Jan. 26, 2015 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:20:21
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. check it out. | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| And we're live, back from the motherfucking jungle, Justin Renn, saving pygmies, hanging out, having a good time. | ||
| What's up, brother? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Man, I'm excited to be here. | ||
| Excited to have you. | ||
| Hey, thanks. | ||
| I've been paying attention to your crazy travels and your journeys, and you brought some pictures and videos for us today, too. | ||
| How long have you been back for? | ||
| I've been back since late October. | ||
| And you were here for a little while, and the last time you were supposed to be here, you were real sick. | ||
| And I gotta be honest with you, we weren't too excited about a dude fresh back from Africa coming in with some sort of funky jungle virus. | ||
| Well, I'm glad I didn't come in. | ||
| What did you have? | ||
| Did you have anything crazy? | ||
| Well, I had bronchitis, but before that I had Shigella, which is an intestinal bacteria. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| How do you get that? | ||
| It's a waterborne disease. | ||
| Waterborne? | ||
| So you drank the water out there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There were just times that I couldn't help it. | ||
| Or it could be from food or a fly landing on your food while it's being cooked. | ||
| There's many different ways that you can get it. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| So you either live your life like the boy in the plastic bubble? | ||
| Remember that John Travolta movie? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the only way you can't get sick. | ||
| How many times have you gotten sick over there? | ||
| All throughout. | ||
| All throughout? | ||
| You're always sick? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I had this guy on the sci-fi show that I did who told me that everyone who lives in South American or jungle climates, everyone has parasites. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| They just live with them. | ||
| Yeah, I had them too. | ||
| I had amoebas. | ||
| I had some kind of parasite in my stomach also. | ||
| I'm actually still a bruise from here because I got seven vials of blood drawn to see what kind of parasites are still in me. | ||
| Still recently? | ||
| Yeah, that's just a few days old. | ||
| Yeah, so it's been a battle since coming back, but I think I'm on the track to get my health back together. | ||
| It's a crazy place to live, to spend your time in. | ||
| It's a very strange thing, the environment where you have all these crazy tropical diseases. | ||
| Is it the heat and the moisture and all of the above? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's just the entire environment. | ||
| It's just brutal because right when I got there, I got malaria. | ||
| And so that was pretty bad. | ||
| So the mosquitoes, the bugs, the parasites, everything can mess with you. | ||
| Yeah, so the water, the climate, the bad living conditions. | ||
| So, I mean, not having a nice bed and not having a good home to sleep in, all those can contribute to sickness. | ||
| Malaria is no joke, huh? | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| Oh man, that was brutal. | ||
| That was one of the toughest times of my life, but I counted it as... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was actually a good experience for me in the end because I got to share in the suffering that they're going through because they don't even have all the antibiotics and all the medicine to pump your body with to get healed from it. | ||
| So I had to be evac'd out of the Congo and into Uganda. | ||
| I was misdiagnosed four times. | ||
| So they drew my blood. | ||
| They did two quick tests for malaria, and they said it was negative. | ||
| Then they drew my blood, said it was negative, but I got real sick. | ||
| Real sick. | ||
| Like, six days I couldn't eat. | ||
| Six days I couldn't urinate. | ||
| I think I lost 34 pounds. | ||
| And then whenever I finally did urinate in Uganda, it was after I got the right medicine, they took my blood out and saw that I had over 70% of my bloodstream was parasites. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| 70% of my blood was full of parasites. | ||
| They would hide in the liver and then they would distribute through your blood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| That's crazy! | ||
| Like you're invaded. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
70% of your blood was parasites. | |
| Am I getting that wrong? | ||
| Or 70% was infected with parasites? | ||
| They said 70% of my bloodstream. | ||
| So they said between 60 and 70%. | ||
| So I was on the third tier. | ||
| Like there's level one, two, and three, and four. | ||
| And four, I was right at four, which was a coma. | ||
| So when you get to four, you're in a coma and it's pretty bad. | ||
| A lot of people die. | ||
| Well, lucky you're a strapping, healthy, young buck of a man that you got through that, huh? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, man. | ||
| It was really good. | ||
| I mean, the pilot that flew me out, it was actually on Thanksgiving of 2013, and he flew me out, just me and him on the plane, and he found out that they're misdiagnosing me, that my buddy there was like, the doctors don't know what's going on with him. | ||
| He's going to die if we don't get him out of here to a good hospital. | ||
| So they took me out of the jungle, flew me to Uganda. | ||
| And when I landed, an ambulance came and picked me up because my vomit had turned to blood and bile. | ||
| So it was literally, I could smell, you know, like in the fight game, you can smell the blood. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I could smell the iron, I think, in my blood. | ||
| And it was literally Christmas colors, red and green. | ||
| And it was brutal. | ||
| For two weeks after, my esophagus was raw. | ||
| And so I could barely eat much. | ||
| I mean, I'd really have to chew it down a lot. | ||
| We'd have to just drink a lot. | ||
| And so, yeah, replenishing my body after that was a whole... | ||
| I mean, I think it's still happening, but it was at least a month-long process to start putting weight back on. | ||
| You think it's still happening from over a year ago? | ||
| Your body's still replenishing? | ||
| Well, from that and from some of the parasites and everything else, so... | ||
| Yeah, but the malaria, I guess there's mixed reviews, but a lot of times they say that the malaria never literally leaves your body 100%. | ||
| So it's dormant in your liver, and then it can come back up whenever stress and other things happen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So we're getting that tested. | ||
| That's one of the things they're testing for me. | ||
| So it can come back up. | ||
| Like, say, if you get run down, like maybe if you get the flu or something like that, malaria might go, come here! | ||
| Yeah, that would be brutal because my fever got to like almost 105. It was like 104.5 or 104.4. | ||
| What's 4.4? | ||
| Like 1.6 or 1.7 or something like that? | ||
| Like 1.10? | ||
| Yeah, they were saying it was getting high enough to where like they really had to watch me because it can do stuff to your brain. | ||
| Yeah, if your brain gets too hot, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Parasites are terrifying, man. | ||
| Don't ever watch that show. | ||
| You ever seen that show, The Enemy Within? | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| The Enemy Within You or Enemy Inside You? | ||
| It's all about people who do what you do. | ||
| Go to someplace and get some crazy parasite, and then they have some softball-sized ball of worms living in your brain. | ||
| And they're like, oh, I have headaches. | ||
| I started seeing Jesus, and there's angels floating around me. | ||
| I couldn't figure out what it was. | ||
| And then I went to the doctor. | ||
| They found this mass inside my brain. | ||
| I probably won't watch that. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| Well, you live it. | ||
| I mean, you don't have to watch it. | ||
| You live it. | ||
| We got plenty of coconut water for you, my friend, if you want some. | ||
| We got C2O. You ever have that shit? | ||
| No. | ||
| C2O is the bomb diggity. | ||
| Get the man a can of C2O. All right, thank you. | ||
| It's from Thailand. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, their coconut water is like, it's really sweet. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's a short tree. | ||
| It's only like five feet tall. | ||
| And, you know, you think of like the big tall, like palm trees as being coconut trees. | ||
| But the Thai trees are short and it's like a much sweeter. | ||
| You drink it, you would swear that they have some sort of sugar in it, but it's not. | ||
| It's totally natural. | ||
| Dude, thank you. | ||
| It's delicious stuff. | ||
| But those parasites, the thing about parasites is that It's really hard to root them out of your system. | ||
| And some of them, like trichinosis, I've found out recently. | ||
| My friend got trichinosis. | ||
| And they said he's got it essentially for life. | ||
| Like, they give him pills. | ||
| It flushed, like, the active parasites out of his system. | ||
| But, like, say, trichinosis comes from an animal eating an animal with trichinosis. | ||
| So if somebody cannibalized him, they would get trichinosis. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| To this day. | ||
| And he's walking around like a normal person, but he's got trichinosis in his system essentially forever. | ||
| So that's like kind of how malaria is. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| Something like that? | ||
| That's what we're looking at. | ||
| So if I ate you, I'd get malaria? | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| If you ate my liver, I think if you ate my liver. | ||
| I'll tell you right now, I'm pretty confident. | ||
| Unless we're in some Donner Party type situation and you die first. | ||
| Man, it's nuts the suffering that they're going through though with malaria. | ||
| Because they don't have mosquito nets and all that other stuff, so I was kind of not cautious enough. | ||
| And one thing I didn't want to do was take a Malaria pill that would prevent malaria. | ||
| What's that called? | ||
| A prophylaxis or something like that? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| And so I didn't want to take that because a doctor here stateside said that if I took some of them, they're really intense. | ||
| They can really hurt your body. | ||
| They also said that even mentally, taking them for a full year, they could give you night terrors and terrible dreams, but then also like people have moments of psychosis from taking them and stuff. | ||
| So I was like, well, I don't want to be dealing with that. | ||
| And if... | ||
| The guys in Congo said, oh yeah, once you get malaria once, normally it doesn't come back very bad. | ||
| And so all we have to do is, all we have to do is, yeah. | ||
| The next time is much lower and much lower and much lower and it's much more, I don't know, you can control it easier. | ||
| And so the thing that was the struggle with me was that they misdiagnosed it four different times. | ||
| And we took it to two different labs. | ||
| And they just didn't have the, I guess, the right tools and technology to really see that. | ||
| Because whenever I got there, we're flying, and I'm hugging a bucket. | ||
| And whenever they were putting me into the ambulance, I remember my vision was tunneling. | ||
| And all in front of me was completely, I mean, it was just a blur. | ||
| It was just a blur. | ||
| And when you say tunneling, could you actually see the walls closing in? | ||
| Well, not at first. | ||
| I woke up one day and all of a sudden my peripheral vision was kind of blurry. | ||
| And that messed with me. | ||
| I was like, what's going on? | ||
| And then all of a sudden it started getting darker. | ||
| And so it didn't start closing, like if you're getting choked or something. | ||
| It didn't do that, but it kind of stopped. | ||
| And I think it just prevented my peripheral vision from really functioning or working. | ||
| And then the thing that sucks is you get these crazy back and forth between shivering uncontrollably and your teeth chattering to then you all of a sudden just like on a dime it switches and all of a sudden you're incredibly hot, sweating and you're throwing everything off and you're grabbing a fan and it just goes back and forth. | ||
| It goes back and forth for maybe 30 minutes or something. | ||
| You're terribly cold. | ||
| Then for 30 minutes, you're terribly hot and incredibly thirsty. | ||
| But then you drink something, you vomit it up. | ||
| And so they were trying to force me to eat because they're like, you don't have malaria, you got to eat. | ||
| And everything I would eat, I'd just vomit. | ||
| You don't have malaria, you got to eat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I had one doctor there that they couldn't agree with each other because they didn't know what was going on with me. | ||
| So the up-and-coming doctor and one of the young nurses said, this guy's got malaria 100%. | ||
| But the older ones were just going off of the results. | ||
| And they're like, no, look, you want to see the first test, second test, third test, or fourth test that says he doesn't have malaria. | ||
| And so there was some humanitarian organization there, and they had gotten this crazy, I don't know, virus or flu kind of thing. | ||
| And they would be sick for three or four days, and then they'd get better. | ||
| But it went through all of them. | ||
| And so they thought that I had gotten that. | ||
| So they said just let him ride it out and he'll get better. | ||
| And then kind of the head kind of doctor that was overseeing it came and I was in my room but she wouldn't even enter into the room because she was looking at me through the screen door saying I'm not coming in there. | ||
| I'm not risking me getting sick with that. | ||
| But malaria can't pass on like that. | ||
| It's got to be from a mosquito. | ||
| Do you know that malaria has killed half of all the people that have ever died? | ||
| I had no clue. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's the nuttiest statistic I've ever heard in my life. | ||
| I had to re-research it and look it up and find corroborating sources. | ||
| Yeah, it's killed half of all the people that have ever died ever have died from malaria. | ||
| I think there's a guy named... | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| That's fucking nuts. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| But listening to your story, it's not surprising. | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| Yeah, it's brutal. | ||
| I think even if you go back and look at Congolese history, James Jameson, I think is his name, but he's one of the Jameson guys that founded the whiskey in Ireland. | ||
| He went, and this is the story. | ||
| I think it's been conflicting, but it's been confirmed by some sources there that were with him traveling. | ||
| And he went to some of the cannibalistic villages there in Congo back in the day in the 1800s. | ||
| And he would actually... | ||
| That's crazy, but he would buy some of the young kids, and he would feed them to the cannibals, and he would do art and stuff like that. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, that's what they said about the Jameson guy, the whiskey. | ||
| He would buy young kids from who? | ||
| From, like, slave villages and stuff like that. | ||
| That's a big past in Congo, is that tribes have enslaved other tribes and things like that. | ||
| And so they would buy, you can buy people there. | ||
| That's what happened whenever we brought a pygmy over to the United States, put him in the New York Zoo. | ||
| He lived in the monkey house for a couple years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was the Bronx Zoo, right? | ||
| Yeah, the Bronx Zoo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then also the St. Louis World Fair. | ||
| And he toured around with them for a little bit. | ||
| Got depressed, got a gun, and shot himself. | ||
| So he got off the security guard, I think. | ||
| But with the Jameson guy, he died in Congo or Uganda from malaria. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And that's the... | ||
| Has it been confirmed that he actually did that? | ||
| That he actually bought people and fed little kids to these cannibals? | ||
| Well, it looks like it because I think it was Stanley. | ||
| I forget Stanley's first name. | ||
| I think he was the one that confirmed it. | ||
| Like, they had a... | ||
| They would go and they would have to have protection, so they would get some of the warrior tribes there to protect themselves. | ||
| And then they would, yeah, in his downtime, he was an artist or something, would paint pictures and stuff like that. | ||
| So we'd paint pictures of suffering. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it happened at least once. | ||
| I mean, maybe that's something that the listeners can go look up or Google, but I'm pretty sure it's confirmed. | ||
| So are they related? | ||
| I mean, did the art, was it related to the children being eaten? | ||
| Like, did you draw art about that? | ||
| Yeah, I think there's one confirmed story, so I don't know that he did it a ton, but I know that he did it once, which is awful, terrible. | ||
| You know, it's crazy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, that's the weirdest thing about people is how much they vary and how adaptable people are. | ||
| You know, the people, when they're involved, when they're in an environment where horrible things are going on, they do horrible things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And have talked about horrific things that they've witnessed and how it became normal and it became a part of them. | ||
| And they contributed and they became a part of these horrific war crimes. | ||
| Like riots. | ||
| Perfect example. | ||
| When people riot, you take a person who would never throw a Molotov cocktail or break a window or stomp a cop to death or whatever. | ||
| But you get them involved in a group of 10,000 people that are doing the same thing and it's almost like it's in the air. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's like people get infected by whatever's around them. | ||
| They sort of imitate their atmosphere. | ||
| Yeah, in Congo, in Uganda I saw it once, but they have something called mob justice. | ||
| And so that's a crazy thing, kind of like with riots, where if something happens, someone just has to accuse somebody, and then everyone comes. | ||
| And in some cases, it's okay, because if a thief is there and they yell thief, then the whole community surrounds the thief. | ||
| But the danger happens whenever someone wants to take justice into their own hands. | ||
| And instead of turning that thief over to the authorities, what they do is they beat him and kill him. | ||
| So me and my buddy Benjamin, he was my translator, we were walking down a center street of, like, basically Main Street in one of these big towns. | ||
| It's called Bunia. | ||
| And in Bunia, they have a big past for lots of different struggles and even, like, I think smaller kind of genocides. | ||
| Well, I say smaller, but I think 50,000 people were killed there, just in that one town. | ||
| 50,000 people killed by different rebel groups, machetes, all this different stuff. | ||
| But we were walking down the street, And someone yelled thief, and nobody even confirmed it. | ||
| They grabbed the guy, started beating him, and then whenever we got up there, Benz grabbed me and said, you don't want to be around this because I'm the only outsider there. | ||
| And so, but at first, my instinct was like, instinct, I didn't know that they were saying thief, thief. | ||
| My instinct was like, there's 30 guys pounding on this guy. | ||
| Like, someone's got to, you know, give this guy some rooms, give him some space. | ||
| He was grabbing my shirt, pulling me. | ||
| And so, anyways, whenever we went back and saw him, his body was just twisted up. | ||
| And he was bent up in basically a ditch. | ||
| Dead. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just beat him to death. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of that for witchcraft, too, right? | ||
| They accuse people of being witches and burn them alive. | ||
| That's a big problem with orphans in Congo. | ||
