March 24, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:03:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Boom! | |
| Justin Wren straight out of the jungle. | ||
| Lookie, you got coconut water? | ||
| You ready to party? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| You got two of them, just in case. | ||
| Oh, I live off of that stuff. | ||
| So, first of all, congratulations on your Bellator fight, man. | ||
| You looked outstanding. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks a lot. | ||
| It's really, like, clicking, man. | ||
| It's really coming together, huh? | ||
| Yeah, finally the muscle memory's back, and I'm at a new camp that's great for my style. | ||
| Training with Rafael Lovato Jr., maybe the best American grappler for BJJ. Most accomplished, maybe. | ||
| He's fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, good. | |
| So you're in Oklahoma? | ||
| Is that where he's at? | ||
| Yeah, Oklahoma. | ||
| Just moved there in December. | ||
| So you moved there to train? | ||
| Yeah, moved there to train. | ||
| Oh, wow, interesting. | ||
| Train alongside him, and that's also where Water 4 is headquartered out of, is Oklahoma City. | ||
| Oh, how fucking convenient. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So now I have the best of both worlds, my two passions right there. | ||
| Oh, that's amazing. | ||
| He's really good, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Rafael Lovato has that pressure style, too, that Salo Hibero smashing style. | ||
| Very fun to watch that guy. | ||
| The only guy I've ever felt claustrophobic underneath. | ||
| Without a doubt, he's just... | ||
| I can't explain it. | ||
| He just cannot get away. | ||
| That smash pass, that pressure pass, he just melts into you and there's no escape. | ||
| It's like he's melting and he's like glue. | ||
| Yeah, Salo, Shanji, that whole family of that style of jiu-jitsu is so powerful, man. | ||
| Yeah, I've gotten to meet both of them now, training with Salo, and then Shanji was there in our corner, so it was pretty awesome for a Bellator fight. | ||
| I was kind of bummed out at Rafael Lovato's last fight because he stopped him with strikes. | ||
| I was like, God damn it. | ||
| Yeah, kicked him in the head, 13 seconds. | ||
| Yeah, it was crazy. | ||
| I mean, it's great to see him succeed and do well, but I wanted to see his jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I think people will, but he's... | ||
| Man, he's an animal. | ||
| Honestly, he's one of those guys that is so well-rounded, and you think he's just one-dimensional because of everything he's done in jiu-jitsu, but he grew up kickboxing. | ||
| Oh, did he really? | ||
| Yeah, his dad's been a lifelong martial artist, a senior. | ||
| He's an incredible guy, and he's been taking Rafael all around the world since he was a little boy, having him train mixed martial arts, not just jiu-jitsu his whole life. | ||
| And he's fighting Bellator as well, right? | ||
| Yeah, that was his first fight, so we fought back-to-back. | ||
| He fought right before me, I fought right after him. | ||
| Oh, that's nice, man. | ||
| Pelotor's making some moves, man. | ||
| They're doing Mitrion versus Fedor, and Lorenz Larkin just signed with them. | ||
| Rory McDonald signed with them. | ||
| That's a stable now. | ||
| They have a legit stable. | ||
| Especially their 170-pound division is super legit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Daily MVP. Lima. | ||
| Yeah, Lima. | ||
|
unidentified
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Korshkov. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a serious division, man. | ||
| And now Fedor. | ||
| Very interesting. | ||
| What did you think about the Fedor-Mitrione thing, where they had to pull out, like, Mitrione had to pull out because of his kidney stone, and then they're going to schedule it again, apparently. | ||
| Yeah, that's Madison Square Gardens, so June 24th. | ||
| That's a pay-per-view, right? | ||
| Pay-per-view, first one for Bellator. | ||
| Pay-per-view's tough, man. | ||
| It's tough to get people to buy something they've been getting for free. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think this card, they're stacking it pretty heavily. | ||
| Chael Sonnen versus Vanderlei. | ||
| That's a good fight. | ||
| That's where Raphael has been going down into Curitiba. | ||
| Curitiba, yeah. | ||
| Brazil, yeah. | ||
| Down there and was sparring with Vanderlei before his fight. | ||
| Sparring with Vanderlei is a fight, apparently. | ||
| Apparently you're fighting. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He sent me a meme of something like, let's train easy. | ||
| And Vanderlei saying like, yeah, train easy. | ||
| But it's that picture of him in Pride or something, or maybe training where he's jumping in the air and he's just coming down with a big hammer fist and going to land on you with his feet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, that's a light day. | ||
| He's kind of known for that, just being a barbarian 24-7. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's why he was so fun to watch. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I think what you said and just asked about what did I think between Fedor and Matt Mitrione when they had to pull out. | ||
| Man, I flashback right away. | ||
| Do you remember whenever Stefan Struve had to pull out of his fight with Mitrione backstage? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was like blacking out or something, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think he passed out a couple times and he was having that heart problem as well. | ||
| But Mitrione was back there all gloved up, already taped up, had his gloves on, was hitting mitts. | ||
| And then there were some of the behind-the-scenes cameras that caught a moment where I believe it was Dana coming back there telling them the fight was canceled and Mitrion just was, you know, cussing up a storm. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| But then all of a sudden you saw it shift to where all of a sudden he was worried about Stefan and he walked down there, went backstage or to his locker room, and man, he just hugged him and Stefan was sobbing. | ||
| And Matt Mitrion was just like, You know, hey, it's alright, bro. | ||
| I know if you could fight, you would have. | ||
| And all that other stuff. | ||
| So I guess he had passed at least one or two kidney stones the fight week. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Maybe a couple days before weigh-ins. | ||
| And then the day of the fight, they just started coming back out. | ||
| I think he had something like 15 or 20 total. | ||
| So, man, I know all the ladies out there, you're a lot tougher than us, given birth. | ||
| But I hear this is the equivalent, you know, for the men. | ||
| It's passing a kidney stone. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| That'd be more like passing a marble through your dickhole. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Maybe even a golf ball. | ||
| It seems like it's not even close. | ||
| It probably hurts. | ||
| It definitely sucks. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| But that 15 or 20 of them, something like that, it had to be brutal instead of just one or two. | ||
| They are a side effect of weight cutting for a lot of people, right? | ||
| I know Aldo had one, and I think some other fighters have had them too, and they think it has to do, there's some sort of connection with massive dehydration, which I'm sure Matt doesn't have to worry about. | ||
| Fighting heavyweight, he doesn't have to cut the weight like that, so I wonder what caused his. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| But yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, you're putting your kidneys through so much when you're cutting weight, especially those extreme weight cuts. | ||
| Yeah, I'm lucky I'm a heavyweight. | ||
| Very fortunate. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| Fuck all that, man. | ||
| Yeah, like, what do you walk around at? | ||
| Like, what's your... | ||
| When you're in shape? | ||
| Like, you're in shape right now. | ||
| Like, what do you weigh? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I weigh 248. That's a good size, man, right? | |
| 245. Don't you think... | ||
| They think that that 240 number is, like, the right number for heavyweights. | ||
| They feel like... | ||
| I don't know who they are, but I'm just talking shit. | ||
| They think that the conventional wisdom is when you get into 260s and above 250, that there's a point of diminishing returns where you're carrying around so much mass, you can't really perform as well. | ||
| But a 240-pound guy is so big and so strong that you can handle a 265-pound guy, but you have more endurance, and it's just a better weight. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| I mean, when I was living at the Olympic Training Center and wrestling there, the weight class was 264.5 or 120 kilos. | ||
| And we always tried to stay above it and then cut to make weight. | ||
| Because wrestling, I mean, being the single sport of wrestling, you need that weight. | ||
| It's only a six-minute match. | ||
| And then the new Greco-Roman rules, I mean, you get three breaks in between a two-period round. | ||
| And so you're getting that weight, you need it to throw the guy around. | ||
| When it comes to MMA and you're adding in that, what is anaerobic, anaerobic strength and cardio and everything else, you need it all. | ||
| And so, yeah, my first two fights back, I was coming in heavier. | ||
| And man, to drop a little bit, I felt a lot better. | ||
| My conditioning was on point. | ||
| I wasn't rushing. | ||
| I'd put in the time, the effort and everything else and got my cardio good. | ||
| My diet really... | ||
| Rafael's got an awesome strength coach. | ||
| His name's Lucius Tyree. | ||
| Now he's my guy from Green Strength. | ||
| And man, he just got us on this warrior kind of lifestyle. | ||
| It's not about a program or a fight camp and you getting ready then. | ||
| It's about, hey, let's just live this in, day in and day out. | ||
| Eat the right food, real food. | ||
| Put real nutrition in your body. | ||
| Real strength, kind of like the Onnit stuff, you know, the kettlebells, everything else. | ||
| And I had never done that before. | ||
