Yeah. 0.93

01:28:52.000 He's a real treasure, that guy. 0.93

01:28:54.000 Doesn't call himself in his story because he doesn't use primary source material or something, just reads popular works?

01:29:00.000 I don't know why.

01:29:02.000 I mean, I know he...

01:29:03.000 Because who owns the name?

01:29:05.000 Yeah.

01:29:05.000 Who owns the definition?

01:29:06.000 He's just really humble.

01:29:08.000 Yeah, I got it.

01:29:08.000 But his main focus of study, his entire life, has been history.

01:29:14.000 When he does these things, if he calls what he does a podcast, I need to change what I do.

01:29:20.000 What I call a podcast pales in comparison because we're just sitting here talking.

01:29:25.000 What he does is he prepares for these things for months and cites different sources and references and then essentially does an educational entertainment piece.

01:29:37.000 Maybe that's why he doesn't like the term historian is because he's not...

01:29:42.000 He's not contributing to the body of knowledge.

01:29:47.000 He's interpreting the body of knowledge.

01:29:49.000 Right.

01:29:49.000 Maybe.

01:29:50.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

01:29:51.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:29:51.000 I think he's just super humble, too.

01:29:53.000 He just wouldn't say that, no matter what.

01:29:56.000 But somehow, I don't know why, more disturbing to see a pile of human bodies than it is to see a pile of the buffalo bones.

01:30:04.000 Yeah, I think I told you, and I've talked about this a thousand times, after the Custer Massacre, The guys that were following the other soldiers who were coming in after the Custer massacre, they didn't know what had happened.

01:30:20.000 They hadn't got word yet that Custer and his entire command had been wiped out by the Sioux in Northern Cheyenne.

01:30:27.000 And they're riding up the valley, and they're looking off in the distance, and they see all these sort of white, bloody-ish things, and all these dark brown things.

01:30:39.000 And one of the guys wrote that their initial impression, looking at it, was that Custer must have caught the Indians in the middle of a buffalo hunt.

01:30:49.000 And what they were seeing was, it was summertime, and they were seeing fatty buffalo carcasses that had been skinned.

01:30:58.000 And that the brown things were the buffalo hides laid out next to the carcass.

01:31:03.000 But on closer inspection it was the brown things were horses, cavalry horses, and the white things were stripped and mutilated soldiers.

01:31:14.000 It's a good image.

01:31:15.000 Wasn't one of the guys, one of the Native Americans, that was in the Little Bighorn whatever event, wasn't he one of the guys who toured with Wild Bill?

01:31:26.000 Many of them.

01:31:27.000 So they had killed American soldiers and then they went on this entertainment tour. 0.52

01:31:32.000 Yeah.

01:31:32.000 It would be as though...

01:31:33.000 It would be like... 0.99

01:31:37.000 This is a fucking risky comparison. 0.98

01:31:40.000 No, I'm not even going to do it. 0.99

01:31:41.000 It's too risky.

01:31:41.000 You're going to say Nazi?

01:31:42.000 No.

01:31:43.000 No, I definitely wasn't going to say that, because it's way different.

01:31:45.000 It would be like... 1.00

01:31:47.000 Shit. 1.00

01:31:51.000 I'm not going to say it. 1.00

01:31:52.000 I don't want to make the comparison.

01:31:54.000 It'll come back to haunt me.

01:31:55.000 I'm trying to think of something that would work.

01:31:57.000 It would be like a people that we now fought against later became a media celebrity.

01:32:02.000 Oh, I guess they're kind of dealing with it right now in Colombia, where the FARC, right?

01:32:09.000 Now that Colombia has struck a peace accord with the FARC. And the FARC are entering into politics, entering into media.

01:32:17.000 FARC commanders who spent their entire life fighting against the Columbia government.

01:32:22.000 Many atrocities were traded back and forth.

01:32:25.000 They now come on the Columbia equivalent of 60 minutes to do interviews.

01:32:30.000 Wow.

01:32:31.000 Okay, so it's like where...

01:32:33.000 You have an adversary that hostilities end and the reconciliation is so complete and so quick that you can become a media personality.

01:32:47.000 And this guy was a touring media personality, right?

01:32:49.000 So Gall, quite a number of them.

01:32:52.000 That's the big giant guy, right?

01:32:52.000 Yeah, Gall, who the historian Evan S. Connell, he's just G-A-L-L. And there's some photos of this guy, right?

01:33:02.000 Yeah, there are photos of him.

01:33:03.000 See if you can find that.

01:33:04.000 Evan S. Connell, he was huge.

01:33:07.000 The novelist who wrote sort of my favorite, Custer History, he says that Gaul went through Custer's men like a wolf through sheep.

01:33:19.000 That's a hard-looking man.

01:33:21.000 Someone asked him how long it took, how long that fight lasted.

01:33:25.000 He said it lasted about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner.

01:33:31.000 Wow.

01:33:32.000 That is a hard-looking gentleman right there.

01:33:35.000 Yeah.

01:33:36.000 That face, man.

01:33:37.000 So he toured all over the country.

01:33:39.000 People would pay to see him, pay to get their photos taken with him.

01:33:42.000 Wow.

01:33:42.000 He did selfies?

01:33:44.000 Yeah.

01:33:46.000 Selfies with people?

01:33:47.000 Wow, what a crazy thing that must have been.

01:33:49.000 Isn't it wild?

01:33:49.000 So they had some mock war that they would do?

01:33:53.000 Yeah, they would come out and reenact the battle.

01:33:57.000 Yeah, so you could go down, and this would have been in your own lifetime.

01:34:01.000 The people who, the families of the men killed at the battle of Little Bighorn could have gone down and got their photo taken with and paid to watch and interacted with the gentleman who likely clovered their father's head in with a tomahawk.

01:34:18.000 Jesus Christ.

01:34:20.000 We're not as, like...

01:34:23.000 We always want to think about how much worse we are now, right?

01:34:26.000 Is that Buffalo Bill up there?

01:34:28.000 I don't know if that's Hickok.

01:34:30.000 I don't think that's him, but that's from his show.

01:34:32.000 Wow.

01:34:34.000 I'm sorry, what were you going to say?

01:34:35.000 We're not that far removed?

01:34:37.000 Oh, no.

01:34:37.000 I was just saying, like, we now...

01:34:39.000 I think we've gotten to such a weird spot.

01:34:41.000 But yeah, you want to point out that people must have been a tad more forgiving at the time.

01:34:46.000 Well, there must have been much more use to death and murder.

01:34:49.000 Yeah.

01:34:50.000 Because it was so common.

01:34:51.000 And it was so personal.

01:34:54.000 Because you're doing it with hatchets and axes and guns that don't fire very well.

01:35:00.000 So you're doing it at close range. 0.66

01:35:02.000 You're shooting people with muskets. 1.00

01:35:03.000 And there was so much more violence then.

01:35:05.000 Yeah.

01:35:06.000 It's so much more death.

01:35:07.000 The fact that you can grow up and be so old now and never see a dead person is like just a new idea.

01:35:12.000 It is pretty crazy.

01:35:13.000 You know?

01:35:14.000 I got people my age that have never seen a dead guy.

01:35:16.000 Yeah.

01:35:18.000 Well, it's a real eye-opener when you see one.

01:35:21.000 There's a lot of people that haven't even seen a dead animal.

01:35:24.000 Dude, I could sit and rattle off the dead people I've seen.

01:35:26.000 It's burned in my mind.

01:35:28.000 How many dead people have I seen?

01:35:29.000 Yeah.

01:35:32.000 Not ten.

01:35:35.000 What have you seen dead people from?

01:35:38.000 I saw two people that were not just dead, but in bits after a plane crash.

01:35:45.000 I saw...

01:35:46.000 Whoa, where was that? 0.98

01:35:47.000 Fucking not even a mile from my house when I was a little kid. 0.98

01:35:50.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:35:51.000 And then...

01:35:52.000 Commercial plane or like one of those little private suckers?

01:35:56.000 It was a 57-year-old man and a 13-year-old kid.

01:35:58.000 Ooh.

01:35:59.000 I tried recently, briefly, to go back and find the article.

01:36:04.000 Here's how the story went down.

01:36:08.000 The way I remember, a detail that I remember very clearly is that this guy, it was his neighbor kid, and he had told this kid's parents, they were going down to wash the airplane and look at the airplane, and he decided to take the kid up for a flight.

01:36:21.000 I don't know if that's true or not.

01:36:22.000 I was trying to find that article to confirm that aspect of it, but I lived on a lake called Middle Lake, and everybody remembers, for whatever reason, this guy buzzed our lake a couple times really low.

01:36:32.000 There was a guy down on the east end of the lake, Named Mr. Rupert.

01:36:38.000 And I remember what was unusual about Mr. Rupert was he would eat freshwater clams, which we were forbidden from doing by our dad.

01:36:45.000 Why is that?

01:36:47.000 You know, people don't regard it as a good practice at all to eat freshwater clams because of toxins.

01:36:53.000 You know, that's another thing I haven't looked into why that doesn't happen.

01:36:56.000 People just generally don't eat freshwater clams.

01:36:58.000 But we would go get them and clean them.

01:37:00.000 And I remember we cleaned a whole shitload once.

01:37:01.000 And my dad was like, no.

01:37:02.000 But Mr. Rupert would eat these freshwater clams.

01:37:06.000 Would he go raw or would he cook them?

01:37:08.000 I'm sure he would cook them.

01:37:10.000 He said, man, I saw that plane.

01:37:13.000 When it dove down over the lake, it went up but then dove down again and never came back up.

01:37:19.000 And he even told some neighbors this.

01:37:22.000 The next day when we wake up, the sheriff's posse, the mounted, like our area had a mounted, like a bunch of volunteers who had horses.

01:37:32.000 And they were like the mounted sheriff's posse, right?

01:37:35.000 Like deputized individuals during emergencies such as this.

01:37:39.000 They were all loading up their horses.

01:37:42.000 To head out into the woods to look for some plane.

01:37:44.000 And another detail that was told to me that I wanted to verify...

01:37:49.000 I just need to go back and go through the microfiche where I grew up and find the article.

01:37:54.000 Because it was something like it had a signal on it and the signal was picked up by some other country even.

01:38:00.000 But they knew that a plane had gone down.

01:38:02.000 And that was a matter of fact.

01:38:03.000 Everyone at this point knew that this plane had gone down.

01:38:06.000 Um...

01:38:07.000 And we were riding around on our bikes out in the woods just kind of following these sheriff's posse guys as they were sort of combing through the woods.

01:38:13.000 And eventually a news helicopter was hovering over a spot like right at the end of White Lake Drive.

01:38:24.000 And there was a news helicopter hovering over there.

01:38:26.000 My two brothers went directly there on their bikes.

01:38:29.000 And I was younger.

01:38:30.000 And for some reason I went and got my mom And then we drove over and we got to the end of White Lake Road where you had to walk into the woods.

01:38:38.000 And there was a guy there that tried to block my mom and me from going in there.

01:38:44.000 And I always remember he said, if you're going to go in there, you better have a strong stomach.

01:38:49.000 And she's like, well, my kids are in there.

01:38:51.000 And so we go in there and Matt and Danny are just standing at the edge of the hole there.

01:38:55.000 And they're trying to sort out.

01:38:58.000 They're trying to sort out who was who inside this plane.

01:39:02.000 Wow.

01:39:03.000 Into bags. 0.96

01:39:04.000 I'm not shitting you, man.

01:39:06.000 I have some visual details I remember from that.

01:39:15.000 It's kind of macabre.

01:39:19.000 I remember we were at our neighbor, Mrs. Musselman.

01:39:25.000 I remember we were at her birthday party and the caterer just fell over dead in front of everybody.

01:39:30.000 Oh my God.

01:39:31.000 So, like, stuff like that.

01:39:33.000 Those are very non-war-related things, right?

01:39:36.000 No.

01:39:37.000 That's what's interesting is most people...

01:39:38.000 Well, yeah, I'm just saying, like, but you can see that these are just, like, happen-chance things.

01:39:42.000 But, yeah, you can go through life.