| Is that if they get accused of witchcraft, they just excommunicate them from their family. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, education, man, right? | ||
| It's like these people have these ancient ideas that are based on just one person who's ignorant telling another person who's ignorant and becomes doctrine. | ||
| And they just pass it down through generation to generation. | ||
| They really believe in witchcraft. | ||
| Apparently they have a real issue with albinos, too. | ||
| They think that albinos, like, they're cursed or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, cursed. | ||
| And then if you can kill, cook, and eat an albino guy... | ||
| This is in Tanzania that I can confirm this. | ||
| If they can consume the flesh of an albino, then it can cure them of HIV, tuberculosis, I don't know, some other sicknesses too. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And that's with the pygmies while we're there celebrating on our first water well that we accomplished there. | ||
| Some of the government officials came and said that this is the first ever clean water source among the Pygmy people, the Mabuti Pygmies in Eastern Congo. | ||
| Because the Pygmies are in many different countries, but in there, that country, this is the first water source for them. | ||
| And so, but on that day, a rebel leader named Morgan of the Mai Mai, it's a terrible rebel group there, they had been confirmed in 2012 Of killing, cooking, and eating pygmies, thinking that it makes them invincible going into battle. | ||
| But while we're there celebrating, all of a sudden, all the Congolese army is driving by us. | ||
| And basically, the Congolese army is just a bunch of rebel groups that defected and came together to be the Congolese army. | ||
| But they're all driving by, you know, where we are celebrating. | ||
| And I guess what turns out, these guys have RPGs and machine guns and all sorts of crazy stuff. | ||
| And I guess I had Morgan, the main leader in the back, and they had killed him. | ||
| But he came to peacefully turn himself in, but anyways, they killed him. | ||
| So that took the Mai Mai. | ||
| The rest of the rebels now don't want to turn themselves in, because if they turn themselves in peacefully, then they might be killed or executed, you know? | ||
| So they went back and started killing more, raping more, attacking more gold mines, stuff like that. | ||
| And then some of the people there from the UN that were studying the conflict and stuff said, be careful in that area where you're going, don't go, for a little bit. | ||
| So we stayed for maybe three weeks and then we went back out. | ||
| But they were saying that the Myanmar were walking around drinking from all the pygmy skulls, just drinking out of their skulls. | ||
| So it's pretty nuts, man. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Jesus, man. | ||
| You've seen some crazy shit in the few years that you've been down there. | ||
| I mean, what a wild transformation your life has taken from going from the ultimate fighter, fighting in the UFC, experiencing The initial trip when you went and you met those people and you became incredibly committed to helping them, you just felt like you were overcome with this almost like a calling, right? | ||
| Is that the best way to describe it? | ||
| Yeah, I'd say so. | ||
| And then you've been there back and forth ever since. | ||
| Yeah, the first time, I would say it wasn't until my flight back that I felt that initial, like, I gotta do something. | ||
| Because whenever I was there, the problem just seemed so huge and so insurmountable that, what am I gonna do? | ||
| How am I gonna help? | ||
| And am I gonna endanger myself or get sick or die or whatever in the process? | ||
| But on the way back, I just felt like, you know, if not me, then who, you know? | ||
| They asked me if I would give them a voice, if I could help them, if I could. | ||
| And I just felt, I don't know, a yearning, a longing that I had to do something. | ||
| And so the second trip back was great. | ||
| I got to actually... | ||
| Meet some people that really had some real plans, because the first time I went with people that we didn't have plans to actually help or anything, like sustainability, it was just kind of a learning trip, going and seeing what their problems were. | ||
| Second time it was the university there, their school of community development, and they had dreams of giving them water, giving them land, giving them food, but they didn't have any way to do it really. | ||
| They had the plan and everything in place. | ||
| But they didn't have funding behind it. | ||
| They didn't have the technology behind it. | ||
| And so the third time was whenever I came back and I had studied how to build those ecodomes and I partnered with an organization. | ||
| It's a great organization called Water 4. And their big thing is what I was searching for, was how to put the The tools are basically the power in the hands of the people there. | ||
| Instead of having to have outside help, how could we actually help them to continue to do it, continue the process? | ||
| And so Water 4 puts the tools in the people's hands, and then they teach them how to do it, and then now they can do it for themselves. | ||
| It can be a sustainable business for them. | ||
| They can use whatever model they want, if it's a nonprofit model, if it's a business model, to make it sustainable there. | ||
| So that way, Yeah, where I'm at, Congolese can help Congolese, and that way I can hopefully, you know, fan the flame, go over there, teach them more, bring over the right people. | ||
| Water4 really supported and sent over, you know, their director of implementation to come, really sit down with us for two weeks, teach us. | ||
| He came back out, did it again. | ||
| Now he's gone over since I've been back already. | ||
| He's been back over teaching our team and more, you know, strategies of how to dig these water wells. | ||
| No, we had a bunch of people donate to your cause, which is, it's fight for the forgotten. | ||
| We had a bunch of people donate Bitcoin, and I matched the Bitcoin, whatever people donated, I matched it. | ||
| But Bitcoin's kind of weird, like it's fluctuating up and back, and although I'm a big believer and supporter, and I think it'd probably be better if people donate cash, so we know exactly what the fuck we're dealing with. | ||
| What's the best way they can donate to your cause? | ||
| Well, they could go to fightfortheforgotten.com and they could just click donate and do it there. | ||
| We're going to be updating the site real soon. | ||
| But yeah, that's straight to the non-profit 501c3 bank account. | ||
| They could go to Water 4 if they want to fund the water projects there. | ||
| F-O-R. Water 4, F-O-R. Water 4 with a number. | ||
| Spell that. | ||
| The number 4. So water and the number 4. Water4.org. | ||
| So they could go to fightfortheforgotten.com, donate, or they could go to water4.org. | ||
| Water and the number 4. Not F-O-U-R, but the number. | ||
| Right, the number. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And since coming on the podcast and people becoming aware of what you're doing, are you getting other organizations that are reaching out to you to try to help you and contribute as well? | ||
| Yeah, that's been a cool thing, but it's trying to be selective in the process because, I mean, funding is something that, yeah, we definitely need, but at the same time, we want to do it in a way that's going to be practical for the people there. | ||
| So sometimes you have to, it sucks, but... | ||
| Sometimes you've got to say no to good opportunities or chunks of money if they're going to tell you how to use it, when to use it, and kind of control. | ||
| If they give it to you with strings attached, instead of saying like, well, culturally, it might not work here, doing it that way. | ||
| You know, instead of going and just, I don't know if that, does that make sense? | ||
| Well, sort of. | ||
| What experience have you had? | ||
| Have you had people that just had the wrong idea of what the environment is like there or what the culture is like? | ||
| I don't want to knock any organization, but things have to be sustainable to really continue change. | ||
| My mind frame is that opportunity is much better than charity. | ||
| If you give people an opportunity to get out of their poverty, then that empowers them. | ||
| Like teach a man to fish. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And you feed him for life. | ||
| You know, give him a fish. | ||
| You feed him for a day. | ||
| And so there's been things where people are like, hey, I'm donating. | ||
| You know, I had to turn someone away that was going to donate 5,000 of the water straws. | ||
| And that might sound really bad. | ||
| I didn't turn them away. | ||
| I said, hey, how about you help us fund a water well like you guys did. | ||
| And I got some pictures to show. | ||
| It's awesome of the village you guys supported. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| But really, the water straw thing is great. | ||
| What's a water straw? | ||
| Well, I don't want to knock them, but I think it's a great organization. | ||
| And I didn't turn the organization down. | ||
| I turned a private person that wanted to say, hey, I'm doing this, and you run with it. | ||
| And I said, thank you, but I think a water well will support them better. | ||
| Because I've had one of those, it's called a life straw. | ||
| And I think the way it's marketed is that it's going to save the third world. | ||
| But then if you think about it, how many times does someone in the third world, every single time they want to get a clean drink of water, do they want to have a straw wrapped around their neck and then put their face in the water? | ||
| I'm not sure what exactly is it. | ||
| Is it a filter? | ||
| It's a filter, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's a live straw. | ||
| And I think it's great. | ||
| I think it's great for survival, you know, if you're out camping. | ||
| I also think that... | ||
| What does it look like? | ||
| Can you pull it up, James? | ||
| You say it wraps around your neck? | ||
| Yeah, it wraps around your neck, you walk around with it. | ||
| And then whenever you need clean water, you put your face in the ground, in the dirt, and then you suck clean water out of it. | ||
| But what he was going to support was going to be worth two or three different water wells. | ||
| And it's a really cool idea. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| I really don't want to knock him. | ||
| I think it's awesome. | ||
| Is this what we're looking at here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he has this whole contraption? | ||
| So see how you have to put your face in the ground right there on LifeStraw? | ||
| Oh, it's called a LifeStraw. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So see, now that's a great marketing... | ||
| I agree with that, you know? | ||
| You're out camping doing something like that and you need a clean drink of water, you don't have it. | ||
| Put your face on the ground and get it. | ||
| So he can just drink through that straw? | ||
| That's it? | ||
| And it's clean water. | ||
| But you have to suck pretty hard. | ||
| I mean, you really do have to pull on it real hard to get the water. | ||
| Maybe after you use it a while, it gets easier. | ||
| I'm sure it does. | ||
| That's how most of those filters are. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, but at first, you're having to really... | ||
| You're turning red in the face and stuff like that. | ||
| Sort of like inflating a really thick balloon or something like that, but the opposite... | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's great. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| But at the same time, to take it in and say to my... | ||
| I really think of the pygmies as my family. | ||
| I'm not going to go in there and just drop those off. | ||
| I'd rather give them a water well that they can go to time and time again. | ||
| They can fill up as much as they want. | ||
| They can drink it from a glass instead of a face on the ground. | ||
| No, well, that definitely totally makes sense. | ||
| It may be good to have both. | ||
| Yeah, it could be. | ||
| At the time, though, it was like even getting it over to Congo. | ||
| Some people are really gung-ho, and I love it. | ||
| Like, please, you know, help us, support us, things like that. | ||
| But then if you're going to donate and say, this is what it's for, and then we have to find a way to get it there, ship it, you know, 5,000 of these straws or something like that. | ||
| It's a lot of work. | ||
| So you turned them down because you didn't have the ability to ship them there? | ||
| To ship them, and then I was trying to just say, hey, this is the real solution that we see right now. | ||
| That could be in the future, and right now I'm in the jungle. | ||
| It's hard for me to come out. | ||
| Getting things in through customs is crazy. | ||
| Also seeing 5,000 of those boxed up. | ||
| The Congolese government there, and the Border Patrol, They're absolutely crazy, man. | ||
| There was $3,000 worth of mattresses donated to this hospital, and these people sent it on a truck and paid for the shipping and everything. | ||
| Then whenever they got there, the government wanted $5,000 so that they could bring it into the country. | ||
| And they're like, what do you mean? | ||
| So the hospital now has... | ||
| $3,000 of donated mattresses for their beds, but now they have no way to get it in there because they don't have the funds to pay $5,000 to the corrupt government officials just to get their beds released across the border, all that other stuff. | ||
| That's gotta be insanely frustrating for you, trying to make a change and running time and time again into all this corruption and all these devious people. | ||
| It sounds like, if you go back to the Jameson thing, it's like this long history of horrible things that have been happening in this area, and there's kind of like a momentum attached to that. | ||
| It's almost like this is just the way it is. | ||
| This is a fucked up part of the world. | ||
| Is that accurate? | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| Every single time I've gone across the border, there's been some kind of problem where they want to arrest me and my team. | ||
| They want to find someone that they can single out, find something that they can get a bribe for, and they just waste so much of your time. | ||
| For instance, we... | ||
| We got a truck donated to us, which was awesome, so that we could get our PVC, our tools, all that out to the forest. | ||
| And whenever we brought it into the country, we had all the paperwork saying it's under the university. | ||
| It's tax-free, basically. | ||
| And this is a university vehicle that's going to be used for humanitarian aid. | ||
| But then whenever we get to the border, the head guys, the absolute head guys of customs were saying, yeah, but how's that going to feed my family? | ||
| And it's like, well, isn't your job a government job? | ||
| And they pay you. | ||
| It's not my job to pay you. | ||
| So they locked up our truck for three and a half weeks. | ||
| So we were delayed almost a month in our process and everything we had laid out, strategies. | ||
| We're going to be in this village from this day to this day, this week to this week, this month to this week. | ||
| So they were just waiting for a bribe. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So after three and a half weeks, how did you resolve it? | ||
| Yeah, they came back to us with a long list of new fees, of processing fees, and we had to go do this to get it, and go do this to get it, and go do this to get it. | ||
| And by that time, we just decided that, I think we ended up paying like $750 to get our truck released, but it was going to be $500 anyways, so I think they got an extra $250. | ||
| Fuck, but you lost three and a half years. | ||
| Yeah, but they were first asking for $7,000 or $8,000. | ||
| They were looking for 50% of the purchase price of the vehicle. | ||
| Oh, god damn, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's gotta drive you nuts when you're dealing with something that's, you know, you're trying to help. | ||
| You're going over there, you're essentially dedicating your life, a huge part of your life, you're going over there and helping these people, being, you know, completely humanitarian in your actions, and then you run into this kind of shit. | ||
| It's gotta be really, really frustrating. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it absolutely is. | ||
| It's different than anything that we experience here because that corruption isn't... | ||
| I mean, sure, there's corrupt stuff that goes on here, but it's not so open, so public. | ||
| I mean, by the time we finally paid that $750, I remember grabbing my wallet because he was wanting more. | ||
| And I grabbed my wallet, and I had Congolese francs in my wallet, and I just shook it on his desk. | ||
| And he had other people witnessing this and other people outside that could see in. | ||
| I'm like, here, this is all I have. | ||
| This is all I have. | ||
| You've delayed us one month from giving your people, your countrymen, water. | ||
| Like, and they're dying from it. | ||
| And I think right before that, a little guy named Bobo had died, and I had been holding him in my hands. | ||
| And so, I mean, I've buried, you know, now a couple of kids, but I've seen, I've been to over 10 funerals. | ||
| And so, yeah, I was holding Bobo, and You know, I didn't know. | ||
| I just got in the hut and whenever I crawled in, you know, his mother is my mother's sister. | ||
| So basically she was my aunt and Baba was my cousin. | ||
| So Chibu Siku is my mother, Macho is her sister, and Baba was Macho's son. | ||
| When you say my mother, like your adopted mother? | ||
| Yeah, my adopted mother there. | ||
| So they just gave you a whole family there. | ||
| Yeah, I love them, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| My name in that village is Efeosa, which Efeosa means the man who loves us. | ||
| And then my new name that everyone's been calling me, especially when I drive up and down the roads there, is Mabuti Mangbo. | ||
| And Mabuti Mangbo means the big pygmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so they just call me the big pygmy. | ||
| The big pygmy and the man who loves us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So the thing that was tough with Babu had just passed away before we got the truck, I think. | ||
| And I actually think Babu happened after. | ||
| A girl named Little Moe happened before. | ||
| And so it's just tough stuff because I'm seeing this. | ||
| It's really wrecking me, you know, seeing kids go through this. | ||
| Or anybody, really. | ||
| And knowing that we have the tools, We have the solution to that problem. | ||
| And what was that problem? | ||
| What were they dying from? | ||
| Water. | ||
| Water. | ||
| Yeah, just dirty water. | ||
| The parasites, they get tapeworms. | ||
| There's other kinds of sicknesses that attribute to it, but most of them, the little kids, they run around with these huge bellies, and it's just full of tapeworms, other kinds of bacterias and things like that. | ||
| And if you can just give them clean water, I think the stat from the United Nations Human Development Report is 85% of sickness just disappears. | ||
| Once you have clean water in your system. | ||
| But once you're constantly getting sick from that, not only that, but it's diarrhea. | ||
| Whenever you have waterborne illness and drinking dirty water, now these people that don't have a lot of food, that are either slaves to get their food, which a whole family can work, you know, a mother, father, and their two or three children can go work for their masters, and they get two small bananas at the end of the day. | ||
| And they have to split that within their whole family. | ||
| But now if you have diarrhea added on top of that, Now you don't absorb any of the nutrients from that banana you just ate. | ||
| It just goes straight through you. | ||
| And so it's real tough to be like, man, first we got them land while we were there, which was a huge thing. | ||
| We negotiated and petitioned and lobbied for them and their rights with the government there, but also the local slave masters, the chiefs of that area, and said, you know, these are the first citizens of Congo. | ||
| Why don't they have any land? | ||
| Why has all their land been stolen from them? | ||
| Why is the land that they're on now all of a sudden legally in the name of somebody else? | ||