| So this was a real shift in my training, and it paid off. | ||
| So he works with you in nutrition as well? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What kind of changes has he made for that? | ||
| Man, for me, I think that it's about maturing, too. | ||
| I mean, the five years I took off, and before that, I was 19 fighting professionally until I was 23, 24. And I was young and dumb. | ||
| I was dealing with addictions and depression and other stuff. | ||
| And, man, I would... | ||
| Tighten everything up during fight camp. | ||
| But before fight camp, I'd eat whatever. | ||
| And this has just been having just tons of salads, eating meat, veggies, fruits, just fueling your body constantly. | ||
| And so that's just been something really good for me. | ||
| I have celiac, so I can't eat the breads, the grains. | ||
| Oh, you do? | ||
| Yeah, I can't eat wheat, barley, rye. | ||
| You're a huge guy to have celiacs. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| Did they find out when you were really young? | ||
| No. | ||
| I found out. | ||
| So I'd gone through the opiate addictions, and I had six years of that, that I had an ulcer in my stomach. | ||
| But I noticed that during that time, any time I would eat wheat bread with breakfast, that I would get nauseous. | ||
| That was during that time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So did you have it before or did you get it because of the ulcer? | ||
| I think that probably triggered something, the opiate addiction and everything else. | ||
| Then when I went to Congo, it really got bad and I didn't know what it was. | ||
| And then whenever I got back, I mean, having the malaria three times, dengue fever, blackwater fever, all sorts of intestinal parasites and bacterias. | ||
| When I got back here, I was just wrecked. | ||
| And so my doctor did some tests on me. | ||
| I was like, man, you have... | ||
| You weren't just any more gluten intolerant. | ||
| Now you have full-blown celiac and you're at the top of the chart. | ||
| So you used to be gluten intolerant. | ||
| Intolerant, yeah. | ||
| And then it became celiac, top of the chart celiac. | ||
| Do you think anything has a connection to, for people who have never heard you before, you live in the Congo for long stretches of time, working with the pygmies and digging wells, and you've caught malaria there on two separate occasions, but you've got it three times because it reoccurred on you, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think that that might have compromised your immune system and contributed to the celiac disease? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| They say that my immune system was just shot. | ||
| And so that's been... | ||
| I mean, before that, the drug addictions, that took a toll on my body. | ||
| Then going to the Congo, having the malaria, having other things, it's wrecked my body. | ||
| And so now, over the last three years, and that's why I am so thankful for a guy like Raphael modeling how to live this lifestyle, this just... | ||
| Day in and day out, Lucia's there to guide us because I needed that. | ||
| I really needed to rebuild my health from the ground up and to stay consistent with that. | ||
| It's like when the fight's over, maybe indulge for like one meal, but then get right back on the grind. | ||
| And so it's been... | ||
| Yeah, really, really great for me to live it out and to really, I don't know, just felt like I'm finally healthy again. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| It's amazing you just come back after taking five years off and essentially not even working out at all. | ||
| And now, you know, I mean, you look good in the first fight, but man, your last fight, you just really look tuned up. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| Now, when you say that you have celiac, so they're adjusting your diet accordingly. | ||
| I'm really big into fat-based diets these days. | ||
| Are you doing something like that? | ||
| Are you on different kinds of carbohydrates? | ||
| How are they monitoring it? | ||
| I'm definitely getting a lot more coconut oils and the grass-fed butters and all that to have a high fat content with every single meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | ||
| I'm still dropping weight. | ||
| This is kind of all new for me where it's like, man, I'm getting in a lot of fruits, veggies, carbs, and mostly fats. | ||
| Fats, then proteins, then fruits and vegetables, and then probably carbs. | ||
| I mean, I know carbs are in fruits and vegetables, but So do they plan your meals out for you? | ||
| Do you have like one of those? | ||
| Yeah, I have a meal prep place in OKC. Oh, that's nice. | ||
| It's called Provision Kitchen, and it's pretty awesome because they have their own farm. | ||
| Everything's organic, locally grown. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, wow. | |
| And so, yeah, I just go in there, and they're able to help me out, and Luke works with them. | ||
| Lucius helps me know what I need to tell them to eat, and so it's just... | ||
| For me, man, I mean, being a heavyweight, a lot of times we haven't had to take a diet too strict. | ||
| And other times I would during fight camp, but I would just do what I thought was right and what was fueling my body, what was feeling good. | ||
|
unidentified
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For performance. | |
| Yeah, for performance. | ||
| But now it's just like all around health and performance. | ||
| Like I need to perform like a machine, like a professional athlete. | ||
| I need to fuel my body like that. | ||
| And so having this team of people that are around... | ||
| And I think that's why the move to Oklahoma City before coming back, having the five years off, then coming and being in Dallas-Fort Worth and trying to rush back, then moving to Colorado, trying to get the camp there, train at six or seven different gyms, you know, cross-train. | ||
| It wasn't really all clicking. | ||
| But now being in Oklahoma City, there's Water 4 right there. | ||
| There's Rafael's team, which he has world-class guys all around him. | ||
| He's got the nutritionist and the right restaurants and places in place to where now I can just focus on training. | ||
| And then I get to, in the meantime, break time, I get to share the story of why I'm back to fighting. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Now this meal prep place, do you give them like, hey, I would like my food to be 75% this, 25% that. | ||
| This is the carbohydrate quantity I'm looking for. | ||
| This is the amount of protein. | ||
| About calories? | ||
| Basically, and I don't know exactly. | ||
| I need to have a better input into it, but man, they've just really said, this is what he needs during fight camp, and then I was focused on training. | ||
| It was really good, though, because I'm getting a bunch of coconut oil and avocados and everything else all throughout the day to make sure I'm having the high-fat content. | ||
| And how many times do you eat in a day? | ||
| Three to five. | ||
| Three big meals if I'm not able, if I'm just swamped and busy. | ||
| But then if I have time to make sure I'm feeling my body, I'm eating five meals. | ||
| So are you working out twice a day? | ||
| Two to three times a day, five to six days a week. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Damn, dude. | ||
| Back in the heat of things. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| Raphael's a machine trying to keep up with him, but feeding off that energy. | ||
| It's been really great. | ||
| I've been around a lot of guys in the sport, and I didn't even expect to talk this much about them, but it's been really encouraging. | ||
| I've been around Kenny Mundy, Kendall Cross, Kale Sanderson, all these Olympic gold medalists. | ||
| And it's been great because they were my coaches pouring into me. | ||
| But here's a guy that's the best at his craft, that's world class, that's world champ. | ||
| He's completely obsessed with every aspect of MMA and being able to see that and feed off of it has been incredibly encouraging for me. | ||
| So him and I both were like, hey man, like the stars are aligning. | ||
| This is destiny. | ||
| You and me both. | ||
| We're gonna go get those Bellator straps, world champs. | ||
| Let's do that first and let's do that quick. | ||
| What does he weigh? | ||
| He walks around at probably 210, 215, maybe 220. And what's he fighting at? | ||
| He cuts all the way down to 185. So he's the biggest 185 I've ever trained with. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And he feels like he's 400, man. | ||
| I mean, Brendan and I were just talking about this yesterday. | ||
| But being under Shane Carwin and worst case scenario where he's having you mounted, I mean, it just... | ||
| You hated life. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I'm sure. | ||
| But there's something so demoralizing, but then at the same time encouraging, because Rafael's doing that and making you feel claustrophobic, like a 400-pound gorilla's on top of you, or 600-pound, whatever. | ||
| But he's also coaching you, telling you how you can do that to somebody else. | ||
| And so at the end of it, he's showing you how to do exactly what he's doing. | ||
| He's a fantastic coach, and you don't always see that from the best athletes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sometimes they're incredibly talented and great at their craft, but explaining it, you're like, okay, now explain it to me again, or show me how to do it. | ||
| Like, here, I'm showing you, like, just watch, you know? | ||
| But he can tell you every little detail, every little inch. | ||
| Well, that probably has a lot to do with the Salo Hibero lineage, too, you know? | ||
| That's a very, very technical school, and they're really involved. | ||
| Salo's really involved in the history of all the different techniques and, you know, where they came from. | ||
| Now, why did he move to Oklahoma City? | ||
| Why is he down there? | ||
| Actually, that's where he's from. | ||
| So I think whenever he was like six, seven, eight years old, he moved from Chicago there. | ||
| I watched a documentary on Flow Grappling. | ||
| That's how I even got a hold of Rafael. | ||
| I knew I was moving to Oklahoma City. | ||
| I'm like, who's there to train with? | ||
