July 27, 2016 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:25:26
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Two, one... | ||
| And we're live! | ||
| Justin Wren, how are you, sir? | ||
| I'm great. | ||
| What's going on, brother? | ||
| Man, I'm excited to be back here. | ||
| Out there kicking ass, digging wells, all of the above? | ||
| Trying, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All of the above. | |
| How many fights have you had now back in Bellator? | ||
| Only two, but I haven't been back since the first or second one, so this is fun. | ||
| You were here before your first one, right? | ||
| You had a long break. | ||
| Yeah, it was five years and two months. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I hadn't even really trained any at that point. | ||
| I was just doing the wells and going to Congo and then got back into fighting and only had a little bit of time to train, but it was okay. | ||
| How much time did you have before your first fight? | ||
| I think, actually, whenever I was here with you, I fibbed a little where I said it was a little longer because I didn't know if my opponent was going to watch or whatever. | ||
| But my fight camp got cut in half. | ||
| I was traveling, traveling, traveling. | ||
| The book was getting ready to come out and other stuff and trying to write the book and prepare and trying to figure all that out where... | ||
| We were just talking before we got on about just life stuff and scheduling it and everything. | ||
| And I had the book and then Congo and then telling people about it and then also training for a fight. | ||
| And I didn't know how to balance those real well. | ||
| But I planned 12 weeks. | ||
| All of a sudden, Congo Corruption took me to Congo for three weeks at the beginning. | ||
| So I cut it down to nine weeks. | ||
| And then whenever I got back or while I was there, I found out they were moving the fight up on me three weeks. | ||
| And so it cut my camp down to about six, seven weeks. | ||
| So six, seven weeks after being off for more than five years. | ||
| Yeah, and I had trained a few times before that. | ||
| I mean, like, within the few months before, but I think it was probably tops, two months, nine weeks. | ||
| Well, plus, weren't you just getting over malaria? | ||
| Yeah, and I was... | ||
| That's the tough stuff. | ||
| That's tougher than you fight, I feel like. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| We have one of our guys in Congo that's had malaria. | ||
| One of our drillers just recently got real sick. | ||
| It's kind of like constant. | ||
| It's just part of life there. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| And it doesn't matter what kind of medication you take before you go out there? | ||
| I was actually taking... | ||
| Actually, our director at Water4 was taking malarone. | ||
| It's like the best anti-malaria pill. | ||
| I think it's something like $7- $8 every pill. | ||
| So it's the creme de la creme of malaria meds, and it didn't work on him. | ||
| And then I was actually going into Congo. | ||
| Actually, I stopped in London, did one of those TED Talks at a university called Warwick University. | ||
| And the day of the talk, I was at a 103 degree temperature, 103.2. | ||
| And I thought I was pulling out. | ||
| They thought I was pulling out. | ||
| We were at the hospital for four, five, six hours. | ||
| Oh, and dude, even the opportunity to go speak at that is because their team was all fans of JRE. Wow. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, that was the opportunity I got because of this. | ||
| It was tough doing the talk, and then whenever I got into Congo, they told me I had the flu in London, and the doctor's there, and that's what I feel like here, too. | ||
| There can be tropical medicine specialists here, and they're probably really great, but I would trust a doctor that's lived in the climate, the tropical climate around malaria, that's seen it, that's treated it, that knows all the symptoms. | ||
| One knows to look for it, because no one gets it over here. | ||
| Yeah, and so whenever I got into Congo, I flew from work to Congo, and whenever I landed, instead of going straight to the forest, they took me to an airstrip at a hospital out in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| So I landed, went straight to the hospital, and then right there, they're like, you don't have the flu, you have malaria. | ||
| And I'm like, but I've been in the States, I just fought, and then I've, in Europe, like there's no malaria really there. | ||
| But it was because it's still living inside me. | ||
| There's like, I think there's three strands, one to live in your body for three years, five years. | ||
| I think the other is like 30 to life or something. | ||
| What?! | ||
| So it just comes back? | ||
| Yeah, it can. | ||
| Like when your body's really run down, when you're really tired, your immune system's low. | ||
| Like training for a fight? | ||
| Yeah, like training for a fight, or right after the fight. | ||
| Right after the fight, I went to London, spoke, then I went to Congo. | ||
| But right after the fight, so you're recovering from malaria, you go through your six-week fight camp, you have your fight, you run down, and then after the fight you got malaria again? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Now, the sickness... | ||
| I've had it now three times. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So at least confirmed twice the third time. | ||
| They're like, yeah, you have it for sure. | ||
| But with malaria, you have to get the test, the blood test, while you have a certain degree temperature, like fever, whenever it's cycling out of your liver and coming out. | ||
| They have to draw the blood at that exact time to get it. | ||
| And so that's why I was misdiagnosed four times in the Congo and in the Congo. | ||
| What a sneaky fucking disease. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| They're crazy because they'll hide in your liver and then they send them out in your bloodstream like a platoon. | ||
| They go and wreck havoc and then they retreat right back to the liver. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They live in your liver? | ||
| Yeah, that's where they're hiding away for three or five or 30 years. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Is there any solution? | ||
| Is there anything they could do? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| And I had a couple things that happened where, you know, I started trying to take the anti-malaria meds, but it's the only medicine I've ever really reacted to. | ||
| get nauseous, start driving. | ||
| I've heard it's awful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even, uh, even, um, no, I'm pasty white and I get real sun sensitive. | ||
| Um, I know another medicine called mefequin, um, which is, uh, I think it's developed in Switzerland or Sweden, supposed to be an awesome new malaria medicine. | ||
| It's actually the one thing my body kind of responds to, but, um, but it's actually really dangerous because, uh, I've seen people that are there for aid work and different stuff. | ||
| And dude, they have to retreat if they're there with kids and stuff. | ||
| They've moved there to the country. | ||
| They're taken off because kiddos or even adults have mental breaks that they can't come back from. | ||
| You can have psychotic episodes for, I think they said if it lasts longer than a week. | ||
| It's probably gonna last like three months. | ||
| If it lasts longer than three months, it's probably gonna last forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| So this is from the medication? | ||
| Yeah, it's just the medication and it gives you terrible, terrible nightmares. | ||
| I almost went to Tanzania this summer. | ||
| I was gonna go on safari and too many people scared the shit out of me with malaria talk. | ||
| I was gonna take my whole family and I'm like, look, I'll take some malaria medication and feel like shit. | ||
| I'm not giving it to my six-year-old. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| I'm not doing it. | ||
| Yeah, but that's a real concern, right? | ||
| Tanzania has malaria as well, right? | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| Because it's more of an arid climate, they have less there. | ||
| It's not so tropical there. | ||
| I've been to Tanzania a couple times and out in Sanzibar. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't there, but I saw it and it was... | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| It's a crazy, crazy place, because you go from Congo, where they have all these tropical diseases, and you go, I don't know, same continent, you just go over a little bit, and there's all these other kinds of parasites. | ||
| Like, in Congo, they have very little of a... | ||
| I believe they're called jiggers, with a J. Be very careful when you say that word. | ||
| Yeah, I will. | ||
| But jiggers with a J. Sounds wrong. | ||
| Sounds like you should stop. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| But they're these crazy parasites that burrow in your feet, and especially kids and elderly. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Why kids and elderly? | ||
| Well, honestly, I think one reason with poverty, the kids don't get shoes until they can work and buy them, and the elderly, if they're not able to work and provide for themselves, it's harder for them to get shoes and stuff, but... | ||
| Also, it's just where they live, because on the sandy, it's either sandy or the clayish or silty soil that's real red in Uganda. | ||
| Man, it just wreaks havoc on those kids to where they're having to have people come in every week to different villages, sit there with safety pins and all sorts of these little hooks that they dig into the people's feet. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Dude, it's painful. | ||
| Whenever I've seen people getting it done, they're literally putting their, and I've had one in my foot, and it kind of came and gone. | ||
| It's not that bad when it's just one, but whenever your whole foot or your whole heel or all the, you know, the balls of your feet are just covered in, I mean, I'm talking 20, 30, 40, 50 of these parasites, and they're just brutal. | ||
| So every step you see them, when they're walking, they're grimacing. | ||
| When you're taking it out, they're screaming. | ||
| God damn, Africa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Africa, it's such a strange, strange continent. | ||
| Strange, but, man, the people are beautiful in their hearts. | ||
| You know, they're awesome. | ||
| They're half, or probably more than half. | ||
| If you're not a good one, you're very terrible. | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| Well, obviously, from the outside, that's what it looks like. | ||
| Someone like me who tries to pay attention as much as I can, but there's only so much you could actually know about it without being there, I think, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I think whenever you get there, I don't know, fall in love with the people and develop the relationships, that's why you can see past all the garbage, all the discomfort. | ||
| You said that you were held up with corruption, Congo corruption. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| So they called me and said, my team is actually Papa White. | ||
| I call him Papa White because he's like a father figure to me. | ||
| He's the one that had this vision. | ||
| I came alongside him and it's just been, It's been awesome to see what's happened. | ||
| And whenever I went to him, actually, what was the question you were just asking? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| What did I say? | ||
| I said about the corruption. | ||
| Oh, corruption. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, he called me and said, Effie, you got to get back here in like three weeks. | ||
| And I'm like, what? | ||
| I'm training for the fight. | ||
| Like, it's coming up. | ||
| And I can't leave now. | ||
| He says, if you don't come back now, like, I don't know when you can come back. | ||
| They're going to revoke your visa. | ||
| They're going to. | ||
| And I'm like, what for? | ||
| And so they said, check your passport. | ||
| They said your visa is expiring in three weeks. | ||
| And I'm like, it shouldn't be expiring. | ||
| I have a five-year visa. | ||
| But then you have to come in and out of the country every 11 months because if you don't, you lose that five-year visa. | ||
| And so whenever I left with my wife, literally, just so that they can get money out of us and steal and be able to ask for $1,400, sometimes $2,500 to get a visa like this, they write down on your visa when they stamp it the date they write it in. | ||
| And so now I know. | ||
| Look every single time they're writing to make sure they write the right date. | ||
| Because she backdated it like six months or something like that. | ||
| Or maybe nine months. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I had to get back there because they're like, nope, it's going to expire. | ||
| And they thought they gave them... | ||
| Actually, it might have been less than three weeks. | ||
| I think I had to go for three weeks is what happened because I had like a week notice. | ||
| I just took off, went. | ||
| It's actually the cheapest trip I've ever got there because it was like the last seat. | ||
| I was by the toilets in the back the whole time. | ||
| But it was only like $800 round trip. | ||
| Which was incredible. | ||
| That's pretty crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can go to Africa for 800 bucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never seen it like that, but it was cool. | ||
| So I went, and it helped because that saved me some money that I was going to have to pay to try to get out of the corruption and stuff. | ||
| But luckily, when we went there, they didn't think I would just drop and be there in five, six, seven days. | ||
| I took off, went, and we spent three weeks trying to just negotiate with the courts and everything else and say, look, you guys did this, you set me up, all this other stuff. | ||
| Trying to prove them wrong, they're never wrong. | ||
| They're always right. | ||
| Trying to show them Even receipts and pictures. | ||
| We were showing him pictures from Ben's wedding. | ||
| He's like my best friend, like a brother, a translator for me. | ||
| He's our team leader. | ||
| Literally, we were showing him pictures of me at his wedding. | ||
| Luckily, he was dated and everything. | ||
| I was here in the country when you said I had already left four or five months before. | ||
| So it's just nuts. | ||
| But the backdating is intentional? | ||
| They do it on purpose? | ||
| Yeah, they do it on purpose so that for me and my wife both, they made it the same date, which was like six months or eight months early. | ||
| Like we left earlier than what we did. | ||
| So from the outside, when you're visiting them, do they think somehow or another that you're wealthy and that they can take advantage of you? | ||
| They know you're on television. | ||
| Do they know all that? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, we keep that really kind of... | ||
| When I'm there, I am a... | ||
| Let me see if I can get the right. | ||
| I am a professor of appropriate technologies. | ||
| And appropriate technologies are like community development or sustainable solutions. | ||
| And I go there and I'm teaching the students at the university how to... | ||
| And I only do like a week or two seminar with them. | ||
| The rest of the time I'm with my well drilling team. | ||
| And that's my covering. | ||
| I go there as a quote-unquote professor. | ||
| Professor. | ||
| You probably shouldn't give that up on the internet. | ||
| Yeah, maybe not. | ||
| People know. | ||
| No, it's okay, but I do that because, you know, when I go, and really, it's not because I'm on TV or anything like that, or they think I have money. | ||
| They just think anyone that's not Congolese has money. | ||
| And so, because that's what they've seen from people coming in and throwing money around. | ||
| So they want theirs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And a lot of the NGOs are... | ||
| They have quotas and everything else and they have just a huge budget and they got to spend it and they got to meet those quotas. | ||
| So sometimes they throw it around and they're not trying to be frugal with the money because it's not theirs. | ||
| They didn't go out and get it or fundraise it or get a grant for it or anything like that. | ||
| They got it to spend, so they'll just give it away. | ||
| Do the people that live in the Congo, like the pygmies, do they still get malaria? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Is it really common with them? | ||
| Yeah, really common. | ||
| But it's weird because whenever people come, I guess they're more acclimated to it, but it still kills so many. | ||
| But whenever I get it, they're saying, you know, the doctor here told me because of the malaria meds, it would be better for you to go because you're already getting sick with medicine. | ||
| Just go, get malaria, and then get it. | ||
| Diagnosed quick enough get the cure and now your body's actually gonna adapt to it and the next time you get it'll be less and less Wait a minute. | ||
| So they told you to get malaria? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh fucking Christ! | ||
| It's like one of the worst diseases a person can get, right? | ||
| Yeah, but honestly I've seen people even even Ben Ben's nuts like the year that I was there he had malaria and Now, it's almost killed him before, too, but he had malaria like three or four times in a year, and it's just kind of really, really common there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But once you, if you can survive it the first couple times, then they say after that it gets more bearable because you feel it coming. | ||
| You feel the heat waves coming over you, and then you feel the shoulder joint pains and elbows. | ||
| And it just down your whole spine and your finger joints are just throbbing. | ||
| Like you can feel your pulse. | ||
| So it's an inflammation disease? | ||
| It's a blood parasite disease. | ||
| And it just. | ||
| But it causes some inflammation. | ||
| The parasite somehow or another does that to your joints? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it at least causes a lot of pain. | ||
| I know that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it. | |
| What was it? | ||
| I lost 33 pounds. | ||
| Five days. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| 33 pounds in five days? | ||
| Yeah, 33 pounds in five days. | ||
| That's a hell of a diet. | ||
| Look at that Dr. Oz. | ||
| Dr. Oz would sell that. | ||
| I could, yeah, be in here. | ||
| L.A. I got a new L.A. diet for you guys. | ||
| Yeah, you really do. | ||
| It's the Congo diet. | ||
| You're getting really hot. | ||
| Makes you hot. | ||
| So that's a massive sacrifice you're willing to take to do that. | ||
| And the fact that it exists inside your body for an undetermined state of time, that's pretty wild, man. | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| Yeah, honestly, I feel like I was in a much scarier place personally before... | ||
| Before I found this, before I found them, before I got given a second family or accepted into a second family. | ||
| More scarier because you were depressed? | ||
| Yeah, well, depressed, suicidal thoughts I had for like 10 years. | ||
| Just battled it from 13 years old, 23 years old. | ||
| And so, yeah, that was a lot scarier to me. | ||
| Man, you had suicidal thoughts when you were 13. Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And, I mean, I was one that, like, you know, the kid in the class that... | ||
| I mean, I wasn't like... | ||
| I wouldn't say I was... | ||
| How do I say it? | ||
| It was extremely brutal, but it was happening to... | ||
| I mean, everyone gets bullied for the most part. | ||
| Somebody's bullying you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When I was growing up, from third grade till eighth grade for sure, it was brutal. | ||
| Seventh and eighth grade was the worst. | ||
| Were you smaller then? | ||
| You're a gigantic dude. | ||
| I was smaller. | ||
| It takes a lot of balls to bully you. | ||
| That might backfire. | ||
| It's actually kind of why I found fighting. | ||
| Or not why. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Or not kind, it is. | ||
| Because I was 13 years old and I had just gotten... | ||
| Well, two things. | ||