| And so where's some land that we could get and purchase on behalf of them? | ||
| And the university did a great job in that. | ||
| I was kind of in the background for that, for sure, because just being an NGO, a nonprofit, something like that, the local government officials, again, will see dollar signs. | ||
| And so if we were going to buy the land, it was going to be astronomical. | ||
| We couldn't have done it. | ||
| If the university would have done it, it would have been over $250,000. | ||
| But since we came up with an idea and a solution saying, well, who cares who gets the credit? | ||
| Like, I don't need it and fight for the forgotten's name. | ||
| Like, it doesn't have to be in the university's name. | ||
| What if we're just kind of the caretakers and we handle the documents and the negotiations? | ||
| And seeing that it's legally done. | ||
| And then all parties will get copies of it. | ||
| They'll put their thumb prints all on the documents. | ||
| And each chunk of land, they have like 10 or 12 thumb prints on it with signatures. | ||
| And there's a handwritten one. | ||
| There's a typed out one. | ||
| And then the government comes out. | ||
| Now we're doing GPS coordinates of the land. | ||
| But the land we got was 2,470 acres. | ||
| So we've been able to do that in 10 different spots. | ||
| So it's one square kilometer in each different village that we've tried to now establish. | ||
| And now we're putting water wells all on those and hoping to start farming projects on them all too. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Do you have any concern that with all this added publicity and all this attention that's in that area that people will come in and try to exploit that because they know the resources are in that area now? | ||
| I think what's been great for me is being able to kind of dive in as part of the university and have their covering because now they say I'm a teacher of appropriate technologies. | ||
| And so I'm teaching Congolese how to dig wells, farm, and build new homes. | ||
| Just different sustainable things. | ||
| I'll come back here, learn it, and I'll come and I'll either teach it or I'll bring someone with me that really can, you know. | ||
| Even if I don't know everything about it, I'll get someone there that will. | ||
| And so the university there is kind of just, they're able to really negotiate and show everybody on both sides, like, hey, this is in everyone's best interest. | ||
| Which is something cool, because whenever we go in and we drill water wells, we're not just drilling them for my pygmy family. | ||
| We're drilling them for the people that oppressed them, too. | ||
| And that way we can show them that the project isn't just... | ||
| For the pygmies and just going to benefit them. | ||
| If you can sell us their land, which sometimes the land prices that we're buying them for are three years, five years, ten years salary for the people that either enslaved them or that own that land. | ||
| And then we come in and we say, we're also going to give you a water well. | ||
| Well, their kids are dying of the same stuff too. | ||
| And they've been struggling with diarrhea their whole life or parasites or whatever it is. | ||
| Now we're going to give you guys both water wells. | ||
| And when we start our farming project, We're bringing in an agriculturalist to teach both sides better farming practices. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a beautiful strategy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so that way, nobody gets offended. | ||
| It's like, hey, no, this isn't a pygmy project. | ||
| Because if it's a pygmy project, then that's not going to be received well. | ||
| But people get jealous, and then they'll... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're used to oppressing them, and why are they getting help? | ||
| And so we want to help everybody out. | ||
| Let's come up together. | ||
| Wow, that's beautiful, man. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| And is there any resistance there? | ||
| Because they've been so prejudiced against the pygmies for so long. | ||
| Is there any resistance to the pygmies having equal treatment? | ||
| I'm sure that there is questions and things like that, but we haven't seen... | ||
| And what we do also is we go in there with the university, like, dean of the Department of Development, and we sit down with them, we explain everything, and it all becomes, like, agreeable and written down on paper before we ever take action. | ||
| And so that way we can always show them, hey, we all agreed to this, you know? | ||
| And so it's been a great process for me. | ||
| Do they all speak the same language, these people that you're communicating with, the Pygmies and their oppressors? | ||
| They kind of have their own dialects also, but most people have... | ||
| Congo has so many languages, there's about 200. Wow! | ||
| Yeah, 200 of their local tribe languages. | ||
| Do they share words in common? | ||
| Some of them do, for sure, especially ones that border each other, but then there's always a common thread. | ||
| I think there's five national languages of Congo, and one's French, so that's kind of the government language and the language spoken schools. | ||
| Another is Swahili, and that's on the eastern side, so that's what I've been trying to learn. | ||
| I can pick it up pretty good, but speaking it, I'm still kind of far behind, so I always have a translator right beside me. | ||
| But they have Lingala, and they have, I think it's called Bannacongo or something like that. | ||
| So kind of in each region, the north, the south, the east, the west, all that, they have their own kind of language that everybody speaks. | ||
| And then as a nation, everybody speaks French. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So do you speak French at all? | ||
| No. | ||
| Are you using like a program or something like that or books? | ||
| Yeah, Rosetta Stone, but really just immersing myself because it's really hard. | ||
| Even the French there is, I mean, I guess you could, French would be good for me to learn. | ||
| It absolutely would. | ||
| To communicate with the government officials, for sure. | ||
| But everybody in the East speaks Swahili. | ||
| And my pygmy family, they speak Swahili. | ||
| But it's broken. | ||
| And so even like Rosetta Stone, it's a hard thing to go on there and learn. | ||
| Because that's the proper Tanzanian Swahili. | ||
| And then Kenya kind of gets a little worse. | ||
| And then there's a break in between Uganda. | ||
| Where in Uganda, it's basically just the military language of Swahili. | ||
| And then you get over to Congo. | ||
| And so there's a big break between that pure, proper Tanzanian Swahili and the Swahili spoken in Congo because they mix in local language and they mix in French and all that other stuff. | ||
| And accents, I'm sure, as well. | ||
| Oh, yeah, definitely. | ||
| So I just try to immerse myself in there and learn it that way. | ||
| I'm able to talk a little bit, but really just having a translator there is helping me. | ||
| It's amazing how many variations there are in languages. | ||
| I went to Northern Ireland once for the UFC and spoke to people in Belfast. | ||
| You can't understand a fucking word they're saying. | ||
| I mean, they're speaking English, and you'll pick out like one out of every four or five words that you're pretty sure that's what the word is. | ||
| But they're speaking English. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| Hey, there's this fucking guy with his English. | ||
| Hey, how the hell in? | ||
|
unidentified
|
How the hell in? | |
| Like, whoa! | ||
| And they're communicating back and forth with each other like this. | ||
| And it sounds like... | ||
| Remember that cantina scene in Star Wars? | ||
| You ever seen... | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they're all, like, speaking all these crazy languages. | ||
| That's what it's like. | ||
| It's like being in this, like, weird starport. | ||
| But they're speaking English, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and my best friend there, Ben, he used to be a translator for the United Nations, so he speaks fluently seven languages, but he knows more than that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fluently, so he just goes around. | ||
| We're buddies. | ||
| We're side-by-side all the time, and he's helping me out. | ||
| You have to, like, if you speak fluently seven languages, you have to kind of practice those languages all the time, right, to keep them fluent? | ||
| I'm pretty sure, but that's what he was doing where... | ||
| I mean, yes, but that's what he was doing when he was at the United Nations for the Russians, because he speaks... | ||
| I mean, he's a Congolese guy that's speaking Russian. | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Whenever we see any Russian soldiers, he would just go on in a conversation with them. | ||
| English is one of his, not his worst, because he's great at it. | ||
| But yeah, all the other languages he's super fluent in. | ||
| It's so fascinating. | ||
| It's like that story from the Bible about the Tower of Babel, you know, that the idea being that this was all like some sort of a plan to keep people from being able to communicate with each other. | ||
| I mean, it's probably indicative of like how frustrating it must be to realize that there are, I mean, I don't know how many languages there are worldwide, but I think it's over a thousand, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If there's 200 in Congo, it's got to be... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine. | ||
| I mean, until you have some sort of a program that translates in order and still... | ||
| Until someone creates a universal language and gets people to adopt it. | ||
| But, shit, we won't even adopt the metric system. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, when I was in high school, they tried that shit. | ||
| They tried to push the, someday, everyone's gonna be on it. | ||
| And I remember everyone in the class was like, fuck this. | ||
| Nobody's gonna adopt this. | ||
| You know, we lived 15 years learning about inches and yards, and we're not into meters. | ||
| You know, we don't really care. | ||
| And it seems like it's... | ||
| Incredibly frustrated for people to communicate without some sort of a universal translator, whether it's a program or something, but even then, without a universal language. | ||
| It's it's it's gonna be really hard for people to relate to each other and to to not like it's it's easy to Look at someone who's speaking some crazy language like people in Afghanistan or people in Saudi Arabia and think of them as like not us Because they don't they don't speak the way we speak if we heard someone in Afghanistan speaking total Fluent English, we would think of them way different than if you hear them in some crazy Arabic language. | ||
| We totally don't understand. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| Language is something that I wish I had a gift at. | ||
| I really wish I could just grasp it and speak it so well, but I really think just immersion into it is the way that you really start to pick it up. | ||
| Because I found myself just able to Start learning Swahili, and then someone's over to the side, and they make a little joke, and I would be able to start laughing with them. | ||
| You understand the jokes? | ||
| Yeah, sometimes. | ||
| Sometimes, for sure. | ||
| What's a good Swahili joke? | ||
| Good Swahili joke. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Two white guys walk into a bar. | ||
| Yeah, well, they call us mzungus. | ||
| They both have diarrhea! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha ha ha! | |
| Like, would they call you what? | ||
| Mazungu. | ||
| That's what guys call tits, isn't it? | ||
| The same thing? | ||
| Mazungus? | ||
| Mazungus? | ||
| Delated? | ||
| Mazungus or something like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mazungu is definitely, they just mean that for white men. | ||
| That's Swahili. | ||
| Mazungu. | ||
| Mazungu. | ||
| Is that, like, derogatory? | ||
| Like, haoli? | ||
| Like, Hawaiians call, uh... | ||
| It, it... | ||
| I think it is, but to them, it's so... | ||
| I embrace it, though. | ||
| I embrace it, and I'll say it with them if the kids are saying it and stuff like that. | ||
| But for them, it's just more everybody sticks to their tribe, and I think that's a problem with some of the violence that goes on there. | ||
| I mean, a lot of times you'll hear people in Congo saying that, and other parts of Africa saying, well, we weren't the ones that chose... | ||
| The boundaries of our country, you know, as the people that colonize us, stuff like that. | ||
| And so we would have been off on our own in this region because this is our language and this is our tribe. | ||
| And so I think that's why there's a lot of tribal conflict and things like that in different languages. | ||
| And so people will pride themselves on their culture, which I love cultures. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| The pygmy culture is awesome. | ||
| In fact, I mean, there's like some great photos in there of hunting and a little boy getting his first hunt, which is great. | ||
| His name is Sam Gee, in the same village that you guys sponsored a water well for. | ||
| So I love cultures. | ||
| And this little boy, what did he hunt with? | ||
| A spear? | ||
| Yeah, it's a spear. | ||
| He got a forest antelope. | ||
| So I was there and had just woke up, and this is early in the morning. | ||
| I don't know if you can tell, it's kind of like a tunnel. | ||
| How tall is that little fella? | ||
| He's a little dude. | ||
| There's another picture of me standing by him, so you'll see. | ||
| But he got it with a spear. | ||
| That spear that he's holding? | ||
| That seems like a heavy spear for a little guy like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's his great-grandfather's spear. | ||
| So his grandfather took him out hunting and he was the one that got it. | ||
| Oh, he's got the arms. | ||
| How cute. | ||
| So there's another picture of it. | ||
| And if you go to the next one, there's a, it's called a, I think they call it a janae or spotted janae. | ||
| It's almost like a, more like a mongoose, but it's kind of like in the leopard. | ||
| I mean, like, it'd be like a cross between a mongoose and a leopard or something, a small leopard, because they're pretty small in size. | ||
| That is wild. | ||
| They eat that? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| They eat everything, man. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So. | ||
| So you can see how small it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How old is that? | ||
| I think he's probably around 12. They don't know their age. | ||
| Wow, they don't know their age. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| So there's some of the men in the village. | ||
| But if you go back to that last one, you can even see the bellies on the little guys down right there. | ||
| You can see the big infected bellies of different kinds of parasites and sickness and disease. | ||
| Wow, that is nuts, man. | ||
| And these people have a clean water well now. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Do you have to give them medicine to get rid of that belly, or does it go away just with clean water? | ||
| It doesn't go away just with clean water, but the sickness drops about 85%. | ||
| But what we do is we have different nurses and things that are partnered with the university, and we send them out, and the pills are like, I mean, a dollar for like 10 of them, and you can give one pill to each of them. | ||
| It's not a fun process, man. | ||
| Either vomit or they have to get the worms out of them. | ||
| It has to kill these biological entities inside their bodies, so it's poison essentially. | ||
| Some type of poison, right? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I mean, I've seen mounds of these. | ||
| I mean, it's mixed with other stuff, but just stumbled upon it. | ||
| And Ben's like, oh, that's because we gave him the pill. | ||
| And I'm like, what is that in there? | ||
| And there was tapeworms all inside this mound of feces on one of the trails that we're hiking. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And how come the adults don't have it? | ||
| They have flat stomachs. | ||
| I think as they get older, I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I think their body just starts learning to fight it better. | ||
| And some of them have had the medicine, and so they'll be smarter and try not to drink dirty water just from anywhere. | ||
| When these little guys are walking around, now they're being taught, you have a clean source of water, this is where you get your water from. | ||
| And they can carry little containers or bottles and take those around with them. | ||
| And they do most of their hunting with spears? | ||
| Most with bows and arrows, I think. | ||
| But they'll drive them into nets. | ||
| And if you keep going down, there'll be a picture of the net. | ||
| But they have these nets. | ||
| That's a net? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And they just go and they break these little trees that are starting to grow. | ||
| They're maybe three foot tall. | ||
| They break them and they lay a net, the top of the net on it, and then they just kind of weave them in and out of the forest. | ||
| And what they do together is maybe they get leaves, maybe they see an animal, and they just drive it into these nets. | ||
| Sometimes, like with monkeys and parrots and stuff like that, they're using their bows and arrows. | ||
| Which, if you go up one picture, that shows the... | ||
| The little boys, I mean, even from that age right there, those little boys are just nailing anything. | ||
| I mean, you give them a target. | ||
| My wife and I would get passion fruit, and what we'd do is, if there's a rotten one, if there's an empty one, we would roll it to them. | ||
| And these guys could hit the moving, like this age right here, which, I don't know, what do you think? | ||
| That's five? | ||
| Five years old? | ||
| They could hit a moving passion fruit target that we're rolling. | ||
| They could just nail them with their bows and arrows. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| There's even a short video I got of them nailing a mouse. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| A mouse? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a mouse in the village and they wanted to show off to Emily. | ||
| That's my wife. | ||
| She came to visit and it was just really fun because she wanted to experience their culture and whenever you show them interest in the culture, they get really, really excited. | ||
| Is this the video? | ||
| Yeah, there's the mouse running. | ||
| I don't know if you can see it running around there. | ||
| But it's definitely live, moving. | ||
| And I just said, hey, shoot it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And just nailed it. | |
| Well, that was like a foot away. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not that impressed. | ||
| But did they eat that mouse? | ||
| Yeah, they'll eat it. | ||
| They'll eat it. | ||
| And then they'll even do like turtles. | ||
| They'll go out and they'll make backpacks out of turtles. | ||
| That sounds crazy, but they'll go out and they'll look for the antelope or something like that. | ||
| And then if they come across a turtle, they'll make out of, I don't know, these little vines, literally just backpacks where they tie it onto the legs of the turtle and they walk around with it. | ||
| And if they find a big thing of meat, then they let the turtle go. | ||
| But if they don't, if they come back empty-handed, they're going to come back with the turtle. | ||
| And these arrows that they use, what do they use for the feathers, for the fletchings and all that stuff? | ||
| The feathers are leaves. | ||
| They make a small slit in the back of the arrow, and then they slide in a leaf that's formed just like a feather. | ||
| And when they use the tips, what's the tip? | ||
| The tip can be metal. | ||
| If they find scrap metal somewhere, they can beat it down and turn it into a very, very sharp. | ||
| But then sometimes they have these wicked barbs on them too. | ||
| And then what they use most though, they would use They would use the metal on smaller game, but on bigger game, they use their poison-tipped arrows. | ||