| I'm moving there for Water 4 and Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| And I saw that documentary, incredibly inspirational, shows the whole lineage of him training with Salu and Shanji and how he went to Brazil to train with them, live with them. | ||
| They came up to like Toledo, Ohio at first. | ||
| He went there and they were living in basically like this little apartment that was freezing inside in the Toledo winters. | ||
| And they're having to put their geese over the heater to try to warm them up after every training session to get back in there and do it again. | ||
| And that's some of their best training matches were in the living room on the mat that they would throw out there right in front of the couch. | ||
| And so it's just cool to see how these guys were, where they came from and what they've done now. | ||
| It's like truly, for me, inspiring because that's what I want to do now. | ||
| No, I mean, that's the best way to do it, right? | ||
| To just be with the elite of the elite in that one particular discipline, at least, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| And you can get so much out of that, especially coming from your background as a wrestler. | ||
| I was super impressed with your arm triangle too, man. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Clamped down on that head and arm choke. | ||
| That was nice. | ||
| Yeah, thanks a lot. | ||
| No, I think it's a great style because I'm coming in with a wrestling background. | ||
| I've won a couple national championships there. | ||
| And then to come in with Rafael, once I put a guy down, now I need to finish him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it surprised me. | ||
| Lovato's wrestling because he's actually got some good stuff that he does. | ||
| But now I'm going to be able to show him that. | ||
| He's showing me his world. | ||
| And then we're growing together. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| That's so good, dude. | ||
| That's so good. | ||
| It's so interesting, too, because there's very few real submission artists today in the heavyweight division. | ||
| It used to be Fedor, when he was in his prime, was a submission artist. | ||
| Of course, Noguera was the premier submission artist. | ||
| Frank Mir, one of the all-time greats, for sure, in terms of his accomplishments as a submission artist. | ||
| But there's not a whole lot of that today. | ||
| You see knockouts and stuff, especially in the UFC. You don't see a whole lot of submissions. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Except Verdum. | ||
| Verdum can still submit people and won the title off of Kane that way. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm excited because statistically, I think in my fights, if I've put it on the ground, I've already finished it. | ||
| But now having that guy with me, coaching me through... | ||
| I heard him in the fight. | ||
| During the fight, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. | ||
| And he's just telling me these little adjustments to make. | ||
| Was he right next to you while you were... | ||
| He was across the cage. | ||
| He's a good coach. | ||
| And I had the whole camp to sit there and listen to him while he was off to the side. | ||
| He's yelling at me. | ||
| So you just tuned his voice in? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Trying to do that. | ||
| And we used to do that at Grudge Training Center in Colorado. | ||
| We would turn up the music. | ||
| We'd blast it during sparring. | ||
| And then we have our corner men off to the side and they're hollering and yelling. | ||
| That way we're able to start trying to pick their voices out with like a distraction with loud music going on, just like in the fight. | ||
| So that way, if there's a huge crowd all yelling out different stuff, you're able to tune into the voices you need to hear. | ||
| Whose idea was that? | ||
| Trevor's? | ||
| Yeah, Trevor's. | ||
| Powerful Trevor Whitman. | ||
| Yeah, he's a smart dude. | ||
| That's very smart. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Now, how are you balancing out your full-time training now that you're moving up in the rankings in Bellator and, you know, you're being more and more successful, but you're also doing this for a cause. | ||
| And for people who don't know, you are doing this for your pygmy family, these people that you've sort of become a part of their world, and you've lived there for many, many months at a time, and you go back and forth to help build water wells with Water4. | ||
| Your organization fight for the forgotten and How are you balancing that out with being a professional fighter and trying to compete and perform at your very best? | ||
| Yeah, that's been a learning process without a doubt but now it's trying to find ways to set the right boundaries and in a way to protect my training schedule and At first I was just saying yes to basically everything and that made it really tough for my first two fights back where I felt rushed I didn't feel like the muscle memory was clicking in between every training session or I'd be late to training sessions doing an interview or trying to talk to somebody or trying to tell people the story or I would have to leave early to go do it now it's like it's been really great to | ||
| move to Oklahoma City I have water for there to protect my training schedule and training comes first because if I can keep Going up in the ranks, if I can get a world championship under my belt or a few, you know, I'll have a bigger platform to stand on to tell, you know, have a bigger microphone, bigger platform to be able to continue to tell this story. | ||
| And so, yeah, we have a team of about 10, 12 people at Water 4. They've all rallied around it. | ||
| They're trying to take stuff off my plate and be able to... | ||
| Help fill in my schedule, but making sure I'm getting enough time to get in the training, get in the rest. | ||
| And, man, just eight, nine weeks of that before this last fight, it truly paid off. | ||
| It felt like there was a whole team around making sure that going into this fight, everything was exactly the way it should be. | ||
| And that's how I felt, too. | ||
| I mean, I have a little highlight clip of the fight, but, I mean, the crowd was just... | ||
| It was Overwhelming in an incredibly good way where it like felt I could feel the energy I could hear everybody there I'd grown up in Dallas Fort Worth water for and fight for the forgotten is based in Lovato's is out of Oklahoma City And everyone met up in the middle on the border at this big casino called Windstar and it was just awesome going in there and having everyone rally around I don't feel like me. | ||
| I mean me too But rally around fight for the forgotten what I'm fighting for. | ||
| Let's see that video Jamie Yeah, and then the post-fight interview, I mean, that's what I'm living for now. | ||
| That's what I'm fighting for, so I can talk. | ||
| And how supportive has Bellator been about all this? | ||
| Oh, man, incredibly supportive. | ||
| It's blown me away. | ||
| I mean, I get to talk about it and everything, so it's been awesome. | ||
| There's Raphael up at the top left, big Josh Copeland to the right, and yeah, I get to put Fight for the Forgotten all over my stuff. | ||
| Is that a new tattoo on your back? | ||
| No, I've had that. | ||
| I've had that, but... | ||
| Yeah, it's been really great. | ||
| You haven't added anything to it? | ||
| Yeah, well, I had the cross, and I did add the Vikings below it, but here I had gotten a lateral drop before, and then I was able to hit a belly to back. | ||
| Beautiful suplex. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Ooh, I like how you call it suple. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's the arm trying. | ||
| There's the tap. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| So, now, where do they have you in their rankings? | ||
| I mean, their heavyweight division is in the deepest in the world, right? | ||
| Who's their heavyweight champion? | ||
| Well, that was Vitaly Minnikov, but he's been kind of, you know, in a struggle. | ||
| Yeah, been inactive. | ||
| Inactive? | ||
| Here's the part that I really like. | ||
| I don't know if we can turn on the volume. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Feet underneath you, remembering how it went. | ||
| It all seemed to come together tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that how it felt? | |
| Yeah, I mean, definitely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got a lot of room to improve, a lot of work to do. | |
| But yes, it felt like the muscle memory was back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in a camp that is so great for my style. | |
| With Rafael Lovato Jr. and the team. | ||
| Big Josh Copeland. | ||
| I'm just so blessed. | ||
| Encouraged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excited to be here. | |
| The little dance I was doing in here. | ||
| Hopefully it didn't look cocky or arrogant. | ||
| That was my pygmy dance that we do out in the forest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I just love them to be able to come in here and fight for them. | |
| Most people are lucky enough to have one tribe. | ||
| You have two. | ||
| Not only your family in Congo, apparently here, they were very much behind you. | ||
| How did it feel to win in front of them, man? | ||
| It's just so awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you guys so much for coming out here. | |
| Everyone from Water 4, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Fort Worth, EcoSurvivor. | ||
| I'm just so lucky, so fortunate. | ||
| People have jumped behind this because I love to fight. | ||
| I love to be here and compete, but it's even better to fight for people And so to know that fighting in here, getting a choke out, I'm going to go to the Congo and knock out the world's water crisis for my big family. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moving forward, you said you have a lot of room to grow, but with performances like that, people are thinking about you in a wide-open heavyweight division. | |
| What's next for you? | ||
| Well, I'm coming for that belt. | ||
| It's gonna come. | ||
| It just might take a little bit of time to get there. | ||
| I'm still getting my feet under me. | ||
| I had five years, two months where I did zero. | ||
| Training. | ||
| And so I'm excited to get back in there. | ||
| Keep working my way up. | ||
| I gotta earn it. | ||