| Have you ever seen in Texas for high school homecomings, they have mums? | ||
| Have you heard of that? | ||
| No, it's a mum. | ||
| The Texas tradition, that's crazy. | ||
| Now, all the kids love them, everything else, but you get these like corsages or fake flowers that they put real big up top and then they are streamers with literal bells and whistles. | ||
| Full-size teddy bears. | ||
| You can have two, three teddy bears. | ||
| When I was in high school, the girl would wear it on her shoulder and the guy would wear it around his arm. | ||
| Now, in Texas, they literally have to put a harness around them and hold these things up because they're so big. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Mums. | ||
| Texas mums. | ||
| What in the fuck is that? | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That's homecoming in Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Look at that. | ||
| I'm telling you, it's nuts. | ||
| It's the whole state? | ||
| The whole state. | ||
| I mean, every homecoming that comes around... | ||
| Texans are nuts about this. | ||
| I mean, I lived in Texas since I was like four months old, so it was... | ||
| They're nuts. | ||
| And they've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger every single year. | ||
| How am I just hearing about this? | ||
| They're real proud of it. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| I mean, I... Are you just hearing about this, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I never... | |
| I think those are literally like two and three hundred dollars now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, when I was in high school, they were like 70, 100. Oh my god, look at all those girls. | ||
| Look at that picture that you had down there. | ||
| There's a giant group of girls with all this... | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| Is that not nuts? | ||
| How do you go to the dance like that? | ||
| How do you go to the game like that? | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| I mean, literally the boyfriends are walking behind them, holding the stuff up for them because... | ||
| What? | ||
| It's getting too heavy, their neck hurts. | ||
| But they want to wear it. | ||
| It's a tradition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Everybody gets excited. | ||
| The bigger... | ||
| The bigger the mum? | ||
| The bigger the mum, the better. | ||
| The more your date liked you. | ||
| Is this a mum company that you just clicked on? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Dude, they're in every single grocery store in Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah, whenever it comes to September, October, November, around homecoming time, high school, this is people's jobs. | ||
| Seasonal jobs, they sit around and they take special orders, they make them for you, or they sell them to where you can make them yourself. | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| It always baffles me when I find out about something for the very first time. | ||
| I don't know why I'm so confused. | ||
| I would like to find out where the tradition came from probably, but people are just so ingrained in you if you're a Texan that you have to get mums. | ||
| Is there any other states? | ||
| Find out if other states accept that. | ||
| Oklahoma doesn't do it. | ||
| Louisiana doesn't. | ||
| New Mexico. | ||
| It's just Texas. | ||
| Twelve things non-Texas need to know about homecoming mums. | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
| The mums started as a simple flower. | ||
| Hold on, scroll up a little bit. | ||
| The mums started as a simple flower. | ||
| Guys give them to their homecoming date. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| Girls also give guys one called a garter. | ||
| Like a garter? | ||
| Oh, they put it on your arm on your garter belt? | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| How bizarre. | ||
| Like one of those things that tie boxers wear? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Being able to make mums can make you rich. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| See? | ||
| $60 to $300. | ||
| What?! | ||
| $300 for fake flowers. | ||
| 300 bucks? | ||
| It ain't cheap to electrify a mum. | ||
| Oh my god, that chick's got one that lights up. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| You can put LED lighting. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Scroll up a little bit. | ||
| You can put LED lighting in mums. | ||
| I didn't know how many folks are doing this back when I was in high school, but nowadays you really want to impress your date. | ||
| The latest in mum lighting technology will help you do just that. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| You know this isn't even like a joke website, right? | ||
| No, this is real. | ||
| They're taking it serious. | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| And so when I was in middle school, seventh grade, I, you know... | ||
| Look at that girl. | ||
| She's got a Christmas tree on her tits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| That's nuts. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| I saved it up and my allowance asked one of my crushes to go to the homecoming game with me. | ||
| She said yes to my surprise. | ||
| Went to the game and spent pretty much all my allowance on her mom. | ||
| Her name's Jessica. | ||
| And I took her to the game, and I'm up in the stands with her, and halftime comes around. | ||
| I'm up at the very top left, and all of a sudden everyone looks back up over the right shoulders at us. | ||
| And this one guy is kind of my bully through... | ||
| Elementary and middle school for sure and his name was Justin as well and so he walks up and Puts his arm out To her and she puts her arm around his and he grabs the streamer that says Justin and Jessica and the year on it or whatever and he says Thanks for getting her this and I'm like what he goes you didn't think she'd come with you Did you and so he just kind of walks down all the schools look in there all laughing? | ||
| having fun And that one hurt, but what was worse was the next year, because, you know, people liked that part of, I don't know, I think... | ||
| For me, when I see bullying now, I just spoke out of middle school and I told one of the teachers asked, what should you tell a kid that's battling with suicidal thoughts or depression, even maybe suicidal thoughts? | ||
| I'm like, well, if this is 300, 400 kids in here, like, for sure, one person is dealing with these issues right now. | ||
| And I would say, you know, the thing that probably saved me was my parents didn't own a gun. | ||
| Probably only Texans that don't own guns. | ||
| And then, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I guess... | ||
| One of the main things was, well, I don't even know that I've ever said this publicly, but I remember having attempted suicide once and then thinking about it again and then thinking, you know, what would this do to my mom? | ||
| And so I love my mom. | ||
| I'm a mama's boy. | ||
| Dad's great too, but that's just who I am. | ||
| She's a tough cookie. | ||
| She's where I got my competitiveness. | ||
| She was a national champion and Barrel racing, state champion in tennis. | ||
| And so she always pushed me. | ||
| My dad, if he was at a wrestling tournament and it's the finals, even state, I would dislocate my thumb or something. | ||
| He'd come up, you don't have to wrestle in the next match. | ||
| I'm like, it's the finals. | ||
| My mom's like, he's getting out there. | ||
| So my mom's the one pushing him. | ||
| Shut up, Jimmy. | ||
| He's going to go out there and he's going to wrestle and he's going to win. | ||
| And so my dad was more of the one wanting to protect me, and she's the one wanting to push me out there. | ||
| So I guess I don't even know why I was saying that except for, oh, that thought was just... | ||
| I'm ringing in my head. | ||
| And so whenever I finally verbalize that and start talking to people, that's what really helped. | ||
| You know, it didn't have to be a bunch of people. | ||
| I didn't have to go around and be a drama queen or do it for attention or whatever, but just find one person. | ||
| And for me at that age, it was having a great mom and parents that love me. | ||
| And I think that's probably absolutely amazing. | ||
| What saved me at that time. | ||
| And so I was telling these kids, you know, hey, even if it's just your mom. | ||
| So I was taking pictures with some of the kids afterwards and stuff, and I walk out to leave. | ||
| And I'm in the hall, and this mom stops me because she's with her little guy, and he's crying. | ||
| So a mom had come to school, had heard there was anti-bullying talk. | ||
| She came up, and I see this little guy. | ||
| It reminded me a lot of me. | ||
| The only difference was he had these kind of big glasses on, but he was... | ||
| A little chubby and just had one of those things that you'd see stereotypical, like, this kid's gonna get picked on. | ||
| And so, probably a lot like me, he's used to getting his... | ||
| Fat pinched and nipples twisted and, you know, all that different stuff. | ||
| And so he was out there just bawling with his mom. | ||
| His mom asked if I could come talk to him for a little bit. | ||
| I did. | ||
| And she was saying that he had never opened up with her in the last two years, but she knew he had been dealing with really bad depression. | ||
| And right there he told her, I've been dealing with suicidal thoughts for two years. | ||
| And so I don't know why I even brought that up except for like it's nuts. | ||
| My parents have a have a photography company and they made a memorial a few years back For a little boy, he was getting bullied, didn't think he had an option out, and he took his life at nine years old. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| I think it was his swing set out back. | ||
| How did he take his life? | ||
| Hung himself? | ||
| Hung himself, yeah. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And so I saw the plaque and everything made up for him, and just gut-wrenching. | ||
| And so, you know, as I say that, and the first story was kind of one that kind of brought everything to a head. | ||
| I was in middle 8th grade this time. | ||
| Got invited to Jennifer's birthday party. | ||
| Really excited. | ||
| Got one of the real invitations in my hands. | ||
| Made the plans. | ||
| Talked to my mom. | ||
| Asked if I could go. | ||
| Talked to some of the people. | ||
| Who else was going? | ||
| I was just kind of the dorky kid anyways. | ||
| But on the invitation, I noticed, man, it says costume contest and the winner gets a prize. | ||
| I started doing research, all this other stuff. | ||
| Other people were doing it, too. | ||
| And I found out that her dad worked at Dr. Pepper and that their house was decorated with it, all this other stuff. | ||
| And then she loved transformers. | ||
| And so I thought, what if I combine those two things? | ||
| What if I could make myself a cardboard transformer from head to toe? | ||
| I think it was a 24-pack around the head, 12 packs around the arms, legs, boots. | ||
| I had a Chestplate had a sword out of cardboard a country kid Texas you see those moms we can do pretty much anything with duct tape and so duct tape cardboard just made it up and Walked into the party and her grandma opened the door. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She goes. | |
| Oh, Jennifer's gonna love this Walked in they literally had a dr. Pepper machine one of those like old-school ones you don't have to pay just push the button it pops out 13 year old kid you love that so we got dr. Pepper can one hand and Have the Dr. Pepper cardboard sword in the other. | ||
| Walk to the backyard. | ||
| And whenever the door opens, I open the door. | ||
| I'm greeted there with like some flashes of lights and fingers pointing, people laughing. | ||
| And I remember Jennifer saying, I can't believe you thought you were cool enough to come to my party. | ||
| And I was the only one that was dressed up. | ||
| Everybody else had gotten there early, and they'd all been planning it. | ||
| And even the invitations were fake, just so that I would come there, dress up. | ||
| Another kid said... | ||
| You're worthless. | ||
| So in that moment, I felt worthless. | ||
| And then the main bully said, you should just kill yourself. | ||
| And so whenever he said that, 13 years old, battle with depression, suicidal thoughts, all that different stuff. | ||
| Man, it took me on a downward spiral, a tailspin. | ||
| It really sucked. | ||
| I didn't know how to cover it up. | ||
| And then I guess I'm getting back to the end of May route where... | ||
| I found that. | ||
| 13 years old at like a flea market in Texas and walking down these aisles. | ||
| I'm looking for a BB gun. | ||
| And all of a sudden I get to this like used video shop and it's got UFC VHS. I think it was 2 through 10 or 2 through 11 or something like that. | ||
| And so I just bought them all. | ||
| You were on there. | ||
| Dude, that is a horrible story, man. | ||
| That is a terrible story. | ||
| How the fuck could those kids be so mean? | ||
| Honestly, I don't think it's... | ||
| I mean, that crazy compared to... | ||
| I mean, it is. | ||
| It's very methodical, very planned out. | ||
| And a lot of people were in on it. | ||
| I think that probably was one of the things... | ||
| Honestly, Jennifer was the biggest... | ||
| Crush I ever had in elementary middle school growing up. | ||
| And so she was the one I really wanted to impress. | ||
| That's why I did that research. | ||
| And then to know that she was in on it. | ||
| These other guys planned it, but she went along with it. | ||
| But to have her say that to you, I can't believe you thought you were cool enough to come to my party. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Yeah, I ended up leaving. | ||
| And this is before cell phones. | ||
| I didn't have a cell phone until I was like 16, 17. And so I'm 13, run out, found a Dairy Queen. | ||
| Went in the back, and where the drive-through is, there was like a, I don't know, a dumpster, and they got like the fence around it. | ||
| And I just was able to open it, sit there, and just cried, basically, until someone came out to throw away the trash. | ||
| And then they were like, oh, honey, got down, and what do you need? | ||
| And all this other stuff. | ||
| Can you call your mom? | ||
| I'm like... | ||
| If I have a phone and so I walked inside called her but she wasn't there so it took a little while to get a hold of my mom and then um Yeah, I mean it was just it was nuts because um It's weird how you you'll believe Especially in today's age with social media and all the tweets and things that people just throw away I throw around You know, it's nuts how you can see somebody don't even know them. | ||
| They might have one follower and But somehow it can still, if you let it, it can still affect you instead of just shrugging it off. | ||
| That's a totally different thing though. | ||
| Someone's saying something on Twitter and someone's saying something and looking you in the eyes and planning out this big deception. | ||
| But you're such a nice guy. | ||
| I don't understand what the fuck caused someone to be such a shithead like that. | ||
| Well, I don't know, man. | ||
| I think I've matured a lot where... | ||
| I mean, obviously, 29 instead of 13. But I think I just became an easy target. | ||
| Because you're just a nice guy? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I wouldn't stand up for myself. | ||
| Maybe I wasn't the biggest kid, but I was chubby and bigger. | ||
| Uh, yeah, I think it just was easy to pick on me in the locker rooms, pick on me in the... | ||
| I don't know, I think the stats I was looking at was something like 87% of bullying doesn't happen in the presence of, um... | ||
| Adults? | ||
| Adults. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, uh... | ||
| I forget, but, you know, even the people around, like how you're saying, you know, to people, plan it out and everything else, look you in the eyes. | ||
| I mean, I think that might have been what took me back the most because I was like, man, like this is, if you're sitting by, this is what I try to tell some of the kiddos growing up now. | ||
| It's like, if you think that by laughing, I mean, if you're there and you're not bullying, but you're giggling, you're laughing, like you're definitely a part of it. | ||
| You're an encourager. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But then if you're, even if you're silent and you're just watching it, And you don't, like, now you're, if you see it, you have a choice. | ||
| You can do something about it or you cannot. | ||
| And so I feel like that's a passive, standby kind of encouragement where, and so for me, it was like everyone was there. | ||
| People were saying it. | ||
| People were laughing. | ||
| People were watching. | ||
| But nobody was standing up for me. | ||
| So it was, I think that's what hurt the most. | ||
| Well, see, so there's two giant instances. | ||
| The one with the other guy named Justin. | ||
| So they planned that out too? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Fuck, man. | ||
| You went to school with some evil kids. | ||
| Yeah, it was actually part of the same kids. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| Yeah, and then, so from that, yeah, that's definitely been the biggest battle of my life has been depression, suicidal thoughts. | ||
| And it was all from that bullying. | ||
| There was nothing other than that. | ||
| For the depression? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it went from... | ||
| Technically, I would say it went from third grade to tenth grade. | ||
| And then whenever I started wrestling and my parents transferred me out of school, everything else then... | ||
| But the bullying is what caused all these suicidal thoughts. | ||
| There was nothing else that was bumming you out about life. | ||
| That is so fucked up that some shitty mean kids can all of a sudden throw this monkey wrench in your life. | ||
| And then I've learned, and I mean... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, obviously looking back, I shouldn't have ever let it get to the point to where, you know, I think I should hurt myself or kill my... | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Just to real quick put that together with the pygmies in Congo. | ||
| Whenever I opened up and shared with some of them around the campfire, just hanging out, talking, sharing life stories... | ||
| I shared that, and I just remember the looks on several people's faces just so baffled. | ||
| Like, did he just say he wanted to hurt himself? | ||
| He was suicidal? | ||
| He wanted to kill himself? | ||
| All that different stuff. | ||
| And then I started asking him, like, does that not happen here? | ||
| And they're like, well, some of them are like, well, we've heard of that happening before. | ||
| And yeah, there's this guy that was that guy and that guy and that guy. | ||
| And we heard that someone in their village had hurt themselves or killed themselves or something. | ||
| But most of the people, I think, were like, no, never hurt. | ||
| Why would anyone? | ||
| If you hurt yourself, you're only hurt. | ||
| Like, that's only hurting you. | ||
| That's not going to help anything. | ||
| But you just wanted the pain to end. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here, I just wanted the pain to end. | ||
| But there, it's like, it's nuts because they, if I look at it, I was a little kid that got bullied by some stupid kids. | ||
| And then, if I look at what they're going through, man, it makes it, it shrinks it. | ||
| It makes it microscopic whenever you stop just focusing on your own problems. | ||
| You start looking at others, other problems that maybe you can be a part of helping solve that problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this bullying all throughout your childhood led into adulthood, and the only thing that made it better was you going to the Congo and helping out these pygmies and building wells and sort of dedicating and devoting your life to their life. | ||
| Yeah, I would say practically that has been, you know, to have a sense of purpose. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a lot of different things. | ||
| But that all kind of came together. | ||
| But for me, yeah, I mean, when you're not living for yourself and you're living for others, you just won't. | ||
| I mean, I didn't know that... | ||