| So they just have it in wood, and they sharpen it down, and they kind of do the spiral at the tip of the arrow, and then what they do is they take roots and berries, and I think that's pretty much it, but they get basically a poisonous cocktail that they make, and it turns black, and then they dip the tip of the arrow right in it, and that's what they use for something they really want to get, a monkey or an antelope or anything like that. | ||
| And when they do that, doesn't that poison the meat? | ||
| They eat it, and I eat it. | ||
| So, I guess it could. | ||
| I didn't ever think of that. | ||
| Maybe I should be careful. | ||
| Well, I would wonder, like, how does the poison work? | ||
| And if that's the case, how are you not ingesting it? | ||
| Maybe is it local? | ||
| Is it only the spot where the arrow hits? | ||
| That doesn't seem to make sense, though. | ||
| Or the bloodstream, maybe, once you drain the blood out of it? | ||
| They shoot it, and then they just track it, and then once it It falls over dead. | ||
| They just put it over their shoulders and bring it back. | ||
| How long does it take before the poison kills them? | ||
| This will be kind of funny. | ||
| I can't really follow them very well through the forest. | ||
| I'm just big and clunking around. | ||
| I got hiking boots on or whatever, but they're just fast and quiet. | ||
| So I've tried to go out on a couple of hunts with them, but I knew they were just kind of humbly being nice, letting me experience their culture. | ||
| But then I realized, these guys are quick, they're quiet, and I'm not. | ||
| And so I better just let them go off on their own and do their thing. | ||
| Do they hunt barefoot? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They do everything barefoot. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Most time, everything barefoot. | ||
| If they can find, like, most of the things that they're wearing on their body is because they've worked for someone or been a slave for someone, and that was part of their payment was clothing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Clothing or shoes or things like that, but it's their culture just to run around barefoot everywhere. | ||
| They got tough feet. | ||
| It's pretty cool to see, like, just their feet, the structure of their feet. | ||
| They don't have the real high arches, and it's not real soft skin, you know, but they can just book it through the forest and step on stuff that I'm feeling through my boots, but they just keep going. | ||
| Yeah, did you ever see that show, Dual Survivor? | ||
| I don't think it's on anymore. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that guy's crazy. | ||
| The guy walks around barefoot everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, he does everything. | ||
| Cody is the name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's an odd character. | ||
| He has this house that he built that's some sort of a sustainable house. | ||
| It's got, you know, I think it uses like sod for the roof or something like that. | ||
| And his whole deal is like surviving with minimal equipment. | ||
| But he does everything barefoot. | ||
| He runs around barefoot and his feet are like this thick skin. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| You don't want to give that dude a foot massage. | ||
| Yeah, he probably wouldn't feel it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's like a shoe. | ||
| I mean, he wears a permanent shoe. | ||
| I guess that's, like, really what's supposed to happen to people, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I think so, too. | ||
| But it's kind of funny, like, you know from martial arts, but, like, the bottom of your heel, you could fucking pound on things with your heel. | ||
| But, like, that same impact on your shin would be very painful. | ||
| You know, it's kind of interesting how that works. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even on the Ultimate Fighter, Wes Sims, when I fought him, I mean, it was like a minute and a half fight. | ||
| I got him to the ground and put him in an arm triangle. | ||
| But before that, he fractured a small fracture, a hairline fracture in my foot, with just a couple of foot stomps. | ||
| I mean, he just did it a couple times. | ||
| I was like, dang, I've never, you know, we didn't train for that in the gym and stuff, so I never felt that before. | ||
| But right when he did it, I knew whenever that hairline fracture came. | ||
| Yeah, just being able to stomp with that is... | ||
| Yeah, the heel is amazingly powerful, which is one of the reasons why I've been sort of a proponent for no gloves. | ||
| I've been on this kick for like a few months now. | ||
| I mean, I'd always been aware that gloves really protect the hands more than they protect the opponent. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| You know, they really protect the guy who's using the gloves more than the guy who you're hitting with. | ||
| I think it's kind of unnatural in a way. | ||
| And I think it's also unrealistic. | ||
| Like, wrist wraps as well. | ||
| Wrist wraps and gloves. | ||
| I think those probably contribute more to opponents getting hurt than anything. | ||
| Sort of like the same argument that a lot of people think that football would be safer if people didn't wear helmets. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If you can wheel kick somebody in the head... | ||
| With your heel, which is like one of the most powerful kicks you can throw. | ||
| Is that Barbosa? | ||
| Yeah, Edson Barbosa and Terry Edom, which is a crazy knockout. | ||
| The first knockout ever in the UFC from a wheel kick. | ||
| But if that is legal, and you could spin and kick someone with the heel, why do your knuckles have a pad on them? | ||
| That seems completely ridiculous to me. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And it seems also like an unrealistic depiction of martial arts. | ||
| Of course, if you want to go that route, you would say, well, you shouldn't wear cups either, because that's kind of unrealistic, too. | ||
| Yeah, I like wearing that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a big fan of kicking people in the balls. | ||
| Yeah, but even with the gloves, being able to hook into it, you know? | ||
| Hook into it and pull. | ||
| I mean, that's a little trick that everyone... | ||
| Well, guys use that to submit guys, too. | ||
| I've seen guys get chokes and guillotines where they'll hook their own glove and use it to finish a choke because it's like you can get some mad leverage along with grabbing it. | ||
| Yeah, and that guy's not going to be able to hand fight it very easily. | ||
| Yeah, no, man. | ||
| Once you hook it, you're allowed to hook your own gloves, too, which is another thing. | ||
| You're allowed to hook your own... | ||
| You're allowed to grab your own shorts. | ||
| Like, say if a guy's trying to get you in a kimura, you can grab your own shorts and hold on. | ||
| As long as they're not his? | ||
| Yeah, as long as they're not his. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just kind of squirrely, you know? | ||
| But it's a frustrating thing, too, when you see two guys grapple, and one guy's trying for a takedown, and the other guy's grabbing the guy's shorts, and the referee will say, stop, and they will stop. | ||
| But that brief moment where they held on might have been just enough for them to scoot their hips out and defend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think everybody should wear tights, too. | ||
| I think everybody should wear old-school Marco Huas, little bikini briefs. | ||
| That'd be great. | ||
| Dennis Hallman? | ||
| Yeah, Dennis Hallman. | ||
| Dennis Hallman, he almost got fired from the UFC for that, man. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think there was almost a slip. | ||
| Yeah, well, apparently he lost a bet, so Dennis Hallman came out. | ||
| See if you can find a picture of that, because they're hilarious. | ||
| Dennis Hallman came out with the smallest bikini briefs. | ||
| Yeah, man panties. | ||
| Probably of all time. | ||
| It was pretty ridiculous. | ||
| Aren't they Superman? | ||
| Were they Superman? | ||
| I don't remember, man. | ||
| I think it had a logo on it. | ||
| Was it training mask? | ||
| Is that what it said? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| But meanwhile, why is that homoerotic? | ||
| Why is everybody upset about that if they're longer shorts? | ||
| I mean, his junk is covered up. | ||
| Are we terrified of the upper thigh? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What is everyone afraid of? | ||
| How come you can see his nipples and nobody freaks out? | ||
| You know? | ||
| And when he freaks out, the guy's bare-chested, but for some reason having little shorts on is offensive. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| That was even the thing I would do to joke around with guys was wear mantis at Wayans because they couldn't look into my eye serious if I had these leopard man panties on with sequins and things like that. | ||
| That kept guys from looking into your eyes? | ||
| Well, they would grin or something like that, you know? | ||
| They wouldn't really do the deep stare down, if that makes sense. | ||
| You made a post, like, recently, like, within the last six months, saying that you were considering coming back to fighting. | ||
| Potentially, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think I should give it a shot. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 27. You're still young. | ||
| I'm a year younger than the youngest dude I fought. | ||
| So, in my 15 fights, the youngest guy was 28 years old. | ||
| I think I was 19 or 20. And... | ||
| So, I mean, I think that... | ||
| The reason I would want to really at least give it my full effort, at least for a season, at least for a year or two, see what I can do. | ||
| See, I'm not taking, you know, big, really tough fights, you know, right when I come back, but to build my way back up. | ||
| Because if I could use the platform of fighting to, and the name of the nonprofit is Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| If I could literally fight for the forgotten and fulfill my first promise to give them a voice, then man, I'm passionate about both. | ||
| Those are like my two greatest passions, you know, is MMA. I can't stay away from it. | ||
| In Congo, if I got to the internet, it was, yeah, it was straight up the Eugenia MMA TV. Yeah, the underground. | ||
| It was what I had to check. | ||
| The first thing I was on was how to get my MMA fix. | ||
| And then, I mean, I'm so passionate about the Pygmies and seeing just... | ||
| Just what I can do. | ||
| I mean, there's even an African proverb or a Congolese proverb about mosquitoes. | ||
| It says, if you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a room with a mosquito. | ||
| Or try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito. | ||
| And so I just think that me in my mind, like at first when I got there, it's like there's no way I can make a difference. | ||
| Um, and then, and then I met some great people that already were, had a heart for it. | ||
| And then if I could use fighting as a platform, um, I'm passionate about it. | ||
| If I can use a platform to say, hey, for my win bonus, we're gonna buy this much more land. | ||
| We're gonna drill three more water wells. | ||
| We're gonna, you know, fund this new farming project. | ||
| Um, I think if I didn't do it, I'd be an old man one day wondering, what if? | ||
| What if I would have tried it? | ||
| You know, and if I just went to the jungle, because I would love, I mean, I feel like I could be completely content with living in a twig and leaf hut for, I don't know, maybe the rest of my life, at least for a while. | ||
| But if I just did that, then, you know, nobody's going to know about it, nobody's going to support it. | ||
| And so if I could use this as just a tool, a platform, I would have to take it super serious. | ||
| There's no way I could just, you know, lackadaisically come back into fighting. | ||
| Have you been training at all? | ||
| I'm getting back into it with Team Takedown. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, Dallas-Fort Worth. | ||
| Okay, so are you living out there now? | ||
| Yeah, I am. | ||
| So that's where... | ||
| Great spot. | ||
| That's a great place to train. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dude, I love how Mark Lehman trains. | ||
| Just... | ||
| He's a genius. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I've never seen it in a gym. | ||
| Maybe you have out here in Cali. | ||
| But we walk into the cage, or they do. | ||
| I've only done a few times there, but that's going to be my gym, I think. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Whenever you walk in, he's got the flat screens all around the cage, and he's got his Mac. | ||
| And if he's showing you a move, he'll show you three, four, five fights that this move has been finished in in the UFC or other promotions. | ||
| And so if you doubt him, he's going to say, hey, pull up to his assistant. | ||
| He'll say, hey, pull this fight up this much into it. | ||
| And then he'll start breaking down the fight, breaking down the move, the setup, and how to finish. | ||
| So I think it's great. | ||
| Yeah, he's a wizard when it comes to MMA knowledge and jiu-jitsu knowledge. | ||
| He's always been completely engrossed in the world of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| He was one of those guys way back in the day that had all these moves categorized and he had folders and files for basically every move. | ||
| I never even heard of anybody that sort of broke it down the way he did. | ||
| Yeah, so that's what I love about that team. | ||
| Whenever I walked in there, I was thoroughly impressed because they treat it like any other professional sport. | ||
| You walk in and the water, the supplements, whatever you need is at your disposal. | ||
| And then whenever you get in there to train, you have five full-time coaches that are paid just to train you. | ||
| So you get a lot of focus. | ||
| And they're training the guys really right. | ||
| I like what they're doing with heavyweights, actually, with Rochelt. | ||
| He's training five days a week. | ||
| And what I used to do is always train six days a week. | ||
| And I'd train two to three times a day. | ||
| And that's what Brennan would do. | ||
| And that's what Shane would do. | ||
| And that's what, you know, I think attributed to a lot of our injuries. | ||
| But with Rochalt, they train five days a week and make sure they're getting his cardio up. | ||
| But he can't train like a 125 pounder, 135 pounder. | ||
| Heavyweights are taking more of a pounding on their body. | ||
| So you got to find a way to not just train harder, but train smarter. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Is it just because of the gravity, just carrying the extra weight, the pressure on the joints? | ||
| Why do you think that a heavyweight can only train five days a week? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I don't think they can only train five days a week, but I think it's a smart move for Rochelt, and I think it would be a smart move for me to do, too. | ||
| Maybe other guys would adopt it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| For me, whenever you look at the heavyweight division, they can end the fight at any minute. | ||
| And you look at the 145, 135, 125, the smaller guys, they're really exciting fights. | ||
| Super talented guys. | ||
| World class, without a doubt. | ||
| But sometimes they're just not the same weight. | ||
| And power behind their punches, behind their takedowns, behind everything. | ||
| I mean, it goes from, you know, 255 pounders equal almost one of us, you know, or a little more than one of us. | ||
| And then now you have 500 pounds colliding into the mat whenever you're taking someone down or punching. | ||
| There's just all this stuff that I think you take a lot more of a beating on your body. | ||
| Well, certainly cardio-wise, it's very difficult. | ||
| That's what makes Kane so unique is that he can keep up a pace that's usually reserved for people that are like 170. He can do at 240. He's so unique in that way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And maybe if you're going to train six days, it's something that's specifically about recovery or cardio. | ||
| Or both. | ||
| Because the way that we were doing it at Grudge, and that's a world-class gym. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But something I look back and see from assessing, just my opinion, is, man, we were, you know, three days a week training and sparring hard. | ||
| And for heavyweight sparring hard, three days a week, you're taking... | ||
| You're taking a lot of punishment. | ||
| You're dishing out a lot of punishment. | ||
| And so where you don't even have time on Sunday, it's not enough time to rest and to recuperate and for your body to heal up. | ||
| Yeah, especially if you're sparring Shane fucking Carwell. | ||
| Oh yeah, dude. | ||
| That guy was scary. | ||
| Still scary, absolutely. | ||
| But whenever he would throw a hook, your body would quake. | ||
| It would send like a ripple effect through your body. | ||
| Yeah, he's a big boy. | ||
| Big ass bones, too. | ||
| And again, his issue was the same issue. | ||
| It was cardio. | ||
| I mean, go to the Brock Lesnar fight. | ||
| I mean, he had Brock Lesnar all butt out in that first round. | ||
| But the second round came around and he just was spent. | ||
| He just emptied his gas tank in that first round. | ||
| And if you look at it though, he was, I mean, if you look at how he's training, he was training six days a week. | ||
| And so somehow that cardio didn't come and even training six days a week. | ||
| So I don't know what, I think maybe it was also that adrenaline dump, I think he was going to finish off Brock and all that other stuff. | ||
| He forgot to breathe. | ||
| He was talking about how when he was punching him, he literally forgot to breathe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because he was just... | ||
| He figured, like, let's just sprint, and this is going to be the end here. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was very close to being the end, so I could... | ||
| I can understand what his mind frame was. | ||
| As close as you could ever get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it was like many people would have stopped that fight. | ||
| Many refs would have stopped that fight. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's cool they gave... | ||
| I mean, it's cool they gave Brock a chance to recover. | ||
| I mean, I... I love Karwin, and he's a great friend, and he's a great person. | ||
| But it's cool to see whenever a guy can have that time to recover and see during the round them recover and then come back and win. | ||
| Yeah, that was an issue this weekend, like the Dan Henderson fight in particular. | ||
| Like, that fight was stopped fairly quickly. | ||
| He got tagged by Gegor Mousasi. | ||
| And in a way, I kind of understand because I think that referees sometimes will look at a guy who's older And judge it slightly differently than a guy who's younger. | ||
| I always go to this one example. | ||
| Frankie Edgar Gray Maynard. | ||
| They could have stopped that fight multiple times. | ||
| And Frankie came on to stop Gray Maynard in the second fight. | ||
| It was an amazing, amazing fight. | ||
| But if you go back and watch that fight, watch that first round... | ||
| There's so many moments where you say, like, if a guy was quick to pull the trigger, it could be over. | ||
| Not everybody's Frankie Edgar, either. | ||
| Like, the other one was this weekend, Andy Ogle, and I don't want to mispronounce his name, so let me say it right. | ||
| Oh, the guy that was Finnish, but from Iraq, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| I actually missed that fight. | ||
| I didn't see it. | ||
| Maquan Americana, who is a bad motherfucker. | ||
| This kid, first of all, this kid goes into the octagon and does these perfect flips, like, and you could, like, right away, you could say, like, whoa, this kid is like a serious gymnast, and then hits Andy Ogle with this ridiculous flying knee, like, launched across the ring, tags him with this flying knee, and then tags him with an upper guard. | ||
| And then the referee stopped the fight. | ||
| And I even said, I probably shouldn't have said that I thought it was a premature stoppage. | ||
| The referee could see better than I can, obviously, whether or not a guy's eyes rolled behind his head. | ||
| But Andy Ogle was pretty upset. | ||
| Maybe I was going on that. | ||
| But the stoppage in that fight was certainly more understandable, I think, than the Henderson fight. | ||