01:39:44.000 We just have it sort of set up now where you can be hidden from it.

01:39:48.000 But when you talk to previous generations, it was just a part of stuff.

01:39:52.000 Yeah.

01:39:53.000 You know?

01:39:54.000 My old man talked about walking...

01:39:56.000 He grew up in Chicago.

01:39:57.000 He talked about walking out of a party one time and there was a dead guy at the bottom of the stairs.

01:40:02.000 That have been beaten to death.

01:40:04.000 Just like...

01:40:05.000 Then went off to World War II and saw who knows what.

01:40:10.000 So yeah. 0.99

01:40:11.000 When people talk about how now we're so violent and shit, there's nothing to support that. 0.97

01:40:15.000 Nothing. 0.99

01:40:16.000 No.

01:40:16.000 It's the safest time to live ever.

01:40:18.000 You used to be able to hang people from trees and not get in trouble for it.

01:40:22.000 If they were the right color.

01:40:24.000 Yeah.

01:40:25.000 Not that long ago.

01:40:27.000 No. 1.00

01:40:27.000 That's what's crazy about this Wild Bill Hickok shit. 1.00

01:40:30.000 We're talking about, what, 1870, 1880? 0.99

01:40:33.000 When was it?

01:40:34.000 And what's funny is he was one of the combatants.

01:40:37.000 So some of those guys, like Wild Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok actually had a dispute over who got to have the name Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok.

01:40:46.000 There were some other Wild Bills, I guess, and it was like a popular name, right?

01:40:50.000 But they were combatants, too.

01:40:52.000 So they engaged in these wars.

01:40:54.000 And the fact that you would later get both sides of the war.

01:40:58.000 It'd be like if you went and got a bunch of Germans who were defending the Normandy Beach.

01:41:06.000 Omaha Beach.

01:41:07.000 And you got a bunch of the Americans who were storming Omaha Beach.

01:41:13.000 And you had a traveling road show in which they would pretend to inflict mass casualties on one another.

01:41:23.000 For paying, adoring crowds.

01:41:27.000 How bizarre.

01:41:28.000 Who came up with the idea for that?

01:41:30.000 I don't know, man.

01:41:31.000 Had that been done ever in history before?

01:41:33.000 I don't know.

01:41:34.000 My guess would be...

01:41:35.000 You know, there's a guy...

01:41:36.000 There's a thing that I've told people a bunch of times.

01:41:37.000 No one ever believes in it. 0.98

01:41:38.000 It's true, but it's fucking true. 0.97

01:41:39.000 It's true. 0.98

01:41:40.000 There was a guy one time...

01:41:42.000 You know Niagara Falls, right?

01:41:43.000 You've been to Niagara Falls?

01:41:44.000 No. 0.99

01:41:45.000 Big damn waterfall. 0.99

01:41:47.000 St. Lawrence drains the Great Lakes, and on its way out to the Atlantic, it was a big-ass waterfall in Niagara Falls. 0.99

01:41:55.000 A guy one time bought, there was like a zoo was liquidating its holdings, and a man bought the zoo and bought a barge.

01:42:08.000 And put all of the zoo animals on the barge and charged a dollar to watch him send his barge full of animals over the falls.

01:42:22.000 Yeah.

01:42:24.000 Wow.

01:42:25.000 So...

01:42:26.000 Right?

01:42:27.000 Yeah.

01:42:28.000 Not that long ago.

01:42:29.000 Now what happens if you...

01:42:30.000 Nowadays.

01:42:32.000 Nowadays.

01:42:33.000 Nowadays.

01:42:33.000 Nowadays, they'll put you in a cage.

01:42:35.000 Yeah.

01:42:36.000 So it's just, yeah, we've traveled What is this, Jamie?

01:42:40.000 This is from when the show started in the World's Fair.

01:42:44.000 He got denied from doing the show outside of the World's Fair.

01:42:50.000 Who's he?

01:42:50.000 Wild Bill Hickok?

01:42:51.000 You're not talking about...

01:42:52.000 Sorry, William F. Cody, so I don't know which one is which.

01:42:54.000 But he found a 14-acre swath of land where he set up stands for 18,000 people to watch each show, and over 2 million people saw it during the World's Fair that year.

01:43:07.000 God!

01:43:08.000 I don't know if he was the first one, though.

01:43:09.000 And there weren't even, there were 2 million soft, but there were less, well under, probably way less than 75 million people in the country.

01:43:18.000 Wow.

01:43:20.000 On what year was it?

01:43:21.000 In World War II, there were 150 million.

01:43:23.000 That's incredible.

01:43:25.000 18,000 spectators, 74 Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota.

01:43:31.000 Wow!

01:43:31.000 18,000 spectators must have been amazing back then.

01:43:35.000 Yeah, but think about the numbers.

01:43:37.000 At that battle, historians feel that at that battle, that was the largest gathering of Plains Indians to have ever occurred.

01:43:48.000 An encampment of maybe 10,000 individuals.

01:43:51.000 And how many people were there from...

01:43:55.000 What's his face?

01:43:56.000 Custer?

01:43:56.000 Custer.

01:43:57.000 He rode into one end of the camp.

01:43:59.000 That's why it's not well understood, like...

01:44:02.000 There were other engagements going on at the same time.

01:44:04.000 When you say Custer, his command was annihilated, there were other prongs to the attack that were repelled and beaten.

01:44:12.000 But it was only one prong of the attack that was annihilated.

01:44:17.000 And how many people did Custer have with him?

01:44:18.000 He rode in with about 200 people.

01:44:22.000 And ran into?

01:44:23.000 An encampment of 10,000 individuals.

01:44:26.000 And later, some of these individuals, like Gall and others in interviews, said that even at the time, Our understanding is that these people were all hopelessly drunk.

01:44:35.000 Oh my god.

01:44:36.000 Because it did not make sense what they were doing.

01:44:39.000 Wow.

01:44:40.000 They just didn't know.

01:44:42.000 That's why there's still all these Custer people who just debate and argue. 0.91

01:44:49.000 Some of his Crow Scouts, he had some Cree or Ree Scouts and Crow Scouts who came and told him, do not...

01:44:59.000 You cannot go down there in the morning.

01:45:01.000 They were planning on attack at daybreak.

01:45:03.000 And they said, you cannot do that.

01:45:06.000 That makes no sense.

01:45:07.000 He said, we're going.

01:45:09.000 They did their death songs.

01:45:11.000 Some of his scouts sang their death songs because they knew they would be dying in the morning.

01:45:16.000 And it's debated still today.

01:45:19.000 To what extent did he believe what his scouts were telling him?

01:45:26.000 So was it suicidal or was it hubris?

01:45:29.000 No one thinks it was suicidal.

01:45:30.000 It was either that he just didn't really comprehend what they were telling him or he was so, you know, he was a decorated Civil War figure and probably was a very ardent believer in the superiority of We're good to go.

01:45:58.000 And they were just killed.

01:46:01.000 And in popular depictions, they always show Custer the last guy standing.

01:46:06.000 There's a mountain of his dead guys around him.

01:46:08.000 And he's still firing his revolver with long hair.

01:46:12.000 In fact, he had short hair at the time.

01:46:14.000 But some people think that in looking at it, he probably...

01:46:19.000 The great one is Here Fell Custer.

01:46:24.000 The great image.

01:46:25.000 Jamie just pulled up a crazy picture.

01:46:28.000 So Herefell Custer...

01:46:29.000 Is that a contemporary picture?

01:46:30.000 Did it say what?

01:46:31.000 No, no, that's the old classic.

01:46:33.000 There's one that was on the Anheuser-Busch.

01:46:35.000 I meant contemporary to the time.

01:46:37.000 Yeah, Herefell Custer was a little bit later.

01:46:38.000 But then the one that was the Anheuser-Busch one was by a German guy.

01:46:42.000 I think that was the one you had pulled up.

01:46:43.000 Anheuser-Busch had a Custer photo?

01:46:45.000 It was like their poster.

01:46:46.000 Oh my God.

01:46:47.000 That's Herefell Custer.

01:46:48.000 Wow.

01:46:49.000 Which is considered to be a very accurate depiction of what was going on.

01:46:57.000 Custer died earlier in the skirmish.

01:47:02.000 In movies, he's got the flowing blonde hair, everyone's dead, and he's still firing away.

01:47:07.000 He was probably killed earlier rather than later in the skirmish.

01:47:12.000 It's so funny because...

01:47:14.000 See right there, he's like, you know...

01:47:16.000 In a different position.

01:47:19.000 It's so funny that we've done that, you know, that people have taken what they know most likely were historically inaccurate accounts and they pass them down generation to generation.

01:47:30.000 It makes you wonder, like, this is what we know now because this is only a hundred and so years ago.

01:47:35.000 Yeah.

01:47:35.000 Like, what are we getting when we're getting some version of something that happened a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, you know?

01:47:42.000 Yeah.

01:47:42.000 How distorted.

01:47:44.000 Insanely.

01:47:45.000 But the problem we have as a culture, I think, is when someone goes to challenge our popular perceptions, it's branded as revisionist and somehow loses interest.

01:48:04.000 Right?

01:48:04.000 It becomes almost like its credentials are tarnished.

01:48:08.000 Do you remember the guy, I can't remember what politician, Jamie, you'd be able to pull it up.

01:48:11.000 There was a politician who said, he famously said, you know, after we realized that Paul Revere, the ride of Paul Revere was...

01:48:21.000 Didn't really happen.

01:48:21.000 Yeah, like fabricated from whole cloth, right?

01:48:23.000 Right.

01:48:23.000 There was a politician who said, I love Paul Revere whether he rode or not.

01:48:30.000 Well, I mean, when we were kids, we were taught Columbus discovered the United States.

01:48:33.000 I mean, we didn't figure that out until...

01:48:35.000 It's still amazing.

01:48:37.000 That it wasn't like the West Indies. 1.00

01:48:39.000 And to this day, it's still amazing that they celebrate that guy when you find out that he was a fucking monster. 0.99

01:48:43.000 I mean, the... 1.00

01:48:44.000 What was it?

01:48:45.000 I believe it was a...

01:48:48.000 A minister or someone, some religious person who came with him at the time, left a journal about the atrocities committed directly by Columbus and his men when they hacked off arms for people who couldn't bring them back gold. 0.99

01:49:02.000 I mean, just horrific shit. 0.99

01:49:04.000 Smashed babies on rocks, did it right in front of them. 1.00

01:49:06.000 And this guy was a first-hand account of what we're supposed to believe. 1.00

01:49:10.000 I mean, who knows how much of what he's saying is accurate, but if any of it is accurate, Columbus was a fucking monster. 0.97

01:49:17.000 Yeah, I think that what it stems from is that from the perspective in Europe at the time, he had... 0.99

01:49:27.000 He had solidified and put some shit together that people had been kind of pecking around the edges of. 0.94

01:49:32.000 Right. 0.98

01:49:33.000 Whether this continent existed.

01:49:35.000 Yeah, and just had...

01:49:38.000 It was like a leap forward at the time.

01:49:40.000 Yeah.

01:49:41.000 How crazy is that?

01:49:42.000 But the fact that it becomes...

01:49:45.000 That, right, that he, like, you know, that in some people's minds, he, like, somehow established America.

01:49:52.000 Yeah.

01:49:53.000 And that we take a day off of school because of it.

01:49:55.000 That's really crazy.

01:49:56.000 It's bizarre.

01:49:57.000 Columbus Day.

01:49:58.000 I mean, we still, to this day, it's 2017, kids get Columbus Day off, don't they?

01:50:02.000 But now, it's like, here's the thing.

01:50:05.000 Now that no one...

01:50:07.000 Now that sort of the consensus, right, the popular consensus is that...

01:50:15.000 He was one of many players involved in putting together what was here and outlining where it was and how to get here.

01:50:28.000 He was one of a bunch of players, almost certainly not the first.

01:50:34.000 No one cares about that meaning.

01:50:36.000 What they mean is you're saying, I uphold The idea of Western civilization's annexation of the New World as being a good thing. 0.99

01:50:50.000 So, when someone gets pissed at the revisionists for questioning the legitimacy of Columbus, they're not actually talking about what he specifically did.