| But I have, I think, more of a reason, a purpose, a passion to be in here. | ||
| And so I'm just so thankful for everyone that's got behind us. | ||
| EcoSurvivor right here is donating 50% of their profits of their entire brand to come to the water wells in the Congo for water cooler. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fight for the Forgotten. | |
| Thank you guys for getting behind us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Before you go, you always talk to your Pygmy family. | |
| What do you have to say to them tonight? | ||
| Nafika Hapa Kuwapinda. | ||
| Amagu Amagu. Nakupinda Sana. Nawapinda Sana. | ||
| Asanti Sana. | ||
| Guguyango. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Man, I just, I love him so much. | |
| I was saying, I'm in here. | ||
| I'm in here because I love you. | ||
| That's what I'm in here. | ||
| I'm a goo, I'm a goo. | ||
| We are one. | ||
| We are not different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so, Siku Mingi, it's been many, many days. | |
| I can't wait to come back and see you guys very, very soon and drill some more wells. | ||
| The Big Pygmy, Justin Redwood! | ||
| That's a crazy platform, man, to be able to do that on TV like that in front of, I mean, who knows how many millions of people watch these Bellator fans. | ||
| I think that came to 1.1 or 1.2. | ||
| Who was the headline? | ||
| That was Marlos Conan and Julia Budd for that inaugural featherweight, I believe, or world title. | ||
| Do you feel like Bellator is getting more respect now? | ||
| For a while, it was looked at as sort of an also-ran, but I think now with the lineups getting... | ||
| Stronger and stronger. | ||
| It seems like a the organization is growing in notoriety. | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| And I mean, I think it's healthy. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| I think it's good for everybody. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And great for the fighters. | ||
| My bosses might disagree at the UFC, but I really think I actually I don't think they would. | ||
| I think they'd probably agree. | ||
| I think it's important. | ||
| It's important to have competition. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| It's good for everybody. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And so, yeah, I think Bader just came over. | ||
| Phil Davis is the light heavyweight champion now? | ||
| Yep, absolutely. | ||
| So you don't really have a heavyweight champion? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| Yeah, they stripped Vitaly Minnikov of it because he's fighting over his contract, allowed him to fight in Fight Nights or EFN over in Russia. | ||
| I went over there, cornered Josh against Vitaly. | ||
| And... | ||
| So he just hasn't come back and he just is, I think he's making money in Russia and fighting there and they're kind of been in a standoff and he can come back and fight but he's been stripped of his belt and now I think they're, you know, Scott's a smart guy so is Rich. | ||
| They're putting something together for the heavyweights and yeah, the Fedor-Matt Mitrione fight, that's going to be exciting to watch. | ||
| That's not for a title though, right? | ||
| No, it's not for a title. | ||
| Is that a three-rounder? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Three fives. | ||
| So when are they going to try to have a heavyweight title? | ||
| I think it's coming up pretty soon. | ||
| So I think probably in the next six months or, I mean, within that next three months. | ||
| Now, looking at yourself and your own development and growth, how far away do you feel like you are from that, from fighting for that? | ||
| Man, I... Want it now I want to take that now, but I think that realistically being smart strategic get another couple wins under my belt some good wins Where I get to go in there and really show to myself to Bellator one I need to earn it and two I need to get a couple more real impressive wins under my belt and yeah, I think I think I know who I am as a fighter, and I can hang with those guys. | ||
| It's just I need to build back because it was a long time off. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| Yeah, it was a long time off, but train with great guys. | ||
| I think in the next two or three fights, I'll really start taking big steps up. | ||
| And then after that, maybe in the next two, three years, I'll have that belt. | ||
| Yeah, their division is interesting. | ||
| Now, Rampage is going to heavyweight, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a catchweight against King Mo. | ||
| I think that might be this next Friday or Saturday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're fighting in Chicago. | ||
| Yeah, I've been reading shit-talking online. | ||
| Yeah, they keep going back and forth. | ||
| King Mo keeps trying to fat-shame Rampage, and he's coming back. | ||
| I love that expression. | ||
| It's so silly. | ||
| It wants fighters fat-shaming when they're about to beat the fuck out of each other. | ||
| Call it fat-shaming. | ||
| So these lanterns you brought me, first of all, thank you. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And second of all, what is the deal with these bad boys? | ||
| So this is the first product that they had developed, and it's EcoSurvivor. | ||
| They're also out of Oklahoma City. | ||
| And this is the company that's donating 50% of their money, their profits, to Water4. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And so all the packaging, this is old packaging. | ||
| And let everybody know that Water4 is the company that's building these wells in the Congo for the Pygmies, and this is the organization that you work closely with. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so they started EcoSurvivor so that it could be basically an empowerment mechanism on all the packaging. | ||
| It's going to have a picture of me, a picture of the whales, a picture of the pygmies, and we're going to tell the story. | ||
| And when they go to EcoSurvivor.com... | ||
| Which I think just launched. | ||
| Looks great. | ||
| You would almost think it's a non-profit website because they're highlighting the cause so much. | ||
| But we're talking about how we make it sustainable there, empower them with sustainable business. | ||
| And they're like, hey, we want to do that here. | ||
| They were already a very successful company, the parent company's Jasko Products Company. | ||
| And they do licensing things, lights and all sorts of things for General Electric and... | ||
| Energizer and Philips. | ||
| I mean, they have 3,000 products on the market, so they're incredible. | ||
| Yeah, so there's their website. | ||
| Would you drink dirty water? | ||
| Nearly a billion people have no choice. | ||
| This is great, man. | ||
| So these things... | ||
| Oops, I just turned it on accidentally. | ||
| And so they're rugged. | ||
| They seem like it. | ||
| I mean, I've done impact testing where I'm jumping up and down on top of these. | ||
| What? | ||
| They're that strong? | ||
| Yeah, they're that strong. | ||
| I can stand on it right now. | ||
| How's that possible? | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Put it down, stand on it. | ||
| You'll be fine. | ||
| I mean, my heavyweight butt gets on top of it and jumps around. | ||
| Dude, this is incredible. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, I mean, our team is using this in the Congo. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Look at that balance. | ||
| You're doing yoga on this motherfucker. | ||
| You are. | ||
| What's that, a scorpion? | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Pay attention. | ||
| I just do what they tell me to do. | ||
| That's amazing, man. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You can stand on this thing, so you can probably chuck it around. | ||
| I've done that with, I won't name any names of the competitors, but whenever I start to stand on the other ones, the bulbs crush and the things break. | ||
| Yeah, so this right here, though, it's got carabiners. | ||
| Our guys were using this until 1.30 in the morning, maybe a week ago. | ||
| They put it up on the tripods, and then they're able to just go to work. | ||
| So it's really great. | ||
| What is the glass made out of? | ||
| How is the glass supporting me? | ||
| That part actually, so I do know this, that a dome structure is the strongest thing out there. | ||
| But it's plastic. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| It is a plastic. | ||
| So it's just a super strong plastic. | ||
| Super strong plastic. | ||
| It's LED light and it's got 360 degree omnidirectional lighting, which basically just means it goes all around and there's no blind spots with the light for the most part. | ||
| That's killer, man. | ||
| Yeah, and then so from there, we're going to do flashlights, headlamps, Bluetooth speakers, Bluetooth speakers that have battery packs in them, then just battery packs. | ||
| Then we're doing walkie-talkies, walkie-talkies that have battery packs in them. | ||
| Oh, shit! | ||
| Yeah, and so we're doing it to where the everyday adventurer can be part of it. | ||
| But we're doing it so that way this stuff's going to last for a team in the Congo. | ||
| And then when people are buying it here, they know that 50% of their purchase or the profits from the purchase are going straight to the cause. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Man, I've heard of companies doing... | ||
| I love it when a company gives 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, but I've never heard of a company. | ||
| I mean, they're running this better than a lot of nonprofits are, giving 50% of the profits away. | ||
| No, that's insane. | ||
| That's incredibly generous of them. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| And so, one more time, the company's called Eco Survivor. | ||
| And what is their website? | ||
| Ecosurvivor.com. | ||
| And it's kind of cool. | ||
| Jamie, if you can pull that up, even if you scroll down, so two days ago was World Water Day. | ||
| Oh yeah, and right on there. | ||
| Make a donation goes right to our page. | ||
| Make a purchase. | ||
| You can buy the lanterns right now. | ||
| We have a lot more coming out soon. | ||
| So right now it's just the lanterns and then the headlamps coming out because I use those. | ||
| Yeah, hopefully I'll get you some. | ||