| The Henderson fight was like one shot. | ||
| And he went down and then stumbled back. | ||
| Well, he tagged him. | ||
| I mean, it was kind of grazing, but it was kind of like the temple area, which always fucks with your equilibrium. | ||
| But this Americani hit him with this flying knee. | ||
| Like, he traveled so far. | ||
| Like, if you watch the flying knee, see if you can find it, Jamie. | ||
| This is his opening move. | ||
| He hits him with this ridiculous flying knee. | ||
| I mean, it was just... | ||
| He launched himself like 14, 15 feet across the... | ||
| The kid's a freak athlete, man. | ||
| And I'd heard that about him entering into this fight, too. | ||
| How quick was the fight? | ||
| Eight seconds. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| He's pretty impressive. | ||
| Yeah, that's great. | ||
| Is that what he said about me? | ||
| I thought he was a drunk. | ||
| That's what he said about me? | ||
| He's a funny dude, man. | ||
| He's got a lot of personality, too, man. | ||
| He's very funny. | ||
| Very funny. | ||
| But find the fight itself. | ||
| Don't just pull shit up. | ||
| I think the thing with... | ||
| You can't look at it without us seeing it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Why is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The way it's set up currently. | |
| Oh. | ||
| But the audience doesn't see it? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But I think with that Dan Henderson fight, I think maybe the angle, because I watched a couple times, and I think maybe the angle of the ref, he was kind of maybe behind kind of Musashi whenever he hit him, and then whenever Hendo's head kind of hit the back of the cage, maybe that... | ||
| That scared the ref and prompted him to stop it early. | ||
| I always wonder when you go to new places, too, whether or not commissions are more sensitive, you know, because, like, maybe Sweden has, like, less sensitive or referees are more sensitive to fighters getting injured. | ||
| Like, we find that in Boston. | ||
| In Boston, they stop cuts. | ||
| They stop fights on cuts way quicker than other places. | ||
| Like, Mark Della Grotte, who's from Boston, told me they've always had issues with that. | ||
| Like in Boston, when fighters get cut, they'll stop it way quicker than they would, say, in Vegas. | ||
| Were these all Swedish refs from that area? | ||
| No. | ||
| A lot of the guys were English guys. | ||
| It was different. | ||
| I know in Finland they have the brutal MMA that you can headbutt still and all that stuff. | ||
| In Finland? | ||
| Right, isn't that right? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| I mean, at least a couple years ago, I went to Golden Glory out in Amsterdam, and I was training with Alistair for a bit, but also... | ||
| Do you remember John Olav Animo? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| John Olav Animo. | ||
| Animo, yeah. | ||
| Who was a Abu Dhabi champion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fantastic grappler. | ||
| Dude, absolutely a beast on the ground. | ||
| He was like a, I don't know, like a spider. | ||
| His legs and everything were nuts how they could wrap around you. | ||
| But he was from Norway, and there, MMA, they were very, very resistant. | ||
| And this was when I was training with him back in 2008, I think. | ||
| But they were very, very resistant to it. | ||
| I thought it was a brutal, barbaric sport, all that. | ||
| But then in Finland, just a couple countries away, you could still headbutt, and that's where he was getting some of his first fights, I think. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So just such a contrast in how they viewed the sport. | ||
| This is the flying knee. | ||
| Watch this kid. | ||
| The kid just flies out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That was... | ||
| I mean, it was a quick stoppage, but man, that kid, that flying knee is fucking incredible. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| I think he only took like three or four steps before he launched in the air. | ||
| Yeah, and Ogle tried to tackle the referee, which is always bad. | ||
| I just, you know, I get sensitive because Ogle was in the cage. | ||
| He was super freaked out and upset. | ||
| He thought the fight was stopped too quickly. | ||
| It's a weird thing, man. | ||
| It's hard to say when to stop and when not to. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| You want to give a guy a chance to recover, but you also want to save the guy from unnecessary punishment if he can't defend himself. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They have the fucking hardest job in the world next to fighters is referees. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I wouldn't want to know all the backlash that they get. | ||
| I think it's like fighters number one, of course, referees number two, judges three. | ||
| You four? | ||
| Some of the... | ||
| I think I'm way down the line. | ||
| Bruce Buffer's job's probably harder than mine. | ||
| I mean, my job is... | ||
| I'm just reacting to things, you know? | ||
| The only time it becomes an issue is things like if I'm critical of a stoppage or if I'm critical of judging, and then it becomes a point of debate. | ||
| But I think that the controversy... | ||
| Especially subjective controversy, whether it's you can agree or disagree, I think it's important because it starts the discussion of what should be legal, what shouldn't be legal, what should happen, what shouldn't happen. | ||
| There's a lot of people that have some really strong feelings about the shape of the gloves right now. | ||
| And that they're contributing to eye pokes. | ||
| And that's something I've had some recent conversations with Dana and with Lorenzo. | ||
| And they're of the opinion, I think, that the fighters need to be penalized more. | ||
| Because their gloves have been the same for a long time. | ||
| But back in the day, it wasn't nearly as much of an issue. | ||
| If you go back to UFC 37.5 or UFC 40, you don't see a lot of eye pokes. | ||
| But now it's hard to go one fight or one event, rather, without a couple of fights. | ||
| Maybe you can attribute that to a lot of Muay Thai training because a lot of guys are doing this, which is really common in Muay Thai and step in with knees and all these guys who do these things with gloves on, which are totally fine with a glove on. | ||
| Palming a guy's face with a glove on and throwing leg kicks or a knee or elbows behind it, but doing it with his fucking fingers, man. | ||
| Fingers just go in the eyes so much. | ||
| It drives me crazy. | ||
| And when you see a guy like Bisping, he's got one eye that looks completely different from his other eye now because of surgery, detached retina surgery, and then they have to put oil inside his retina. | ||
| And I don't even know how much he can see out of his right eye. | ||
| But when you look at him in the eyes, his one eye looks very different than the other eye. | ||
| Alan Belcher. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Even Anthony Johnson had a problem with that, right? | ||
| Yeah, with Kevin Burns. | ||
| Yeah, Kevin Burns poked him in the eye. | ||
| And then in this fight, Gustafson accidentally poked him in the eye. | ||
| They're totally accidental, but it's like this thing where guys are doing that. | ||
| Jon Jones is the number one guy as far as the controversy because he's so tall and long. | ||
| That's an excellent strategy. | ||
| He's almost like doing that cartoon thing where he puts his hand on your head and you're swinging because he can't reach him. | ||
| I wonder if there's a way to cover the fingers. | ||
| I've always wondered. | ||
| This is kind of hypocritical because I think they shouldn't be wearing gloves at all, but I wonder if there's a way to Like, put some sort of a soft leather over the tips of the fingers. | ||
| You know those old-school Everlast boxing gloves, those bag gloves? | ||
| Remember those? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| They had the little bar inside them, almost. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| They had the bar inside of them. | ||
| I don't know why they had the bar. | ||
| Why was the bar there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Didn't make any sense. | ||
| But those gloves almost like would be better. | ||
| Like some people think that it would be bad for grappling because the fingers wouldn't work as individuals. | ||
| But you never really do this anyway. | ||
| You know, if you use your thumbs at all, you kind of use it like this. | ||
| It's very rare that you hook a finger and a thumb together. | ||
| I think the Pride gloves, you weren't really... | ||
| We have a pair of them around here somewhere. | ||
| Do we have a pair of them still? | ||
| The Pride Gloves, they had far less problems. | ||
| But, you know, Krokop and Josh Barnett, that was an issue. | ||
| I mean, it happens. | ||
| Guys get poked in the eye. | ||
| It's almost like... | ||
| It seems like it's inevitable, but Dana's opinion is that they should be penalized. | ||
| Every time there's an eye poke, one point. | ||
| Which, I mean, it's pretty harsh. | ||
| But you wouldn't do it. | ||
| Yeah, you wouldn't do it. | ||
| I've never had a... | ||
| In my fights, I've never had a problem. | ||
| The pride gloves are blue, Jamie. | ||
| Yeah, I never had a problem poking a guy in the eye. | ||
| I got poked in the eye once and it absolutely sucks because for the whole round my vision was like it would double and it would turn black and it just jacked with me the entire round. | ||
| These are the pride gloves. | ||
| Brian from London Real gave me these. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Thank you, Brian. | ||
| Piece of history. | ||
| Yeah, these are... | ||
| Nobody fought with these on, but these are the original Pride gloves. | ||
| They're very different. | ||
| And there's a pronounced curve to them that you don't get from the gloves the UFC uses. | ||
| Everlast, which is now a sponsor of the UFC, or... | ||
| I don't know if it's a sponsor or a partner or they're working together with the UFC. I guess we're going to use the Everlast gloves. | ||
| Everlast has an excellent MMA glove that is more curved than the ones that we use now. | ||
| These also are longer. | ||
| Yeah, and they're easy to form, too. | ||
| Whenever you get those UFC gloves, you instantly have to start breaking them in, you know? | ||
| And so I could see the argument of it making it harder to close your hands sometimes because if they're not broken in like this... | ||
| Yeah, look, these automatically make your hands curve. | ||
| Like, automatically. | ||
| It's like, by default, your hand wants to curve. | ||
| I would think these would be, why don't they just go back to fucking pride gloves? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Why don't they go back to this? | ||
| This seems like a good glove. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just feel like there's a better way. | ||
| And I feel like if you do, you know, that's that expression, like, what's the definition of insanity? | ||
| Do the same thing over and over again, expect a different result. | ||
| You know, it's just, it seems like the gloves that we have now, everyone says the same thing. | ||
| Every fighter that I've talked to, that it actually, they make your hands straighten out, especially as your hands fatigue as the rounds go on. | ||
| They literally make your hands straighten out. | ||
| But the Bellator gloves that they're using that Everlast designed are far more curved. | ||
| So Everlast has like their own sort of patented technology, their patented design. | ||
| And they're also having less hand breaks too. | ||
| I didn't know that at all. | ||
| Yeah, Bellator, they did some sort of a study on handbrakes before the new gloves and handbrakes after the new gloves. | ||
| And they have much less breaks after the new gloves because of the shape of it and the support on the top of the glove. | ||
| It lends more support to the metacarpals, I guess. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But then again, like I said, I think they should be bare-knuckled. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think if you can hit somebody with a shin... | ||
| I was just about to ask you that. | ||
| Do you think you'd ever go back to that? | ||
| Probably not, right? | ||
| I think it's too ingrained or too adopted, too part of the culture now. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| It's like, why is everybody so hung up on everything staying the same? | ||
| First of all, I think cups. | ||
| Cups are a huge goddamn issue. | ||
| Guys get hit with glancing blows to the sack and they go down. | ||
| I think there's a lot of guys that wear really shitty cups. | ||
| Have you worn the Diamond MMA Club? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I heard they're great. | ||
| Oh, get them one. | ||
| We have them in the back. | ||
| Oh, sweet. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, we'll give you one. | ||
| I had one in one fight. | ||
| Might not fit your fucking giant strapping glutes, you savage. | ||
| But if they do fit, see if you get a large or probably extra large, whatever the bigger ones are, but Diamond's figured out a way to make this compression short with all these straps and this cup that is like sort of, it's got a rubberized outside but it's hard as fuck around it and the compression shorts keep the cup right over your junk and you could take full blast shots and you're, it's not gonna feel good, but it feels way better than anything else I've ever used. | ||
| Yeah, I've had it. | ||
| The same fight I got my eye poked, I got a groin shot that splintered my cup. | ||
| It splintered my cup, and I had a little cut from it. | ||
| It was up in the pubic area, but it was brutal, and I hated it. | ||
| Hated that, and then I wanted to go to steel cups, which it's got this in it. | ||
| Well, the steel cup is, I think, probably one of the best. | ||
| The Thai steel cup. | ||
| See, that's their design. | ||
| It's a very good design of a cup, but there's nothing too extraordinary about it. | ||
| But what's really interesting is the way it fits into the compression shorts. | ||
| And they're constantly redesigning it. | ||
| They just had a new, updated design that just sent me a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| But I had one incident in jujitsu where I wasn't wearing a cup and I had a lot of bleeding. | ||
| And since then I went to cups. | ||
| But a lot of guys say that the steel tie cup is one of the best solutions too. | ||
| Because you could tie that fucker up tight. | ||
| It feels super uncomfortable, you know, when it goes up your... | ||
| Asshole area and g-string style, but when it's tied in, like really fucking tied in, that's one of the best ways to protect yourself, too. | ||
| But they outlawed steel cups in jiu-jitsu matches. | ||
| Oh yeah, because of stuff like Frank Mir, right? | ||
| Yeah, well the leverage. | ||
| I mean, it becomes like this insane fulcrum point because it's literally steel. | ||
| And when that steel is pressed against your pelvis, I mean, that's like this crazy lever. | ||
| And if you get an arm there, you know, it's really unfair. | ||
| It's an unfair lever that doesn't exist in nature. | ||
| It's like the opposite of what nature gives you. | ||
| Like I've had a lot of people, like you teach them how to do an arm bar, like, ah, it hurts my balls. | ||
| Like, yeah, you got to get used to that. | ||
| Like, an arm bar will probably hurt your balls. | ||
| But if you're wearing a steel cup, it hurts them way more than it hurts you. | ||
| I think that's what popped Tim Sylvia's arm in the forearm, right? | ||
| Well, certainly Frank Miri yanking on it. | ||
| Yeah, well, for sure. | ||
| No, he's an incredible martial artist. | ||
| He's a jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| Stud jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| One of the best guys ever. | ||
| Whenever you can get Naguera and do that to him. | ||
| Break his fucking arm, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's nuts. | ||
| He's the only guy in the UFC's heavyweight division that's broken two people's bones with submissions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You know, I mean, Frank Mir will go down in history as one of the greatest submission guys ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| The times I grappled with him, I was like, wow, he's amazing. | ||
| Oh, he's a stud. | ||
| He's a guy who's got a lot of fucking miles, man. | ||
| He's fought a lot of fucking hard fights. | ||
| But those steel cups, like, you can't wear them anymore in jiu-jitsu matches. | ||
| So, I mean, I wonder how long before people recognize that in MMA and say... | ||
| Because right now you could get away with wearing a steel cup. | ||
| But, like, have you ever had someone mount you and they have a steel cup on? | ||
| Oh, it hurts. | ||
| And they compress your... | ||
| On your sternum. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's brutal. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| Yeah, those are dangerous, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Definitely. | |
| In that way. | ||
| Well, hey, man, thank you for this one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, please. | |
| I'm excited to give it a whirl. | ||
| Yeah, those guys are pretty dedicated, man. | ||
| I shouldn't say pretty. | ||
| They're very dedicated. | ||
| There's Diamond MMA guys. | ||
| They've done a lot of... | ||
| They're constantly redesigning that thing, too. | ||
| But I think that's an issue. | ||
| Like, there's guys who wear, like, the standard jockstrap with, like, the little silly cup inside of it. | ||
| That's just fine if you're playing softball, you know, but, goddammit, when you're getting kicked, we really need, like, a better design when it comes to that. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Man, yeah, thank you so much for this. | ||
| And I also want to thank you, man, for coming in here because the village of Bobofi is the village that you guys sponsored, and they got a water well. | ||
| So I'm just thankful you're giving me this. | ||
| You sponsored my family getting water. | ||
| We even had, I mean, if it's okay, I could show you a picture. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, please. | ||
| This is kind of the drilling process right here of the tripod. | ||
| Is that something you brought over there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the tripod legs we bought in Uganda and then we hauled them over. | ||
| So that's our drillers. | ||
| They get ready. | ||
| They put it on that tripod. | ||
| This is us getting ready in Bobofi to put the pump down. | ||
| And so those bricks and that circular, it's the cement well pad that we're getting ready to do. | ||
| But first we've got to put the PVC down and put the pump. | ||
| How do you find where to drill? | ||
| Do you get one of those dudes that has that chicken bone thing? | ||
| Does that shit work? | ||
| No. | ||
| Divining? | ||
| I'm not sure if that works, but there's some expensive equipment that you can get, but we're really there for the things that they're going to do and where they are in the rainforest. | ||
| There's water there. | ||
| There's clean water. | ||
| It's just under your feet. | ||
| You've got to get to it. | ||
| And so most people don't know how to get to it, so we show them how to get down there to it. | ||
| And so once it's below 6 meters or 20 feet, the Water 4 system has been approved by USAID and the UN and all these places saying it's just as safe as a lot of mechanicalized rigs. | ||
| And so what they do is they drill it down there and once you get to a certain depth, you can put a cement pad that protects it at the top, but you also put like a clay sanitary seal up from six meters and above. | ||
| A clay sanitary seal. | ||
| A clay sanitary seal. | ||
| Do you guys make that or is it something you purchase? | ||
| Like how does it work? | ||
| You can purchase it. | ||
| Did you guys make it? | ||
| What we do is we go find it from a hill. | ||
| Powerful on a t-shirt. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that helped me out too over there. | ||
| So you helped me out a lot over there. | ||
| But what the sanitary seal does is one meter of clay, it can take a hundred years for water to get through. | ||
| One Layer impermeable clay. | ||
| And so if you can put that down there, then it takes a long time. | ||
| So any ground contaminants that are trying to pass through that, first you have the cement pad that we put on, and then you have the clay sanitary seal beyond that. | ||