| For me, I had a big paradigm shift or change in my life whenever, you know, coming out of the addiction, I felt like, oh man, like I don't have to walk around and hate myself and stay away from people because they're either going to hurt me or I'm going to want to hurt them. | ||
| Like, I don't have to do that. | ||
| I can help people. | ||
| I can want to love them. | ||
| I can... | ||
| You know, figure out something. | ||
| Dude, it first started, what really started helping a lot was I got involved with a lot of different stuff from a juvenile detention center, going in and meeting with some of those kids once a week, to a homeless shelter, to becoming an official volunteer at the Denver Children's Hospital and taking the grudge guys through there. | ||
| And I think like Rashad and Dwayne and Shane Carwin and Brendan and all these guys, you know, they were going and they actually saw me going through the really tough addictions and getting kicked off grudge fight team. | ||
| And then a year later, I'm luckily able to organize an event where they wouldn't let us come in just as fighters to visit the kids because they were like, fighters, why would you guys come and visit us? | ||
| And that's violent. | ||
| And so I decided I'll become a volunteer here, go through all the processes and the training and all the other stuff. | ||
| And then I loved volunteering there. | ||
| And then after they got to know me, I'm like, hey, can we do a team visit? | ||
| Man, us in there, the best visit they had ever had was the bikers. | ||
| Like this biker gang guys always brought pizza on Wednesday night or something. | ||
| And they literally did look rough and tumble. | ||
| And then they said ours was the second best. | ||
| And I'm like, you know what? | ||
| And they said, well, I won't say the teams, but some of the other big major league sports, they said those have been, and they named some of them, they've been some of our absolute worst. | ||
| I'm like, man, see, you thought fighters were going to come in here and I don't know if you thought we were going to beat up the kids or something, but no, we're passionate about the sport. | ||
| I mean, I think passionate means you love something so much that you'll suffer for it. | ||
| Or even that suffering looks like enjoyment or becomes enjoyment because you love it and you're passionate about it. | ||
| And so, I mean, whenever you're a fighter, you're getting beat up and all the other stuff. | ||
| And man, we're passionate people. | ||
| We We really love each other. | ||
| It's all team camaraderie. | ||
| Yeah, there's an intense camaraderie between people that train together because you go through such difficult sessions and difficult sparring and difficult moments and conditioning and all that stuff and you push each other and it's a different kind of bond, right? | ||
| Yeah, and on that I think I saw someone recently post something that was Pretty cool where it showed like a jujitsu gym and it was showing all the different people. | ||
| And in it, it said something like, where's the one place you can find these religious people and these different skin colors? | ||
| And I forget how it was worded, but... | ||
| All the mats. | ||
| Yeah, and we all get along and there's all peace. | ||
| It's like all the mats. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Yeah, I do as well. | ||
| Do you stay in any way in touch with those kids from back in the day, from the kids that bullied you? | ||
| It was actually funny. | ||
| After The Ultimate Fighter, I got invited out by one of the guys. | ||
| And just because I think a couple of people... | ||
| Yeah, I saw one of the guys who was one of the main guys and he's like, hey, I just saw him walking around downtown Fort Worth and he's like, why don't we go out here or whatever? | ||
| I'm like, alright, I'll go. | ||
| And, well, he had actually brought me into the sushi restaurant and all around the table was most of the people that were, not most, it was probably only like 8 or 10 people. | ||
| But they were some of the main kids that were at that party when I dressed up and everything. | ||
| Man, if we'd have known you were a fighter, you could have kicked our butts, then we wouldn't have done that to you. | ||
| So I told him I was going to the bathroom and just left. | ||
| I think that's the only time I've ever done anything like that, but I was like, I can't be around these guys. | ||
| Did you sense any feeling of remorse from them, or did they just want to be friends with you? | ||
| One or two of them, one guy for sure, he's pretty cool now. | ||
| But then one is a knucklehead for sure. | ||
| Still. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| You know, it's that classic thing of kids ganging up on one kid. | ||
| That's a weird instinct that sometimes children have. | ||
| You remember that movie Carrie? | ||
| She goes to the prom. | ||
| Did you ever see that Sissy Spacek movie? | ||
| It's based on a great Stephen King book. | ||
| You know, I know the cover. | ||
| The Sissy Spacek movie was really trippy. | ||
| John Travolta's in it back in the day, young and handsome. | ||
| But it's, you know, that's the themes that they push her. | ||
| She has these crazy telekinetic powers and they push her to this point and they do it by mocking her and bullying her. | ||
| They take her to the prom and they pour pig's blood on her head. | ||
| She winds up killing everybody. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty crazy. | ||
| But that thing that happens when kids gang up on a kid that they feel like is vulnerable. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is that, man? | ||
| What a horrible instinct. | ||
| Like, is that... | ||
| But, I mean, I just, I struggle to understand where that instinct comes from or why people do it. | ||
| It's, um, especially little kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I guess I could understand that if the kids have been abused themselves and they want to lash out, they're angry and hurt, but oftentimes it's just they find someone who's vulnerable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It's like they find the pecking order, and they find the one person they can get away with, and they all funnel their insecurities and their anger and their aggression on this one person, just because with no regard whatsoever what kind of impact it's going to have on that kid. | ||
| Yeah, and I think one of the things that makes it so much worse now is, I mean, I don't know, I get to... | ||
| Here's some of the stuff and they can't escape it because it follows them home. | ||
| I'm all that cyberbullying and they get the text and all this stuff. | ||
| So it's constantly... | ||
| So I could at least escape it from, I don't know, 8 to 3. At 8 to 3, I was at school, but when I came home, I was okay. | ||
| And maybe that gave me a break, but a little bit of a break from it. | ||
| But I mean, it's nuts. | ||
| The world that we live in and the stuff that's happening. | ||
| I mean, what you said happened in... | ||
| Germany and other school shootings have happened here. | ||
| I was in Aurora when the movie theater thing happened. | ||
| And it's just terrible. | ||
| But then there's absolutely, without a doubt, zero excuse for, you know, never do anything like that. | ||
| But then I kind of have looked at it maybe once before. | ||
| It might be stupid for me to talk about it now. | ||
| But I kind of can see where they've been pushed over the edge in a way. | ||
| No excuse. | ||
| They should not ever do anything like that. | ||
| But for me, it's like, man, it was never a fair fight. | ||
| They were always cornered, outnumbered, beaten down over and over and over. | ||
| And they just snapped. | ||
| And now it's terrible. | ||
| Don't do... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if that's the case with the Aurora shooter. | ||
| I think he was completely insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think it certainly can happen to people where they get to this point where not only do they not want to live, they don't want you to live anymore either. | ||
| Because, I mean, I'm sure if you had been in a situation where you knew someone, you had a friend who was in the same boat as you, you know, like those kids from Columbine. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Where the two kids got together and they sort of helped each other do something really fucked up. | ||
| If you were involved with the wrong people at that time and someone had a gun and you knew where these kids were and you wanted to do that to yourself, who knows what you would have wanted to do to them as well. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of a scary thing to think about. | ||
| I did have a dark period. | ||
| I think it was in between 7th and 8th grade where I started hanging out with a lot of the Just the kids that were involved in just darker thoughts, music, stuff like that, where I'm hanging out with them and we're all depressed. | ||
| We're listening to that Papa Roach song, The Last Resort. | ||
| I think it's like, cut myself bleeding. | ||
| I'm never going to... | ||
| Or I don't want to breathe again or live again or something like that. | ||
| And then all of a sudden they're bringing out, what are those, the big black cats or those M80s or something like that. | ||
| And there's a bunch of frogs where we lived in the country. | ||
| And they go, get the frogs, blow up a frog, get another frog, blow up a frog. | ||
| And all of a sudden I'm like, this is a little way too dark for me. | ||
| How do you blow up a frog? | ||
| You stick it in its mouth? | ||
| Yeah, stick it in its mouth and just light it right in front. | ||
| Sorry for anyone. | ||
| And the frog just keeps it in his mouth for some strange reason? | ||
| Yeah, they're hopping, hopping, hopping. | ||
| With it in his mouth? | ||
| Yeah, with his mouth. | ||
| Because I think maybe with the M80s, they use those because they're big. | ||
| So you stick it in there, it kind of sticks in. | ||
| Oh, they can't get it out. | ||
| Yeah, they can't get it out. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yeah, so brutal. | ||
| Anyways, when that happened, I was like, okay, I need to change the... | ||
| That was a group of like five or six kids that were just in a very, very dark place. | ||
| And even one's in jail, so... | ||
| Fuck, dude. | ||
| What a bummer. | ||
| You're bumming me out, Justin. | ||
| Sorry, I don't want to do that. | ||
| Every time you've been here, it's just been all joyful and loving and all the things. | ||
| I didn't know your history. | ||
| Well, hey, man, it's just honest expression. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with it. | ||
| It makes me, as an adult, I almost want to go back in time and stop it from happening. | ||
| It makes me... | ||
| It makes me very sad. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's one of the worst aspects of human beings that they could plan something like that and do that and just try to ruin someone's life just for sport, just for fun, for no reason. | ||
| You didn't do anything to them. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| It's fucked up, man. | ||
| I see it as a thing that actually helped... | ||
| Shape and mold me now in a way of like, I look at it and it was Loretta while we were writing the book. | ||
| She's like, do you not see all these kind of parallels? | ||
| And I'm like, what do you mean? | ||
| You grew up, you got really, really bullied. | ||
| Then you're trying to help people that are like maybe the most bullied people on planet Earth. | ||
| I'm like, oh, I guess I see that now. | ||
| And what was it last? | ||
| Not the last trip, but the second to last trip to Congo that I had. | ||
| I was there and we're having to get a mechanic to help. | ||
| We're tires and different stuff, and all of a sudden a drunk mechanic comes out, and he's always drunk, and he comes out, he's talking with us, this little boy walks by, he's literally He should be in school, but because his family's so poor, he's out selling eggs. | ||
| And if he's selling eggs, he'll make, you know, nothing. | ||
| But he'll never be able to go to school, probably. | ||
| And he's just trying to make money to feed his family. | ||
| And he's literally five, six, seven years old. | ||
| And he's coming around selling the eggs. | ||
| Normally they sell them hard-boiled, but sometimes they don't. | ||
| When they're walking around, you want to eat it then. | ||
| But these kids were all raw, so it's even harder for them to sell them. | ||
| But the drunk guy picked up the egg. | ||
| He's looking at it, shakes it a little bit, finds out it's raw, and just smashes him. | ||
| The kid, this is an adult, 30-something-year-old man, and this is literally a 5, 6, 7, 8-year-old kid, just smashes it over his head, and the kid looks up at him with just fear. | ||
| I mean, it's not smart for me, because, you know, I'm the outsider to the government's eyes and everything else, but, like, I almost got in a fistfight with him. | ||
| I remember just pulling my hand straight back and And just almost just backhanded him right across the face. | ||
| And then Ben's like, whoa, whoa, whoa! | ||
| Then I grabbed, I think I grabbed his shirt, grabbed his shoulder, And I said, Ben, translate for me real quick. | ||
| If he ever lays his hands on that kid or any other kid, I'm going to lay my hands on him. | ||
| And so just make sure he understands that, this kind of thing. | ||
| And I don't even know what I'm into that except for... | ||
| I mean, I just don't get... | ||
| Get people sometimes. | ||
| We'll get into some positive stuff, but that one just blew me away. | ||
| I was like, you're an old guy picking on a kindergartner. | ||
| I just... | ||
| As a... | ||
| I mean, as a person... | ||
| I don't understand it, but I also don't understand it logically. | ||
| I don't understand where that inclination comes from. | ||
| What is it about a human being that makes them want to do that? | ||
| How did that develop? | ||
| How is it so common? | ||
| I guess when you... | ||
| Put someone down, you feel better about yourself. | ||
| But do you really? | ||
| I mean, does anybody really? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| What I've found is the exact opposite. | ||
| When you help somebody, it actually helps you. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| If you love somebody, you feel more loved when you... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, so it's counterintuitive, but that's kind of what people do, right? | ||
| Do the opposite of what we... | ||
| But it's so common. | ||
| I wonder like what is the cause, the root cause of it? | ||
| Does it play some sort of evolutionary role? | ||
| Like what is it? | ||
| Like pecking order with chickens. | ||
| Like they try to find out who's the weakest one and they'll attack. | ||
| They'll all attack like the weakest chicken. | ||
| They'll all peck at it. | ||
| It's like what the fuck is that? | ||
| Like why? | ||
| Are they trying to weed out the weak? | ||
| Is it an evolutionary thing? | ||
| Are they terrified of someone doing that to them so they strike first? | ||
| Well, you know what? | ||
| There's actually a pretty incredible video. | ||
| Pull this thing up too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's actually a pretty incredible video that I was absolutely terrible whenever I gave the speech or whatever, but I played part of the video, cut it down to like three minutes. | ||
| It's had like 12. I think it's called The Battle at Kruger. | ||
| Have you seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's in Africa. | ||
| Oh, I have seen that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's the water buffaloes and the lions and the crocodile. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The lion takes the... | ||
| The back of the pack, the smaller, weaker, younger, lions all go after that one, tackle it, splash in the water, they're dragging the baby out of the lake, or river, and all of a sudden a huge crocodile comes and grabs it, and they have a tug-of-war match. | ||
| With this baby, I think it was... | ||
| Kate Buffalo? | ||
| Kate Buffalo, yeah. | ||
| And so, it wasn't Wildebeest, right? | ||
| It was Kate Buffalo? | ||
| I think. | ||
| Anyway, it was one of those. | ||
| And yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| But what I love almost in that analogy of where, you know, if you're standing by like you're encouraging it or if you're not doing anything, you're encouraging it. | ||
| But if you just stand up, oh, that's the stat I saw where 87 percent of bullying happens in the presence of nobody. | ||
| But in the times that it is around people, if one person says one thing to the bully, 90 percent of the time, it's 80 to 90 percent of time it stops within five seconds. | ||
| It just stops. | ||
| And it doesn't have to be anything aggressive. | ||
| It can be, hey man, lay off of them. | ||
| And then if you, after that, it's something like 95% of the time if you invite the bullied victim to come into your group or hang out or sit at your table or whatever, then it stops even better right away when you don't address the bully, you address the person that's getting bullied. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it seems like the people that are bullying, they almost need reinforcement. | ||
| And they're getting reinforcement by people being complicit or being silent. | ||
| They're joined in like those lions. | ||
| One lion decides to take out the little guy. | ||
| That's so different though. | ||
| That's what they do for food. | ||
| That's how they stay alive. | ||
| That's a natural instinct. | ||
| This is a weird evilness. | ||
| The one thing I do like about it, though, is with those two stats, like, say something, don't be passive. | ||
| Whenever one Cape Buffalo turned around, a couple other ones did too, and then one came in there in the middle of the line. | ||
| One hit, one line, threw it in the air, and then all of them tucked tail and ran. | ||
| Yeah, once they realize what a Cape buffalo can actually do to them. | ||
| Man, that's so terrible. | ||
| You know, Cape buffaloes apparently are some of the most dangerous animals in Africa, and they will charge you. | ||
| They're just so used to being around people, or around animals rather, that are trying to kill them. | ||
| I almost got us arrested, and not just a little bit, a lot of bit, where we accidentally, I believe the Serengeti's in Tanzania, and we're on the border of Kenya and Tanzania, and we're taking a shortcut from some locals, which is always fine if you're from there. | ||
| And we saw this awesome, but we didn't know we were going through the Serengeti. | ||
| We just thought it was a shortcut. | ||
| We didn't pay for a park pass or anything like that. | ||
| And all of a sudden I see this just gigantic Cape Buffalo skull just sitting in the middle of nowhere. | ||
| I'm like, let's get that. | ||
| Let's take it back. | ||
| And so we put that in the back of the truck. | ||
| All of a sudden we're driving and we get pulled over by the park rangers. | ||
| Then they see the Cape Buffalo skull, they say we're poachers, they say this, that, and just swarmed by all these park rangers, like three or four different vehicles. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Saying they're going to arrest me, all this different stuff, and our crew, and luckily, anyways, that's a random thing, but luckily we just said, hey, can I just put it right back where it was? | ||
| I didn't mean to, I didn't know we were in a national park. | ||
| Yeah, they don't take any bullshit from poachers out there. | ||
| It's very dangerous. | ||
| They kill poachers on site. | ||
| Yeah, they can kill them where a lot of times it's literally the life in prison sentence for certain ones. | ||
| For poaching? | ||
| Yeah, for endangered species, for sure, with the okapi. | ||
| One of my last trips, someone tried to I think I maybe said earlier where on one of the past episodes where someone tried to sell me the meat and the fur of an okapie. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Okapies are in danger? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they're only found in the one area that we're kind of working in. | ||
| And the rebel groups there went to a little... | ||
| Wildlife Reserve for them, protecting them. | ||
| And they went and murdered, like, I don't know, 15 or 20 of them. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| They were there trying to help stimulate them, you know, help them come back in the wild and everything else. | ||
| They just went and killed them all. | ||
| Yeah, and then another guy was trying to sell me a rhino horn. | ||
| And, yeah, it's just brutal. | ||
| Now, poaching sucks, but... | ||