01:51:02.000 It's become a proxy For the cultural annexation of the New World. 0.98

01:51:09.000 And to say, oh, I hate Columbus, he's an asshole, they take it to mean you're saying that you're questioning our claim on the Western Hemisphere and that it was a bad thing. 0.99

01:51:20.000 I think that's why people are annoyed by it. 0.99

01:51:23.000 I don't think people are too much annoyed by it anymore.

01:51:26.000 Because I think it's pretty much been established that Columbus is a really bad guy.

01:51:29.000 But no one's gone in and undid the day.

01:51:31.000 I don't think they have.

01:51:31.000 Have they?

01:51:32.000 Is there any movement?

01:51:33.000 No, they kind of change them around, don't they?

01:51:35.000 Well, they should probably come up with another name for it.

01:51:38.000 You know?

01:51:40.000 Happy West Indies Day.

01:51:41.000 It's still a day, right?

01:51:43.000 I think so.

01:51:44.000 Pretty sure.

01:51:45.000 Yeah.

01:51:46.000 It is kind of crazy, though. 0.99

01:51:47.000 I'm not here to defend the day, but I do understand kind of how that shit came to be. 0.99

01:51:52.000 Yeah, I understand it. 0.98

01:51:53.000 It just seems pretty incredible that just 500 years ago, here it goes, the War Against Columbus Day in the Washington Post.

01:51:59.000 Yeah, so it's waged by the same people who were waging a war against Christmas.

01:52:03.000 Is it really?

01:52:06.000 That's crazy.

01:52:08.000 Indigenous People's Day.

01:52:09.000 In favor of Indigenous People's Day.

01:52:12.000 Makes sense.

01:52:14.000 Just give us a day off, we'll take it.

01:52:16.000 I'm generally, like, little movements, like little cultural movements like that, I'm generally not receptive to?

01:52:23.000 No, I don't try to read too much into them.

01:52:25.000 If I woke up tomorrow and told me that we had decided, you know, that people got together and decided against Columbus Day, I wouldn't, like, do a lot of soul-searching on that day.

01:52:34.000 No, no, I wouldn't either.

01:52:36.000 Well, you know, you don't work a traditional job anyway, or go to school where you take that day off.

01:52:40.000 Oh, yeah, I think people that lost the day, they're like, dude, that's my day, man.

01:52:43.000 Yeah, it's just hard to imagine.

01:52:45.000 That's how I hit walleyes with my buddy Doug every year.

01:52:47.000 Yeah, you'd be bummed.

01:52:48.000 It's just hard to imagine that, you know, 500 plus years ago, they really didn't know in Europe about the continental United States.

01:52:57.000 That's amazing.

01:52:59.000 Yeah.

01:53:01.000 Earlier we were talking about violence, right?

01:53:04.000 More violent than.

01:53:05.000 I think that we're so tripped up by the upheaval caused by the digital age Right?

01:53:13.000 And everything.

01:53:15.000 Like, you know, I just changed our sleep practices and just everything.

01:53:18.000 You know, it's major upheaval.

01:53:20.000 Yeah.

01:53:21.000 But picture that, picture that in your lifetime, they all, like, you become aware that the earth...

01:53:35.000 That there are three times as many or whatever, as many civilizations on Earth as you thought there were.

01:53:44.000 Yeah.

01:53:46.000 I mean, that's a huge thing to grapple with.

01:53:49.000 A huge thing to grapple with.

01:53:50.000 People that had history, people that had boats, they were seafaring.

01:53:54.000 Had more history than you.

01:53:55.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:53:56.000 Crazy.

01:53:57.000 Or to think that one day, and this is not too long ago, You know, some of our grandparents remember this, to think that one day we had devised a contraption that was capable of ending life on Earth, and that these contraptions could be initiated by the distant actions of a handful of people.

01:54:20.000 That's a change, right?

01:54:23.000 Yeah.

01:54:24.000 The nuclear era. 0.70

01:54:25.000 Here's the craziest change in the nuclear era.

01:54:28.000 From the invention of an airplane to someone dropping a nuclear bomb from an airplane is less than 50 years.

01:54:33.000 Yeah.

01:54:34.000 I think Wright Brothers, 1903, right?

01:54:36.000 1906, 1903. Early 1900s.

01:54:38.000 First sustained flight with a heavier-than-air vehicle.

01:54:41.000 And then in 1945, they dropped an atomic bomb.

01:54:45.000 That's crazy.

01:54:46.000 That's inside my life. 0.99

01:54:48.000 Someone's like, I knew this airplane shit was going to take off. 0.98

01:54:52.000 But that is probably one of the biggest changes ever in terms of the amount in 50 years in the world. 0.99

01:54:59.000 To go from no air travel at all to dropping a nuclear bomb out of an airplane in less than 50 years.

01:55:07.000 Yeah, and to then have it be that it's a staple of American life.

01:55:12.000 Not just where other people...

01:55:14.000 Like space travel, you're like, okay, it's this flood of information, but it's not...

01:55:20.000 But with that, that's now how you get around.

01:55:24.000 At a time, when you wanted to cross the country, you would lose a large percentage of your party to death.

01:55:33.000 You had to plan ahead.

01:55:34.000 It would take many, many months to being just a thing you just do on a whim.

01:55:39.000 Now, I do believe, I accept that we are in a state of upheaval right now, and I think that we're probably impacting ourselves in ways we don't fully understand.

01:55:48.000 How so?

01:55:49.000 Digital devices.

01:55:50.000 Oh, for sure.

01:55:51.000 Yeah.

01:55:51.000 Just how you run your day.

01:55:53.000 Yeah, no doubt.

01:55:54.000 How you spend your time, how you run your day.

01:55:55.000 Well, ever go to a restaurant and you see a whole group of people just staring at their phone?

01:55:59.000 Yeah.

01:55:59.000 Yeah, we were laughing about this the other day.

01:56:01.000 If you're staying at the baggage claim, not looking at your phone, people are going to think you're nuts. 0.93

01:56:06.000 That's true.

01:56:07.000 My friend...

01:56:07.000 Just looking around, trying to make conversation with people.

01:56:10.000 My friend Rourke was talking about a conversation his wife was having with someone where someone said I was in Starbucks drinking a coffee, just sitting there staring at the wall like a fucking lunatic. 1.00

01:56:18.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:56:22.000 If you're like, what's wrong with that person?

01:56:23.000 What are they up to?

01:56:24.000 Are they going to start killing people?

01:56:26.000 They're not doing anything with their phone.

01:56:29.000 It's a big thing, but one of the helpful things, I guess one of the helpful things, just to bring it full circle, one of the helpful things about traveling or about just reading about history is you lose some of that sense of specialness about Thinking that the life you're living in the moment you're living it is this great test of humanity or some like super peculiar thing going on and realize that people have always been involved with and struggle with cataclysmic upheaval You

01:56:59.000 know and then to go and then to go witness some other people in some version of that transition Is pretty healthy man Maybe in the long term, like just traveling, going to see how other people do stuff.

01:57:14.000 It's unsettling, but probably ultimately pretty good for you.

01:57:17.000 Yeah, I think it's very good for you.

01:57:19.000 Just anything that enhances perspective, it gives you like another layer that you could consider when you think about life on Earth.

01:57:25.000 We're so used to our own environment, our own ways.

01:57:28.000 It's like you were talking about talking to these people and asking them, like, why don't you eat monkeys?

01:57:34.000 And they're like, oh, we just don't eat monkeys.

01:57:36.000 Has he ever been to a supermarket?

01:57:40.000 That's a good question.

01:57:41.000 A couple years ago, when I was mentioning that, I mentioned to you that a couple American companies that have some conservation spending they do, they were training some guys from Rewa Village.

01:57:57.000 They were training some of them to just how to interface with Westerners.

01:58:04.000 And as part of that, he went up to, he might have even gone up to the Bahamas.

01:58:09.000 To go for a couple days to a fly fishing lodge.

01:58:14.000 So, yeah, he flew on a commercial aircraft.

01:58:16.000 Oh, wow.

01:58:17.000 Yeah.

01:58:18.000 But he's peculiar in that way.

01:58:21.000 Now, I've brought up to him, I'm trying to talk him into coming up and going, I want to take him on an ice fishing trip.

01:58:28.000 That would be crazy.

01:58:29.000 I want to take him up to Alaska to fish the ice.

01:58:31.000 Because what I want him to understand is I'm so uncomfortable with With him, physically uncomfortable.

01:58:40.000 With the heat, with everything biting me all the time.

01:58:44.000 Just everything.

01:58:45.000 It's just extremely uncomfortable.

01:58:46.000 And to him it's standard.

01:58:48.000 Yeah, it's comfortable.

01:58:49.000 But he's never, like, if he hadn't done that trip, or just all of his siblings and most other people in those villages, they never experienced 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

01:58:58.000 Now what is it like to them when it comes to bugs?

01:59:00.000 Do they have any sort of resistance to mosquitoes or anything along those lines?

01:59:05.000 They don't care about it nearly as much as we care about it.

01:59:07.000 Do they get the same amount of bites, though?

01:59:09.000 Do they get chewed up like we do?

01:59:10.000 Yeah, they complain about tick bites and stuff, but it doesn't seem to bother me like we do because it's just a part of everyday life.

01:59:16.000 You've got to get used to hanging out in Bolivia.

01:59:20.000 You get bit by bees and wasps.

01:59:25.000 At about the same rate that you'd get bit by mosquitoes if you were at like some 4th of July thing out at your uncle's pond, you know, shooting fireworks off at night on the edge of a cattail marsh.

01:59:36.000 Really?

01:59:36.000 It's like, you're just getting bit.

01:59:37.000 You just like wake up and you start getting bit by bees and wafts.

01:59:40.000 So they just get just kind of used to it.

01:59:43.000 And then you'd say, like, I remember when I got stung by a bullet ant asking like, hey, how many times have you been stung by bullet ants?

01:59:48.000 And a lot of them would be like, I couldn't even begin to guess how many times I've been stung by bullet ants.

01:59:53.000 But they just suffer different.

01:59:54.000 So what I want to do is I want him to experience suffering while watching me not suffer.

02:00:02.000 So I want him to look at me with awe.

02:00:08.000 Okay?

02:00:08.000 And so to do this, I want him to come up and ice fish.

02:00:12.000 I'm going to take him up.

02:00:13.000 I got a friend who likes to go on...

02:00:16.000 He likes to get on snow machines in February or March out of Fairbanks.

02:00:21.000 And they go overnight camping on snow machines fishing through the ice for burbot.

02:00:27.000 What's a burbot? 0.99

02:00:28.000 Oh, they call them freshwaterlings.

02:00:30.000 You know why they call them lawyers? 1.00

02:00:32.000 Is when you gut a burbot, his heart's way back next to his asshole. 1.00

02:00:37.000 So they call them lawyers. 1.00

02:00:39.000 Or vent.

02:00:40.000 You know, fish have a...

02:00:42.000 Like a cloaca, they have a uni-hole. 0.97

02:00:45.000 Like a bird? 0.90

02:00:47.000 Yeah, we have a couple outlets, and they have a single outlet for waste and sexual exchange. 1.00

02:00:55.000 So yeah, lawyer, burbot, freshwaterling, poor man's lobster is another word for it.

02:01:00.000 It's a northern fish.

02:01:01.000 Looks like if you combined a snake and a bullfrog, kind of.

02:01:06.000 Yeah, I want to take him out to camp in a tent in 40-degree below weather.

02:01:09.000 That's it right there?

02:01:10.000 Yeah.

02:01:10.000 Wow, what a cool-looking fish.

02:01:12.000 Very good to eat.

02:01:13.000 Yeah?

02:01:14.000 Very good.

02:01:15.000 Wow.

02:01:16.000 Now, are they commonly caught through the ice, or do people catch them on the street?

02:01:19.000 That's a northern pike. 1.00

02:01:19.000 That's a northy, yeah. 1.00

02:01:21.000 Oh yeah, no, it's burbot or not. 1.00

02:01:24.000 They're in the Great Lakes.