| I'll buy them. | ||
| I want to contribute. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It shows where the walls are being built. | ||
| Wow, that's so cool. | ||
| And then down a little bit shows the statistics. | ||
| And it just shows, I mean, the average water walk, for instance, is 3.75 miles round trip for a woman to just go collect, oftentimes dirty, most of the times dirty water. | ||
| And heavy. | ||
| Heavy, 44 pounds. | ||
| It's 20 liters, 5 gallons. | ||
| Most people have no idea how hard it is to carry 40 pounds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, think about one of those kettlebells, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then a lot of times the women do two at a time and the children do one. | ||
| And so these little girls can't go to school because they, in that water walk, they're not doing that one time a day. | ||
| They're doing it two and three times a day because their household needs more than just five gallons of water. | ||
| And so a lot of times the girls can't be sent to school or the kids can't or they have to pick one of the kids that can go to school so the other ones can go collect water all day. | ||
| I think it's over a billion days each year, work days that are lost just because of the women that have to go do the waterwalks. | ||
| Over a billion work days. | ||
| And if people have never seen any of the episodes that Justin was on before, please watch the last ones. | ||
| If you get a chance, you'll catch up more to what you've gone through, what some of these people have gone through, the kind of parasites these people get from this water, and how important this is for you, and how much growth and progress has been over the past few years of your efforts down there. | ||
| Well, thank you so much. | ||
| It's been incredible. | ||
| Emily was telling me, my wife, coming here, that, wow, this was over four years ago when you were on Joe's show the first time, and we hadn't drilled one single well. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I had just been there. | ||
| Andy Bowe had happened, the one-and-a-half-year-old boy that had passed away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Held his lifeless body and buried him. | ||
| It ripped me open. | ||
| It tore my heart apart. | ||
| Like it would anyone. | ||
| But it was just a rude awakening to the water crisis. | ||
| That there's 800 kids every day die just because of diarrhea. | ||
| Just like literally die from diarrhea. | ||
| And then 2,350 die of the malnutrition that diarrhea causes. | ||
| So if you're in an area that doesn't have access to clean water, there's probably not an abundance of food around you. | ||
| But even the food that you do get, you're eating it and it goes right through you because you have diarrhea. | ||
| You don't absorb any of the nutrients. | ||
| And so that's over 3,000 just because of that. | ||
| And then that's not counting a lot of the sicknesses and everything else, typhoid, E. coli. | ||
| And so that's 1.5 million deaths a year of children under the age of five. | ||
| 1.5 million, all of them are preventable. | ||
| And so, like, I truly believe, man, like, we have, we've found something really special at Water4 and there's other organizations that That I'm sure are doing it in different spaces, but I feel like us, we are doing it in a way that we put the tools in the hands of the people that need it the most. | ||
| The people in the community. | ||
| I mean, our team's 18 people, and the first year that I was there, so in the last five years, I've lived there for about two years, back and forth, one year at one time. | ||
| But then I was able to help drill and train them for the first 13 wheels. | ||
| The year I was stepping back, I was nervous. | ||
| You know, I'm not going to be there. | ||
| I can't micromanage these guys or I can't watch them. | ||
| I can't encourage them. | ||
| You know, I don't want to micromanage anyone, but I can't be there to do the work. | ||
| But then they were able to do 20 wells the year without me, the next year. | ||
| Last year they did 29, so we're up to, I think, 62 wells that they've drilled for themselves in their own community. | ||
| And that's our guys of 18, but Water4 has 375, and they drilled 690 water wells last year alone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And that served, so those are 375 people in the continent of Africa that live in 16 African nations, and they were able to give 172,000 people clean water for the first time in their lives. | ||
| And so, man, we can knock this water crisis out in our lifetime, if that's what we do, if we give them the solution. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| That's amazing progress in just a few years. | ||
| Yeah, it's blown me away. | ||
| So talk to me about how Bellator is helping, how they're getting behind this. | ||
| Well, that's what really sold me. | ||
| I mean, I had offers from most places when I came back, but when I sat down with Scott, And I was writing the book with Loretta and went out to eat with him in Santa Monica and he was just like hey like we want to give you a chance to really tell your story like you need to fight you got to prove it like you have to have that that hard work and skill and talent behind you you have to be able to perform but if you can do that we're gonna rally around you they want to rally around their fighters | ||
| that that that put in the time the effort that they can produce results but It was really encouraging to hear that and then I was bummed out the first two fights I mean I won but I didn't win decisively like I wanted to so to get this last fight underneath me where I really performed well and and was pretty dominant like I think they know that I can fight and and I know I can fight and so now we can do this in a way that Man, | ||
| when I win, literally wells are being drilled every single time. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so EcoSurvivor is helping me drill several wells after this last one. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, how do you balance out your training when you're visiting the Congo and staying there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So a tough thing is, so I kind of shared a little bit of our model and how we give the tools to the people in the community. | ||
| So my travel schedule, it's been a hard pill to swallow, but I think it's the most strategic thing where I'm only going to go once a year now. | ||
| I'm going to go once a year because I need to be here training. | ||
| At first I thought I was the one that made this thing go, but really it's our guys in the field. | ||
| They're the engine, and I was maybe the spark plug that kind of started up something. | ||
| And now I get to go back and be the encourager or to fuel them back up. | ||
| But they're the ones doing the work. | ||
| And so I'm only going to go once a year. | ||
| I'll probably fight in June or July. | ||
| I was talking with Bellator. | ||
| And then right after that, we're starting up a soap production facility in Congo with our guys is going to start another eight to 10 jobs because we go in and we teach the wash program. | ||
| So we need them to start making soap for themselves because right now the only thing I've ever seen available is car washing soap that's packed full of chemicals from China or India. | ||
| Did they wash themselves with car washing soap? | ||
| I did while I was there for the year, and my skin would be raw afterwards because there was nothing else available. | ||
| I mean, I took soap with me, but when I was there for a full year, I mean, it only lasted for the first month, maybe. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so the rest of the time, I was using this car washing soap that, man, it... | ||
| It's rough on your body. | ||
| And so we are partnering with a company called Pacha Soap. | ||
| They're at all the Whole Foods. | ||
| They have a sister company, Amazi, they're at Target. | ||
| And those guys go around and they start up soap production facilities in the developing nation to give jobs. | ||
| So is it possible that that could become an industry for the people in the Congo where they can start selling their soap? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And then, you know, maybe Eco Survivor could sell it on their website as well? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Or they'll start up a new, yeah, or that other company. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pacha, which has been great to us. | ||
| They actually, a kind of cool story, the founder of Pacha was listening to this podcast whenever he had the dreams to start it up. | ||
| And he was actually being like kind of a, I think it was a janitor at night through the night shift. | ||
| And he was listening to this and he had all the dreams to start up Pacha. | ||
| He helped us get our 501c3 with Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| So after my first time being on the show, he reached out to me and he had just started up Pacha. | ||
| And so he helped me get Fight for the Forgotten started up. | ||
| His name's Andrew Verbis. | ||
| Great, incredible guy. | ||
| But the inspiration he got from here to do something, make a difference. | ||
| Now he's in all the Whole Foods. | ||
| He's about to be in Target. | ||
| And he's coming with me this next trip. | ||
| Or actually, he might not come because we don't really take... | ||
| Volunteers now. | ||
| We just empower the locals. | ||
| But we're going to start up that soap production facility that's going to start eight to ten new jobs. | ||
| We'll go in the schools, because last year our team spent 301 days teaching the wash program. | ||
| So teaching water and sanitation and hygiene, helping them dig latrines, helping them know the importance of clean hands. | ||
| So we set up outside the latrines a hand washing station, which is called a tippy tap. | ||
| So they have a clean jug of water, they have a bar of soap, they step on a stick and a rope, and it tilts this jug over, and they're able to wash their hands right there. | ||
| But then they only had that car washing soap, so now we're going to meet another need, start up the soap production. | ||
| They have the eucalyptus trees there, the palm oil, the avocados, I mean, just whatever we need, the lemongrass, whatever we need to make the soap with, which that's not my specialty, but I know all the raw materials are there. | ||