| I love how the Pygmies culture is with hunting. | ||
| I even have a quick video. | ||
| Did you see what they're doing where they're making 3D printed cloned rhino horns and they're going to flood the market with them? | ||
| That's a great idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| You should do that with shark fins too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they're... | ||
| I mean, at least people eat shark fins. | ||
| I mean, it's fucked up that they're killing them all and making soup out of them, but Jesus, at least they're eating them. | ||
| The rhino thing is insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's absolutely based on nothing. | ||
| I mean, the... | ||
| Medicine. | ||
| But it's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just can't imagine that here we are in 2016 with Viagra and Cialis and all these different boner pills you buy at the gas station that Red Band takes. | ||
| When I was pulling this up, I found this on Vice. | ||
| 3D printing rhino horns are not the solution to poaching crisis, experts say. | ||
| The experts don't agree that that's the best way. | ||
| Well, I don't know if it's the best way either. | ||
| I mean, I just can't imagine that the rhinos are literally on the verge of going extinct because people want to kill them and take their horns, which do nothing. | ||
| Isn't it like the same substance as like a fingernail or toenail or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's exactly what it is. | ||
| It's like hair. | ||
| Yeah, but they have this erroneous idea that you eat it and it makes your dick hard. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What the fuck is going on with Asia? | ||
| That's a broad statement, isn't it? | ||
| Boy, I generalize. | ||
| I generalize on a billion people. | ||
| What the fuck's going on with Asia, man? | ||
| I mean, I wonder... | ||
| I think it's also a status symbol I was reading. | ||
| That even though it might not necessarily be real or really work, but it's such an ancient cultural status symbol thing that these businessmen will get together and they'll have rhino horn tea. | ||
| But they think it's cool because it's illegal and you can't get it and it's dangerous and it's got to come from Africa. | ||
| So it must really work. | ||
| No, no, I'm just kidding. | ||
| Maybe it does work. | ||
| Maybe that's what they think, though. | ||
| Maybe it does work. | ||
| It's this expensive. | ||
| Maybe it does something. | ||
| Their grandfather said it worked. | ||
| His grandfather said it worked. | ||
| Why don't you Google that, Jamie? | ||
| Does rhino horn actually work? | ||
| No, it won't. | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| I mean, maybe it doesn't work as good as other stuff. | ||
| If biting your fingernails doesn't... | ||
| Maybe it does. | ||
| Then you just gotta eat enough fingernails. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine? | ||
| What's an acceptable source to find? | ||
|
unidentified
|
If this is true or not. | |
| I don't think there would be one. | ||
| Is it from China's Google? | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| You have to find a website that you trust, right? | ||
| It's got to be like wired.com or something like that. | ||
| PBS has a story on fact or fiction use on it, but... | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| PBS is probably valid. | ||
| That's a lot of information I'd have to read first, but just a long article about it. | ||
| Rhino horn use fact or fiction. | ||
| When I'm exhausted and I look at something like that, I go to the very bottom and say, hmm, how do they wrap this up? | ||
| Overall, not much evidence to support. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The pressure of claims about the hearing properties of the horns. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's a good little tip I just learned from you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're not really... | ||
| This isn't life-dependent. | ||
| This is not something that you're really... | ||
| It's not really a factor in your life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just go to the bottom line. | ||
| It is very strange. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Not believed as once believed. | ||
| It's not as once believed, rather. | ||
| Made simply from a clump of compressed or modified hair. | ||
| Recent studies by researchers in Ohio University. | ||
| Ohio. | ||
| There you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| What is that word? | ||
| Tomography? | ||
| CT scans have shown that the horns are, in fact, similar in structure to horses' hooves, turtle beaks, and cockatoo bills. | ||
| The studies also reveal that the centers of the horns have dense mineral deposits of calcium and melanin, a finding that may explain the curve and sharp tip of the horn. | ||
| The calcium would strengthen the horn, while the melanin would protect some of the core from being degraded by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Softer outer portion worn away over time by the sun and typical rhino activities, bashing horns with other animals, rubbing it on the ground. | ||
| The inner core would be sharpened into a point, much like a wooden pencil. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah, and the horn that this kid was basically trying to sell it. | ||
| He was like 15, 16 years old. | ||
| old his dad was the poacher and his dad didn't want to get arrested so he sends his kid and it had all sorts of like us deep deeply scratches inside of it and stuff and or just all over kind of the top was all nicked up and stuff University of Hong Kong found a large doses of rhino horn extract could slightly lower fever in rats imagine Imagine if rhino horn was a cure to malaria. | ||
| Well, then we would start breeding them, right? | ||
| Like we do with chickens and stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How strange. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| I mean, obviously, it's not happening in the Western world. | ||
| It's not happening here. | ||
| But... | ||
| It could, I guess. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, some people are just fucked up. | ||
| Some people, they don't care if something's about to go extinct. | ||
| They just want... | ||
| They want what they want. | ||
| And if they want that rhino horn, for whatever strange reason. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Well, it's like kind of with the trees. | ||
| We're getting ready, I think, to replant, I think it's 1,000 more trees, which would take our total up to 4,500 on the land for the pygmies. | ||
| Around there, the reason that, I mean, China and all these other places are coming in, they're cutting down the rare hardwoods, the mahogany, and the reason King Leopold went there was the rubber boom and the trees there and everything else. | ||
| But then it just nuts me because I think they're, you know, they want it for greed, money, everything else. | ||
| But then the people in the country, they're starting to learn and get educated in the fact that, like, hey, if we're cutting down all these trees, we better start replanting some because it takes so long for them to grow back. | ||
| And so, no, but it's just for charcoal or fire, and they're like, once that's gone, what do you have? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bunia, actually, the town that all of our well drillers live in at the university, they used to be in a rainforest. | ||
| Now you have to drive three, four hours to get to the closest forest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| You have to drive three or four hours away, and it used to be in the center of the, not center of the rainforest, but the edge of the rainforest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| It used to be a forest, and now it's not. | ||
| Three or four hours drive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all just because of deforestation, all chopping down for logging. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| I was in Canada, and they do a pretty good job of regulating it in BC, but it's still disturbing because you come across these big, gigantic fields where the trees are just gone. | ||
| All the trees have been cut. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And, you know, they plant some, and they have... | ||
| They also have, like, perches. | ||
| They leave perches for animals, which is probably, like, an awesome spot for, like, a hawk or an eagle or something like that, because everything's cut down. | ||
| They can see everything. | ||
| They see straight to the perches. | ||
| Yeah, but it's these cut... | ||
| I forget what they call it. | ||
| These patches where everything's cut down. | ||
| It's so disturbing. | ||
| I get that they replant. | ||
| I get that they have a cycle. | ||
| But it just bugs me that people could do that. | ||
| They just giant swaths of the landscape shaved off and turned into toothpicks or whatever the fuck they do with it. | ||
| Yeah, and so I was in a village before my wife's first time to Congo, and it was, I mean, it was almost like, you know, lush, untouched, virgin forest, and then all of a sudden, come back next time with her, come out of the forest, come back in, it was probably a month or so, because we went to a couple other villages, we go back, start going on the same hike, and all of a sudden there's this huge clearing, at least 10 acres, probably 20, 25, and it was just... | ||
| Nothing there except for a few remaining huge cut-down trees that I could stand in front of and the base or whatever was way taller than I was. | ||
| Like a midget next to it. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| So yeah, it's pretty crazy. | ||
| And I was telling her, I'm like, babe, like... | ||
| I was like, take some pictures of this. | ||
| I think I have some pictures right here of where we are right now on this trail. | ||
| And there used to be trees here, and it was nuts. | ||
| Because all of a sudden, for me, the rainforest is great, actually. | ||
| I mean, it's hot, and I'm all hairy. | ||
| But she... | ||
| But being under the canopy of the rainforest, I mean, I love that because it's shaded and everything else. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Still hot, still humid, but I'm not getting burned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially, yeah, you're really pale, right? | ||
| On a hike, I was getting burned, and I'm like, man, this is nuts. | ||
| Especially on that malaria medication, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They were talking on this documentary I was watching about the deforestation of the Amazon, about how fast it's happening and how terrifying it is. | ||
| And a big part of it, I guess, is not even, well, there's logging, but there's also, they cut it down to make room for cattle grazing. | ||
| And when they were showing, there's just a sheer size of the deforestation, of how much they've done and so quickly. | ||
| And then also the people that live in these areas where if they resist the loggers or they resist, they just get murdered. | ||
| Yeah, especially the indigenous people that are more out there. | ||
| And that happens with the pygmies, too, because they're the weaker, more vulnerable ones that you can push around and they can't push back. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you consider your life and you consider these horrible stories that you're telling us about your upbringing, how disturbing it is, does it feel to you, since you've found this sense of purpose and this real connection with these people in the Congo, that almost like these horrible events in your life were setting you up to be the perfect person to find these folks? | ||
| Without a doubt. | ||
| For me, honestly, it's almost like, what's the right word? | ||
| Maybe sort of my chance at kind of redemption or just not being the kid that I grew up being. | ||
| Not that I was a bad kid or anything, but just I hated myself. | ||
| And it's like, you know what? | ||
| I get to stop hating myself. | ||
| I get to stop loving it. | ||
| Loving others and not just that you also have this massive impact on other people You have all these people that love you. | ||
| You have this amazing wife now You have this amazing pygmy family. | ||
| You have your regular family. | ||
| It's amazing Like you have so much positive going on now. | ||
| It's really kind of incredible. | ||
| It's almost like you're the horrible Experiences you had as a young kid have sort of made you into this incredible adult I don't know about that. | ||
| Well, you're very humble. | ||
| I don't even know how this... | ||
| Honestly, there's not a good explanation that I could probably explain that it should be working or that it's working like it is because... | ||
| Well, with me at the front of it because I don't have any community development training or... | ||
| I have a degree. | ||
| I actually don't speak the language I'm learning. | ||
| How much can you speak? | ||
| How rudimentary? | ||
| Like, como te llamo Joe? | ||
| Yeah, I can say, my name is this, where's the bathroom? | ||
| You doing okay? | ||
| You sure? | ||
| You tired? | ||
| You're like, oh, you lost me. | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| The saying is brief. | ||
| What does it sound like? | ||
| What do they sound like when they're talking? | ||
| Jamie, pull some pygmy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what they say? | |
| That's what they talk? | ||
| That's what the forest calls. | ||
| That's kind of like our walkie-talkies. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| You yell that out? | ||
| Let people know where you are? | ||
| So what are you saying when you're saying that? | ||
| That is actually... | ||
| That's not a word. | ||
| It's just kind of like your own... | ||
| It's like yo? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or it's actually like, I'm over here. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
| Kind of things like that. | ||
| Or we're just checking. | ||
| We're even at just excitement, just fun. | ||
| I mean, whenever we go on hikes, those hikes are long, right? | ||
| And there's no TV or you can't text or scroll the internet. | ||
| You, yeah, have each other, which is always great, but then you goof off. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Actually, you know what? | ||
| I bet in one of those videos it has them speaking, and it's pretty awesome. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| When you're saying hikes, are you talking like recreational hikes? | ||
| No. | ||
| You just gotta get around. | ||
| You hear someone talk about hikes in LA. It's like, oh, I'm gonna take my little dog to Runyon, and we're gonna go hiking. | ||
| You say hiking. | ||
| Yeah, that's what people think of. | ||
| They think of some recreational activity with one of those little camel things, the little water things, camelback, water reservoirs you put on your back and you suck on the straw as you're walking. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I took a couple of those to Congo the first couple times and I realized just how impractical they are. | ||
| And in a real... | ||
| Long-term, not a day hike or a three-day weekend or something. | ||
| A lot of guys don't like those. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of guys don't like them. | ||
| They'd rather have a... | ||
| How do you say that word? | ||
| Nalgene? | ||
| Nalgene, right? | ||
| Nalgene. | ||
| Nalgene. | ||
| How do you say it? | ||
| I think it's Nalgene. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is this like a certain type of plastic? | ||
| I think it's a really hard, durable plastic that... | ||
| Yeah, that people use for water jugs. | ||
| And that's what I would rather use because the other one's too hard to clean and too hard to fill up and leaks and just all sorts of stuff. | ||
| But some people like it because they don't have to stop. | ||
| They can just keep walking and just suck on that thing as they're walking. | ||
| I've never used one though. | ||
| Yeah, I used it for the first two times I went, which was like about a month each. | ||
| You switched to water bottles? | ||
| Yeah, and then even they have those camelback kind of like, I think they're called like a platypus or something. | ||
| It's a gravity filter for water where you have a dirty water bag and you have a clean. | ||
| You scoop the dirty, you hang the dirty and it goes down through a filter and into the clean bag. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| Does that work? | ||
| Those don't work? | ||
| I think they work great here in the States where... | ||
| You're not dealing with much. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But whenever the water is dirty, like really dirty, they break pretty quick. | ||
| So you have to backwash them and other stuff. | ||
| There's some that are... | ||
| They're good, but even the maintenance of them, just really, really tough. | ||
| So they work for like one filtration, but they won't work over and over and over again? | ||
| My first time I went for about a month, I had it for a week or two, and then all of a sudden it started breaking, because I was even filtering the water in the town that's coming from wells, because I don't know if they... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If they did it properly, right? | ||
| Good call. | ||
| And I had been sick enough. | ||
| I'm like, I'm done with this. | ||
| Yeah, I hear you. | ||
| So I'm filtering that stuff. | ||
| And then by the time I get out to the forest, I was able to use it a few days. | ||
| And then it was out. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I was stuck with just chlorine tablets the rest of the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| And you can boil it, but it's just impractical where every single time you want to drink, you take a container down to dirty water, which could be 30, 45 minutes away. | ||
| Bring it back, boil it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bring it back, boil it. | ||
| Filter it. | ||
| Yeah, and then all of a sudden all the ash is getting in it, and then it's the hot, humid rainforest on the equator, and boiling water doesn't cool down basically ever there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's impractical to do it that way. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| But what I love now is, oh, you know what? | ||
| I'm pumped. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| So this girl, first of all, she's way too hot to be in this video. | ||
| She's very distracting. | ||
| But they're going to take this in what looks like a very clean stream. | ||
| So this is so much different. | ||
| But people should also be aware that clean streams, although they may look clean, you can still get giardia from them. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what I learned from his buddy of mine named Matt. | ||
| He was the director of implementation. | ||
| Now he's like the chief operating officer. | ||
| And he came out there and one of the things he really drilled into us for our well drilling team, we're learning from a great guy. | ||
| He's saying, hey, you can drill 100 wells or 200 wells, but if you didn't do it right and proper... | ||
| Then I would have rather you done one the right way or none. | ||
| None. | ||
| If you do it the right or the wrong way, 100 times, 200 times, and you are giving a village, like you just hit home hard because he's like, look, we're learning every single step. | ||
| You can't skip one. | ||
| We've got to Drill us in you where you know it, you know, because we can't skip a step or miss something, and then all of a sudden they are looking at it, drinking it. | ||
| It tastes good. | ||
| It's clean. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| It's crisp. | ||
| It's in a well, but yet it can still be, you know, contaminated, dirty, and still get real sick if you don't properly construct the well. | ||
| No matter what well it is. | ||
| The well's here, anywhere. | ||
| What are the factors? | ||
| Like when you say properly construct, what are the issues that you have to avoid? | ||
| Yeah, so we, man, and our team's getting great. | ||
| By the way, real quick, last time I was on the show, I think we had completed 20 water wells. | ||
| I went back and looked at that. | ||
| 20 water wells. | ||
| Today, I got a picture sent to me, and it's our 45th Whoa! | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Dude, I love it. | ||
| I absolutely love it. | ||
| And so what's so great is seeing that, you know, they're, they're, they're taking this on as, as their own thing and flying on their own two wings. | ||