02:01:25.000 They're all over there in Alaska.

02:01:26.000 Yeah, there's burbot everywhere. 1.00

02:01:27.000 So does it taste like lobster?

02:01:29.000 Is that why they call it a poor man's?

02:01:30.000 No, the reason they call it poor man's lobster, it doesn't really taste like lobster, but it's suitable for boiling it and dipping it in butter and cocktail sauce and eating.

02:01:39.000 Really?

02:01:39.000 Yeah, but you also make fish sandwiches with it.

02:01:41.000 Huh. 1.00

02:01:42.000 They even sell that shit commercially. 1.00

02:01:44.000 Burbot. 1.00

02:01:45.000 Guys that have, like, guys that, like...

02:01:49.000 Native American...

02:01:49.000 In the northern Great Lakes, you have Ojibwa.

02:01:52.000 The Ojibwa Indians still carry on White Lake.

02:01:56.000 They fish for Great Lakes whitefish.

02:01:58.000 They trap net Great Lakes whitefish.

02:02:00.000 They're able to sell bycatch of burbot, and they have restaurants.

02:02:06.000 In the UP, I got some friends that do it, and they got restaurants in the UP that they sell their burbot into, and they make burbot sandwiches.

02:02:13.000 Freshwater link.

02:02:14.000 So I want to take them on an ice fishing trip.

02:02:16.000 And...

02:02:18.000 But for him to leave, he doesn't go into Georgetown, which is the capital of his country.

02:02:24.000 He'd have to go into Georgetown and start trying to figure out some kind of visa situation and a passport.

02:02:32.000 Does he have a birth certificate?

02:02:33.000 I don't know what he has.

02:02:35.000 I told him that I would try to help him with all that, but he said it's a very daunting idea that you would go and leave the country.

02:02:41.000 Wow.

02:02:42.000 Or that you'd go in and stay in Georgetown.

02:02:44.000 But he has been on a commercial flight.

02:02:46.000 He did that trip, yeah.

02:02:48.000 So he has done it?

02:02:49.000 Yep, he has done it.

02:02:50.000 So he had to get a passport in order to do it.

02:02:53.000 His passport didn't last long, and now he has no passport anymore is what he's telling me.

02:02:57.000 When I was asking him about the feasibility of this.

02:03:00.000 And then, you don't need a visa for there, but he needed a visa to come here.

02:03:04.000 But I'm going to figure it out.

02:03:06.000 I want to have him up so bad.

02:03:07.000 Wow.

02:03:08.000 Him and his brother, Dennis.

02:03:11.000 One of the things you get is...

02:03:16.000 You're from, what state were you born in?

02:03:18.000 New Jersey.

02:03:18.000 Yeah, see, you've been all over the place, right?

02:03:21.000 Yeah.

02:03:22.000 Imagine that you hunted and fished and farmed, and that's all you did.

02:03:26.000 So you're always on the land.

02:03:27.000 And you've done it all within a 25 mile, a 20 mile radius of your home.

02:03:35.000 So you're outside hunting and fishing or farming or gathering in the jungle every day and you're in your 30s or 40s and you've done it in a radius of 20 miles.

02:03:47.000 Wow. 0.97

02:03:48.000 To what level you understand your spot and without the distractions of the digital shit and without the distractions of an occupation. 0.98

02:03:59.000 Oh, he doesn't work at all. 0.96

02:04:01.000 I mean, now he guides a little bit every year.

02:04:04.000 For the fish.

02:04:05.000 He guides a little bit, but typically not.

02:04:07.000 Like most days, he's not engaged in that activity.

02:04:10.000 So the spatial awareness is the thing that's most striking to me in spending time with these individuals is everything.

02:04:24.000 I'm interested in what they notice and what they never miss.

02:04:31.000 It's like you realize that all of the bits of information that you're able to contain in your head that allow you to function and carry on, right? 0.98

02:04:40.000 You're like a comedian, and you do shit with MMA, and you have a very successful podcast, and you have a family, and you're digitally very astute, and you have opinions about fucking coffee, right? 0.98

02:04:50.000 All this shit, you're widely read, right? 1.00

02:04:53.000 That's like all... 1.00

02:04:55.000 You sort of fill up your brain with as much as it can hold.

02:04:58.000 But for them, it seems to be, from my perspective, it's like all of that breadth of knowledge but crammed into the natural world to where every plant, every tree, what are its uses, what are the other things?

02:05:15.000 And it's like they know as much.

02:05:17.000 They know as much as we know.

02:05:19.000 But it's just focused.

02:05:23.000 In a way that our breadth of knowledge, which would probably be astounding to them if they realized all the shit we knew about, but all those bits of information are just applied in a different way, down to a granular understanding of the jungle.

02:05:37.000 It would probably be very bizarre for them to see us walk out to this parking lot, these little patches of plants. 0.97

02:05:45.000 We don't have a fucking clue as to what they are. 0.87

02:05:47.000 We pass through them like they're just peripheral. 0.98

02:05:51.000 There is no like, oh, I don't know what that is.

02:05:52.000 Yeah.

02:05:53.000 Wow.

02:05:53.000 No.

02:05:54.000 They know everything.

02:05:55.000 And there's...

02:05:55.000 Toxicity.

02:05:56.000 How many thousands and thousands of different varieties of plants and animals?

02:06:00.000 At various times, there's 1,500 species of birds.

02:06:04.000 Listen, there was never a moment when I heard a bird call.

02:06:11.000 I never said, hey, what's that bird?

02:06:13.000 That everyone there didn't say what the bird was.

02:06:16.000 Bird sounds.

02:06:18.000 Just from sounds. 0.91

02:06:21.000 It's like you can't, like, and the shit that, like, it's almost just something you have to go see is the ability to just, like, move through the jungle and notice everything. 0.92

02:06:34.000 Now, are they like the people in Bolivia where they're barefoot most of the time? 0.98

02:06:37.000 Yeah, but, you know, that's another bummer is getting more into shoes, man.

02:06:42.000 Roman still likes to take his shoes off when he goes into the jungle.

02:06:45.000 Like, we went into the jungle after some curacao and he pulled his shoes off to be extra quiet.

02:06:51.000 But, yeah, so he'll now and then put flip-flops on now.

02:06:54.000 And before, there's no way.

02:06:55.000 Wow.

02:06:56.000 Do they still have the weird feet that are all just calloused and toes are spread?

02:07:00.000 Splayed out, yeah.

02:07:00.000 It's very strange the way their feet look.

02:07:03.000 Real strange.

02:07:04.000 I was in the Philippines one time in the Highlands where people are...

02:07:09.000 Just hiking mountain trails, like, you know, severe topography on rocky ground, and the feet there, I've never seen anything like it.

02:07:17.000 Barefoot.

02:07:17.000 Yeah, but it's almost unrecognizable as a human foot.

02:07:21.000 Really?

02:07:21.000 From your perspective of a human foot.

02:07:22.000 What does it look like?

02:07:23.000 Have your man here.

02:07:27.000 Because they're photos of their feet?

02:07:28.000 Type on Luzon Island Highlands Kalinga K-A-L-I-N-G-A feet.

02:07:41.000 I don't know.

02:07:41.000 Try that.

02:07:43.000 This is probably some high-resolution National Geographic photographs of people's feet.

02:07:48.000 If he's any good at his job, you will be seeing some crazy feet in a moment.

02:07:53.000 Another thing I wanted to share with you, I mentioned sort of a surreal image, is watching a woman in a DKNY shirt digging turtle eggs for food.

02:08:09.000 There's flowers.

02:08:11.000 Everything's in bloom, right?

02:08:13.000 It was just the beginning of the rainy season, so there was some rain, like everything was in bloom.

02:08:17.000 And these flowers, flowers of all variety, hang out over the river.

02:08:22.000 And sometimes you'll pass through and it just has this warm, floral smell.

02:08:28.000 It's astounding.

02:08:31.000 It reminded me of, you know, in the end of Apocalypse Now, when Kurtz, when Captain Willard finally catches up with Kurtz, and Kurtz asks him where he's from, and he mentions Ohio, and Kurtz tells him about a river trip he took with his father on the Ohio River when the gardenias were in bloom,

02:08:51.000 you know, and he talks about the smell in the end of Apocalypse Now, but these flowers would smell like that.

02:08:55.000 But when the rain would come, what's going on?

02:08:57.000 I can't even see what...

02:08:59.000 You got some feet?

02:09:00.000 Oh, you'll find some feet, boy.

02:09:02.000 Yeah, why not?

02:09:02.000 I was trying to find something better.

02:09:05.000 So, it would rain.

02:09:06.000 It would knock all the flowers into the river. 0.99

02:09:11.000 Oh, wow.

02:09:12.000 And, you know, like, the way...

02:09:15.000 Nah?

02:09:16.000 Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

02:09:17.000 So, from grasping.

02:09:20.000 Wow.

02:09:21.000 They're almost like a gorilla's feet.

02:09:23.000 Yeah, from wrapping your feet around rocks and stuff while you climb.

02:09:29.000 That one in the middle is so soft.

02:09:32.000 I saw quite a few people that had feet that resembled that.

02:09:41.000 Down in the Amazon and other areas, you're just walking on soft ground.

02:09:46.000 But imagine if you're just walking on slippery rocks.

02:09:49.000 And you're using your feet in a way.

02:09:51.000 That's not even uncommon.

02:09:53.000 So what we're looking at for people that are just listening to this, it's like at the middle of their foot, especially that one foot in the middle to the right, it's like he's taking a turn, like a hard turn, like a 15 degree plus turn.

02:10:08.000 Why do those seem like disembodied feet?

02:10:11.000 Because they're just photographing the feet, I guess.

02:10:15.000 This is like a big article about some people from the Philippines, I think, from the same area.

02:10:21.000 Go back to it for a second, Jamie, because what we're seeing in this is this massive spacing between the big toe and then the first toe to the point where it looks like a hand.

02:10:34.000 It's an opposable toe.

02:10:35.000 Yeah, it's crazy.

02:10:36.000 Seems like.

02:10:37.000 Almost like an opposable toe, yeah, almost like a thumb.

02:10:40.000 No, I'm sure what's at play there, too. 0.99

02:10:42.000 That's what's really fucked. 0.98

02:10:42.000 Like, it makes you wonder. 0.98

02:10:43.000 Like, at one point in time, was it like that?

02:10:46.000 That's the thing, is you wonder, and I don't know the answer to this, but my guess would be that over time...

02:10:55.000 You know, they're not starting out with your foot.

02:10:59.000 Like, over time, that's been something that's been selected for in a population of people.

02:11:07.000 Like height, or like, you know, some people...

02:11:09.000 Whoa, look at this guy's feet.

02:11:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:11:11.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:11:15.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:11:17.000 We're looking at what looks like frog feet. 0.99

02:11:20.000 But that's not even Asia.

02:11:23.000 That's North America. 0.56

02:11:28.000 H-U-A-O-R-A-N-I. How do you pronounce that? 1.00

02:11:32.000 Harani.

02:11:33.000 I'd have to check where that is.

02:11:35.000 God, it's bizarre. 0.99

02:11:36.000 But it really does show you From fucking wearing shoes your whole life. 0.99

02:11:41.000 Yeah, and given the different environment, that's insane. 0.99

02:11:46.000 Like what we're looking at here, they literally look like thumbs.

02:11:48.000 Like they're sticking out of the side, but it's the same structure as a human foot, meaning that it's the same length of toes and just you see that from using it that way, they've just developed this incredible...

02:12:01.000 You know what's really crazy?

02:12:03.000 What is one of the hallmarks of civilization that shows like the really poor choice in footwear?

02:12:09.000 When your feet go the other way, when they go in an ineffective direction, they get that hammer toe and they climb over each other.

02:12:17.000 These people have functional feet to the point where they could probably hold something with their feet.

02:12:23.000 Yeah, when I look at...

02:12:26.000 When I look at my wife's feet, I feel like she's got a foot that seems very much shaped by a lifetime of office footwear. 0.52

02:12:34.000 It's awful.