| What is this company again? | ||
| And how do people find out about this company? | ||
| Pacha? | ||
| Spell that. | ||
| P-A-C-H-A. Pacha Soap. | ||
| And you can go, I think, into any Whole Foods. | ||
| Pacha.com? | ||
| I think it's Pacha Soap.com. | ||
| Pacha Soap.com. | ||
| But they're incredible, man. | ||
| They're in Whole Foods. | ||
| They're already in Whole Foods? | ||
| They just started? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They've been in there a few years now. | ||
| Fill your Easter basket. | ||
| But yeah, you're saying this is all within the last few years, right? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Within the last few years, last four or five years. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| So it's Pacha Soap.com? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're hiring. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Your purchase spread goodness. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so they do a buy one, give one, but they do it in the right way. | ||
| Because the social entrepreneurship, like you buy one and then here and we give one in a developing nation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sounds really good. | ||
| It's got the right heart good intentions, but it can be very dangerous if it's distributed in the wrong way So their buy one give one actually creates jobs in the developing nation then they make it and then they sell it and they're able to give it that way to their community instead of Some of the charities, you buy something here and you go give it over there. | ||
| And then when they go, they go with huge amounts. | ||
| And say if they're dropping off shoes or clothes or whatever, the local people that have a shoe store go out of business whenever you bring in containers and containers of shoes. | ||
| Or the guy that's repairing the shoes, the cobbler, you know, the one that's making shoes there. | ||
| So you can't just go into a community and give it out. | ||
| I actually watched a documentary recently called Poverty Inc. | ||
| Man, it was powerful. | ||
| Showing how charity hurts or how... | ||
| There's also a great book out called When Helping Hurts. | ||
| And it talks about, hey, charity's awesome when it's absolutely needed, but it's very dangerous if you use it in the wrong way. | ||
| You can cripple a community. | ||
| And so how do we empower the local communities with a hand up? | ||
| How does it cripple the community? | ||
| By giving them something for nothing and then they Yeah, that's first on the surface. | ||
| They can develop a dependence mentality of just putting a hand out because they got to get what they can get whenever people just show up, blow up and blow out of there. | ||
| But the documentary Poverty Inc. | ||
| goes in there and shows how in Haiti, their local farmers have been put out of business by government subsidies. | ||
| I've been to Haiti, and I've seen the American-grown rice that's all just given out for free. | ||
| Or at the markets, the people that get it for free then go to the market and they beat all the local farmers because they got it for free or they paid such a small price. | ||
| They didn't really do all the work, so they're able to beat all their competitors, the local market. | ||
| So they get it for free and then they sell it? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| They can at little shops. | ||
| They can do that, or they just get it and they don't need it. | ||
| And so it cuts off the local farmers who are trying to sell their own stuff, and since they're getting it for free, they can sell at a much lower price. | ||
| Right, absolutely. | ||
| And it shows, it dives deep into how... | ||
| How it hurts so much in a way that, like, man, I think Haiti's, they used to eat rice two to three times a week. | ||
| Now they're eating it three times a day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | ||
| And they're doing it, and it's all the rice that they have available to them are from the U.S. or from China or from India. | ||
| And it's because these big farmers with a lot of power in the government, they're able to make deals with the United Nations and other places to be able to go in and give out their rice there. | ||
| And they get paid for it from the government here, right? | ||
| U.S. government pays these farmers these prices and then they go into a community and just give it out. | ||
| How do I say this in a way that it's not bad intentions? | ||
| No one's trying to... | ||
| I don't think there's these evil people trying to destroy developing nations. | ||
| I don't think that's the case. | ||
| But there's a model out there that's been the traditional model of let's announce our arrival by throwing a parade. | ||
| Let's throw a big party. | ||
| Let's get a bunch of pictures. | ||
| And let's leave to the next one because we have such a big... | ||
| Organization or so many funds or a big quota to hit. | ||
| We have, this is our goal this year. | ||
| We have this many tally marks to get. | ||
| So we blast into one community and then we blow out of there into a new one. | ||
| We don't develop relationships with them to be able to empower them, teach them skills. | ||
| That part, how do I say it? | ||
| The answer to poverty isn't charity, it's opportunity. | ||
| Opportunity is always better than charity if that if that makes sense a handout or hand up like the give a man a fish Right feed him for a day or teach him how to fish feed him for a lifetime And so if there's a disaster if there's a person with a disability If there's a war or famine then charity is the solution, but there's got to be an escape plan There's got to be a route out. | ||
| Otherwise whenever I went to Haiti it was a year and a half two years after the earthquake and And the tent city they had, had doubled or tripled in size. | ||
| Because I met a guy there that was saying, I moved out of my apartment, which wasn't damaged by the earthquake, and I get to go live at tent city rent-free. | ||
| I still have my job, and I get three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | ||
| I don't have to prepare them. | ||
| I don't have to pay for them. | ||
| And these places are always going to be giving to that tent city, and it's actually grown in size. | ||
| He was like, I'm saving up to buy a house. | ||
| And so it's like if people think oh, there's just this disaster It's like man if someone brought in like some vocational training, you know, let's teach these people how to do this kind of work like I don't think honestly most sane people Out there that are living in poverty want to be poor for the rest of their life They're sitting there waiting for an opportunity. | ||
| The dad wants to put food on the table for the family So does the mom she wants to take care of her kids and so whenever we can come into a community And spend time with them, if that makes sense. | ||
| Like sit down, listen to them, learn from them. | ||
| And then we can say, how can we work together? | ||
| How can we brainstorm? | ||
| What does your community really need? | ||
| Instead of treating it like there's a cookie cutter solution or blueprint, that since it worked in this community, it's going to work in that community. | ||
| Or since it worked in this community. | ||
| It's going to work in that country. | ||
| Every country has its own culture. | ||
| Congo has over 200 tribes. | ||
| That's over 200 different cultures. | ||
| And so some are going to receive it well, some aren't. | ||
| How do you work with them in a way that isn't just coming in and just giving them stuff? | ||
| I've seen a riot happen in Uganda. | ||
| It was in Jinja, Uganda. | ||
| Where an organization came in with a bunch of canned foods. | ||
| And they did it in a very poor fashion where they just cracked open this container in a slum. | ||
| And it's one of the roughest slums in Uganda. | ||
| And people just raided it. | ||
| And it didn't even give probably a quarter of the people in the slums a canned item from the U.S. And so people started fighting over it. | ||
| And they're fighting over it. | ||
| And someone got really hurt. | ||
| I don't know if they died, but someone got really hurt there. | ||
| We had to get out of there. | ||
| And so, what I know from that organization is, and I'm not going to say the organization, but I heard from the other organizations there that they had been warned, like, you're new at this, don't go in there and do this. | ||
| Don't crack open this container and do it that way. | ||
| But they had spent like $20,000 getting the canned goods there, buying a container, shipping it over there, going through Kenya, then Then probably Tanzania, then Kenya, then Uganda. | ||
| They're having to pay all the fees everywhere they go to just go give it away. | ||
| That $20,000 could have empowered so many farmers locally or people that don't know how to farm to be able to start farming for themselves that then is going to have such a better return on investment because you're investing into the people, into a trade, into a skill, into something that they need, and it's going to last. | ||
| It's going to continue to produce results. | ||
| It totally makes sense. | ||
| And I think what you're saying is so important that these people have great intentions, but that just human nature and giving the circumstances in which these people live in where they had no hope and then all of a sudden they have this one thing. | ||
| And this one thing is gifts. | ||
| Far better to do what you're doing, to provide them with opportunity. | ||
| And I think that's... | ||
| I mean, the issue that I think a lot of people are going to have with even discussing that is the callous discussions of the welfare mentality, you know, the way people look at some communities and people who, you know, the term welfare brats or welfare, you know, welfare people that are just kind of like connected to that mentality. | ||
| The need for charity. | ||
| And I think that mirrors the idea of welfare and, you know, where people don't have jobs and don't have opportunities and just getting money and getting addicted to that money. | ||
| That problem exists in America as well. | ||
| Obviously, it's a much bigger deal in the Congo because you're talking about, like, basic life necessities, like fresh water. | ||
| But I think that's important, man. | ||