| They, they were empowered in a way that's like, Hey, you can, you can do this. | ||
| You can do it for yourself, for your countrymen. | ||
| You guys are going to be more passionate about ending the suffering because you know the suffering because you have suffered. | ||
| You've lost family members, you have sick kids, all that different stuff and And so they're going to be able to be a better champion for this cause than I could be. | ||
| Because, I mean, maybe we have different resources where I get to, you know, you share your platform with me, which has been incredible. | ||
| And the Kickstarter and the documentary coming out, all the different stuff is really great. | ||
| But I know that the team there, like, I couldn't do anything without them doing it and how great they've gotten. | ||
| But Well, that's a beautiful thing that you've helped them help themselves. | ||
| You taught them how to help themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There you are right there. | ||
| Look at that picture. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| That, to me, if I could explain it, is... | ||
| Better than... | ||
| I've been to the World... | ||
| I was just at UFC 200. I was at the World Series, NBA Finals, Super Bowl, Pacquiao fights. | ||
| I mean, I've been to all these things and those huge crowds are 30, 40, 50, 100,000 different stuff. | ||
| And that little crowd of 100, 120, to me, it drowns out the sound of an entire stadium. | ||
| It's a different kind of gratitude, thankfulness, when you've suffered your whole life. | ||
| And then you get to partner with people. | ||
| And I'm not even talking about me. | ||
| Our team, our well drillers, they see them coming in, staying with them, living like they're living, eating like they're eating. | ||
| Sitting around the campfire like they sit around, which nobody else does that with them. | ||
| And so, sleeping in the huts that they sleep in, which nobody else would do in that area. | ||
| And then, like, you just develop this bond and really quickly and to where all of a sudden they're jumping in and helping with the construction of the well and everything else. | ||
| Now, they do the simple day labor stuff, not the technical stuff, but then, yeah, our guys are getting it down, which is pretty cool. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, you're at 45 wells. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And do you have an ultimate goal, or would you just like to continue? | ||
| I think my ultimate goal lines up with Water 4's ultimate goal, which I love, and then with our drillers in Congo. | ||
| Our goal is to end the water crisis, if possible. | ||
| We think it is possible. | ||
| And we have the technology. | ||
| We should be able to do it in our lifetime. | ||
| Before you or me pass this earth, we should have the technology to get everyone clean water. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that that's their issue? | ||
| Over here in America, we have so many trivial things that we're constantly worrying about and fretting. | ||
| When it gets down to basic human necessities, like water, the ability to get clean water, which is, without that, All the other things that we argue or bicker about, it's all nonsense. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| That's something that... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's something that I... I get this crazy culture shock because I feel like I'm in two different worlds. | ||
| And when I'm there, it's uncomfortable because I'm passionate about it. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| But then getting back here, sometimes it's like, man, everything, a lot of times, everything that we're chasing, even me, doesn't really matter in the big, grand scheme of things. | ||
| How can we... | ||
| How can we instead of get for ourselves, how can we give to another person? | ||
| Because, like, I mean, it truly is, like, that's better. | ||
| And I know you have to take care of yourself so you can take care of someone else. | ||
| Like, I get that. | ||
| I just think it's kind of like this. | ||
| Our culture here... | ||
| You see kids and even adults. | ||
| That's mine, right? | ||
| I mean, that's our culture. | ||
| We say, that's mine. | ||
| Give me that. | ||
| It's mine. | ||
| In Congo, if that kid that had the eggs, instead of having an egg, if he had a bag of peanuts... | ||
| And he bought it for himself. | ||
| And then I walk by, sit down with him. | ||
| If I'm a friend or not, even just introducing myself, he's going to offer me his food. | ||
| Like, instead of, it's mine, he's going to say, you want some? | ||
| And so it's different in that culture where it's nuts. | ||
| They don't have anything, but they'll give you everything they got. | ||
| Like, for instance, that knife last time that I was able to, you know, bring back that Chief Leo May made. | ||
| You know, he made a bow and arrow, and I'm actually bringing that to you. | ||
| It was under our crawl space, and I lost it, and now I know where it is. | ||
| But he's pumped to bring that back to you. | ||
| But, I mean, for them to give that kind of stuff away... | ||
| Whenever Leo May, he's the chief of his village, and now, because he's got a job, he might have more, but whenever I knew him, he had maybe, he was lucky if he had two changes of clothes, because most of the pygmies have the clothes on their back. | ||
| They don't even have a blanket. | ||
| The fire's their blanket. | ||
| And so it's just a completely, I don't know, night and day difference. | ||
| There's a lot of people that listen to this that have gotten this far that want to figure out how they can help. | ||
| So what can people do to donate? | ||
| Where can they go? | ||
| Water 4's website, is that the best place to start? | ||
| Or fightfortheforgotten.com? | ||
| Both of them are one and the same. | ||
| Fightfortheforgotten.org. | ||
| Yeah,.com,.org. | ||
| They both work. | ||
| Both work. | ||
| Fightfortheforgotten.org,.com. | ||
| And there's a big yellow donate button. | ||
| Click on that and have at it, folks. | ||
| Well, thank you, man. | ||
| It's been crazy to see what's going on. | ||
| We're getting ready to do something that I'm pumped about. | ||
| Me and Papa Wai and Ben and Matt, we had talked about it and kind of dreamed it up. | ||
| And we were saying, how awesome would it be? | ||
| If in Bunia, which is kind of a city center, maybe less than half a million people for sure, but in the city center where there's a university, there's a community development program that's literally changing their part of Congo by not waiting on the government or by not waiting on an NGO. They're just taking the initiative themselves. | ||
| And so we've seen that they're so bought in. | ||
| That whenever we presented an idea of, what if we could start a sustainable solutions, appropriate technology center where there's land, water, and food solutions. | ||
| And then after that, maybe we can get into solar. | ||
| Maybe after that we can do this or that or, you know, whatever. | ||
| But at that place, we'll have different stations where here's land. | ||
| You can come learn about land rights, how to replant the trees, the forestry aspect, you know, all that different stuff, the importance of land. | ||
| And we have people there that can help and show them things. | ||
| If a chief wants to come in and book our well drilling team for their community, they can come in, see how we do it, why we do it, everything about it. | ||
| We want to have a little conference room where we can train people up on the WASH program, because now we're doing that. | ||
| All the villages that we've drilled wells in, we're going back in and we're doing the WASH program, water and sanitation and hygiene. | ||
| Do they have outhouses? | ||
| What do they use for... | ||
| They're getting them. | ||
| They're getting them now. | ||
| And so for the year I was there, there was one or two of the ten villages we were in had a quote-unquote latrine, but it was only like three or four feet deep, which isn't safe. | ||
| So most of them were just going in the woods? | ||
| Yeah, and honestly, until you do it the right way, because outside of there, some of those latrines in the cities, man, I... Definitely think I've gotten sick from a fly that maybe landed there. | ||
| So, I mean, I don't know. | ||
| But, yeah, so we get to go in there now, teach them how to dig the latrines, make sure it's way far enough away from the water well. | ||
| And then, you know, outside of the... | ||
| That's another issue too, right? | ||
| It can contaminate the water? | ||
| Yeah, if you want, you have to keep, what is it, I think 30 meters away or more, any latrines. | ||
| And then if it's a, like a, what is that? | ||
| Dump, trash dump. | ||
| It has to be 50 meters or more. | ||
| There's batteries, different stuff like that in it. | ||
| And so, yeah, we make sure. | ||
| And this is what's nuts. | ||
| So, one of my last trips, I went and we're going through Uganda on the border of Congo. | ||
| And there's these people that are so proud of their water well. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| But then I feel like the people who ever did it, I don't know. | ||
| Cut them really short. | ||
| They shouldn't be drilling wells because I went in the restroom and then all of a sudden I look out the window and I'm at a gas station. | ||
| Uganda's a lot nicer than Congo. | ||
| I mean, there's still terrible, brutal poverty parts of that, but it's just night and day difference. | ||
| And whenever I looked out, I see here's an 18-wheeler filling up. | ||
| Here's someone else filling up. | ||
| And in between that, I'm at the toilets. | ||
| At the other side, there's a trash dump. | ||
| There's 18-wheelers and trucks filling up with fuel. | ||
| And right in the middle of the two fuel pumps is a water well. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| They drilled it on the lot of the gas station with a trash dump, with latrines and toilets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| And so it was completely contaminating. | ||
| And the line... | ||
| It was so long, and Ben was trying to tell him, like, hey, just want to tell you, because we love you, that water is really not safe. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Matt kind of ingrained that into us to where it's like, you know, you've got to do it the right way. | ||
| And so Ben was taught that. | ||
| So this was a recent well that these guys had put in? | ||
| And it was one of the... | ||
| And there's a big line of people to try to get to this recent well. | ||
| I'm telling you, there was at least 20, 30 people in line. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And Ben was trying to tell him in the most appropriate way possible to like not crush the hopes and dreams of the village there But he also want to know like hey this water can it look safe. | ||
| It's not And so so that's why we're testing our wells and whatever happened That feels did you you had to leave? | ||
| Yeah, I mean it's a town. | ||
| We don't I've been in the town Maybe twice, but um, yeah, it was the first time I saw it last time Jesus yeah, so But that's what's creating. | ||
| A lot of people don't know. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| No, I know it is. | ||
| Half the hospital beds in the world right now are because of dirty water or waterborne-related diseases. | ||
| Half? | ||
| Half. | ||
| Half right now. | ||
| So if we were able to, as human beings, if we could join forces, unite, kind of like everyone did against Ebola, you know, if we attack the problem head-on, and just because we got it, we don't pretend everybody else has it, like, we could really end this thing. | ||
| We could fix it. | ||
| Like, the tools are there, the water is there, it's under our feet, and here we waste it, and there they don't have it. | ||
| We don't hear about Ebola anymore. | ||
| It's like it's over. | ||
| It's like they moved on to Zika. | ||
| Zika? | ||
| Yeah, Zika. | ||
| Zika. | ||
| All the Olympians are going to get it? | ||
| Yeah, they're fucked. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| Oh, the last time when I got back, the CDC was testing me. | ||
| Two different rounds of treatments, trying to figure out what... | ||
| So, on that trip, I told you going in, I got malaria. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, malaria... | ||
| Keep meaning to ask you this. | ||
| If you have malaria, can someone else get it from you? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| If a mosquito stings you while you have malaria, then it stings somebody else. | ||
| They can't get it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh... | |
| I mean, that's one I never heard of. | ||
| I mean, I've never thought of that one, but... | ||
| Remember that when people were worried about that with HIV? They were worried about mosquito transmission? | ||
| That was like the big thing. | ||
| Keep away from gay people in the summer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I... I had never thought of that, but I know that... | ||
| Don't shoot hair in the swamp. | ||
| I know that the doctors, they're always saying, you're fine. | ||
| I mean, I can fight and everything else. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You have malaria and you can fight. | ||
| Yeah, but I literally don't... | ||
| Because it's in my liver, I think you would have to go into the liver, unless it was a current outbreak that... | ||
| What about a liver kick? | ||
| You got liver kicked? | ||
| Don't let out that secret. | ||
| Just kidding. | ||
| No, but it's been a lot of fun to... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think what maybe kind of shifted was... | ||
| Kind of growing up, you know, getting bullied, you're only looking at, why am I getting bullied? | ||
| And all this stuff's true, and I am not a good person. | ||
| And then, or nobody likes me, whatever. | ||
| Then when I got 23, fighting, still not really fulfilled. | ||
| I was living more for myself there, and I'm like, man, what am I doing with my life? | ||
| Now it's so cool because seeing that and being able to tell you that last time I was here, 20 water wells or 25. But regardless, we've done 20 or 25 more. | ||
| And so that to me is a life that I get to look at. | ||
| And if I were to die, I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Without a shadow of a doubt that my life meant something. | ||
| And I know that I never felt that before during the depression, addiction, and all that other stuff. | ||
| But now I know that the life I live hopefully will outlive my life. | ||
| I want this team to... | ||
| Doing what they're doing. | ||
| Climb higher than I can climb. | ||
| Run farther than I can run. | ||
| Jump higher than I can jump. | ||
| You know, like, I want my... | ||
| What's that saying? | ||
| I want my ceiling to be their floor. | ||
| I want them to go farther than I can go because then that means that I actually made an impact that matters. | ||
| That mattered to them enough that it continued. | ||
| That it had a residual effect. | ||
| It just kept on going. | ||
| And, man, that's really shifted... | ||
| Kind of everything in my life. | ||
| Like, man, this is what life is about. | ||
| I've been signing my book ever since it came out, but I signed it, Live to Love, Love to Live. | ||
| And I know that can sound cheesy or goofy or whatever, but that's something that just really helped me whenever I was sobering up was, man, if that's what I focus on, if I can live my life to love, love, love, Then I'll love to live. | ||
| But everyone wants to love their own life that they live. | ||
| And so they're just focused on that and get this and get this materialistic thing and get this different chick because she didn't make me happier, you know, this or that or whatever. | ||
| Whenever it's like, you know what? | ||
| Like, hey, let's focus. | ||
| Let's... | ||
| I don't know if that's if I think there's a natural inclination to gravitate towards unattainable things like Ferraris and mansions and you see those things on TV and the movies and you just that shows you that you've made it and When you don't have anything and you're wanting for things you don't have Money and you're struggling you look at someone who's got all those things and money and you think if I only had that all my worries would be gone and then I would be happy But if you have that, | ||
| and nobody likes you, your life is shit. | ||
| It's still shit. | ||
| Meanwhile, you are in a hut in the middle of nowhere, well, in the middle of the Congo, with all these people, and you're having a great time. | ||
| And you're making wells, and you're loving life. | ||
| That picture that came up, I think why I got so excited was because that night in that village, I mean, we, I'm not kidding, danced and danced and danced and feasted. | ||
| I mean, we just all came together just to celebrate. | ||
| Celebrate life. | ||
| Celebrate each other. | ||
| Celebrate, guess what, our kids aren't going to be sick anymore. | ||
| Different stuff like that to where... | ||
| It's just a life where, like what you were just saying, you're always comparing, comparing, comparing. | ||
| For me, man, comparison, I think for most people, comparison is probably the number one thief that robs us of joy, of being able to be at peace. | ||
| We're always comparing ourselves and we always compare up. | ||
| We never compare down. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or just compare ourselves to people that are just like us. | ||
| We always look at what you're saying as unattainable. | ||
| And always pursuing that. | ||
| And my whole thing has been, like, recently, man, I just want... | ||
| I think I've learned it from our team in Congo. | ||
| Like, that's been the greatest gift. | ||
| Like, you were saying that, you know, there's been a lot of great stuff that's been happening. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| But, man, I started thinking, and now I think it sounds cliche, but I'll say it anyways, where... | ||
| Man, like... | ||
| They've given me more of a gift than I can give them. | ||
| I mean, you see, I told you that growing up and everything else, but to find a life of purpose, of passion, of helping one another, of, I don't know, our mission statement is defend the weak, love the unloved, empower the voiceless. | ||
| And the vision statement is overcoming oppression with overwhelming opportunity. | ||
| And so if we can go into these communities, and we've seen incredible stuff, that's what's going to be in the dock this last trip. | ||
| Me, Ben, Matt, and Derek, the filmmaker, we would not be—they wouldn't be ashamed of me saying this. | ||
| We were in tears after an interview with one of the former slave masters that ran a hospital. | ||
| And actually, if you could pull up a picture, it's called Captula. | ||
| And we were at this hospital. | ||
| And it's tough because we were trying to get treatment for Keptula. | ||
| He's a buddy of mine that passed away. | ||
| And we spent seven months taking him to hospital, taking him to hospital, taking him to hospital. | ||
| And they were just sending him away because he was a pygmy. | ||
| And it's like I knew whenever I first saw him. | ||
| Actually, if you bring up maybe the first Keptula one, that's when I saw him. | ||
| That's when I saw him for the very first time. | ||
| Oh, look at a guy that's extremely emaciated. | ||
| Yeah, and so... | ||
| So what is going on with his health right here? | ||
| Right there, we didn't know, but I had a gut feeling that it could have been tuberculosis because we've helped several of the pygmies that have tuberculosis and stuff. | ||
| Little girl in Fina and some others. | ||
| What's the root cause of tuberculosis? | ||
| There was some sort of a study on that recently. | ||
| You have a low immune system. | ||
| There was something that just came out really recently about tuberculosis. | ||
| It had something to do with fire. | ||
| If it's something to do with smoke, I believe that because the bacteria spread from person to person through microscopic droplets released in the air. | ||
| It can happen when someone in the untreated active form of tuberculosis coughs, speaks, sneezes, spits, laughs, or sings. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Imagine getting tuberculosis from a shitty song. | ||
| Like some dude breaks out the banjo like that scene in Animal House. | ||
| He breaks out a guitar and starts singing and he gives you tuberculosis as well as an ear beating. | ||
| Was there some connection with fire? | ||