02:12:35.000 Especially with women. 0.91

02:12:36.000 They get that hammer toe, that bunion thing, where their toes are kind of crossed over to the side.

02:12:42.000 I know that thing well.

02:12:42.000 It's so weird.

02:12:44.000 It's a weird choice that someone has decided that women should shove their toes into these pointy things. 0.91

02:12:51.000 But, but, uh... 1.00

02:12:53.000 Just like that I saw a group of individuals lock on to polarized sunglasses as being the shit. 0.99

02:13:04.000 If you went back in five years, I'm telling you, instead of being barefoot, everybody was going to be wearing shoes. 0.99

02:13:12.000 What if you got those women high-heeled shoes and said, this is what all the women in America- I think that's a stretch. 1.00

02:13:16.000 Of course.

02:13:17.000 I think it'd take a while.

02:13:18.000 Oh, that's disgusting.

02:13:20.000 That's foot binding. 1.00

02:13:21.000 That's just fucked up right there. 0.99

02:13:23.000 That's just insane. 0.99

02:13:23.000 I can't tell what I'm looking at. 0.99

02:13:25.000 Yeah, that's her toes curled under. 0.88

02:13:26.000 Oh, that's from binding your feet?

02:13:28.000 Yeah, that's foot binding in China.

02:13:29.000 Yeah, well, you know, soft tissue.

02:13:32.000 It's very flexible.

02:13:33.000 Oh, man.

02:13:34.000 Go to Cirque du Soleil.

02:13:36.000 Look what those people can do to their bodies. 1.00

02:13:37.000 The human body is pretty bizarre in its ability to adapt.

02:13:41.000 Yeah, you know those groups that used to bind their children's head to that backboard to flatten their head out?

02:13:46.000 Well, how about those people in...

02:13:48.000 What part of the world was it where they have that...

02:13:55.000 Incas, where they have those lines, the Nazca lines, you know, and they've found all these skulls from people back then where they had stretched their heads out and almost made their heads look like aliens. 0.52

02:14:07.000 Yeah.

02:14:07.000 There you go.

02:14:08.000 But see if you find the Inca.

02:14:12.000 Inca skulls.

02:14:13.000 It's so much so that a lot of the really loony people said, look, they're trying to be like the aliens that have come down and given them knowledge.

02:14:19.000 Yeah.

02:14:20.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:14:21.000 Have you ever been down to, do you remember those, they're held in Salta, Argentina, I went to see them one time, but those children that they found, they were entombed at the top of a mountain, and they were basically freeze-dried?

02:14:36.000 No.

02:14:37.000 It's perfectly preserved children.

02:14:39.000 What happened to them?

02:14:40.000 Well, they were taken up and given as an offering.

02:14:44.000 So first, it seems, based on the stuff they had with them, that they were paraded through the Incan Empire, and people lavished them with gifts.

02:14:53.000 And when they look at the isotopes in their bodies, it's like their diet, their whole lives, they had just had potatoes.

02:14:59.000 But then you can see that toward the end of their lives, they were very well fed with meat and fish and all kinds of stuff.

02:15:04.000 And they had just innumerable treasures.

02:15:16.000 Yeah.

02:15:20.000 Wow.

02:15:22.000 It's like, it's best that they haven't dated it exactly, but it seems like, I mean, it seems like we're talking about, you know, Columbus 1492. It's like we're talking about 1491. Wow.

02:15:31.000 So, the height of this empire, the height of the empire budding up against its dramatic and sudden collapse with European contact.

02:15:42.000 But they took, yeah, I went to see, and, um...

02:15:46.000 They made a deal with the indigenous people where they only put one on display at a time, but she was on display when I was there.

02:15:51.000 And how do they have her encapsuled? 0.66

02:15:54.000 So they took them...

02:15:55.000 Well, I'll tell you how they came to be first.

02:16:00.000 They were finely dressed, had a lot of ornaments and things with them, had been very well fed, and they took them up to a high peak.

02:16:09.000 I can't remember how high.

02:16:09.000 They might have been 14,000 or 15,000 feet above sea level.

02:16:12.000 And they built a little tomb for them and sat them in the tomb.

02:16:16.000 They were drunk.

02:16:17.000 They had a lot of rice wine in their bodies when they died.

02:16:20.000 The oldest one must have put up some kind of struggle because she was hit in the head with a hammer or an axe. 0.82

02:16:27.000 We're good to go.

02:16:49.000 What freeze drying is is your liquid, it's like you freeze something and then expel the liquid where the liquid goes from a gaseous, where it goes from a solid to a gas without passing through its liquid state.

02:17:03.000 So when you freeze dry food, you like freeze dry it, you put it in a freezer and get super cold and then you start, then you start putting it under a vacuum to a point where all the water It goes immediately to a gaseous state.

02:17:16.000 It doesn't pass through a liquid state, so it holds its form, but all the water's gone.

02:17:23.000 If it goes through a liquid state, then it collapses, but it just holds its form in the non-water parts.

02:17:49.000 It's in Salta, Argentina.

02:17:52.000 Wow.

02:17:53.000 Near the border, very near the border with Bolivia.

02:17:55.000 I wanted to ask you something totally unrelated, but it came up because you talked about freeze-dried foods.

02:18:00.000 I know you cook a lot, but have you ever, and I know you eat those mountain house things, but have you ever tried to make your own?

02:18:06.000 Have you ever tried to dehydrate some of your wild game?

02:18:08.000 Oh yeah, I've dehydrated.

02:18:10.000 I mean, it's how you make jerky or dehydrate and stuff.

02:18:12.000 Right, but have you ever made like chili and things like that where you could rehydrate it in the field?

02:18:15.000 I don't think I've ever made dehydrated.

02:18:18.000 No, I've assembled a lot of dehydrated things, but I've never...

02:18:22.000 At what point...

02:18:24.000 How many ingredients need to be in something before it becomes a recipe?

02:18:29.000 Just a couple.

02:18:30.000 Pemmican, that's a recipe.

02:18:32.000 What is it?

02:18:33.000 Pemmican, that's got two things in it.

02:18:34.000 What's pemmican? 0.90

02:18:35.000 Pulverized meat with liquid fat poured over the top of it.

02:18:39.000 Did you know what that is?

02:18:40.000 No. 0.97

02:18:41.000 People fuck that up all the time, what pemmican is. 1.00

02:18:43.000 I've never heard of it before, I don't think.

02:18:45.000 If I did, I forgot it.

02:18:46.000 It's like the original road food.

02:18:48.000 You dry meat.

02:18:50.000 It's into jerky.

02:18:51.000 Air dry meat into jerky.

02:18:52.000 Then you pulverize it into what looks like sawdust.

02:18:55.000 And then you take and stir it into liquefied fat.

02:18:58.000 I made some from a buffalo I killed when I wrote my buffalo book.

02:19:01.000 I made pemmican from that.

02:19:03.000 And I had it in my fridge just as an experiment.

02:19:05.000 I kept it for seven years.

02:19:07.000 Survival food that can last 50 years.

02:19:09.000 But that's not pemmican.

02:19:10.000 It's not?

02:19:10.000 It doesn't look like it.

02:19:11.000 It looks like jerky sticks.

02:19:13.000 Because it's not pulverized.

02:19:14.000 People just now start all of a sudden calling like...

02:19:18.000 I'm not saying that hardly everybody messes up, but it's like a thing that gets messed up.

02:19:25.000 What was I getting at?

02:19:26.000 What were you asking about?

02:19:27.000 I was asking about dehydrating food.

02:19:29.000 I never dehydrate a bunch of different things and combine it into a recipe that I then bring with me.

02:19:37.000 The reason I use dehydrated food, and a lot of backpack hunters use dehydrated food, is because If you have a dish made up of dehydrated ingredients, they have different hydration times.

02:19:55.000 So if you do beans, like a piece of meat is going to be digestible to you.

02:20:02.000 A piece of dehydrated meat that's then hydrated is going to be digestible to you.

02:20:06.000 A dehydrated bean might take 30 or 40 minutes before it's going to be in a condition that doesn't rip you apart. 0.99

02:20:15.000 If you want to fuck yourself up, eat straight dried beans. 0.99

02:20:19.000 What happens? 1.00

02:20:20.000 It's just like rocks.

02:20:21.000 Yeah, your stomach doesn't know what to do with it, man.

02:20:24.000 Well, it knows what to do with it.

02:20:25.000 It starts producing voluminous amounts of gas, right?

02:20:30.000 It's awful.

02:20:31.000 It's horrible.

02:20:31.000 But if you take food and cook it to a ready-to-eat state, And then freeze dry it, you can rehydrate it kind of like simultaneously if you do everything right.

02:20:47.000 Now it wouldn't work with like a hamburger, right? 0.72

02:20:49.000 If you dehydrated a hamburger and then you add water to it, you're going to wind up with a soggy ass bun.

02:20:54.000 So the trick is like finding things that are going to, in a hot water bath, are going to all come back to life kind of at the same time.

02:21:02.000 But places that make backpack food out of just dehydrated but not freeze dried ingredients is a recipe for disaster.

02:21:10.000 Really? 1.00

02:21:10.000 Some people like that shit, but for day in, day out consumption, I'm a freeze dry man. 1.00

02:21:18.000 And is freeze dry something you can do at home? 1.00

02:21:21.000 You'd have to buy a sublimation chamber, so no.

02:21:24.000 What is a sublimation chamber?

02:21:25.000 What does that look like?

02:21:26.000 It's a chamber in which sublimation...

02:21:27.000 You know what it looks like?

02:21:28.000 It looks like a submarine.

02:21:30.000 Really?

02:21:31.000 It's small, but it's very heavy duty.

02:21:33.000 Because what you're doing is you're taking food, you take ready-to-eat foods, and freeze it.

02:21:39.000 Right.

02:21:40.000 And then you put it into a sublimation chamber and pull a very strong vacuum on it.

02:21:45.000 And the air pressure gets to a point where the liquid sublimates and goes directly to a gaseous state.

02:21:52.000 And you condense it on another surface inside the chamber.

02:21:54.000 But it's out of the food.

02:21:56.000 Then you take the food out and it's like glass.

02:21:58.000 You can shatter it.

02:22:01.000 That's freeze-dried food.

02:22:02.000 But it rehydrates in a real nice way.

02:22:04.000 I have heard, we eat a lot of it, because we do a lot of backcountry trips.

02:22:10.000 I've heard everyone's complaints about it, but it's like, from my perspective, which I will argue is a well-informed perspective, it's like, it's the lesser of two evils.

02:22:20.000 It's not that bad.

02:22:21.000 For day-in, day-out consumption, I think that the companies that do freeze-dry, it's just better, in my opinion.

02:22:28.000 Now, when I say that these children were freeze-dried, I think some people are going to challenge that because it's not technically freeze-dried, but a similar thing going on where they're keeping their form but shedding their water and, you know...

02:22:43.000 Shedding water, keeping their farm and being frozen and preserved for a long time.

02:22:47.000 So, yeah, it's a trip.

02:22:48.000 Because I was reading a podcast, or reading a podcast, listening to a podcast, rather, where this guy was talking about how he's doing that with his own food for backpacking trips.

02:22:56.000 Dehydrating it all.

02:22:57.000 Sure, man, why not?

02:22:58.000 Things like chili.

02:22:59.000 Things along those lines.

02:23:00.000 Is he cooking chili and then dehydrating or just dehydrating the components?

02:23:04.000 I think dehydrating the components.

02:23:05.000 I think he was talking about dehydrating the meat and dehydrating the pasta.

02:23:09.000 Like something, you know, like taking some meat with sauce and then putting it together with a pasta.

02:23:15.000 Now, my brother one time, he's a very frugal man.

02:23:20.000 That's not the right word.

02:23:21.000 He just hates...

02:23:23.000 To see food go to waste.

02:23:45.000 That's insane.

02:23:46.000 Does it take that long?

02:23:47.000 What does Rice take?

02:23:48.000 Like 20 minutes?

02:23:49.000 It seems like it takes more time to do that.