| And then it's not going to let the ground contaminants and other kinds of waterborne disease get down into our clean aquifer. | ||
| So we try to find a good aquifer that's going to keep refilling. | ||
| That's fresh water, clean water. | ||
| We test it. | ||
| Did you have failed wells where you tried to make some? | ||
| Yeah, we did. | ||
| The first probably seven or eight we failed because I had like a short training here. | ||
| Then they also sent over a guy that had done 28 water wells in Congo. | ||
| And I was like, great. | ||
| He's a Congolese guy all the way across the country. | ||
| And we flew him out and he was 28 for 28. He had never failed a well. | ||
| And then we got out there and we hit seven in a row that we failed. | ||
| And so... | ||
| So when you say failed, like, it didn't give you any water or it was bad water? | ||
| Well, I guess, sorry, what I should have said was seven holes fail. | ||
| And so what we're doing is we're looking for the water. | ||
| And sometimes you're digging and you come across a layer of granite or a layer of... | ||
| Our problem was sandstone. | ||
| Well, what happened was we'd have these augers that have like these claws on it. | ||
| And we'd pull out scoop after scoop after scoop and a foot at a time. | ||
| And sometimes you get to like a sandstone layer. | ||
| And if you get to that, it's hard to advance through. | ||
| And so a lot of times you do need a machine that helps you get through that. | ||
| And so Water4 has been helping us with that. | ||
| And so normally under that sandstone layer, there's fresh, like a very good, powerful aquifer that's going to keep... | ||
| You have to probably be careful about ruining your equipment on that too, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| We didn't want to waste our tools, so what we'd do is we'd pick up and we'd move. | ||
| Because we can't make those tools yet in Congo, so we're bringing them from the States and it's high-quality stuff. | ||
| Hopefully one day we do have a metal shop there that we can start trying to produce things that will just blast through softer layers. | ||
| And so you're doing this not just in the pygmy villages, but in also these neighboring villages, too, to try to help these people out so that they don't get angry at the pygmies for having this stuff? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So how many of these wells have you guys completed? | ||
| Fifteen. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Fifteen water wells. | ||
| Each one of them is serving hundreds of people. | ||
| This is the JRE area. | ||
| Well, this is the Joe Rogan Experience water well. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| We're dancing around it. | ||
| Look how happy those people are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's so cool. | |
| That's actually sangue on my shoulders on that other picture. | ||
| The hunter that killed those two things. | ||
| Oh, that's so cool. | ||
| It's on my shoulders. | ||
| If you go down, this is the chief's wife, and she took one of our well-driller sunglasses, and she was the second one to pump, and so she loved it. | ||
| So that... | ||
| The thing that's on top, that blue metal thing, is that metal? | ||
| What is that thing that we're looking at that's pouring into the bucket? | ||
| The blue is actually just a bucket that's holding our cement. | ||
| We use it as a form so we can pour the cement inside of it that protects the pipes that are coming up from deep in the ground. | ||
| And the pump is a hand unit? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Yeah, it's basically like a T-handle, and you grab each side, you pull up, pump down, pull up, pump down. | ||
| An old-school cartoon dynamite thing? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And every time you go down, it sprays out, I don't know, maybe 10 ounces of water. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what is the quality of life change for these people now that they have this clean water? | ||
| I mean, it must be amazing. | ||
| Yeah, they've never seen clean water before. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| They've never tasted it, except for maybe rain water, but they don't have a way to collect it. | ||
| So it's like them going out and if you go to the folder saying bad water... | ||
| How often does it rain there? | ||
| It rains quite often, but they don't collect the water. | ||
| It's easier for them to go to where the water sat, where the creeks or streams that rose to get their water there. | ||
| Well, it seems like that would be an awesome supplement as well. | ||
| So that's the water that they usually get? | ||
| Yeah, that's actually a pretty good one. | ||
| But I thought what was cool here was she was using the leaf as a funnel. | ||
| But she would scoop it and pour it into the container. | ||
| But yeah, that's completely dirty, contaminated. | ||
| That's where the... | ||
| The antelopes and other animals are going to get water and then they... | ||
| Shitting it. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, man. | ||
| Giardia is something that people get from gophers and shit and all these different animals, beavers. | ||
| I had typhoid while I was there. | ||
| What is typhoid like? | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
| But I had it at the same time. | ||
| That's why they misdiagnosed me with malaria. | ||
| They thought that I had typhoid because I had gotten typhoid, but like a small amount of it. | ||
| And then they started treating me for typhoid. | ||
| But since it was mixed with malaria, I don't know if that was why malaria was so... | ||
| So brutal. | ||
| I mean, I got it from two different sources. | ||
| I obviously had dirty water or someone cooked with dirty water and ingested the typhoid fever. | ||
| So cooking with dirty water, even if you boil the water, you still get some of those illnesses? | ||
| You can if you don't cook it correctly right, if you don't get it really, really hot. | ||
| And sometimes out here, you're just cooking over a fire, and it just sticks, and you put on a bowl over it, and it has to get to that boiling point and stuff. | ||
| And if they don't cook it right, or if they add some water to it a little later to add some more, you can still get sick from that. | ||
| Do they have metal pots and pans and stainless steel or cast iron? | ||
| Like, what are they cooking in? | ||
| Yeah, a lot of times they do get, well, they would make a tripod. | ||
| I wonder if that's in the folder. | ||
| They would make a tripod to smoke the meat. | ||
| And so they would just use wood and leaves to cook the meat. | ||
| But yeah, they would bargain or get the scraps from either their slave masters or someone they went and worked for. | ||
| They would negotiate and bargain labor to get some kind of pot that's discarded. | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's Bobofy Village, the Jerry Village. | ||
| And that's kind of how they cook it. | ||
| So that one I think we brought with us, though. | ||
| And they just cook it over the fire. | ||
| That one we got real hot. | ||
| Normally they don't waste wood, man. | ||
| They just put an X or a cross of wood and they just push it in from the sides. | ||
| And so basically it's just smoldering. | ||
| There's no real flame. | ||
| And so that's how they cook. | ||
| It's not even on a real hot flame. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's so much we take for granted, living in civilization. | ||
| Those huts, maybe you can go to the folder with my wife. | ||
| It'll show some of the size of the pygmies and then also the huts. | ||
| But it's crazy how they're living. | ||
| This guy's Bajanji, but that behind him is one of our huts that we're staying in. | ||
| So their huts are chest height to us. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Living there, it's crazy. | ||
| There's all sorts of stuff that come in. | ||
| There's spiders, snakes. | ||
| Love those too. | ||
| A lot of poisonous stuff, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| A crazy story right here in this village was a spider. | ||
| Actually, Emily had gone in there. | ||
| By the way, this is her first ever camping trip. | ||
| Her first ever time camping. | ||
| She went hard. | ||
| That's how you go hard. | ||
| First ever camping. | ||
| Camping in the Congo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Maybe there's another picture of a hut, her and I, but it's crazy because, yeah, right there, the rain had beat us there. | ||
| So going from the roadside to getting to the actual village can take over an hour. | ||
| It can take an hour and a half hiking. | ||
| And so rain had moved in, and it just drenched us on her first night ever camping. | ||
| And then there was roaches. | ||
| Well, it stopped raining, and then you're thinking that it's raining, but it's actually, or that's sprinkling, but it's actually the legs of the roaches running on the leaves. | ||
| So that freaked her out. | ||
| And she had to get up and leave, and I understood, you know. | ||
| I walked her out. | ||
| It's going to be okay. | ||
| She's like, because one of the roaches had fallen on her neck, and that's when she kind of lost it. | ||
| I don't know if I can do this. | ||
| But after that, she embraced it and really fell in love with the people. | ||
| And then there was another crazy story with this gigantic spider, or at least to me, you'll know why I thought it was gigantic in a minute. | ||
| It was on her, what we'd do is we'd put up a little tent, almost like a mosquito net tent inside of the huts, so that she could be protected from all the mosquitoes and stuff like that. | ||
| But Ben and I would sleep next to that and we didn't have a mosquito net over us. | ||
| And all of a sudden she saw this gigantic spider crawling on the mesh. | ||
| And she freaked out and called for me. | ||
| And then it jumped. | ||
| It's like this tarantula kind of spider. | ||
| And it jumped onto the leafs, and that's the wall. | ||
| It's just leafs and sticks. | ||
| And so I grabbed a flip-flop trying to kill this tarantula. | ||
| And whenever I finally started to hit at it, it slipped right behind one of the leafs and disappeared. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| And she's like, you didn't kill it! | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| Yeah, I think I did. | ||
| And Ben's like, I killed it. | ||
| Yeah, he killed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He killed it. | |
| And she's like, I want to see a leg, a body, something. | ||
| I want to see its guts. | ||
| And so anyways, right after that too, there's two chickens sleeping beside her tent in the wall. | ||
| She's like, get these chickens out of here. | ||
| So I grabbed them, got them out. | ||
| But then the next day we woke up and she woke up before me and she was outside. | ||
| The women were kind of painting, doing this awesome paintings on a bark cloth. | ||
| So it's cloth that is actually just bark. | ||
| And so they're out there painting. | ||
| It's bark? | ||
| Cloth? | ||
| Like, what do you mean by cloth? | ||
| They make like a cloth. | ||
| It used to be clothing that they would wear like in traditional ceremonies, but it would be bark that they would beat down and it would kind of be like these fibers that would stick together and it would actually be like a bark cloth. | ||
| You know, I'll have Emily bring you some of it. | ||
| She's coming out here and we got you a knife because they can bang down these knives into, or bang down these nails into knives. | ||
| Super wicked looking and sharp, but they can make nails into knives. | ||
| And so we got you one of those. | ||
| And it's nuts the things they can do. | ||
| How big are these nails that they can turn them into a knife? | ||
| They're normally pretty big, like from the lumber guys and stuff, whatever they're doing, if they're building ladders and things like that. | ||
| And so they can do everything. | ||
| And so she was out there watching them paint on this bark cloth. | ||
| I think if you just Google bark cloth, they'll show it too. | ||
| And then I step out of the hut, and Ben's standing there, and when Ben's standing there, he looks at me, and all of a sudden, he goes, don't move. | ||
| And I said, my eyes got big, and I said, why? | ||
| And whenever I said why, all of a sudden, I saw that big spider from the night before, that tarantula. | ||
| It was in my, at the time, gigantic, you know, chest-length beard, and its legs were just coming up right on my face. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Doom! | |
| And Ben literally just slapped you in the face. | ||
| Oh my gosh, so hard. | ||
| Just smacked me. | ||
| And the spider fell and Emily starts turning around and Ben steps on top of the tarantula because he doesn't want to freak her out. | ||
| She's like, what just happened? | ||
| I said, oh, nothing. | ||
| Nothing happened. | ||
| She's like, what's going on? | ||
| And Ben's still, you know, moving his foot back and forth, squashing the thing, killing it, making sure it's dead. | ||
| But there's just crazy stuff out there. | ||
| Like, I've been able to pull out, I think Emily and I counted five times in one night that I pulled these little roaches out of my beard. | ||
| Because I guess they think it's like a nest or something like that. | ||
| Why are you growing that crazy beard out there, man? | ||
| Well, I didn't take any beard trimmers with me or anything like that, but also I wanted to see how long it would get in a year. | ||
| And it's kind of an icebreaker for me. | ||
| It's kind of funny or crazy, but for me, they've never seen something like it. | ||
| I look like an animal to them a lot of times walking through. | ||
| They have these jokes that I wouldn't want to come across him in a dark forest, you know, on a dark path. | ||
| And I've come into the village, actually Bobofy, that one, whenever I first walked in, people grabbed their kids, jumped in their huts or... | ||
| We're literally just booked it and disappeared through the forest because they didn't know... | ||
| They've never seen anything like you before. | ||
| Yeah, they've never seen a white dude. | ||
| They've never seen someone with white skin. | ||
| Did they know that white dudes exist? | ||
| I'm sure there they did, but they've never seen it, never heard of it. | ||
| They've been told at times... | ||
| It's almost like sometimes... | ||
| White guys are the boogeyman or something where, you know, if you don't behave, a white man's going to come get you or come eat you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I've heard that before, yeah. | ||
| And so for me to go in there, they're really timid or scared at first until I develop a relationship with them. | ||
| And as goofy as it is, my hair... | ||
| My hairy, hairy, enormously hairy arms and beard and long hair can be an icebreaker. | ||
| So I can first scare them, then it can be an icebreaker, and then it can be kind of entertainment for them. | ||
| They braid my hair, they play with my beard, all that. | ||
| Well, there's some great videos of you that have gone online that people have actually tweeted to me, not even knowing that I know you, of them seeing you for the first time, of pygmies touching you and touching your beard and seeing your white skin for the first time. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Some of the rumors that happened, too, is there was a neighboring village, and he had sprinted from Bobofi back to Bahaha. | ||
| And he was visiting there, got terrified, ran away, and basically said that there was a big white ape that had walked into the village. | ||
| And basically, I was a great white Sasquatch or vanilla gorilla, and it made him terrified. | ||
| And so then he found out that we had been there, we'd gotten them land, we'd dug a well, we started farming yams and potatoes and beans and corn now there. | ||
| And so it's been pretty funny. | ||
| Another thing was... | ||
| One of the slave master villages had said that I came to leave... | ||
| Jamie, do you have your mic on? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, there's someone outside. | |
| Oh, there's someone outside? | ||
| My real reason of being there was that because I would go and I would walk with them to the dirty water source. | ||
| If you pull up the bad water, I would carry it with them just to experience how long that they would have to walk. | ||
| Sometimes they were walking five miles Five miles with dirty water to come back and cook with and give their kids and drink and bathe. | ||
| And those, I think, are 20 gallons or 40 liters or something like that. | ||
| But they're like 30, 40 pounds, man. | ||
| And my neck, just doing that with them, would get so incredibly sore. | ||
| I mean, those are grown women next to me. | ||
| And they're walking sometimes with two of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Sometimes they're walking with two of those, or one about half that size. | ||
| But the other people from the other tribes that are bigger and stronger, they're walking with one on top of their head and one over their back. | ||
| And it's just crazy. | ||
| And one of those villages that said, what I really come there to do was study their streams, their creeks, and then I left behind my half fish, half woman, and stationed them at each little creek and each little stream that I was going and investigating. | ||
| So basically they were saying that I had brought mermaids to leave at every village. | ||
| And I'm like, where did that come from? | ||
| Like, where did you guys think I'm coming up with a mermaid to come bring and leave here? | ||
| And they didn't say it was evil or anything, but they said I was bringing mermaids. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| It's like you're living in the 21st century, but it's almost like you're going into this land that hasn't changed much in thousands of years, and they still have the same sort of mythologies and folklore that you'd expect from people that lived Before education, before the internet, even before books. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like you're going back in time. | ||
| Because people don't have cell phones. | ||
| A lot of times, what I would do is, yeah, we'd take pictures together. | ||
| But then I'd come and I would go into town and I brought with me, I think it's called a selfie. | ||
| It's like a little Canon printer. | ||
| And I could print off photos that I took. | ||
| So I'd go back, and them seeing themselves on my camera for the first time. | ||
| Some of this is their first time seeing themselves, besides being in a reflection of water. | ||
| I mean, they don't have mirrors. | ||
| They don't have cameras. | ||
| They don't have any of that. | ||
| So how do they see themselves besides their reflection? | ||
| But what we would do is, I mean, there's been other people that have come into some of the villages and take pictures, and they leave, and then they never get to see them. | ||
| But we would go print them, and we'd come back, and we'd give them family photos. | ||
| We'd give them like a family portrait. | ||
| But we would either put it in like almost a Ziploc bag or kind of do... | ||
| One time we did like this laminate kind of stuff on it because in their living conditions, in their huts, with the rain coming through it, with their ground sometimes turning to mud that they're sleeping on, you know, we wanted to protect the pictures that we were giving them. | ||
| But just something like that, it's a small gift to us. | ||
| But to them, it just blows their mind that you can take a picture of them, a moment in time, you can go print it, and then you can give it back to them, and now they can have it forever if they keep it right. | ||
| That's incredible, man. | ||
| Is there any superstition involved in photographs, like you heard with the Native Americans? | ||
| No, not there. | ||
| Now, in other places like populated areas in Congo and Uganda and Rwanda, anywhere that there's been conflict, that then brings in a lot of reporters and other people. | ||
| Like, they come and they take pictures, and the locals will say, oh, they're coming and taking our pictures, and then they're going and making money off of us. | ||
| We don't get to see those pictures or anything like that, so you have to be, like, I'm not going around like a tourist and taking pictures. | ||
| I'm When I get into the village, you know, sometimes I pull it out for entertainment and show them themselves where they can, you know, in the iPhone where you can actually see yourself on the screen at that time and their eyes just light up and it's like a mirror but it's, you know, it's on a screen. | ||