| I swear I read something really recently about that. | ||
| Some connection between tuberculosis. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Was tuberculosis born of fire? | ||
| By damaging lungs and bringing people together, fire may have turned a soil microbe into a global pathogen. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Many thousands of years ago, a chilly African night. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So they think that might have started it off. | ||
| Around a fire in a cave. | ||
| And that they're always in the fire. | ||
| I can't sleep with... | ||
| That's why the bugs are even worse on me, because I have many times slept in the huts whenever the fire's going, but it just fills up with smoke to where my eyes are just... | ||
| Tears are coming down my face the whole time. | ||
| So you have to light a fire in their hut? | ||
| Yeah, that's their... | ||
| That's how they keep the bugs out? | ||
| Oh, well, it's one of the ways, but it's mainly for warmth, but a benefit is there's less bugs. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And it can help waterproof their twig and leaf huts, where enough smoke and everything, it kind of, I think it's like a tar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That shits in your lungs, too, though, right, of course? | ||
| Yeah, and there's so many kids that are at this Sustainable Solutions Center that we're hoping to get up and running. | ||
| We're wanting one for cooking, where they can use either corn cobs or corn husk or peanut shells or different things where they can put those into little briquettes. | ||
| And then they can use that and recycle it and everything else. | ||
| And it burns longer at the same temperature. | ||
| And you're not having to deforest anything and you're not breathing in that terrible smoke. | ||
| Yeah, coconut charcoal is a really... | ||
| There's some company, a grill company, Kamado company. | ||
| You know what a Kamado is? | ||
| One of those Japanese grills? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like a green egg, that kind of thing. | ||
| And they sell charcoal made out of coconut. | ||
| And apparently it's like one of the best charcoals because it's like really sustainable. | ||
| It's really easy to grow. | ||
| And it's apparently slow burning. | ||
| So much of them they waste it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just throw it away. | ||
| So what if we can recycle it? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| People throw the outside of the coconut away, but apparently it's really good for charcoal. | ||
| So Bellator has embraced this narrative. | ||
| They've embraced your story and they've made it a big part of your fighting there to let everybody know that you're doing it not just because you want to compete, but also because you want to expose the world to this passion, this project, this sort of life direction that you've taken. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I think it's really cool that they've done that. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| Dude, I love the UFC. I was 13 years old, found those tapes. | ||
| And just on that real quick, I bought all those tapes, put them under my bed, and I would wait for my parents to go to work or to go to sleep. | ||
| And I'd be popping them in the VHS. And my dad comes in and I Turn it off real quick, lay down, act like I'm asleep, and it's, you know, the VCRs, the VHS is still moving, and the, I don't know, the screen's still lit up and everything. | ||
| My dad confiscated that tape, then when he found the rest, he thought it was all porn, but it was just the UFC. Why did he confiscate it? | ||
| Well, I think me being 13, being picked on, you don't want me to start fighting people at school and different stuff. | ||
| Just a precaution. | ||
| But he told my mom, he's going to do that one day if we let him keep that stuff. | ||
| I was like, no, I won't. | ||
| But in my head, I'm like, yeah, I will. | ||
| I remember looking at the VHS tape, and when I turned it over and saw the... | ||
| Jiu-jitsu and sumo and boxing and wrestling and all these different things, it came alive to me. | ||
| It's like, oh my goodness, these guys... | ||
| Well, I think I originally connected with it because I'm like, well, these guys aren't anything like me. | ||
| They could stick up for themselves. | ||
| They're an athlete. | ||
| They're popular probably. | ||
| Instead of being the laughingstock at the party, they might be invited to the party or it might be their party. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so, I mean, I like that aspect, but then I just fell in love with the sport of it, you know, watching it and seeing how everything, and now being a fan and watching how it's evolved and everything else, it's just, it's not seeing a guy like Dan Henderson that's been fighting, I think, isn't it 20 years straight? | ||
| 20, yeah, 20 straight. | ||
| I was there when he was fighting in 97, and I wasn't there for his first fights. | ||
| He fought in 96, I think, in Brazil. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I think that was his first fight. | ||
| I actually watched that first fight in the last couple weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, because, dude, I love Dan. | ||
| Dan's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, and to see him even, I mean, because whenever he stepped in... | ||
| He was just a wrestler. | ||
| He had heavy hands, but then he's just... | ||
| Well, he didn't even have heavy hands in the beginning. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're right. | |
| In the beginning, he was just a wrestler. | ||
| Lay down and take him down and pound on him. | ||
| Yeah, he figured out over time how to utilize his power. | ||
| That's what I want to get. | ||
| Maybe I could bribe Dan or Big Country or someone to teach me that big right hand. | ||
| Do you think you can teach someone that? | ||
| I mean, Dan's one of the few guys that have sort of developed it. | ||
| But Big Country always had power. | ||
| Big Country was known way back in the day as being a jiu-jitsu guy. | ||
| He was one of Mark Lehman's guys. | ||
| And he was really respected as a grappler. | ||
| Yeah, black belt. | ||
| Yeah, but to go from that to being this... | ||
| Crazy knockout brawler. | ||
| People rarely see big country. | ||
| You never see him submit anybody. | ||
| I mean, the closest thing was when he took Kimbo down and got him into the Mounted Crucifix and just elbowed him until the referee stopped the fight. | ||
| Since I was on that season, I think he threw a couple elbows, but when they finally stopped it, we were all counting every single punch, but he was just tapping his forehead like this because it wasn't intelligently... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Defending himself, but... | ||
| He didn't even have to hurt him to stop the fight. | ||
| He was just... | ||
| Tapping his forehead. | ||
| Well, he was... | ||
| It's almost like, you know, when you... | ||
| What is that called in wrestling? | ||
| When you have so many points, it's a technical... | ||
| Tech fall. | ||
| Yeah, tech fall. | ||
| Tech fall. | ||
| Almost like that. | ||
| It's like, you're never coming back from this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like a 10-run rule in Little League Baseball. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 10 points up, you just call it. | ||
| And... | ||
| The big countries got very good submissions, but everybody expected that from him when he started fighting. | ||
| Like, if you remember back when he was fighting for Elite XE, which was like the most corrupt organization in the early days of MMA, he had Andrei Olofsky down in side control, working for a Kimura, had that, yep, had side control and had that double wrist lock position, and he was working for the Kimura, and they stood him right up. | ||
| And I remember watching TV going, it's corrupt! | ||
| We're screaming at the TV, it's corrupt! | ||
| They had a 15-second rule. | ||
| Like, if it went to the ground, if nothing happened in 15 seconds. | ||
| I think Jake Shields submitted Paul Daly. | ||
| It was one of the few submissions in Elite XA. But he just mounted him and just immediately went to an arm bar and locked it in. | ||
| Was it Paul Daly? | ||
| I think it's Paul Daly. | ||
| I might be wrong. | ||
| I was actually, well, I mean, now with the Kimbo stuff happening, it's pretty, I mean, it's very, very sad. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I mean, apparently he had a doctor telling him, you know, for people who don't know what we're talking about, Kimbo died really recently of heart disease. | ||
| And he had a doctor telling him recently that he needed a heart transplant. | ||
| I guess he had some sort of congenital heart disease. | ||
| That, I mean, how could that be, you know, you look at him, the guy's a stud, he's in great shape. | ||
| I mean, how could you imagine that? | ||
| His heart was so bad that they were telling him he needed a heart transplant. | ||
| And this, yeah, this could probably sound cliche again too, but because knowing him, being an ultimate fighter, and him cooking the best steak I've ever had, sorry Big Josh, but he, I don't know, even though he had a bad heart, I think I don't know. | ||
| Emotionally, I had a good heart. | ||
| He was always a good guy. | ||
| Always a very friendly guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even with... | ||
| I mean, technically, we were supposed to fight, I think, three times before or two times on Elite XC. My name was in the hat for that. | ||
| And then because I was like a 19 or 20-year-old kid, I had a decent record. | ||
| But it was a bad matchup. | ||
| So they... | ||
| Scrapped it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Wasn't smart. | ||
| Then on Ultimate Fighter, I was actually matched up with him. | ||
| And then Roy got it. | ||
| And then we were talking about it in Bellator, where at our last fight, February 19th, I think, Houston Toyota Center. | ||
| And backstage... | ||
| Oh, actually, that was... | ||
| This will be good in a way that the dude just loved on Ben, my brother and translator from Congo. | ||
| He got to actually come from Congo for my second fight. | ||
| And so the first fight, actually, if you can pull up that video, it's called Fight Day, talking to my Congo guys. | ||
| But it's less than a minute, I think. | ||
| And they surprised me for my first fight back. | ||
| Josh woke me up, and it was a guy that's like my father figure, a guy that's like my brother. | ||
| And it was just an awesome fight day. | ||
| My first thing to see in here is this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This was so awesome. | |
| Who is this that's laying down? | ||
| Is that your voice? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You gonna watch it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you can't fall in from there, but we'll record it. | |
| The shittiest angle ever. | ||
| I couldn't even tell it's you. | ||
| It's a beard. | ||
| A talking beard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I miss you guys. | ||
| My heart's happy now. | ||
| I think you can stop it in a minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Yeah! | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| The battle's already won before the fight. | ||
| Hey, uh, you go back to Congo today? | ||
| Okay, so yeah, you can stop it now. | ||
| And then, um, it was, uh, it was really cool. | ||
| Like, I mean, Josh was filming because he didn't want, I guess it was a surprise. | ||
| They were going to call me and... | ||
| But they were in Uganda getting more well drilling supplies, because you can't Skype from Congo. | ||
| They were at a decent enough hotel that had Wi-Fi, and they were able to Skype with me the day of my first fight back. | ||
| Man, it was awesome. | ||
| That was so much motivation, seeing them, hearing them, and then having them come for the second fight and be there. | ||
| He was actually in my corner. | ||
| What you're doing is helping them by building wells. | ||
| Once you do that, like say if you establish a series of wells and well building and everybody has fresh water, do you want to take it another step? | ||
| Did you want to try to give them safer housing or cleaner housing? | ||
| Do you want to try to teach them how to build houses? | ||
| Are you planning on escalating it from where you're at right now? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact, I went about it, and it was a learning lesson. | ||
| I don't regret it, because I got some great training here in California. | ||
| I think, is it called Hesperia, California? | ||
| And there's something called CalEarth, and they build ecodomes, or earthbag homes, or they call them super adobe, the technical term. | ||
| But they make... | ||
| It looks like pygmy huts out of sandbags that they fill up with sand, do it in a circle, and supposedly they're earthquake-proof, tornado-proof, all this different stuff. | ||
| This is it? | ||
| Yeah, right there. | ||
| And a dome is the strongest structure known to man. | ||
| The arch is after that, or a vault, then an arch. | ||
| But yeah, I was in these exact buildings. | ||
| That's like a hobbit house. | ||
| What a cool-looking little house. | ||
| House Quetzalcoatl. | ||
| Back up. | ||
| But I went there because... | ||
| Why are they calling it Quetzalcoatl? | ||
| That's an Aztec god, right? | ||
| That's that Aztec snake feathered plume serpent god? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Costa Rica, that might be. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Cal Earth Green Build. | ||
| I actually love all those guys there. | ||
| We have a lot of like-minded beliefs of how to help people. | ||
| But yeah, I loved it because... | ||
| Housing what? | ||
| Because I slept in the huts the first two times I went and got rained on and literally one time woke up in the mud like sunk halfway because it just rained and rained and rained and rained. | ||
| Just lying in mud. | ||
| Yeah, to where it just kept coming through. | ||
| It was just washing down the hill. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| When my wife was there, I was doing it again and all the pygmies get up and they came out and I didn't know what they were doing. | ||
| I thought something was going on because everyone was around our hut in a circle. | ||
| Digging this trench so it wouldn't come in and get Emily wet. | ||
| They're just so caring, so awesome. | ||
| But when I saw the huts, those ecodomes, earthbag homes, I was like, man, that's something culturally sound. | ||
| That is something that they would want to live in because it looks like that. | ||
| It looks like their huts, similar. | ||
| And so this is something that you want to try to implement? | ||
| Without a doubt, but it has to be the right timing because what happened was... | ||
| I knew Papawaii and the school was working on land and I was going to help with that too. | ||
| I had no clue how to get clean water. | ||
| I was looking for it. | ||
| I was in my backyard. | ||
| I bought everything from Lowe's. | ||
| I'm in my backyard and it was like a website. | ||
| I think it's literally something like howtodrillyourownwell.org or something. | ||
| And it's this guy standing on the back of his pickup truck and he's drilling a well. | ||
| But what I didn't know is that's not drinkable water the way he's doing it and everything else. | ||
| And so I'm in the backyard with like $500, $600 of low stuff with PVC trying to drill my own well by myself and trying to learn. | ||
| But I'm like, man, this is so hard. | ||
| There's got to be an easier way. | ||
| And so I kind of stepped around that because I'm like, you know what? | ||
| I can't help them with housing. | ||
| If I go here, get trained. | ||
| Sandbags are cheap. | ||
| Get a couple shovels, make some mud and get some cement and make a plaster to go around it to waterproof it better. | ||
| And that's going to work. | ||
| What kind of plaster? | ||
| I always make it out of a mix of cement and soil. | ||
| And if it's got the right mixture, which I'm forgetting right now, it can be just as strong or waterproof as like concrete. | ||
| So it's a really great thing. | ||
| But when I get there and all of a sudden I see, you know, hey... | ||
| First, if they don't have any land of their own, then building these things are going to be worthless. | ||
| Someone else can move into them. | ||
| So they've got to have land first. | ||
| There's a process. | ||
| The most important thing is land and the water, because water is next, then food, and after that, yes. | ||
| If you can be healthy, I want to stay in a sweet spot and in a lane and not spread ourselves too thin because we aren't focused. | ||
| But have you thought about these people that you dealt with in California, trying to bring them in and have them take over that aspect of it? | ||
| Yes, that would be cool. | ||
| The only thing that we are is we try to be really protective of the pygmies. | ||
| And because bringing in a lot of outsiders, most outsiders that visit them, it's not a good experience. | ||
| And so just bringing in a lot of random people. | ||
| If it was a couple of people that were really highly skilled, had the right hearts, their vision lined up with our vision of how we... | ||
| Kind of do the community development because we want to... | ||
| I think there's a great book. | ||
| I think it's called Helping Without Hurting or How to Help Without Hurting or something like that. | ||
| And I have it. | ||
| I should know it. | ||
| I have two of them. | ||
| And it's really great about how you can go about helping people in a way that helps them more than helps you. | ||
| In a way of like, a lot of people help because it's going to make them feel warm and fuzzy. | ||
| And yeah, you just do that enough for random people. | ||
| But what if you can make a difference that... | ||
| That lasted longer. | ||
| And it's great to do both, right? | ||
| It's great to do both. | ||
| I actually love when I see someone else do some random act of kindness. | ||
| It warms my heart. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But how can we help in a way that really changes the game of things there? | ||
| Well, I think you're definitely already doing that. | ||
| I mean, you're certainly spreading it. | ||
| I think you feel like it's a long job and your job's not nearly done, but... | ||
| No, I don't think it ever... | ||
| Ever will be? | ||
| Well, for water, I have definitely hope for that, but then... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think I just feel... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Whenever you... | ||
| How is it? | ||
| When you have that heart connection, it's kind of like, well, I want to see these people if they have everything I got, too. | ||
| I still want to hang out with them all I can. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know what, though? | ||
| It's been really cool to see... | ||
| So there's these guys from Uganda that came in and helped train us, and they're called Young Men Drillers. | ||
| And there are these guys that were... | ||
| You've heard of the LRA and Joseph Kony and different stuff like that? | ||
| One of the guys was, he told me around a campfire that he was one of two, it might have been three, survivors out of a three, four, five hundred person village. | ||
| The Rebels came in, killed everybody. | ||
| He barely escaped. | ||
| And then another kid, another kid. | ||
| And it's so cool to see these young guys all of a sudden stand up and Water 4 got involved with them and train them up on how to drill wells in their own country. | ||
| And these, when I say young men drillers, like, I think some of them were 16, 17, 18 when they started. | ||
| Well, then all of a sudden they cranked out over 100 water wells. | ||
| Over 100 water wells. | ||
| They've been doing it longer than we have. | ||
| We haven't done any. | ||
| I'm in the Congo. | ||
| We try to get them out to us to help. | ||
| Matt comes in to train us and to continue training with them. | ||
| And then they were going to leave that team. | ||
| We've got the main three guys from Youngman Drillers behind to train us, to invest and impart their knowledge in us. | ||
| Matt was doing real intensive training. | ||
| And then these guys are going to stick around for the next three months and make sure we could bust out, you know, a few wells and do it the right way. | ||
| And so it's so cool. | ||
| They came and stayed with us. | ||
| And so cool to see that they've gone through all that, where one of the guys, it was probably every other night or every three nights, He's waking up in night terrors where he is just screaming. | ||