02:23:51.000 You have to talk to him.

02:23:51.000 So this is the same guy.

02:23:54.000 Is this the same guy that found the hobo's underwear and stole it?

02:23:57.000 Yep.

02:23:57.000 And the same guy that one time our dear late friend was getting married and his bride...

02:24:10.000 The wedding was at his bride-to-be's house, and a neighbor was away on vacation.

02:24:14.000 And the neighbor that was away on vacation said, you know, since we're out of town, if you guys want to use our home for some of your wedding guests, go ahead.

02:24:24.000 And so, all the groomsmen were lodged up in this house of this man we didn't know who was the neighbor of his wife's parents.

02:24:34.000 And, uh...

02:24:36.000 I don't know why, but my brother got to snooping around in this guy's freezer and found that he had a bull elk in there that had been in there for seven years.

02:24:44.000 And he had this crisis, this moral crisis, where he's trying to figure out, is it morally worse to steal or morally worse to allow this man to waste this meat?

02:24:56.000 How long will a bull elk stay good if you freeze it? 0.99

02:24:59.000 You're fucking pushing it at seven years. 0.99

02:25:01.000 Seven years. 0.99

02:25:02.000 What is commonly agreed upon It depends who you ask.

02:25:07.000 If you ask me, the way I trim, the way I cut, trim, and wrap, I don't even blink at two years.

02:25:15.000 Two years is fine.

02:25:16.000 Yeah.

02:25:16.000 The way I cut, trim, and wrap.

02:25:18.000 But when you start seeing four years, you get a little weird?

02:25:20.000 Well, a thing that...

02:25:21.000 I don't let it go.

02:25:22.000 I've never even done it.

02:25:23.000 I would have to think it's going to start to go.

02:25:25.000 Because the texture will change.

02:25:27.000 The texture will change.

02:25:29.000 Seven years, there's two things going on.

02:25:31.000 One, you're borderline.

02:25:32.000 And two, you're starting to get the idea that this guy isn't going to eat that thing.

02:25:35.000 Right.

02:25:36.000 Yeah.

02:25:36.000 So he weighed it out in his head, and when he left, he had a bunch of that meat with him and took him home and ate it, because he just hated to see an elk go to waste.

02:25:44.000 How did it taste seven years in?

02:25:45.000 Don't remember.

02:25:45.000 We didn't have to ask him.

02:25:47.000 Wow.

02:25:47.000 But his standard of good is different than your standard of good.

02:25:50.000 His standard of good is acceptable in cases like that.

02:25:55.000 That is a weird crisis, though.

02:25:56.000 It makes sense.

02:25:57.000 But throughout his whole life, he always is running into these situations where he just cannot let food go to waste.

02:26:07.000 If I talk to him right now, there's probably 10 more things like that that have happened to him since I talked to him last.

02:26:12.000 When he found in his alleyway one time, and he's living in Montana, he still lives in Montana, living in Bozeman, found in his alleyway a discarded cash from a homeless man and ate all that guy's food.

02:26:29.000 And he was a PhD candidate at the university.

02:26:35.000 You grew up with him?

02:26:36.000 Yeah.

02:26:37.000 Do you understand him?

02:26:39.000 The first time, here's where he kind of, not where it came from, but he drew a bear tag when we were in Michigan, and it was hard to get a bear tag at the time.

02:26:49.000 And he drew a bear tag, and the only way to hunt bears in the UP is like... 0.95

02:26:53.000 You're not going to spot and stalk on them because it's flat ground and you can't see shit, right? 0.98

02:26:57.000 You're going to use dogs or you're going to use bait. 0.99

02:26:59.000 You're not going to see a bear.

02:27:01.000 So he started a bait pile, and the way he was feeding his bait pile ahead of the season was just dumpster diving.

02:27:08.000 So, as he's dumpster diving, it's like, he's living off, not only is he baiting the bear with the dumpster food, but he's, like, living off the dumpster diving food that he found, too, because he, like, discovered his great richness.

02:27:19.000 Oh, my God!

02:27:21.000 He found, I'm not saying, he found this big box of boxes of expired bugles, you know, those little crackers?

02:27:28.000 Yeah.

02:27:28.000 The people, like, put Cheez Whiz, shoot Cheez Whiz into the open end of that bugle.

02:27:32.000 And I even got a picture of him.

02:27:34.000 He'd just walk through the woods with boxes of bugles under his arm and get out, and he'd be, like, dumping them out for the bear and then just eating the bugles, too.

02:27:43.000 And then he'd walk back with a handful of bugles.

02:27:45.000 Just hates to see wasted food. 0.98

02:27:47.000 His old girlfriend had a job cooking, like, the brown food in the Albertsons, you know, like, the display case where they fry all those, like, burritos and shit. 0.98

02:27:54.000 And, um... 0.98

02:27:57.000 She was bringing all that home and they were living off the food that was going to the garbage.

02:28:01.000 And they came to her and said, you can't steal this food.

02:28:03.000 And then she started stealing it quietly.

02:28:05.000 Wow.

02:28:06.000 He can't stand to see food go to waste.

02:28:09.000 Well, that's probably noble.

02:28:10.000 You know, what's extra nice is he works for the USDA. So it's good to know that a person like that is involved in...

02:28:21.000 You know, is at least in the room with people who are thinking about food systems.

02:28:29.000 Is it good? 0.99

02:28:30.000 Because it seems like he'll fucking eat anything. 0.99

02:28:33.000 Dude, he will. 0.99

02:28:34.000 He's on a different level. 1.00

02:28:36.000 I mean, on a different level of toughness and shit. 0.98

02:28:39.000 He's the guy whose arm is shrinking because, remember what I was trying to hook you up with? 0.99

02:28:42.000 Yes.

02:28:43.000 Because he's got a muscle.

02:28:44.000 Did he do anything about that?

02:28:45.000 Nope.

02:28:46.000 Oh, Jesus.

02:28:47.000 That's not good.

02:28:48.000 No.

02:28:49.000 Once you get that atrophy, it's very tough to get it back.

02:28:51.000 The way his nerves regenerate takes a long time.

02:28:55.000 It's like a half an inch a year.

02:28:56.000 He chronicles its decay by taking a...

02:29:00.000 He's got a 30-pound kettlebell, and he was chronicling its decay by watching how many...

02:29:09.000 It's his tricep.

02:29:11.000 So counting how many tricep curls he could do with that kettlebell with one arm and one with the other.

02:29:16.000 And I think the last time we were talking to him it was 30 or something like 30 on one side and 10 on the other side.

02:29:21.000 Oh, Jesus.

02:29:22.000 That's bad.

02:29:22.000 So that's a neck issue then.

02:29:24.000 That's like a C3 or C4 or something like that.

02:29:28.000 He's gone.

02:29:29.000 I shouldn't say he's gone.

02:29:30.000 I shouldn't say he hasn't done anything about it.

02:29:32.000 If he listens to this, he's probably cringing because he would feel that he has.

02:29:36.000 Tell him if he's listening.

02:29:40.000 There's a couple things you need to do.

02:29:41.000 It seems to me like it's a neck issue, because when you start getting elbows and things where your arm starts atrophying, usually it's a cervical disc, which is somewhere up in here.

02:29:52.000 What you should do is get a neck decompression device.

02:29:57.000 They're inexpensive.

02:29:58.000 They hook over a door.

02:30:00.000 You put it on with Velcro.

02:30:02.000 You strap it, and I have one.

02:30:04.000 It hangs on a thing.

02:30:05.000 It's like you're hanging yourself by your chin.

02:30:07.000 Making some room in there for all those nerves.

02:30:10.000 Exactly.

02:30:11.000 And well, same principle as these toes spreading out and then also toes smashing up.

02:30:16.000 You can kind of soft tissue stretch out your neck and decompress all those areas.

02:30:22.000 A lot of people have it from bad posture.

02:30:25.000 A lot of people have it from athletics.

02:30:26.000 I got it from jujitsu.

02:30:28.000 From all this, you know, getting your neck yanked on.

02:30:31.000 See that thing right there that lady has? 1.00

02:30:33.000 Yeah, man. 0.89

02:30:33.000 That's a shitty one because that one's working on a bag of water. 0.89

02:30:36.000 That doesn't work with a neck like mine. 0.99

02:30:37.000 You need to be able to hang. 0.95

02:30:39.000 You need to hang a rhino on the other end. 0.99

02:30:41.000 I have a thing where I go like this.

02:30:43.000 Click, click, click, click, click, click, click.

02:30:45.000 And then I let myself hang from my neck.

02:30:50.000 And it's just like that.

02:30:52.000 Just like that.

02:30:52.000 See how that guy's just sitting there?

02:30:54.000 Reading a magazine.

02:30:55.000 Yeah.

02:30:55.000 And you can adjust that.

02:30:56.000 So there's a little cord.

02:30:58.000 It's tough to see in this photo.

02:30:59.000 But there's a cord you pull, sort of like a plunge around one of those old school toilets.

02:31:03.000 You pull that click, [...

02:31:05.000 See how he's pulling it right there?

02:31:06.000 And then you just relax.

02:31:09.000 And you just got to learn how to go with it and sort of relax.

02:31:12.000 And it feels weird at first because there's a lot of pressure, but it's pulling your neck.

02:31:16.000 Literally pulling your neck.

02:31:17.000 You can feel sometimes when I'm really relaxed, I feel like pop.

02:31:20.000 I feel like something pop.

02:31:22.000 Little tissue separations in there.

02:31:24.000 Do you feel that it's gotten better long term?

02:31:27.000 Oh yeah, for sure.

02:31:28.000 And it feels like really relaxing.

02:31:30.000 Like after it's over, I feel like...

02:31:33.000 I feel like it just takes a weight off you.

02:31:35.000 I think there's a tremendous amount...

02:31:37.000 I think sitting is terrible.

02:31:38.000 These seats that we're in right now are exceptional because they're ergonomic chairs.

02:31:42.000 If you use them right.

02:31:43.000 If you use them right.

02:31:44.000 I'm pretty cautious about sitting up straight.

02:31:47.000 But from back injuries, I've been very, very cautious about working out all the muscles around my back.

02:31:55.000 I just worked out and I figured those things would take care of themselves.

02:31:58.000 Now I treat them just like brushing my teeth.

02:32:01.000 Like my spinal column and all those supporting muscles in the spine.

02:32:06.000 Those are huge.

02:32:07.000 They need to be exercised.

02:32:08.000 And especially if you do anything, like you guys pack out a lot of weight.

02:32:12.000 Yeah.

02:32:13.000 That's a big one.

02:32:15.000 That's where he feels that a different, well he had sciatica.

02:32:19.000 Right, that's lower.

02:32:20.000 That's a lumbar issue.

02:32:21.000 Yeah, that was a different thing.

02:32:22.000 But he knows, he like traces that to a specific animal.

02:32:31.000 That he's packing out.

02:32:32.000 Yeah.

02:32:32.000 Makes sense.

02:32:33.000 Because sciatica is, what sciatica is, is a disc that's bulging, meaning the disc, the soft tissue in between the two hard bones is pushing out and it's pressing up against the nerve. 0.99

02:32:46.000 And it causes pain that shoots down your ass and your lower legs. 0.85

02:32:50.000 And a lot of people don't even recognize it as a lower back issue because maybe their back is not really that painful, but the leg and the ass is painful. 0.99

02:32:57.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:32:57.000 What the fuck is going on here? 1.00

02:32:59.000 I had a similar issue with my neck where I was pushing on my ulnar nerve and I was getting this elbow pain and I was like fuck this really hurts like down my arm and in the back of my tricep and then I started getting numbness in my fingers and that's when I started figuring out what was going on then I went to a doctor I went to a chiropractor first which is a fucking giant mistake I spent a year But do you not believe in chiropractors? 0.99

02:33:22.000 I don't believe in chiropractors at all I think it's 98% horseshit. 0.99

02:33:27.000 That's what I think.

02:33:28.000 And I don't know, but I think chiropractors that are smart, they incorporate things that I think are beneficial.

02:33:34.000 Cold laser, massage, a lot of different things.