| And so it's crazy for them. | ||
| That is so cool, man. | ||
| What an amazing journey you've been on, man. | ||
| I mean, just... | ||
| I know Loretta Hunt, who's sitting over here to our right, to your right, who you've written a bunch of books, Loretta, and she's writing a book about you right now. | ||
| I want to read that book, man, because I think it's really fascinating. | ||
| But I think a documentary is really what we need to see, too. | ||
| Like, someone needs to... | ||
| Gotta have some bad motherfuckers that go with a camera crew to the Congo, too. | ||
| Yeah, well, we did something for Water 4, and it's on Vimeo, but it's called Freedom in the Congo, and it's a very, very well-done seven-minute documentary of kind of the work we were doing. | ||
| So yeah, it's called Freedom in the Congo on Vimeo. | ||
| And what was so cool was this guy that came to film it, his name's Derek Watson, and he's done stuff for National Geographic and PBS, and he's done like full documentaries and got a woman named Sister Rosemary that was helping girls that were abducted by the LRA and made quote-unquote wives of them, but really they were just sex slaves. | ||
| She would help them out. | ||
| His documentary got her in Time Magazine's Top 100 People. | ||
| But anyways, he snuck in a GoPro drone. | ||
| Here it is right here. | ||
| So it's just flying over the forest. | ||
| Wow, you can't sense what the forest looks like. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| You know, living in my American bubble. | ||
| You know, there's no slaves today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got rid of that in the 1800s. | |
| Slavery in today's age? | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Why should it exist? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is all subtitled for folks that are just listening to this. | |
| Freedom in the Congo. | ||
| Check it out on Vimeo. | ||
| Slave masters come up to me and say, what are you here doing with my animals? | ||
| What are you here doing with my property? | ||
| I own these people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's them getting paid two bananas. | |
| They just need to be given a few fish, a few bananas, something small so that they can come back and work the next day, so that they're hungry enough that they have to come back and work the next day. | ||
| It's, um... | ||
| Let's leave this for people to wash the full things so they don't... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One thing on that that we're going to edit, just to know, is it says on there, it says Bantu on it. | ||
| And yeah, they are some of the slave masters there. | ||
| It's the Bantu and the Pygmies, but really it's the Makapala. | ||
| And it's basically the non-pygmies. | ||
| In the region that the pygmies live, we don't want to villainize a certain people group. | ||
| Again, we want to work with both sides. | ||
| And we want to add to each. | ||
| We don't want to take away. | ||
| We don't want to hurt them in the process. | ||
| But we want to educate them that, hey, we're both equals and how can we do this in the best way? | ||
| Possible so we're changing that just so that there's no like Nothing nothing seemed like we're trying to To to point them out because they're the biggest people group in a in all of Africa and they're there most of them live where there aren't even pygmies But where there are pygmies most of it most of the time the pygmies are being enslaved do these guys know these these pygmy folks do they know that you Fought in the UFC. Do they understand what the UFC is? | ||
| I'm trying to explain it. | ||
| They kind of I wonder, how can that be a job? | ||
| Because they've only seen physical conflict whenever there's a real dispute. | ||
| And there's not really martial arts there. | ||
| But they do kind of wrestle around some. | ||
| But it's gotten me out of trouble before in the Congo. | ||
| I had a Topps card, and I just kept it with me on me. | ||
| And I'd try to show them, and it was me just blasting, I hit them in the chin. | ||
| And it was... | ||
| Anyways, yeah, they were being real corrupt and everything and I showed them it and ended up signing it and just giving it to them and they let us go. | ||
| Instead of paying any money. | ||
| Give them a baseball card or an MMA version of the baseball card. | ||
| They were going to try to steal... | ||
| Well, Jay Lua, he's my grandfather, he gave me a pygmy bow and arrow. | ||
| Well, a bunch of arrows and a bow. | ||
| And this guy was just saying that it was illegal for me to have it. | ||
| And I'm like, it's a gift. | ||
| He's like, no, no, no. | ||
| You came here to come take our artifacts back to your country and make thousands of dollars. | ||
| And if you're going to go make those thousands of dollars, then you have to give me hundreds of dollars. | ||
| I'm like, that's not going to happen. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| And so he's like trying to pull it out of my hand. | ||
| I said, what if I give you this? | ||
| And just gave him the UFC Tops card and talked to him and played around with him. | ||
| Sometimes when they're asking you to give them something, Matt actually taught it to me, the guy in the video from Water 4. If they ask for you to give them something, sometimes you just got to give them anything and they'll let you go. | ||
| It can be a bottle of water, it can be a passion fruit, it can be a banana. | ||
| One time a guy said, you got to give me something or I'm not going to let you go. | ||
| So I just wrapped him up in a big bear hug. | ||
| Afterwards, I said, there, I gave you a hug. | ||
| And he was laughing, you know. | ||
| And in between us, you know, he's got a machine gun. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| A bear hug to do with a machine gun? | ||
| Well, he wasn't holding on to it and pointing it at me or anything. | ||
| They just always have them around him. | ||
| That's still a bold move. | ||
| And Matt had done basically that same thing in, I think, Togo, where he was doing water wells all throughout there. | ||
| He's done hundreds there. | ||
| But yeah, sometimes you've got to find a way to make them laugh, or to make them like you, or to try to find a way to get the job done. | ||
| Do they speak English when you're communicating with these people? | ||
| Some of them are. | ||
| Some of them are pretty educated. | ||
| I think it's harder for us and our culture to learn languages because we don't grow up learning several languages at once. | ||
| But there, they're growing up learning four, five, six languages at one time. | ||
| And so some of them, yeah, they speak English very fluently. | ||
| And are they learning this from school? | ||
| Are they learning this from... | ||
| School or a lot of times the military are learning it from their jobs, their work. | ||
| If there's humanitarian organizations that are speaking English and different things like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What is the endgame for you here? | ||
| You're obviously improving their lives dramatically by creating these wells and bringing them medicine. | ||
| What do you eventually hope to do? | ||
| Well, that's a big question, but I'll try to simplify it. | ||
| I just want them to know that they're loved, that they're not forgotten, and that this is a lifelong thing for me. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't matter what's going on. | ||
| I'm going to be going there my entire life. | ||
| What I hope is just to add to their life. | ||
| Like for me, whenever I sit back and I say, okay, what does a perfect world look like? | ||
| And how can I try to take action to see that the good comes into the world instead of the bad, instead of the evil? | ||
| Instead of the kids dying of dirty water, what can I do as a person to see that that is alleviated at least a little bit? | ||
| Even just for one person, if I can do that. | ||
| For me and my pygmy family, I don't want to see that same kind of suffering. | ||
| We've actually seen them set free now, and we've seen them get clean water and seen them have food, and that's hopefully just the beginning of different things that will be a lifelong way to To sustain them and the people in that region. | ||
| When you're there and you hang out with these people, especially when they know that you've done the UFC and they understand that you participate in professional conflict, as it were, do you teach them things? | ||
| Do you ever have a class there? | ||
| I've shown a few of them, about maybe 10 or 15 of the men one time, just some little wrestling. | ||
| I was teaching them an arm drag, just because I didn't want people falling down and getting hurt or something like that. | ||
| So I was teaching them an arm drag, a throw-by, a little bit of a double leg, but how to set them down easy. | ||
| So it was fun, and then they really grasped onto it. | ||
| And a guy named Baiwanja, he loved it and he would go around and he would be grabbing onto everybody. | ||
| Arm dragging them? | ||
| Yeah, arm dragging them, jumping on their back. | ||
| You'd teach them how to take the back? | ||
| Yeah, from an arm drag or a throw-by. | ||
| Not on the ground grappling, but I would... | ||
| Yeah, he would get behind them. | ||
| That was just his natural reaction was to be a spider monkey, just jump on their back, Marcelo Garcia style. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| What about striking? | ||
| Do you teach him any striking? | ||
| No, I haven't done that, man. | ||
| I think for me now, it hasn't been a big thing showing them martial arts. | ||
| It's my big passion. | ||
| I'd love for them too. | ||
| It's just kind of hard being in the jungle, in the forest, there's trees everywhere, there's stumps everywhere. | ||
| It's hard to get a nice space to grapple. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine that would be, especially for takedowns, right? | ||
| Fall down, land a log up your ass. | ||
| When you are planning, I mean, have you committed to this plan of fighting again, or is this still something that you have in your head? | ||
| I haven't announced it or formally made a plan with anybody yet, but for me, my family, my wife, and the Takedown guys know that I'm going to make a real stab at it. | ||
| So you're definitely going to do it? | ||
| I'm going to do it. | ||
| So when you do that, how much time will you spend here, and how much time will you spend there, and how much time do you spend here and there right now? | ||
| Yeah, well, I've been going since 2011, and I've taken, you know, month-long trips there until this last one, which was a one-year trip. | ||
| And if I go back into fighting, it would only allow me probably to go there one, two, or max three times a year for anywhere from two to four weeks at a time. | ||
| So I would love to train hard, to fight hard. | ||
| I know one thing's for sure. | ||
| I'll never have more motivation to beat a dude. | ||
| To go in there, to get my hand raised, not just for me, but for starting my family with my wife, but also for the family there in Congo, that more is going to be added to them and to alleviate what's going on there. | ||
| Now, were you released by the UFC, or did you just stop fighting? | ||
| Like, what happened? | ||
| Yeah, I was released, and then I fought, and I won three fights, and I stepped away. | ||
| I'm sure there was an open door to go back. | ||
| What organization did you win three fights with? | ||
| Ring of Fire. | ||
| So you were in Denver? | ||
| And then I fought in Vegas once for another promotion. | ||
| I fought a dude that I think was 6-0 at the time and stopped him. | ||
| For me though, I know that it wouldn't be a step right back into that level of the UFC. Not right away. | ||
| I'd have to work my way back up to that. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| If the right opponent and stuff like that comes along. | ||
| But for me... | ||
| I want to train hard but smart, be strategic about the matchups. | ||
| I mean, me, I'm a competitor. | ||
| Whenever I was wrestling, I had Kenny Monday as my high school coach, Olympic gold medalist. | ||
| Kendall Cross, Olympic gold medalist. | ||
| Then I went to the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| So something I think, if you ask Brendan or anyone that's trained with me, they'll say that I'm a competitor and that my heart or spirit is a competitor. | ||
| Spirit of a fighter, heart of a fighter. | ||
| And Kenny Mundy's that team takedown, too, which is great. | ||
| Yeah, that's something that is, you know, is a light bulb moment. | ||
| I was amazed that they let him go with the Black Zillions. | ||
| I was like, are you crazy? | ||
| Do you know what a wealth of knowledge that guy has when it comes to wrestling? | ||
| I mean, I guess it was a personality conflict or something like that, but man, what a great coach that guy is and a great wrestler. | ||
| Yeah, with me, high school, and then ever since then, and then even now, whenever I stepped away, he fully 100% supported everything and said that he loves what I'm doing. | ||
| But what's so great about Coach Money is he really will invest into people and really teach them Slick stuff that you're not going to find from a high school or college program. | ||
| This is Olympic-level stuff that's coming from all over the world, and it's the little things that matter. | ||
| So he's able to teach us those things. | ||
| He's a great man. | ||
| Yeah, I thought he was a great addition to Team Takedown. | ||
| I saw him when he was training and working with Johnny Hendricks in the rematch with Robbie Lawler. | ||
| What's going on right now with Johnny Hendricks? | ||
| Are you training with him? | ||
| Are you there with him in Dallas? | ||
| I've watched him train. | ||
| I haven't really stepped in there yet. | ||
| I think for me, right now, I'm out of shape. | ||
| I'm out of shape, and I want to come back in. | ||
| My problem was that I would come back too soon, and then injuries would happen, so I'm going to get my core and all that back before I step in there with those guys. | ||
| What do you weigh? | ||
| Right now, 280. 280? | ||
| Yeah, 280 right now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, and so I'll have to get back down. | ||
| I'll probably be around 255, around fight time, 250. That's me coming back from Congo, having no food, coming back and having all the food at my disposal. | ||
| Barbecue, baby. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Are you living in Dallas? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And my grandpa owns several barbecue restaurants. | ||
| Oh, how dare you. | ||
| Texas barbecue is something special, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You're living an incredible life, man. | ||
| I think it would be really fascinating if you did come back and what a story that would be. | ||
| I mean, it would generate an incredible amount of press and an incredible amount of attention towards what you're trying to do in the Congo. | ||
| Well, that's humbling to hear because I respect your opinion so much of being in the fight game for so long. | ||
| I want to be realistic about it and say right now I'm not looking at the world champion level. | ||
| I'm not aiming at that right now, but that could be a future goal once I get back into it, get in shape, and really start Start just knocking some dudes down. | ||
| Do you know how crazy it would be if you got to the point where you're fighting for the title? | ||
| Do you know how fucking bananas that would be? | ||
| That would be nuts. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about the most incredible PR campaign ever. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about someone that you could really get behind and root for? | ||
| Jesus Christ, you'd have the whole world rooting for you. | ||
| It's a goddamn Rocky movie. | ||
| I'm getting goosebumps. | ||
| That would be crazy, man. | ||
| If you could really get into top shape... | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| I would love that. | ||
| That would be the perfect world. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| I feel like in my heart, that's one of my deepest desires is to fight and contend for the highest possible good in every circumstance. | ||
| Like, it doesn't matter if it's there or here, whatever it is, whenever I'm meeting somebody, like, what can I do to add to the lives of another? | ||
| And if I can do that through fighting, something that I'm very passionate about, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean, it's humbling. | ||
| It goes through my mind. | ||
| I try to be realistic, try to... | ||
| But at the same time, I'm a big dreamer. | ||
| And I think that if I could do... | ||
| I mean, that would be, obviously, the cat's pajamas. | ||
| If I could be the champ in the cat's pajamas. | ||
| Could you imagine if you won the title? | ||
| I mean, that would be unbelievable. | ||
| Obviously, that's going to take some superhuman dedication to hit that level. | ||
| You don't get to that level without it. | ||
| No. | ||
| But yeah, that's what's so motivating about me getting back into it is I see a huge opportunity. | ||
| To fulfill that first promise I gave him, man, I was standing at the grave of Andy Bo, and I had held him in my hands and had his blood on me. | ||
| And I had buried him, and it was so tough, so hard. | ||
| And then one of the chiefs came to me and said, nobody knows. | ||
| About what's happening to us. | ||
| Nobody knows about the suffering. | ||
| And he said, I know you can't promise us water, land, any of that stuff, but can you tell people? | ||
| Can you at least give us a voice? | ||
| And so that's whenever I made that promise. | ||
| And so me going back into fighting would be... | ||
| Extremely emotional for me to get back into it, to get back in shape, to go back in there, to knock some dudes out. | ||
| They're gonna have to put me away, really put me away for me not to do everything in my power to win that fight. | ||
| Well, you've always had a ridiculous chance. | ||
| That was like one of your biggest assets. | ||
| You take a tremendous shot. | ||
| Has that always been the case? | ||
| People would always joke saying I have cement. | ||
| Get that big fucking Viking head, dude. | ||
| Yeah, well, even at heavyweight, my head's normally like twice the size of everyone else. | ||
| So it's an easy target, but it takes a beating. | ||
| Was it tough watching a fellow Viking go down this weekend? | ||
| Man, what was so tough was like... | ||
| Him afterwards, like even with Anthony saying that, you know, he's crying. | ||
| I can't even celebrate. | ||
| That was tough. | ||
| Well, he's so loved there, man. | ||
| I mean, he literally is carrying the entire country on his back there. | ||
| I mean, there's a tremendous amount of pressure involved in that. | ||
| A tremendous amount of love, too. | ||
| They fucking love Gustafsson. | ||
| I mean, they were cheering for him after he lost. | ||
| It was like, in America... | ||
| I mean, I don't want to shit on America, but man, when people lose in America, everybody fucking clears out of the arena right away. | ||
| And nobody cleared out after you lost. | ||
| They stuck around and they waited. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about an arena filled with 26,000 people, too. | ||
| It's a long fucking commute. | ||
| It's zero degrees outside. | ||
| It's cold as fuck. | ||
| They all stuck around. | ||
| They were chanting out his name after he lost. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I knew that it was a deafening silence when he lost. | ||
| Yeah, I could have started crying if I started thinking about it. | ||
| I could have started crying then, watching him. | ||
| It was pretty intense. | ||
| But I was so blown away by Rumble, too. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| Beast. | ||
| Yeah, it was like this combination of... | ||
| I mean, that's often how it is when you watch fights. | ||
| It's like there's a combination of moments. | ||
| Like, I'm a big fan of Jon Jones, but I'm also a big fan of Daniel Cormier. | ||
| I love Daniel. | ||
| I love both those guys as human beings as well as as fighters. | ||
| So after Jon Jones trounced Daniel, part of me was like, man, I feel sorry for Daniel. | ||
| But other part of me was like, god damn, Jon Jones is a bad motherfucker. | ||
| There's this weird sort of, you revel in the moment for the guy who won. | ||
| Also, you've got to look at a guy like Gustafson and go, wow, that's hard for him. | ||
| That's got to be hard. | ||