| And I've never been around that before. | ||
| But the things he saw, the things he's been through are just so tough. | ||
| But then to see he chose that he's going to take a different path. | ||
| He's going to find something that he can help people with, and then he's going to give it to others in a different country, in Congo. | ||
| So they came and lived with the pygmies for three months. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| Now, Ben and a couple of our other drillers are in Cameroon. | ||
| And I kind of had this thing that I haven't really spoken out, but I would love to see the pygmies in Congo all have water. | ||
| But then after that, you know, the other pygmies are suffering in very similar ways to the pygmies in Congo. | ||
| And so what's so cool is that, okay, the Youngman drillers comes out, invest in us, pours their hearts and lives. | ||
| They almost died coming to us. | ||
| Their car flipped, ran over a lady. | ||
| A taxi driver was driving. | ||
| He ran away. | ||
| She died. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, fuck. | |
| They ran over a lady? | ||
| No, they didn't. | ||
| The cab driver did? | ||
| The cab driver did, and he bailed. | ||
| He was from Congo, and they were from Uganda, and at the border, they had to get in with a Congolese taxi driver. | ||
| Well, they do that, and they can't even speak the same language. | ||
| And he gets in a wreck. | ||
| He knows Congo. | ||
| He does that drive all the time to the border. | ||
| And so he just bails. | ||
| And literally, the people in a place called Nyoka, which means snake, it was a place of a rebel group that used to be there and everything. | ||
| And so it was a very, very bad part of town. | ||
| There's gold mines on both sides of them. | ||
| Luckily, this lady took them in and held them in there and called the military because people literally had, not the military, but the cops, and it was just a little shack. | ||
| Were people going to kill them because they thought that they killed the woman? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And there, it doesn't matter if, you know, you're guilty and we'll ask questions later. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's mob justice. | ||
| Someone's got to pay. | ||
| If this person was just hurt somebody, even if you weren't driving, even if you were... | ||
| One of our guys was thrown from the vehicle of the car when it rolled and running away, fearing for their lives. | ||
| They had, I think, $15,000 of well-drilling equipment in the trunk, plus they had a... | ||
| A solar pump, solar filter, and it did like 400 gallons of water a day, or 400 liters, 100 gallons. | ||
| And anyways, they looted it. | ||
| I think they set the car on fire. | ||
| I know they looted it, but then at the police station, a little shack, people outside had machetes, literal torches. | ||
| They had like those hose for farming. | ||
| What else did they have? | ||
| Oh, tires. | ||
| They were going to put tires around them and set them on fire. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And so, luckily, man, I, yeah, very luckily, it was a miracle that Papawai is such a great, like, I don't know, he's a peacekeeper. | ||
| Like, he can go somewhere and talk with anyone that's having a dispute and bring him to some sort of agreement. | ||
| And he was able to go out there on behalf of our Ugandan guys, doesn't even really know him yet. | ||
| Gets them out. | ||
| And while they're leaving, Papa Wai is really respected because he's actually helping people in their country. | ||
| People know him when he's walking around because he's like, oh, that's the crew that's actually putting what they're learning into action. | ||
| And so he went up there and as they were getting ready to leave, someone came up to him and whispered to him and says, we know where all your stuff is. | ||
| And he's like, what? | ||
| Everything that was stolen. | ||
| He's like, I think it was something like he said it to him there or later. | ||
| Why they didn't keep it and why they gave it back. | ||
| But whenever they got there, it was the case. | ||
| They had broken the lock, opened it up, and... | ||
| Oh, whenever they opened up that solar pump, it's got these two different... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I'm losing my words, but canisters on it. | ||
| And they left it because they thought it was a bomb. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, God. | |
| And so they left that and all our well-drown equipment, and we were able to reclaim everything, get them to us. | ||
| They lived with us for three months. | ||
| Then there are supply chain from Uganda to Congo. | ||
| I'll wrap this up where it's so cool to see where now, no joke, the guys that came out to learn from Cameroon that work with the Pygmies in Cameroon are named Willie and Turbo. | ||
| Those are their names from Cameroon. | ||
| And actually, that big heavyweight, what is his name? | ||
| He's in the UFC now. | ||
| Francis Ngara. | ||
| Yeah, Francis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, him and Chet Congo, both. | ||
| Chet Congo's from Congo. | ||
| I believe. | ||
| I'm not sure which one he's from. | ||
| No, it's huge. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| He is fucking huge. | ||
| Beast. | ||
| He's a scary guy, man. | ||
| And both those guys ended up in France because they're French-speaking countries, both Congo and Cameroon. | ||
| So it's just cool to see how the trickle effect comes from these guys that are lucky to be alive. | ||
| Then from growing up, then they're lucky to be alive coming to help us. | ||
| Then they decide to stay in the country that they were almost murdered in for an extra three months so that we get it down to where we really know what we're doing. | ||
| Then they can go back and we have this great relationship. | ||
| But now another can come and learn from us. | ||
| And now we're sending our team out to different parts of the continent, to Rwanda, to Kenya, to Cameroon, to I think Rwanda, Uganda, and training up these other teams that are wanting, they have a desire to... | ||
| To do the same thing. | ||
| That's such a crazy story, man. | ||
| They're so lucky. | ||
| They'll stick them in tires and light them on fire. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a guy beat. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| Ben and I both saw a guy beat to death. | ||
| Because they called him a thief. | ||
| And rumors were that we were kind of far away. | ||
| I tried to get up kind of too scary close. | ||
| Ben's literally pulling my shirt away. | ||
| Because I'm seeing this. | ||
| I don't know who he is. | ||
| And he's getting beat and kicked and all this other stuff. | ||
| But Ben's like, F.A., we gotta go. | ||
| We gotta go. | ||
| And so he pulled me away. | ||
| And then when we came back later, I couldn't even bend my body like that. | ||
| Like it's like a contortionist kind of thing where he's like bent up like a pretzel and just laying there. | ||
| And supposedly the rumor was that just some drunk guys started a rumor, called him a thief, called him a thief. | ||
| And when someone says thief, they pounce on the on the thief. | ||
| And so sometimes it's really a thief or whatever, but other times it's some innocent guy and crazy stuff can happen. | ||
| I can only imagine. | ||
| You've seen some shit, dude. | ||
| Man, it's been different, but I wouldn't change it. | ||
| It's beyond... | ||
| It literally is wild. | ||
| Like, I couldn't... | ||
| I couldn't have dreamed it up for myself. | ||
| And what's kind of funny is, I think... | ||
| Not funny. | ||
| It's actually... | ||
| Have you ever heard of... | ||
| I think it's a book called What They Don't Teach You at Harvard? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| What they don't teach you at Harvard Business or something like that? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think the author's name is Mark. | ||
| Well, he did something pretty incredible, and I heard about it when I was in high school, but Kenny Monday, which he got to, it came full circle. | ||
| He coached me in high school, then for my comeback fight, and he coached me a little bit in MMA at the beginning, but then for my comeback fight in this last one, he was in my corner. | ||
| But anyways, he told me, you know, hey, if you want to wrestle, go home, write down your goals. | ||
| Like, write them down. | ||
| And this book talks about how if they polled some class, some senior class at Harvard, and asked who has goals. | ||
| Who knows their goals? | ||
| And some like 87% didn't know. | ||
| Like, besides, I'll get my college degree from Harvard and then I'll figure it out. | ||
| Then they asked, who knows your... | ||
| I think it was 87% of them or something like that. | ||
| Or 83% something. | ||
| And then it was... | ||
| 13% or something like that where they had... | ||
| I'm sorry I'm screwing this up, but it's an incredible stat. | ||
| So 87% or 83% didn't know their goals. | ||
| 13% or 17% did know their goals, but they didn't have them written down. | ||
| And then only 3% of the class had written concise, direct goals of what they wanted to do in their life. | ||
| I think they went back 10 years later, and the ones that had goals but didn't have them written down were making twice as much on average than all the other 83% or 87% that didn't have goals. | ||
| And then the people that had written down goals, they were making 10 times as all the other 97 combined. | ||
| Here is why 3% of Harvard MBAs make 10 times as much as the other 97% combined. | ||
| Harvard MBA program is extremely competitive and today admits approximately 15% of the applicants. | ||
| The 1960s acceptance rate was about 30% down to 25% in the 1970s, fluctuated between 10 and 15% ever since. | ||
| Students who make it past the application process are typically standouts and already fairly successful by most traditional definitions. | ||
| They have an undergraduate degree, typically three to five years of work experience. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| And when considered suitable for acceptance into the Harvard Business School, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So, okay, so it's explaining about writing your goals down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And having a clear direction. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| And for me, and seeing that, hearing that, and then having Coach Mundy tell me that. | ||
| Honestly, wrestling, MMA, having a goal to focus on, having a goal to write down, I think that really helped me escape the depression for a while, for a few years, because now I found something that I could focus on and I was passionate about. | ||
| That was my outlet. | ||
| But he also told me, he went a step further, I don't think I've said this publicly, but he told me, write down, what's your goal? | ||
| I'm like, I want to be a state champion. | ||
| And he said, okay, go home, write that down, and put it somewhere you can see it either on your website. | ||
| You know, your bathroom mirror or somewhere. | ||
| I put it above my bed, but I didn't never write down state champion. | ||
| I wrote down national champion. | ||
| Started working towards it, was state champion that year. | ||
| Having a great, great training partner. | ||
| And I'm kind of jazzed up that the Olympics is coming up. | ||
| I know some guys that are going. | ||
| Robbie Smith, he's a heavyweight. | ||
| He was my roommate at the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| Travelle DeLagniv, we wrestled together in high school and then after. | ||
| So I'm pumped about it. | ||
| But see these guys obtaining their goals, their dreams, and writing them down. | ||
| Well then, with Coach Mundy, he's like, hey, get some of your favorite wrestling moves, some pictures, so you can visualize them. | ||
| Not just see the words, but see the actual thing that you want to do. | ||
| Like, see it. | ||
| And so I went and I put one wrestling move on the left and another on the right. | ||
| And man, I just would go to sleep dreaming about it, basically, and wake up motivated to attain that gold national champion. | ||
| And having a guy that's Olympic gold medalist teaching you the basics, like, you'll get good quick that way. | ||
| But, um... | ||
| Also having the goals. | ||
| The first national championship I won was with the move on the left, and the second national championship was with the move on the right. | ||
| And it was nuts to see how all that works out. | ||
| And looking back on this book and seeing, like, man, you've got to... | ||
| Write down. | ||
| And I need to update that now. | ||
| I've been working on it and everything else. | ||
| I think a lot of us do. | ||
| Yeah, I think focusing on one individual goal like that or writing something down, having a very clear thing that you're working towards, it takes away a lot of the ambiguity that people have about wanting to be successful. | ||
| Just wanting to be successful, just wanting to do well, that's not enough. | ||
| You have to have something that you're looking towards, something you're moving and working towards. | ||
| A plan, an initiative. | ||
| That's probably one of the biggest strengths that our team has had. | ||
| The 18 employees we have at Water 4, we write down what we want to do. | ||
| It's so cool. | ||
| When I came on the show the first time, And I had gone and I'd only experienced the terrible stuff. | ||
| Like, nothing good had happened yet. | ||
| Only corruption and me holding the little guy that died and all this just brutal stuff. | ||
| But I came back and, like, finally was like, okay. | ||
| I can't say no anymore. | ||
| I got to do something. | ||
| And so let's just write it down and do it and start speaking about it and throwing it out there. | ||
| And then to see the other team, like they're coming in with the real, like here's the big vision stuff, but here's filling in all the details, how we're going to get it done. | ||
| And man, my first time to write things down was one water well on 300 acres of land, and maybe we could build a school and get a teacher. | ||
| And they would help them with education because the Pygmies don't have any representation in the government because nobody is educated. | ||
| And that's their excuse, at least in Congo, what I hear. | ||
| And so I was like, school, that'd be great. | ||
| One water well and 300 acres. | ||
| And now it's, by the end of this year, it'll be 3,000 acres of land. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That they literally own. | ||
| It'll be 10 times more. | ||
| 45 wells. | ||
| 45 wells. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| 18 employees. | ||
| We've got three working farms right now. | ||
| Over how long? | ||
| How many years have you been doing this now? | ||
| Five. | ||
| That's pretty incredible, man. | ||
| Over five, for sure. | ||
| That's an incredible commitment. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| It's been a... | ||
| Yeah, it's been an awesome watch. | ||
| Even being able to go back and have all these pictures to show you about Leo May growing papaya trees and standing in front of banana trees and all the different stuff. | ||
| And they're growing them with the water that they're getting from the wells? | ||
| Well, it's the rainforest and everything, so it's pretty fertile. | ||
| Yeah, you can spit a seed on the ground and it's going to sprout up something in the rainforest. | ||
| Well, that's great, too. | ||
| Are you bringing seeds over there for these people? | ||
| They have pretty good seeds there. | ||
| And a lot of those trees were doing seedlings. | ||
| And they know how to garden and farm and all that stuff? | ||
| Yeah, especially at the university, because they have a whole agriculture department that teams up with the community development department. | ||
| So they come and teach the pickings how to do it? | ||
| Yeah, they come in and teach them, and then they start learning how to do it for themselves. | ||
| And this was... | ||
| I think I can tell you two moments real quick where... | ||
| Going back and seeing Leo May and walking in and seeing all those banana trees blew me away. | ||
| And then now there, it's just so cool because I was leaving and there's a little guy named Jippy and I've seen him grow up. | ||
| I've watched him grow up and I saw whenever his water source was absolutely disgusting. | ||
| Like you could not ever imagine... | ||
| A human being drinking it. | ||
| What am I looking at? | ||
| That was their water source where they got water. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's this little stagnant pond kind of thing with all this moss over it. | ||
| That's a pond? | ||
| Yeah, now what's so cool is this picture. | ||
| That looks just like green. | ||
| It doesn't look like water at all. | ||
| It's a big thick thing. | ||
| So they'll get a stick and they'll push all the moss. | ||
| Did you send this to Jamie, this photo? | ||
| That's what I had and then it all lost. | ||
| What happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, do you? | |
| You're the man. | ||
| Oh, the people can see? | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| How's that working? | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| What is wrong with the connection to you? | ||
| I don't have that photo. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| It doesn't have the photo because everything crashed on me. | ||
| Dude, I didn't even sleep last night at all. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Because I was trying to send videos to Water 4, an update video, and it was at my hotel. | ||
| It's a little roach motel, but it took like two hours to send water. | ||
| One video, and then I have to do another. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And then all of a sudden, it just... | ||
| I lost the PowerPoint, and it went back to... | ||
| Well, speaking of videos, let's watch the video that you said Bellator did for you. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. | ||
| Let's watch that. | ||
| I want to see that. | ||
| What is this one I'm looking at right here? | ||
| That's where we drilled one of the new wells. | ||
| What is those things in their hands? | ||
| Jerry cans. | ||
| They're filling out. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact... | ||
| Okay, so let's play this. | ||
| foundations. | ||
| Justin Wren versus Josh Burns. | ||
| The story of that fight was the time off of a very talented fighter. | ||
| He'd been away from the sport for years. | ||
| One of those guys, when he was active, when he was at his peak, was considered one of the hottest prospects in the heavyweight division. | ||
| Talented wrestler, aggressive, well-rounded, well-coached. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa, whoa! | |
| Whoa, whoa! | ||
| But the time off, the ring rust, the time away from the sport against Josh Burns, a guy who traditionally wasn't a very fast starter, we thought he'd have time to warm up and he didn't. | ||
| Burns came right after him, a guy I think was trying to take advantage of the fact that Wren had been off for so long. | ||
| Wren handled it extremely well. | ||
| Wren had been away from it a long time so you could see the surprise. | ||
| You could see the fatigue. | ||
| You could see the questioning of himself. | ||
| You could see those times when things started working out and it started coming back to him. | ||
| The story of all his time off was on his face and was in his performance. | ||
| That's a guy making up for time off in one fight. | ||
| What's easy to forget with Justin Wren's story, with him helping out the Pygmies, with all he's done socially, with all he's done politically for that tribe, they can't go in there with him. | ||
| And the pressure of having a big story on your shoulders, everybody rooting for you, everybody reading your book, that's not an easy thing to carry into a fight. | ||
| Everybody talks about how great the story is and what it does for a fighter and what it does for their career. | ||
| It's also a gigantic burden. | ||
| You're not just fighting for yourself anymore. | ||
| You're fighting for everyone who looks up to you. | ||
| Winning that night was a big deal for him. | ||
| People don't understand what he was carrying. | ||
| He was carrying ring rust, and he was carrying the hopes and dreams of everybody he was fighting for, and he managed it. | ||
| Could you go back to 1.27 real quick and pause it? | ||
| Just one minute, 27 seconds, because I just... | ||