02:33:37.000 But I think that manipulation that they do, unless you have like some sort of significant scoliosis or something they're attempting to slowly put back into position, I think most of the time it's just popping your neck and it just feels good.

02:33:50.000 Like in an immediate sense?

02:33:52.000 I went to a guy that's a very nice guy and he was trying to tell me that I didn't have a bulging disc because he was pushing down on the top of my head and it didn't hurt.

02:34:00.000 I'm like, okay.

02:34:01.000 So I was listening to him. 0.99

02:34:02.000 I listened to this guy for like a fucking year. 0.98

02:34:05.000 I had treatment with him and I still have these neck problems and back problems. 0.99

02:34:08.000 Then finally I got an MRI and they're like, yeah, you got a bulging disc.

02:34:12.000 And I remember being angry.

02:34:13.000 I remember being angry. 0.99

02:34:14.000 Because I was angry that I was being treated by someone who was a professional that really didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. 0.95

02:34:20.000 And they were treating something that was a significant issue that I was experiencing. 0.99

02:34:24.000 A real deterioration of my function, Pain.

02:34:28.000 I wasn't able to do jujitsu correctly. 0.99

02:34:31.000 There was a lot of problems that I was dealing with that I was like, well, what the fuck is this? 0.97

02:34:35.000 And then I started talking to doctors about it. 0.99

02:34:37.000 And when you have a bulging disc, man, they want to cut you open like you're a pinata and you got gold inside of you.

02:34:44.000 Well, that's a thing that my bro's talking about is he's very nervous about a procedure that he could or could not do.

02:34:52.000 Well, for some people, it's not a bad move, depending on whether or not your brother's willing to do all the different things that can...

02:34:58.000 But he's got a lot of atrophy already, which is a real bad thing.

02:35:02.000 It's noticeable.

02:35:03.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:35:03.000 That's not good, because that shit doesn't grow back. 1.00

02:35:06.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:35:07.000 Boss Rutten has it real bad. 0.98

02:35:09.000 Boss Rutten, former UFC heavyweight champion, he fucked his neck up and went through a bunch of different treatments and then eventually wound up getting it fused. 0.96

02:35:18.000 He's got, I believe, two discs and maybe more. 0.96

02:35:21.000 And his neck fused together, where he doesn't have any disc tissue.

02:35:25.000 They just screw the bones in together and remove the disc tissue and stabilize the area.

02:35:29.000 But his right arm is significantly smaller than his left arm, to the point where he calls it baby arm.

02:35:35.000 And this is a former UFC heavyweight champion of the world.

02:35:37.000 And what's ironic is that some of it came from fighting, but the last thing came from doing a stunt on Sons of Anarchy.

02:35:46.000 He was in some sort of a fight.

02:35:47.000 I believe it was Sons of Anarchy.

02:35:48.000 Some sort of a fight scene where they were doing something and some guy was supposed to throw him on the ground and he landed on his head. 0.97

02:35:55.000 So all that actual fighting and you get fucked up pretend fighting. 0.91

02:35:58.000 Isn't that hilarious? 0.98

02:35:59.000 And it's bad, man.

02:36:01.000 I mean, it's slowly starting to come back, but I've known Boss to have this issue for...

02:36:07.000 We worked together on a movie before my seven-year-old daughter was born and he had the issue then.

02:36:16.000 And so for seven years.

02:36:18.000 And still now does.

02:36:19.000 And it still does.

02:36:20.000 It's come back slowly.

02:36:22.000 But what I'm talking about is like, I think there's some, like the way that your nerves regenerate...

02:36:27.000 It is extremely slow.

02:36:29.000 They can deteriorate quickly, like the atrophy can happen pretty quick, but the way it regenerates is extremely slow. 1.00

02:36:35.000 So they say once you have atrophy, you're fucked. 0.99

02:36:38.000 Like, you've got to act on it right away. 0.99

02:36:40.000 That's the thing they told me when I had Lyme disease is that a thing that fucks you up is the nerve damage.

02:36:47.000 Yeah.

02:36:48.000 And then a lot of people go on to think that they always have it, but they're like, You had a thing, it's treated, it's gone, but it'll live with you for so long because of the damage to your nerves that it's so slow to recuperate.

02:37:01.000 I talked to a doctor about Lyme disease and he said it's not just a Lyme disease you're dealing with.

02:37:06.000 He said Lyme disease is this overall term.

02:37:08.000 He said you can get a tick that has A hundred pathogens in it. 0.99

02:37:13.000 When you look at that list of shit, it gets scary. 1.00

02:37:15.000 It's scary as fuck. 1.00

02:37:16.000 And they connected it to Morgellons. 0.99

02:37:18.000 You know what Morgellons is?

02:37:19.000 No.

02:37:20.000 I've heard of it.

02:37:20.000 Morgellons is a disease that a lot of times they think is psychosomatic because there's some sort of a neurotoxicity involved in Lyme disease.

02:37:27.000 And all these people that have Morgellons almost, without a doubt, have Lyme disease as well.

02:37:33.000 And what Morgellons is, is they start itching at themselves and they think they have fibers growing out of their body and they start hallucinating.

02:37:40.000 Well, most of the time it's treated as a psychosomatic disorder.

02:37:44.000 Like they'll get carpet fibers in their body and they'll claim these carpet fibers are coming out of their body and growing out of their skin.

02:37:49.000 But I talked to this doctor who was the only lucid person that sort of explained it to me because he's a doctor and he has Morgellons.

02:37:56.000 And he also has Lyme disease.

02:37:58.000 And he says, like, to a person, they all have Lyme disease, that he's encountered at least.

02:38:03.000 But he was saying that he was looking at himself in the mirror and he saw something moving across the surface of his eye.

02:38:08.000 And he knew it was a hallucination.

02:38:10.000 And he realized it was a hallucination as a doctor, as an educated man in medicine, and still was seeing it.

02:38:17.000 And was freaking out.

02:38:18.000 And then he realized, oh, there's some sort of an extreme neurotoxic effect that this stuff has.

02:38:24.000 And then he started doing some pretty deep investigation into what constitutes Lyme disease.

02:38:29.000 And he's like, well, it's not like you have Herpes, you know?

02:38:34.000 No, it's not like that.

02:38:35.000 He's like, you get bit by something. 0.99

02:38:36.000 You get a bunch of shit in that cocktail of whatever that disgusting tick is carrying around, and it's variable. 0.99

02:38:42.000 You know, you might get it from one part of the East Coast, and it has, you know, 50 things. 1.00

02:38:47.000 You might get it from another, it has 13 things.

02:38:48.000 Yeah.

02:38:49.000 But he's saying, with the people that have more gelins, what he believes is they're suffering from hallucinations brought on by Lyme disease.

02:38:57.000 That's a thing about Lyme that I found was...

02:39:01.000 About medicine and about people and about mysterious diseases is like...

02:39:06.000 I quit doing it now, but I would get in arguments with people.

02:39:09.000 Where I was trying to deal with it and finding out about it, and people were telling me, here's what's happening to me.

02:39:15.000 I'm like, no, I was told that's not how it works.

02:39:17.000 Because there's so much...

02:39:19.000 The same thing you were bringing up earlier about a doctor or a chiropractor telling you the wrong thing. 0.99

02:39:24.000 There's so much subjectivity in the fucking medical world. 0.99

02:39:30.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:39:32.000 It's like, on one hand, all these people are sort of going through this regimen, this educational regimen, which is, you know, there's government oversight, there's certain criteria you need to meet, things you need to pass, and you think it would sort of have this unifying effect,

02:39:49.000 but people come out on the other end. 0.99

02:39:52.000 Who've gone through kind of the same educational system telling you fucking wildly different shit. 1.00

02:39:57.000 Yeah, wildly different shit. 0.99

02:39:59.000 About the problems where one guy, like, you could walk in, one guy's gonna, like, do a surgery, and the next guy's like, oh, no way. 0.97

02:40:06.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:40:07.000 Who was it that had the cyst in his balls? 0.99

02:40:10.000 Who was it? 0.99

02:40:11.000 It wasn't Steve-O, right? 0.99

02:40:12.000 Who the fuck was it? 0.99

02:40:15.000 Oh, Santino, I think. 1.00

02:40:17.000 Andrew Santino. 0.97

02:40:18.000 He was telling me that he had a cyst in his balls, and he thought he had ball cancer. 0.99

02:40:22.000 Went to a doctor, and one doctor told him that he has excess cum stored up in his balls, that it's sperm, that's stored up in his balls, and that's what's causing this knot. 0.99

02:40:33.000 He went home to his wife and said, listen. 0.99

02:40:34.000 He went to another doctor.

02:40:36.000 No, he wasn't married at the time.

02:40:37.000 He was a young man. 1.00

02:40:39.000 This shit's come to a head. 1.00

02:40:41.000 And the second doctor said, who the fuck is that doctor? 1.00

02:40:44.000 That guy should lose his ability to practice. 1.00

02:40:46.000 Like, you don't get cum stored up in your balls and it makes some sort of a knot. 1.00

02:40:51.000 Like, he's like, that's insane. 0.99

02:40:52.000 Who told you this? 1.00

02:40:53.000 And a fucking real practicing doctor told him that. 0.99

02:40:57.000 Yeah, I used to go into it when I was younger. 0.98

02:40:59.000 I'd go into it thinking it was like going to...

02:41:03.000 It's like going to get an oil change, right?

02:41:06.000 You could have 20 people and they're all going to change your oil the same way. 1.00

02:41:09.000 What we do is we drain it and put new shit in. 1.00

02:41:12.000 I'm like, great. 1.00

02:41:13.000 Now I realize it's a fucking roll of the dice, man. 1.00

02:41:15.000 Roll of the dice. 0.99

02:41:16.000 Or you can mitigate that by doing some research.

02:41:20.000 But it really is.

02:41:21.000 I don't know if the guy's going to tell me.

02:41:22.000 He's not going to tell me the same thing the other guy's going to tell me.

02:41:23.000 The big thing when it comes to health, and this is one of the things that I have a big problem with when it comes to anything dealing with the back, is preventative maintenance is one of the most important things for back health.

02:41:35.000 We're sitting in desks all day, and most people are not sitting up straight.

02:41:39.000 A good thing is one of those balls, those gym balls, those big balance balls.

02:41:43.000 Those are great to sit on because they force you to kind of stabilize yourself.

02:41:46.000 And use your core muscles.

02:41:47.000 Or some sort of an ergonomic chair forcing you to stabilize.

02:41:51.000 But doctors are not telling you, hey man, you've got to take a yoga class a couple days a week.

02:41:55.000 You've got to do something to straighten out your posture. 0.76

02:41:58.000 You've got to do something to make sure that your spine is strong enough to be carrying your butt.

02:42:02.000 You can't slump forward because you're putting undue pressure on these different portions of your back. 0.98

02:42:07.000 There's a significant amount of doctors that are just not fucking telling you that. 0.94

02:42:10.000 They're going like, oh yeah, your disc is bulging. 0.98

02:42:11.000 We're going to have to do a disectomy.

02:42:13.000 No worries.

02:42:14.000 It's outpatient.

02:42:15.000 It's an outpatient procedure.

02:42:16.000 What they're not telling you is they're chopping off a chunk of this finite material.

02:42:20.000 There's a small amount of material that separates your discs.

02:42:23.000 And when they talk about, oh, I have disc degenerative disorder.

02:42:27.000 It's a disease.

02:42:28.000 My disc...

02:42:29.000 No, stop! 0.98

02:42:30.000 It's not a disease.

02:42:31.000 What's going on is you're compressing your body through weightlifting, through extreme exercise.

02:42:37.000 Your body is slowly getting smushed down.

02:42:40.000 You're not allowing it to recover.

02:42:42.000 You're not stretching it out.

02:42:43.000 You're not strengthening all those core muscles.

02:42:44.000 You're not giving it some time off.

02:42:46.000 You're probably engaging in the same damaging activity over and over again and toughing it out. 0.95

02:42:51.000 If there's one thing you should never fucking tough out, it's a back issue. 0.94

02:42:55.000 Anytime there's something going on with your back, don't tough it out. 0.95

02:42:58.000 Don't try to work through it.