| It's really cool hearing that about the Swedish fans, though. | ||
| I mean, that's a reason why I loved Pride, was that the fans were so educated. | ||
| And they would sit there, you know, quiet and polite, and then whenever they would appreciate even the moves of grappling, you know, passing full guard to half guard, and they would clap, you know? | ||
| That's something that... | ||
| We're starting to see that more now. | ||
| People understand positions. | ||
| Like someone will move to a mountain, you'll hear a big cheer throughout the audience where people understand. | ||
| But yeah, Japan, it's a very, very different environment. | ||
| It's incredibly quiet while the fights are going on. | ||
| And then there's a cheer when there's some sort of a transition or someone does something good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they also, they don't put as much of an emphasis on winning as they do as much as you fought your hardest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And there's always going to be people that beat you. | ||
| Like, you could train your hardest, and you run into somebody who's just far better than you, and there's just nothing you can do about it. | ||
| That guy's always going to beat you. | ||
| You know, there's certain guys like Perfect example. | ||
| Stefan Bonner when he fought Anderson Silva. | ||
| You can fight your hardest, man. | ||
| You're not going to be in Anderson Silva. | ||
| He's better. | ||
| He's just better. | ||
| He trains just as hard. | ||
| He's probably just as smart, if not smarter. | ||
| He knows way more. | ||
| He can move way better. | ||
| But in Japan, when a guy would fight like that, They would still appreciate your warrior spirit. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was going to say. | ||
| It's like that samurai kind of spirit, you know? | ||
| America, we just like winners. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We like winners. | ||
| When you lose, people will get on your fucking Facebook page. | ||
| They'll get on your Twitter page. | ||
| I mean, I've read... | ||
| Some, you know, I don't want to call them fans, just douchebags that torment people after they lose. | ||
| And I've read some of the tweets and it's just fucking appalling. | ||
| It's appalling that these anonymous shitheads who go on these guys' pages after they've spent, you know, eight... | ||
| Weeks plus camps every day preparing for this moment and then they get trounced and then people just go off on them and they make memes about them and they mock them. | ||
| That's a very unfortunate aspect of our culture. | ||
| They put so much emphasis on the winner only. | ||
| But on the other hand, it's like that cruelty and that intense pressure, it's also why the baddest motherfuckers come out of that culture. | ||
| It's like people that can withstand that. | ||
| There's a yin and a yang, and the yin is harder and the yang is harder. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I don't think it's the right way to be. | ||
| I certainly don't think there's enough respect paid to the people that lose in MMA in America. | ||
| I think I appreciate the Japanese version of it better. | ||
| I don't like win bonuses either. | ||
| I mean, I know the UFC probably doesn't like to hear this, but I think... | ||
| I think a guy should be paid a certain amount to fight, and I know the guys are going to fight their fucking hardest. | ||
| I mean, they're not fighting harder because they get a win bonus. | ||
| They're trying to survive. | ||
| I mean, you could say that. | ||
| I mean, you could explain that more than anybody, but... | ||
| You're trying to win. | ||
| A win bonus, the fact that you can make 50% more if you win than you do if you lose, it's kind of crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of crazy because once you get to a certain level at least, once you get to a certain level, man, I don't think it does make you fight harder. | ||
| Afterwards, it sucks more. | ||
| Yeah, it sucks more. | ||
| Because now you can't pay the bills that you were hoping to and things like that. | ||
| Well, Tyron Woodley had a really good statement recently. | ||
| We was talking about how people are always saying, you know, don't leave it in the hands of the judges. | ||
| He's like, do you fucking think we're trying to leave it in the hands of the judges? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, they're fighting the best guys in the goddamn world. | ||
| It's like, you do what you can do, and if you do more than that, like... | ||
| If you do something stupid, or you do something illogical, or you do something reckless, you can get knocked the fuck out. | ||
| I'm a big fan of guys fighting intelligently. | ||
| And when people fight intelligently, sometimes it's not the most entertaining fight. | ||
| But that is the fight that you have to fight. | ||
| That's the way you have to perform. | ||
| In order to to use your skills to the best of your ability, you know, and people don't understand that and this idea that like they're Trying to leave it in the hands of the judges. | ||
| I mean occasionally you'll see a guy fight safe Yeah, you know you see a guy that goofy fight Where the goofy ending Nate Corey versus who was it where he's walking? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah walking him down. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure they wouldn't want to beat him the same amount I'm sure they were happy that they paid him 50% Yes, that's that's the worst example of all time. | ||
| Yeah And I don't know what was wrong with Caleb Starnes in that fight, but yeah, those memes exist. | ||
| That'll haunt that dude forever. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| But I think, yeah, once you get to a certain level, and if you're a real competitor that does have the eye on the top prize, then you're going to fight your heart out every single time. | ||
| I'm glad Woodley said that. | ||
| That's a very important point. | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| I hadn't heard that. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Yeah, I don't like that. | ||
| Don't leave it in the hands of the judges. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And then the judge thing, too, is a real issue. | ||
| In Boston, there's a few retarded decisions where people just went, what? | ||
| And people just turned around looking at each other. | ||
| I love watching a decision. | ||
| When a decision's bad, I always turn towards the crowd. | ||
| Because I like watching people look at each other like, what the fuck? | ||
| Because you'll see head turns where people turn to their friends like, what the fuck just happened? | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| Yeah, there's some bad fucking judging, man. | ||
| There's some really, really bad judging. | ||
| And it didn't help that it was in Boston where the white guys were getting the good judges, the good call. | ||
| You know, because Boston, where I'm from, is not exactly known for being the least racist place on the planet, you know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't want to sound sexist at all, but one of my fights on... | ||
| Too late. | ||
| Oops. | ||
| Whatever you say. | ||
| I don't want to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sorry. | |
| On The Ultimate Fighter, when I fought Big Country, two of the three judges we had were women. | ||
| And one had gray hair and the other had her two kids that were running around at the Ultimate Fighter like Jim. | ||
| And so she was worried about her kids while we were warming up for the fight. | ||
| And then I'm not saying that affected the decision. | ||
| It could have gone a third round. | ||
| I definitely believe that. | ||
| But at the same time, like, it was just nuts to me that I'm like, whoa, how are these the judges in Vegas? | ||
| Not that, I mean, but I think that judges should at least have had to have trained or fought before or really had to have gone through some deep training to become a judge. | ||
| Yeah, there's no way you understand it any other way. | ||
| I don't, especially the ground game. | ||
| You know, there's a judge, I don't want to say his name, but he told me that he was watching a fight once, and there was a woman who was also judging, and the guy was going for a Kimura, and the woman said, what's he doing? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| And she said to him, what's he doing? | ||
| Like, what's he doing? | ||
| Like, god damn. | ||
| See, for my fight, it was nuts, because I'm like, this woman, I don't know that she's ever, I mean, maybe she had really watched MMA and studied it, but... | ||
| She's got gray hair. | ||
| It's not normally into her element and then her time zone or whatever. | ||
| But then also the other lady that brought her kids there, do they know what these moves are that we're doing? | ||
| Do they know the names of them? | ||
| Do they know the setups? | ||
| Do they know the defenses? | ||
| Do they know what's going on during the fight? | ||
| While that human chess match is going on, do they know what the fighters are thinking, doing, how they're making it happen? | ||
| And if they don't, they shouldn't be judging. | ||
| There's no way they should be judging. | ||
| I mean, there's so many fans of MMA, and I've said this many times. | ||
| I've even said this on broadcast. | ||
| There's so many incredibly knowledgeable fans of MMA that if they held open casting calls for new judges, you would get incredibly qualified people who have either... | ||
| Trained their whole lives or competed multiple times that enjoy the sport love the sport like you if you decided to never like Ricardo Almeida He's a judge in in New Jersey. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, he judges in New Jersey I would trust yeah fucking without a doubt or even if it was a girl if it was one of the women that had fought for a train before a Rose or Rhonda or someone like that like I could trust their judgment Yeah, and I think you should be like, God, you've got to have some grappling experience. | ||
| Because grappling seems to be the most confusing. | ||
| It seems like if someone is hitting the other guy more, and the other guy gets stunned, it's kind of obvious, oh, that guy's winning the fight. | ||
| But if you're watching, say, a guy who's really slick on the ground, like fill-in-the-blank, some guy who's got a nasty guard, and he's putting this guy in all sorts of bad positions, but the other guy's on top, Like Charles Oliveira, a perfect example when he fought Jeremy Stephens. | ||
| I mean, he was catching Jeremy Stephens and all kinds of shit, but Jeremy's a beast and he kept pulling out of it. | ||
| But for my money, he's winning the exchanges. | ||
| I mean, he had him threatened with arm bars. | ||
| He's threatening with all this sort of shit off of his back. | ||
| If you don't know what the fuck is going on and you're watching that... | ||
| I think the guy on top's winning. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You might be inclined to think that. | ||
| I think with a person who's trained, you understand it way better. | ||
| And I just think it's unfair. | ||
| Like, just deeply, deeply, deeply unfair for a professional fighter who's taken eight weeks out of his life and just every morning got up sore and did his road work and, you know, hitting the pads and sparring. | ||
| Doing constant drills and strength and conditioning. | ||
| You're jumping over hurdles. | ||
| You're doing all this fucking shit. | ||
| You want to puke blood. | ||
| You're throwing up. | ||
| And then some a-hole who doesn't know shit about what they're talking about gives the other person, they just go left or right. | ||
| You know, oh, pick this guy. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a lot more than that eight weeks of training, too, that all goes into it. | ||
| All of the stuff that ever came before it and all your heart, all your soul, all that. | ||
| And then what is, I was going to ask, what is even the process to become a judge? | ||
| Because I don't even know what that is. | ||
| Well, it depends on the athletic commission. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of local athletic commissions where they do a better job than the bigger athletic commissions, really, because the people that are involved are dedicated mixed martial artists. | ||
| In Boston, I know Joe Esposito was part of the commission, and Joe Esposito was my first karate instructor. | ||
| I mean, he's a guy who's a lifelong martial artist, so he is a very credible source of martial arts knowledge. | ||
| I mean, he's a guy who's been involved his whole life. | ||
| Whereas, you've got people in Nevada that came from boxing. | ||
| They were boxing judges, and then someone said, you know, we need judges for MMA, you know, we'll just take these boxing people and, you know, we'll use them to judge MMA fights. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| I mean, it's really crazy. | ||
| Well, you know, you've got people that don't understand how much a leg kick hurts. | ||
| They don't think that that's anything. | ||
| You know, you've got people that they have no idea what's going on when you're watching infighting up against a cage. | ||
| They have no idea, you know, who's getting the better of those exchanges. | ||
| They just don't know. | ||
| They just see bodies moving, you know, and they just, they don't, you know, see guys reversing positions back and forth and they really don't understand what's happening. | ||
| It's a real shame because the sport is growing in such a huge way. | ||
| I mean, it's exploding all over the world in leaps and bounds, but then you're hampered by these bad judge calls, you know? | ||
| Yeah, it's terrible. | ||
| I know that it's robbed a lot of people of not just, you know, their passion, their hopes to win the fight, but even that 50% win bonus. | ||
| Yeah, that's disgusting. | ||
| Yeah, so they're actually taking money out of people's pockets that should have won the fight. | ||
| If you decide, and you have decided I guess, to go and do this, what's your timetable? | ||
| How much time are you going to spend training before you get in there? | ||
| I think I need at least, maybe before my first fight, maybe around six months, of actually once I'm in shape, then training. | ||
| Which I'll be getting in shape while I'm training. | ||
| But actually before I start taking some of the bigger, tougher fights, maybe it's a year, maybe it's longer than that. | ||
| It's not something that I'm going to do in the next month or two months or three months. | ||
| It's got to be a... | ||
| A process of really getting my lungs back, getting my core, you know, tightened up so it prevents injuries. | ||
| Getting the timing back of the striking, you know, and timing back of even the transitions on the ground, that chain wrestling or just flowing and grappling. | ||
| So are you starting that process right now? | ||
| So you've already, like, tightened up your diet and started to train harder and started, you're just slowly ramping it up? | ||
| Begun to. | ||
| One thing that I'm getting done before I really maybe start sparring, before I start, yeah, before I start sparring, things like that, is I'm getting my knee checked. | ||
| I got an MRI done. | ||
| And so a doctor says it could be... | ||
| I mean, an MRI, like, scope can be three days down, but I might get something scoped either before or after my first fight back. | ||
| Three days down? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Someone's... | ||
| Well, even Loretta's husband was down for only three days after getting his meniscus scoped. | ||
| Three days. | ||
| Listen, I've had my meniscus scoped a couple times. | ||
| This shit's more than three days. | ||
| I know it could be two weeks, three weeks, six weeks. | ||
| It can be all that. | ||
| You want to make sure that you don't... | ||
| There's a lot of guys that have had knee operations and then got in too soon and done more damage. | ||
| Yeah, that's brutal. | ||
| You're dealing with pain and inflammation and cutting away soft tissue. | ||
| It's not nearly as big a deal as ligaments, but it's so important with knee injuries especially to do the rehab. | ||
| Just do the full rehab. | ||
| You'll listen. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure. | ||
| If you get it done, you'll get it done at a reputable place and you'll talk to a really good doctor. | ||
| Right now it's the Denver Broncos knee doc that I'm talking to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perfect. | |
| He's a great guy. | ||
| What's their prognosis as far as how long? | ||
| First MRI we sent his office, we think lost, but I sent another one out. | ||
| They lost it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it got lost in the mail or something, but we sent it. | ||
| The second one he's looking at, though, I went in for an exam. | ||
| He started moving my knee around. | ||
| He said it feels like there's something with my meniscus and whenever I move it around, it cracks a lot. | ||
| But I don't know that it's going to be something that keeps me out from the first fight. | ||
| Maybe it's something I do right after. | ||
| But I think it'd be good probably to get it done before. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Get it done before. | |
| Yeah, get it done before so I can train right. | ||
| That's what fucked Kane up in the rematch or the fight with Verdum, his meniscus. | ||
| He blew his meniscus out earlier and then, you know, sort of rest and rehabbed and then tried to go back again without getting the operation and then wound up having to get an operation. | ||
| It's the same knee injury that he had when the first fight with Junior Dos Santos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| For me, before I want to actually hard spar, I know it might sound kind of goofy to some, but I think there's truth to it. | ||
| My wife was a swimmer in high school, and so getting into swimming, something that's low impact, but also that's going to be great on my lungs, cardio. | ||
| You don't even notice that you're sweating, you know? | ||
| So swimming, we'd do that at the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| We'd play underwater hockey 12 foot deep. | ||
| We'd go down and just have teams and have to score a goal. | ||
| Dude, swimming's not goofy at all. | ||
| Swimming is brutal. | ||
| Yeah, swimming and yoga is what I'm going to get into hard just to get my body back in shape. | ||
| In a way that my core starts to catch up and develop before I go in there and get put in these funky positions sparring or picking a guy up. | ||
| That's been one of my problems. | ||
| Sometimes I'm slamming a guy or something and that's when I get hurt because I came back from a back injury and then I slam him and then I re-hurt that back injury and I should have rehabbed it better, should have taken the time to really build my core back up. | ||
| So that's going to be not my focus, I'm going to be doing everything else, but that's going to be a priority of mine at the beginning is swimming and yoga. | ||
| Well, listen, dude, we're behind you 100% and your website. | ||
| Let's put it out there one more time. | ||
| Fightfortheforgotten.org.com. | ||
| And then water4.org. | ||
| Fightfortheforgotten.com. | ||
| And there's a donate button on there. | ||
| So please, whatever you can do, folks, donate. | ||
| This is a beautiful cause. | ||
| I think what you're doing is awesome. | ||
| It's so inspirational. | ||
| And you're just an awesome guy, man. | ||
| Just happy to give you a platform to let people know what you're doing. | ||
| Yeah, well, I can't thank you enough for what you've done for even... | ||
| I mean, I know you don't even want props, but whenever you did the Bitcoin and then whatever came in, you matched it. | ||
| I mean, that funded a well plus more. | ||
| Let's fund some more wells, baby. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I'll be more than happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That'd be awesome, man. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're an awesome guy. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Justin the Viking on Twitter, holler at him. | ||
| Go tweet him and go to the website and donate whatever you can. | ||
| This is a real, legit, awesome humanitarian cause, and you're an awesome guy. | ||
| Thank you, Justin. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Alright, fuckers, we'll be back in a little bit with Eddie Huang. | ||
| He's got a new CBS sitcom, and we'll be right back with him at 3 o'clock, which is about 25 minutes. | ||
| See you! |
Export Selection