| It's important to understand what human nature, the mechanisms of human nature, and what you're talking about here is really powerful. | ||
| To have thought it out so well, and to give these people this opportunity, and now to give these people this opportunity with soap. | ||
| I mean, Pacha is doing an awesome job. | ||
| I mean, that's an amazing thing. | ||
| I think that's so important. | ||
| And I really hope that more people listen and more people hear you and more people say, hey, you know, I want to get involved. | ||
| Let's do something else in the Congo. | ||
| Let's give these people another opportunity. | ||
| If they could start businesses down there, man, and like really empower themselves and be able to build homes and just like in your lifetime, you could see some crazy change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I know that's coming in Congo, but I think, like, let's not set a ceiling or roof on it, and I'm not saying that's what you're saying, but I'm just saying that I truly believe that the water crisis, one billion people not having clean water, In our lifetime, we have the tools, the technology, and people are learning. | ||
| I mean, from podcasting, like people are getting better than doctorate's degrees, you know, like in information and life experience and learning and learning to do things the right way and truly have people's best interests at heart. | ||
| I think there's going to be a real shift to where, I mean, if I have the water to take a piss in or to water my lawn with or to give my dog clean water, We're going to be able to give every person in the world clean water. | ||
| But it's through empowerment and it's through opportunity. | ||
| And that's what I love. | ||
| Since it was World Water Day two days ago, I have a video that kind of explains the problem. | ||
| And it's from a village that I'm really close with named Ataluhulu. | ||
| And there's this little girl named Siku that was just... | ||
| A beautiful little girl, and if it's okay, but it shows what they're facing, what they're drinking. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And man, it's powerful. | ||
| You got that, Jamie? | ||
| Hashtag powerful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My hope for my children is for them to go to school, to grow in peace, and to be good and take care of me when I'm old. | ||
| That's the water they were drinking. | ||
| For folks just listening, it's green algae all over the surface of it. | ||
| It looks disgusting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone is suffering here, but in most cases, it's our children. | |
| I know the water we drink gives us all these sicknesses. | ||
| My daughter's name was Siku. | ||
| I'm a woman. | ||
| She couldn't speak yet, but she was able to crawl. | ||
| She was a baby. | ||
| I suffered so much when she was suffering. | ||
| I brought her to the hospital. | ||
| She passed away there. | ||
| I said to myself, I was just carrying my baby. | ||
| And then to see people burying her? | ||
| I said, how did she disappear? | ||
| Where did she go? | ||
| She's carrying this water on her head folks. | ||
| This giant jug. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When I lost my child, I lost all hope for the future. | |
| We're watching a video of her walking through the Congo carrying this water jug on top of her head. | ||
| This 45-pound jug. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| That's hard to deal with. | ||
| If someone like you wasn't bringing attention to this, do you understand what a huge role you're playing here? | ||
| I mean, it's surreal, but at the same time, I think that's why I've completely, wholeheartedly dedicated my life to this, because that was the... | ||
| That was the first promise. | ||
| I didn't know that we could do anything with land or water or food at first. | ||
| Now we have 3,000 acres of land, drilled the 62 wells. | ||
| We have three farms up and running, about to start the soap. | ||
| But man, like, I didn't want to make any promises that I couldn't keep. | ||
| And for the chief to come to us and say, hey, everyone else calls us the forest people, but we call ourselves the forgotten. | ||
| It wrecked me. | ||
| And then he said, can you help us have a voice? | ||
| Because we don't have one. | ||
| I said yes. | ||
| I knew that from fighting, from being on The Ultimate Fighter, whether that ever grew or didn't grow, I had some people. | ||
| And just having the platform of being here, being from the West, being from somewhere where people can have an abundance of resources to make a difference. | ||
| And even if it's small, like our small here is so big there. | ||
| And so I said yes to that, and little Siku was the third little one that I knew that had passed in Atalahulu, and before that was Andy Bo, after that was little Babo, a little girl named Mo also, and Sangule, and Kaptula, and Siku. | ||
| And these are all kids I knew that I had become friends with over two years living there. | ||
| And so, having either held them or buried them or having played, growing up, knowing their families, they're seeing some of those kids grow up and then their lives get cut short. | ||
| It's been like, man, like, when I fight, it's in honor of them. | ||
| When I talk about this problem, like, I know the... | ||
| It's not just I read about it or I just maybe saw it and it hurt for a little while. | ||
| I knew them. | ||
| Those kids, 800 kids a day from diarrhea and 2,350 from another 1.5 billion a year. | ||
| I know the names of some of those kids and had relationships with them and their families. | ||
| So, I never would have thought that I would be in a position to try to help or that I even knew about the problem. | ||
| I didn't until it hit me upside the head. | ||
| But now that that's where my life has gone, that's what I'm going to dedicate it to. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's powerful shit, dude. | ||
| You're living a fucking crazy life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You really are. | ||
| I mean, you're really living a life of purpose. | ||
| It's so rare that someone does it at such a high level, you know? | ||
| I mean, you're in a very strange situation, a very strange driver's seat in life. | ||
| I mean, yeah, it is definitely strange, but thank you to you, man, for... | ||
| For even allowing me to have this platform before we drilled. | ||
| I mean, we were getting to it, but we hadn't actually completed it yet. | ||
| It's kind of how Andrew was listening to JRE while he was being a janitor, had this dream. | ||
| I had this dream, and you allowed me to come on and share about it. | ||
| So many stars have aligned because of that. | ||
| And there's just been a lot of really great stuff. | ||
| That knife, actually, I have a picture for you. | ||
| I'm holding up a knife that's made out of a nail. | ||
| I use this to open up all my letters and packages and stuff. | ||
| That's so awesome. | ||
| Chief Leo May made both of those for you. | ||
| I think on that little file it says knife and I actually had a picture I didn't get to show you yet but this is how he makes the knives but he just finds the nails out in the forest and some ladders or different things and he pulls them out the people deforesting the rainforest he gets their nails and makes them something Something useful. | ||
| And so that's a picture of the knife. | ||
| I think there might be one more picture of him making the knives. | ||
| So what he's doing is he's taking a nail and he's hammering it flat. | ||
| He's taking this big spike nail, like a construction nail. | ||
| Like a railroad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And not quite a railroad nail. | ||
| It's like a framing nail, right? | ||
| Oh, the one in his right hand that he hammers it down with. | ||
| He uses it as a hammer. | ||
| It's a railroad spike. | ||
| Just really creative. | ||
| And this is actually, if you pull up the other one that says, oh yeah, there he is with some of the kiddos. | ||
| This little Swazi on the right. | ||
| And there's the huts behind them and the twig and leaves. | ||
| They make those kind of doorways in there. | ||
| And it's just been really cool. | ||
| They live on 247 acres. | ||
| It's land that they have for the first time. | ||
| And, oh man, so that video was powerful because it showed the problem, but there's actually one that's with Chief Leo May. | ||
| It's the second video on that list, and if I can show that to you, I got something for you. | ||
| From there from leo may's village. | ||
| It's called the bothy and there's a video That's going to show like kind of the transformation or the solution kind of to the problem Because that first video just showed the problem is hard, right? | ||
| But then there's hope to do something about it Real transformation changes the present and the future - We up there! | ||
|
unidentified
|
So he's walking with a giant. | |
| My name is Leome. | ||
| I'm from Bobofi Village. | ||
| I want to teach my grandson how to hunt. | ||
| We are teaching these young boys this because this is our original way of life. | ||
| One day we'll die, but these young people will live on. | ||
| I love that forest. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's gorgeous. | ||
| People treat pygmies like we aren't important. | ||
| They think we're stupid. | ||
| When we worked on farms, we would get 10 or 15 bananas to split among seven people. | ||
| If I tried to start a small farm, someone would take it from me and say, your father did not own any land. | ||
| In 2013, Leo May's village received land of their own. | ||
| It's about 247 acres. | ||
|
unidentified
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I was happy to have my own land, but we were getting water from the river. | |
| It was bad water. | ||
| Our people were sick. | ||
| Sometimes they would get sick and die without treatment. | ||
| I've never heard of anybody getting sick from the water since we've had the well here. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| It's so sweet. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But the big change is that we can farm. | ||
| This is a before and after of the same place. | ||
| All those banana trees. | ||
|
unidentified
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We started with potatoes, then cassava, then we planted some banana trees. | |
| How many banana trees have you planted? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I cannot count. | |