| That's not easy. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's right there. | ||
| So the girls on the left through the cage, this is the only time this ever happened. | ||
| That's my wife. | ||
| This is her first fight of mine to ever go to or see. | ||
| And we've been together for four or five years. | ||
| And it's so funny because I was throwing the knees right here. | ||
| And this is the ring rust. | ||
| Dominic Cruz can say there's not ring rust. | ||
| He's just... | ||
| Way too mentally tough and stubborn, and he's an awesome competitor. | ||
| But, dude, well, one, I didn't train like I really should have. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure that had a big factor. | ||
| Yeah, and two, it was, man, but one of the ring rust kind of things was, I could hear the commentators, and I could, I looked out, the first person I see is my wife. | ||
| And I see her, make eye contact with her, like, we stared into each other's eyes, and I know this is going to sound goofy, but... | ||
| She had a new outfit on and I'm just like, she's beautiful. | ||
| And then all of a sudden I see her and she's like, go! | ||
| And all of a sudden I'm like, I'm in a fight! | ||
| And he's like punching me and I'm just like, ah, crap! | ||
| So, uh, no, it was in, in actually right there was the closest part where I almost finished him there with some, some knees or coulda, shoulda, woulda. | ||
| And, um, and then I stop, look out at my wife, see her and Grace, which she came to Congo with us too. | ||
| And I see them, and I'm like, what am I doing? | ||
| After the fight, I instantly thought, what was I doing in the fight? | ||
| Looking out, seeing my wife, and thinking, she's beautiful. | ||
| So, I don't know why I brought that up, except for... | ||
| It was a moment. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it was unique, and it was a blessing. | ||
| And that video actually was... | ||
| I'm glad to show it because of that, but then... | ||
| I meant to show you the one that came first, which we don't need to play that, but what happened for the first fight back, which is kind of nuts, that the guy surprised me and called me in the morning, and I was able to see him, and they were able to encourage me for the fight and say, we know you're fighting for us, all that. | ||
| It's really great. | ||
| Then Emily sent me a picture of her. | ||
| It's so awesome. | ||
| Her with like 10 or 12 kids around her, and they all have the biggest smiles. | ||
| She says, remember... | ||
| Remember who you fight for and why you fight. | ||
| That's a lot of pressure. | ||
| It is, but at the same time, she's so awesome and loves me. | ||
| For some reason, I like pressure. | ||
| I like to be under the gun, something like that. | ||
| What's next for you, man? | ||
| Man, I think... | ||
| I think we just got pretty much settled into Colorado and joined in the MMA scene up there. | ||
| Team takedown was great. | ||
| It kind of dissolved. | ||
| Team takedown dissolved? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sort of? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| When Johnny Hendricks left? | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| He's not on there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But once he left... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The coaches are gone. | ||
| That came in from out of state. | ||
| No, team takedown was a weird situation, right? | ||
| It was like some wealthy guy was financing the entire thing, right? | ||
| One, and he's a great dude. | ||
| And then he brought in a bunch of other people. | ||
| But I think... | ||
| I think for them it was just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think they might have got burned. | ||
| Well, they had a deal, right? | ||
| Where they would pay guys a salary and then... | ||
| Salary, car, your rent, your groceries. | ||
| But when you won, you were supposed to give them a percentage of your winnings. | ||
| I think it was 50%. | ||
| 50? | ||
| 50%. | ||
| But you get your house payment, your car, your insurance, and the health insurance. | ||
| That's great until fighters started making 10 million bucks. | ||
| And then they're like, what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's very true, because they're only spending 50 or 70. Well, who agreed to that? | ||
| Did Johnny Hendricks agree to that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he was giving 50% of his purse? | ||
| Yeah, I think most every team takedown guy was. | ||
| Johnny might have been a little, I think his might have been a little different than everybody else's. | ||
| That seems like a crazy deal. | ||
| How much were they paying them? | ||
| I love all the guys. | ||
| They're awesome dudes. | ||
| I wouldn't even want to quote it, but I know over 50, maybe under 100, but... | ||
| A year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Well, that's a good investment if you get five million bucks back. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But I guess it didn't work out because when Johnny started making real money, that's when he... | ||
| Is that when he left or was there other issues? | ||
| Yeah, I think it was that and then I think internally there was some butting of heads between a few different people, between maybe coaches, maybe management, maybe fighters too. | ||
| So now you're in Colorado. | ||
| Now I'm in Colorado because... | ||
| And where are you training in Colorado? | ||
| Well, my home gym will be Grudge Training Center, which is actually pretty cool. | ||
| There's an instructor named Drew that's pretty great, came in. | ||
| He opened, I think he opened up, maybe I'm wrong on that one, but 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu in, I think, Boulder. | ||
| But now he has one in Nevada, which is inside of Grudge. | ||
| And so now we got a 10th Planet in there. | ||
| And he's actually showing some slick Darce chokes. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Does Bellator have a fight lined up for you? | ||
| Maybe November, December. | ||
| We're looking at that. | ||
| The thing that I want to do is get in a real... | ||
| I haven't given myself time to settle, to really train, to really focus, and I know that now it's a time crunch. | ||
| I'm 29... | ||
| I know that the youngest heavyweight, I think, is still JDS and Junior Dos Santos in the top 10. He's 32. I mean, Barnett's, I think, 38 and Brock's 39. Heavyweights tend to mature later in life. | ||
| Hunt is 42. Well, Brock is pretty much done now, I think. | ||
| I think that last positive test, he did two positive tests in a row. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He got one before the fight, one after the fight. | ||
| It's most likely one and done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I got some time. | ||
| Are you thinking about going to the UFC? So you have this Bellator deal. | ||
| Are you enjoying competing for Bellator? | ||
| I have thoroughly appreciated how they've been treating me. | ||
| But you're mentioning all these MMA fighters from the UFC. So are you thinking about going over there? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| I mean, I would never be against that because I love the UFC, love MMA, and that's a big, big platform. | ||
| How long is your deal at Bellator for? | ||
| I have two more fights. | ||
| So I'll fight two more and... | ||
| For me, I mean, the reason we're in Colorado first is I'm wanting to get my wrestling back because I'm pretty disappointed in my first two. | ||
| Honestly, winning, this was the first two times winning felt really good because I didn't do it for me. | ||
| But then at the same time, right away, the competitor comes in and is like, you messed up here, here, here, here, here. | ||
| And I think... | ||
| Pretty much every guy taking the ground finished. | ||
| It's like, why am I trying to outbox the boxers whenever I need to wrestle? | ||
| Is it difficult for you to balance the two worlds? | ||
| Because, you know, you have one that demands incredible attention. | ||
| Your fighting career demands incredible attention. | ||
| And then you have the other that also demands incredible attention. | ||
| You have an amazing commitment to these pygmy people. | ||
| And this incredible passion and love for it, but then you also have, you're in the most dangerous combat sport in the world. | ||
| I mean, it requires massive attention. | ||
| Like, we were talking about Francis Cano. | ||
| Like, if you're gonna fight Francis Cano, you gotta fuckin' batten down the hatchets. | ||
| You gotta be in incredible shape. | ||
| Being consistent, dedicated, and no excuses. | ||
| That's what left a pretty sour taste in my mouth after these last two fights, because I knew... | ||
| I hate doing that, like rushing it or getting in whenever I'm not prepared. | ||
| Are you training at all when you're in the Congo? | ||
| And how often are you in the Congo? | ||
| Now I'm going to start going back just after every fight. | ||
| When I fight, go back for a couple weeks. | ||
| I tried to be real safe this time. | ||
| I took my own food, like all of it, like an entire check bag was just Kind bars and Lara bars and... | ||
| All these different green smoothies and different stuff. | ||
| So I wasn't even eating any food there. | ||
| Still got sick. | ||
| And so I had malaria. | ||
| Then after that, I got shingles, which is crazy. | ||
| It was completely across my forehead and over here. | ||
| So that was like the middle of the trip. | ||
| That's like a herpes, right? | ||
| Isn't that like kind of a herpes? | ||
| Shingles? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| But it's the adult form of the chicken pox. | ||
| And it's brutal. | ||
| Like it was... | ||
| It was a different pain than I've ever felt because it's a nerve pain. | ||
| And I was out in the forest and there was a couple, two, three days where we were there, you know, for the documentary, for the water wells, everything else. | ||
| And we got a team that came. | ||
| And so we got to get it done. | ||
| So I kind of stayed back a couple days. | ||
| But then while we're out there and different stuff, like a rebel group actually came like... | ||
| I believe it was three miles from us and only about a mile away from our truck. | ||
| And so I'm sick. | ||
| I can't get back to the hospital that I just came out of from getting treatment for malaria to get treatment for shingles. | ||
| So that was tough. | ||
| But for me, to answer your question, I want to be... | ||
| I want to be realistic, but at the same time, a quote my mom taught me, I forget who it was, but she says something like, an optimist is someone who goes after Moby Dick in a rowboat and takes the tartar sauce with him. | ||
| So an optimist goes after Moby Dick in a rowboat and takes the tartar sauce with him. | ||
| So for me, I want to swing for the fences, make the biggest impact possible. | ||
| But at the same time, We're restructuring stuff. | ||
| We had meetings at Water 4, and I think just getting everyone on the same page. | ||
| Well, me too, because I was spreading myself too thin. | ||
| The biggest thing possible is the UFC Heavyweight Championship. | ||
| Yeah, without a doubt. | ||
| Maybe first Bellator, then UFC. Yeah, is that a thought that you have in your mind? | ||
| Yeah, we'll be on one of those goals. | ||
| Okay, at UFC 200, this could sound goofy to anybody else. | ||
| I think a lot of athletes would probably get it. | ||
| Some might not, but I bought a UFC replica belt because I'm not going to hang it or anything, but I want to have times where I set that down on a table or a desk and look at it, think about it, dream about it. | ||
| And know that before I go out the door training You know, that's that's a goal of mine, you know, if I could get there then I know this fight for the forgotten can be Set up for you know, the maybe the rest of my life there, you know It could keep going on and on further than it right what if I did realistically to try to attain that sort of a goal Like it's gonna require more than just staring at a belt or writing something down. | ||
| You're gonna you're gonna need to go on a rampage and Yeah, Waterforce surrounded Fight for the Forgotten with a team of eight people from media to my sports agent to lawyers. | ||
| All these people are incredible. | ||
| And I'm sitting in the room with them at a conference table like this. | ||
| And I'm like, what am I doing in a room with these incredible people? | ||
| All focused on you. | ||
| Yeah, they're all focused on me and them and the story. | ||
| I don't know if you'd call it raw or pure. | ||
| And they're getting behind it, which has been incredible. | ||
| But then they've just overwhelmed me saying, we want to free you up in a way. | ||
| We were kind of talking a little earlier when I was alluding to it. | ||
| But I've really got to readjust everything in my life of how I'm training. | ||
| Because now that I'm getting settled into Denver, I'll go up to Denver one to three times a week. | ||
| And then I'll also be going to the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| I've been talking with Brandon Slay, the old freestyle coach, which he actually just moved to Penn State. | ||
| But talking with, and I have access there at the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| And hopefully I can get in touch with Matt Linlund. | ||
| He's the new head coach for the Greco team there. | ||
| But with, have you ever heard of Adam Wheeler? | ||
| Adam Wheeler is an absolute beast. | ||
| And I wonder if I have that video in there. | ||
| But there's one if you just search Adam Wheeler on YouTube. | ||
| It should be called Iso-Pure, but this dude is an Olympic bronze medalist and black belt in jiu-jitsu, and he won no-gi worlds, heavyweight. | ||
| And so he's a beast, just an absolute monster. | ||
| And so I was helping him train before the 2008 Olympics and stuff. | ||
| And it was pretty great. | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| This guy's a beast. | ||
| We're not hearing anything, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I never actually got into wrestling until I was in high school. | |
| There was a point when I started getting in a little bit of trouble and just hanging out with the wrong crowd. | ||
| My wrestling coach, he's the one that kind of put me back on the right track. | ||
| He taught me what work ethic was. | ||
| I try to be the guy who motivates people, pushes people. | ||
| The most pure moment of my athletic career is 100% the Olympics. | ||
| Even though I didn't win, I still was on that podium representing my country for the sport that I put so many hours into. | ||
| That feeling is indescribable. | ||
| And the point is, this is a guy you're working with or something? | ||
| Yeah, and sorry, I probably should have set that up a little better, but this guy is an absolute monster, and we're getting together and we're going to start working out, and he's at Prime Jiu-Jitsu now in Colorado Springs, but they cross-train with Easton's, and anyways, the thing... | ||
| I'm all over the place. | ||
| But he is the only guy at the Olympic Training Center. | ||
| We're all jumping, doing squat jumps, row by row up these bleachers. | ||
| And I promise he's skipping one at least and sometimes two. | ||
| And he's just flying up there. | ||
| People will be halfway, three quarters of the way. | ||
| This guy's six foot four, 235 pounds, solid muscle, freakish athlete. | ||
| And he's just... | ||
| So there's a training partner for you. | ||
| Yeah, training partner. | ||
| So I guess what I was trying to allude to is, man, I feel like how... | ||
| Water Forest surrounded me with such an incredible team to achieve success that we want with Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| And now I'm really trying to do that with fighting because if I don't, then I'm going to fail and I'll be wasting time. | ||
| But if I... Because this isn't a... | ||
| It's not patty cake, right? | ||
| I mean, we're going in there and we're throwing down and I've got to have my head on straight. | ||
| Yeah, as you move up in competition, for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, without a doubt. | |
| I mean, when you're looking at the competition you faced in Bellator, it's good steps. | ||
| It's tough guys to fight against. | ||
| They're good steps. | ||
| For the timing of everything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's not, I guess, swinging for the fences or taking the tartar sauce with me, if I see that... | ||
| That it's not going to happen. | ||
| I hate saying that because I want to fight so bad, but fight for the forgotten is more important in a way. | ||
| But, man, I think it's possible. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think it's possible to be a great fighter. | ||
| Well, I think you've also brought a lot of people in to help you with Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| They can sort of pick up the slack as well. | ||
| And you've started a movement. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot going on here besides just your involvement. | ||
| You've started this movement and being involved with Waterfor and writing the book and letting people know about it on these podcasts and educating people to what your goal is and what you've been able to accomplish over there. | ||
| You started a movement. | ||
| So... | ||
| I think, man, if you really can do it, it would be absolutely incredible and it certainly would shine even more light if you could really become successful as an MMA fighter from here on out. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| But it's going to require everything. | ||
| It requires everything. | ||
| I feel like there's two parts of this where, man, the fight for the forgotten guy in me wants to be... | ||
| I want to be humble and everything else say, you know, it's not going to happen unless I do all the right things, which is the same on the other side of the coin. | ||
| But I'm at the same time, I feel like if if I can just get the time, I haven't been getting the time to train. | ||
| And one of the things that Well, you have to make the time. | ||
| Yeah, we have to make the time, and it's got to be the priority, and I don't think I do six to eight hours. | ||
| Whenever I was telling the guys at Water 4, and it's just because they've been incredibly supportive, but whenever I broke it down, like, when's your training schedule? | ||
| What time do you train a day? | ||
| I mean, they know some NFL guys and stuff like that that might train once a day for four or five times a week or maybe twice a day. | ||
| But with MMA, it's just so different that they're like, oh, wow. | ||
| So that's why they've rallied around me. | ||
| And I think that through that, it's going to free me up to really go to all the right places, get up to grudge for my striking, get to the Olympic Training Center for my wrestling, get around these black belts and world champs. | ||
| In jiu-jitsu get around the 10th planet guys get around this so that we can We can take this the farthest that we can beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| Listen Again, one more time for people at home fightfortheforgotten.org fightfortheforgotten.com What is your the big pygmy on on Twitter on Twitter and Instagram? | ||
| It's the big pygmy Translate, it's Mabutimangbo. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Yeah, so it's The Big Pygmy, Fight for the Forgotten.org. | ||
| Oh, this is something that I just found out at Water 4 is that, man, $25. | ||
| Some of the people have been so generous. | ||
| Some of the donors have given a full water well, but even just $25 a month, if that's possible, it gives water to 15 people per year. | ||
| If you do it the next year, it's another 15 people that could save their lives, save kids' lives. | ||
| And so I just know it's being used the right way and passionate about it, seeing it in action. | ||
| You're a beautiful soul, Justin Wren. | ||
| You really are, man. | ||
| What you're doing is absolutely amazing. | ||
| And I'm so happy that we can help you out in any way. | ||
| So thank you very much for coming on again. | ||
| And let's do this again, brother. | ||
| Yeah, love you, man. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You got the best community. | ||
| Best fans, man. | ||
| Well, I'm honored. | ||
| And I'm honored to be able to help you tell your story. | ||
| It's powerful. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you, my brother. | ||
| All right, folks. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow with Duncan Trussell. | ||
| See you. |
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