02:42:59.000 Just don't.

02:43:00.000 Because you're going to fuck it up worse, and then it's going to get to a point where it just does not recover. 0.98

02:43:04.000 And then you're going to have to get surgery. 0.98

02:43:06.000 Yeah.

02:43:07.000 Man, all this is making me super self-conscious about how I sit.

02:43:10.000 I sit like Larry King, man.

02:43:12.000 So bad.

02:43:12.000 When I'm at a chair and a desk.

02:43:14.000 I used to much more.

02:43:15.000 I do try to sit up as much as I can now.

02:43:18.000 I feel like every time I've been here, I went away for a couple days trying to sit straighter.

02:43:22.000 After staring at you sitting all nice for three hours?

02:43:25.000 I try, man.

02:43:26.000 I didn't always used to be good at it.

02:43:27.000 I used to slump quite a bit before I had back issues.

02:43:30.000 Yeah, I gotta catch up.

02:43:30.000 These chairs are called Capisco chairs.

02:43:33.000 They're from Ergo Depot. 0.99

02:43:35.000 You can go to ergodepot.com and get these fucking things. 1.00

02:43:38.000 They're the shit. 1.00

02:43:39.000 They're comfortable enough to sit in, too. 1.00

02:43:41.000 I've been on some of them where your knees slide in and there's a pad against your shin.

02:43:46.000 Those are kind of gross.

02:43:47.000 These seem much more like an actual chair, but they're super comfortable.

02:43:52.000 What's it called?

02:43:52.000 It's called a Capisco.

02:43:54.000 Sounds like a drink.

02:43:55.000 I know.

02:43:56.000 Ergodepot.com.

02:43:58.000 No, they didn't pay me to say that. 1.00

02:43:59.000 But these things are the shit. 1.00

02:44:01.000 Bax, man. 1.00

02:44:02.000 Bax are the one thing. 1.00

02:44:03.000 When people have these heavy pack-outs and everybody likes to pride themselves and, oh, packed out 150 pounds, 7 miles.

02:44:10.000 Don't! 0.57

02:44:10.000 I'm prone to saying those kind of things. 0.57

02:44:13.000 I tell everybody, take 75 and do it twice.

02:44:16.000 Please.

02:44:17.000 And even that's a lot, man.

02:44:18.000 I have this new thing that I got.

02:44:20.000 That's a good point.

02:44:20.000 Why do people...

02:44:23.000 Why do they like to talk? 0.64

02:44:24.000 Because they want to be badasses.

02:44:25.000 Yeah, but you'd never be like, yeah, man, I jumped out in front of a truck and just jumped away right in time.

02:44:30.000 People love to tell their friends, too.

02:44:33.000 You know Mike?

02:44:33.000 He packed out two elk quarters on his back.

02:44:36.000 Dude's a fucking savage. 1.00

02:44:37.000 And I go, Mike's probably going to have no legs. 1.00

02:44:40.000 Dude's a fucking dumbass. 1.00

02:44:41.000 His fucking legs are going to stop working. 1.00

02:44:43.000 He's probably got a massive bulge in his back. 1.00

02:44:46.000 No, I'm guilty because I traffic in those stories, and when I hear those stories, I'm like, right on, bro.

02:44:53.000 Well, you know how hard it is, that's why.

02:44:55.000 When you've done a pack-out, a real pack-out, you know how hard it is.

02:44:59.000 I remember when we shot that mule deer right there in Montana, and we only walked, like, what, was it two miles, maybe?

02:45:06.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:45:06.000 And we had the meat split up between, like, three of us, so it was probably only like 50 pounds on everybody's back, and I was like, holy shit! 0.99

02:45:16.000 Once we finally got to camp, two miles, pretty flat, it wasn't that hilly, Yeah, if you're not accustomed to it, it's a lot. 0.99

02:45:22.000 Fucking exhausting! 0.95

02:45:23.000 Yeah, so if you're not accustomed to getting bit by bees six times a day, it's overwhelming. 0.99

02:45:27.000 So I should tell people that the Outdoorsmans, I know a company that you like their products as well, they make an Atlas trainer now.

02:45:34.000 It's a packed frame.

02:45:35.000 I saw you were messing with that. 0.98

02:45:36.000 It's fucking great. 0.99

02:45:36.000 And you got a weight you put on there. 0.99

02:45:38.000 Yeah, it's like an Olympic late.

02:45:39.000 It slides in like an Olympic post and it clamps down.

02:45:42.000 I thought maybe you rigged that up yourself.

02:45:44.000 No, no, they're selling it now.

02:45:45.000 It's their thing.

02:45:46.000 I saw that.

02:45:47.000 You had that.

02:45:48.000 I thought you'd gone down to the hardware store and...

02:45:51.000 I knew the frame, but I just didn't recognize the...

02:45:54.000 I know guys do it, but usually they use sandbags.

02:45:57.000 They put sandbags in their backpack and get used to it.

02:45:59.000 It makes a big difference.

02:46:00.000 And it's an incredible workout.

02:46:02.000 And it doesn't shift.

02:46:02.000 It doesn't shift at all.

02:46:03.000 And you can really lock it down in place.

02:46:05.000 So you're not going to have the risk of tweaking.

02:46:08.000 It's strength, but it's not... 0.99

02:46:10.000 Because when your shit's wiggling around, then it like, I don't know, it doesn't like make you stronger, it just makes you more inclined to like fuck something up. 0.99

02:46:16.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:46:16.000 To twist funny. 1.00

02:46:17.000 Yeah, no, I agree.

02:46:18.000 You know?

02:46:19.000 But I just say implore people, just please, just, just exercise your back.

02:46:23.000 Treat it like it's like brushing your teeth.

02:46:25.000 Just take yoga.

02:46:27.000 You don't have to take it, Ethan.

02:46:28.000 Just get some YouTube videos.

02:46:30.000 They're free.

02:46:30.000 They're available everywhere.

02:46:32.000 Just do something to strengthen your back.

02:46:34.000 You will prevent... 1.00

02:46:35.000 Most people don't want to listen to this, and they're not going to do it because people are lazy as fuck. 0.99

02:46:38.000 But you will prevent a host of issues that people have just by exercising your back. 0.99

02:46:43.000 Simple stuff.

02:46:44.000 There's the Atlas trainer right there. 1.00

02:46:46.000 Yeah, you could do chin-ups on him if you're a fucking savage. 0.99

02:46:48.000 Look at this guy. 1.00

02:46:49.000 It's an animal.

02:46:51.000 But, um, yeah, you could carry up to 90 pounds with that thing.

02:46:54.000 So it'll take two, uh, I bet it'll take 100-pound plates, too.

02:46:58.000 I just don't know if the plate's designed for it, if the pack, rather, is designed for it.

02:47:01.000 That's a good idea to do pull-ups that sumbitch on. 1.00

02:47:03.000 Yeah. 0.87

02:47:04.000 I use a weight belt.

02:47:05.000 I put, like, a belt and I hang a kettlebell in between my legs.

02:47:08.000 I put a 50-pound kettlebell on a chain and I do chin-ups like that.

02:47:11.000 Really?

02:47:12.000 Yeah.

02:47:13.000 Huh, it's hanging where? 0.85

02:47:14.000 It's right between my legs.

02:47:16.000 Like, it's a big leather strap.

02:47:17.000 But where do the straps fall across your legs?

02:47:19.000 Right in between.

02:47:19.000 Well, the straps are on my back or on my hip, like this, and then there's like a chain in between my legs, and the kettlebell hangs in between my legs.

02:47:26.000 But it's not getting your scrow at all.

02:47:28.000 No, no, no, no.

02:47:29.000 It's swinging low.

02:47:30.000 You've got to make sure your legs are separated so it's not cracking against your knees, but when you're doing chin-ups, it's just...

02:47:36.000 Hang in there. 0.99

02:47:37.000 No shit. 1.00

02:47:38.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:47:38.000 They say that that's the best way to get more reps in with your chin-ups is not to try like 19, 20. The absolute best way is do less, but with heavy weights. 0.99

02:47:49.000 Do like, you know, put a weight vest on or hang a 70-pound kettlebell between your legs.

02:47:54.000 Yeah, I've never done that.

02:47:55.000 Just grind out three or four.

02:47:56.000 Yeah.

02:47:57.000 But again, you run the risk of injury.

02:48:00.000 Maybe that's why I've never done it.

02:48:02.000 Yeah, you've got to build yourself up to it.

02:48:05.000 That's also one of the big things that happens to people when they start exercising.

02:48:08.000 They just try to go too hard too quick.

02:48:10.000 They go too full balls.

02:48:11.000 I remember at various times not running for a long time and then being like, yeah, I'm going to start running and then go on a five mile run. 0.57

02:48:19.000 I've been running now for just a little over a month.

02:48:22.000 I've got a friend who's a runner and he's a hobbyist but runs marathons and he never did before.

02:48:29.000 But he was saying...

02:48:33.000 He's a writer, so he's been writing about that a little bit.

02:48:35.000 And he was saying he just wrote a piece about you don't run to get in shape.

02:48:40.000 You've got to get in shape, then start running.

02:48:43.000 Yeah, it's a good idea.

02:48:44.000 It's a smart way to do it.

02:48:45.000 He's like, there's some steps. 0.96

02:48:47.000 If you're just like a slob, right? 1.00

02:48:50.000 There's some things you need to get taken care of before you embark on that. 0.95

02:48:56.000 Smart.

02:48:56.000 There's groundwork that needs to be done to get ready for the run.

02:49:02.000 I don't like to ever discourage people from doing jiu-jitsu, but I talked to a buddy of mine who just did jiu-jitsu.

02:49:07.000 He's 43 years of slovenly behavior, no exercise whatsoever, other than the occasional pickup basketball game, for like seven years.

02:49:18.000 And then he started doing jiu-jitsu and immediately his body's falling apart.

02:49:20.000 I'm like, okay, I know this is going to be hard for you to do, but if you really want to do it, you've got to get in shape first.

02:49:28.000 You should have started out with thumb wrestling and gone into arm wrestling.

02:49:33.000 Steve Rinello, you got to get out of here.

02:49:34.000 It's 315. Listen, man, you got one of the best podcasts in the world.

02:49:38.000 It's fucking awesome. 0.86

02:49:39.000 I love listening to it. 0.82

02:49:41.000 I'm so happy you do it.

02:49:42.000 And I think you got the best hunting show ever.

02:49:45.000 I owe the podcast all to you, Joe Rogan.

02:49:47.000 Well, listen, man, hanging out with you.

02:49:49.000 Look, it's so easy for you.

02:49:50.000 You have so many great stories and you're such a good talker. 0.98

02:49:53.000 I was like, how the fuck does this guy not have a podcast? 0.91

02:49:55.000 I'm glad you steered me in that direction. 0.80

02:49:57.000 Thanks for the plug.

02:49:57.000 I'm glad you're still doing it.

02:49:58.000 It's called The Meat Eater Podcast.

02:50:00.000 It's available everywhere.

02:50:02.000 And Meat Eater is available on Netflix.

02:50:04.000 And right now it's only...

02:50:06.000 How many seasons do you guys have on?

02:50:07.000 Seasons 5 and 6. Seasons 5 and 6. Yeah, 5 and 6. We'll have more.

02:50:11.000 We got more.

02:50:11.000 We got a dozen episodes that are new that we're going to be releasing.

02:50:15.000 So just stay tuned.

02:50:16.000 And then, you know, months ago, a couple months ago, if you go to my Instagram, Stephen Rinella, you'll scroll back and find a bunch of pictures from...

02:50:24.000 You'll find a bunch of Guyana photos.

02:50:26.000 Yeah, amazing stuff from Guyana.

02:50:28.000 We never even talked about that.

02:50:28.000 Oh, we did talk about that.

02:50:29.000 You'll find some pictures.

02:50:31.000 Good times.

02:50:31.000 Thanks for doing this, man.

The Joe Rogan Experience - June 06, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella

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