| It's a lot. | ||
| I can't finish counting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Potatoes, bananas. | ||
| The first time we took bananas to the market, we bought clothes for the children. | ||
| When we saw them wearing clothes and shoes, we were so happy. | ||
| Today, we have a toilet. | ||
| We have a place to wash our hands. | ||
| We have a place to shower. | ||
| So to me, that's progress. | ||
| I'm so full of joy. | ||
| I'm so full of joy. | ||
| Because he did a great thing for us here. | ||
| Because they did a great thing for us here. | ||
|
unidentified
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So this generation and generation children will be here on this land. | |
| Wow. | ||
| That's intense. | ||
| It's intense. | ||
| Imagine living your whole life in despair, and then all of a sudden, over the last few years, things radically change for the better. | ||
| That's powerful, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Whew. | ||
| Man. | ||
| What a crazy thing you're doing, Justin Wren. | ||
| Well, to be completely honest, man, I got to be the spark plug, but man, there's a big engine around this. | ||
| Oh, I understand. | ||
| Stateside Water 4, without a doubt, all of our supporters, we couldn't do it without them. | ||
| But mostly, we couldn't do it without the people on the ground there in the Congo, 18 Congolese people with a heart to change, be the change in their own country, to change the country from the inside out, countrymen to countrymen. | ||
| Not being dependent on others. | ||
| I mean, they're starting to secure water contracts to drill wells and do water projects in their own country, so that way they don't have to be dependent on us. | ||
| I mean, our team in Uganda is over 70% self-sufficient, self-funded inside the country. | ||
| Our guys in Congo are close to 50%, and we're on track to get these teams to where they're 100% self-sufficient, to where we just come in with the training and the techniques and the tools. | ||
| But, like, they don't need us to fund it anymore. | ||
| So that way we can go off to other places and do it again, replicate it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So what is the... | ||
| Is there a long-term strategy in terms of... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So basically things that work in their context. | ||
| So that way we give them, like, the manual drilling. | ||
| One instance, I don't know why this Swahili proverb just popped in my mind, but they say, you Americans or you Westerners, you guys all have watches. | ||
| But we're the ones who have time. | ||
| And so does that make sense? | ||
| Like you guys all have watches, but we have time. | ||
| And they see us as always rushing, rushing, rushing and trying to get this done and that done and this done. | ||
| And they're like, hey, it's good to go out and crush things and get so many goals and so many accomplishments under your belt. | ||
| But let's make sure we're doing it all the right way. | ||
| So that's what I mean. | ||
| Honestly, I've learned from them. | ||
| Slow it down so you can do it right. | ||
| Do it correctly. | ||
| I've even started to implement that into my lifting and training, right? | ||
| Like slow things down, do it slow, controlled, and do it correctly instead of just trying to put up a bunch of weight. | ||
| And so there, they slow things down. | ||
| And honestly, the long-term solution is the reason why we don't take volunteers anymore. | ||
| And I've only taken two people with me to the Congo. | ||
| But they were geohydrologists or engineers that needed to come. | ||
| But the reason is because when you take volunteers over, most of them are going to be amateurs or they're going to be white belts, if I put it to an MMA or BJJ analogy. | ||
| And our guys in the field there, they're becoming black belts, or they are now. | ||
| After years of training, years of development on this since 2011, I mean, our guys in Congo have drilled those 62 wells, but they went to Sierra Leone. | ||
| They taught a team in Cameroon from the ground up. | ||
| They went to Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. | ||
| And these teams are all working together, and they're going off after they learn how to do it. | ||
| They're going to other communities in their own country, or they're going to another country. | ||
| It's so cool. | ||
| We have this dynamic going on between, we call it the Virunga Initiative. | ||
| There's the Virunga Mountains that are on the border of Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo. | ||
| Now, there's so many rebel groups that are there, and those countries have been at war against each other. | ||
| Like, the people from those nations pretty much hate each other. | ||
| Like, they all blame one another for, you guys are doing this in our country, and you're sending rebels into our country, or your government soldiers are actually pretending to be rebels, but they're working for the government, and they're stealing our gold and our diamonds. | ||
| Anyway, so they... | ||
| They don't work together, but now our well drillers that are from Rwanda and Uganda and Congo, they're all working so much together. | ||
| We get everything in from Uganda. | ||
| Our team goes to Rwanda from Congo to teach them how to train, but that Rwandan team comes over to us and teaches us business principles. | ||
| It's just been so cool. | ||
| To see how they're working together and how our guys in Congo are holding Ugandan and Rwandan flags over their back taking pictures and the other guys are wearing Congo flags over their back and Our team that came from Uganda to live with me for three months and our team to help us really get off the ground and start learning They had drilled over 100 wells for their fellow Ugandans They left for three months to come live with us in Congo Their first day there, the car flipped. | ||
| Their taxi driver flipped. | ||
| The car ran over a woman, killed her. | ||
| They don't speak the Congolese, Swahili, or French. | ||
| They're from an English-speaking nation in Uganda. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the car was looted. | ||
| It was torched. | ||
| And people were chasing them down, wanting to put tires around them and set them on fire and burn them and kill them because they were Ugandan. | ||
| They got in an accident. | ||
| It's the whole mob justice kind of mentality that happens. | ||
| Like... | ||
| If they send them to the jail or court, they know that justice probably won't be had if they have money on them. | ||
| And so people just want justice then. | ||
| It's kind of wild over there in that area of the world. | ||
| So these Ugandan guys literally knew they're risking their lives to come live with us in Congo just because they're hated by Congolese. | ||
| But then whenever they flip their vehicle, first day there, they're on the border basically still of Uganda. | ||
| They're in a town called Nyoka, which means snake. | ||
| And they hit a lady. | ||
| It killed her. | ||
| And that was the taxi driver driving it, and he's not part of our team. | ||
| But then they all wanted to kill the Ugandan guys instead of the Congolese guy. | ||
| And then they still stuck it out. | ||
| We were able to regain our $15,000 of well drilling equipment that was there. | ||
| Luckily, we had a... | ||
| This is a side topic, but we had this... | ||
| This water filtration system that was from solar panels and they had these two big chambers on it and in the middle is this timer that you literally Twist and it goes for an hour and has a green and red light on it and it ticks tick tick tick tick tick Well, we had it locked up whenever it came from the states and our Ugandan team picked it up and they go hey the Something called TSA broke off the lock and left you a note And so they were checking it because it looked like these two chambers and a timer and it looked like it could have been a bomb in this big pelican case and So whenever the Congolese guys looted | ||
| the car, set it on fire, they ran away with it and hid behind a hut. | ||
| Well, whenever they opened that Pelican case, all of a sudden they thought it was a bomb and they ran away and left all of our stuff there. | ||
| So whenever they found out that these guys from Uganda already risked their lives to come here and teach Congolese how to drill wells for themselves. | ||
| They were truly good guys. | ||
| It was just an accident. | ||
| They got behind us and led us back to our equipment and said, be careful, though, like that bomb. | ||
| That's why we left it out there. | ||
| So they understood that it was a big misunderstanding. | ||
| Yeah, it was a big misunderstanding. | ||
| And so they forgave those people? | ||
| Forgave our Ugandan well drillers, who weren't even really a part of it. | ||
| It was the taxi driver that accidentally hit. | ||
| Did they apologize for wanting to stick tires around them and light them on fire? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And so anyway, that's a long story. | ||
| It was crazy wild, and we thought our guys were going to die because we were like six hours away from them, and we were hearing like a riot basically happening. | ||
| But it was so cool, man, that we got all our supplies back, and then afterwards, I mean, we... | ||
| We helped with the burial process and the funeral and everything else, even though it was the taxi driver, not us. | ||
| We felt so bad that that had happened. | ||
| But then to know like, hey, now it was just a story that we were able to, not the loss of life, but those people now know that we're here to help them. | ||
| And we were able to go back in there and do that for them afterwards. | ||
| It's amazing, man. | ||
| I mean, I know there's a book that Loretta Hunt wrote with you, right? | ||
| But you've lived another life since the book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, you have another book's life, a book's, well, a life's worth of, what's the way to describe it? | ||
| Another, easily another book. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| Well, that's what I love about, man, these short films, that's all part of the documentary. | ||
| In fact, maybe, I mean, I should probably say that, like, after I was on the second or third time here, we did a Kickstarter for the documentary, and we got it fully funded. | ||
| The documentary is not out yet because we're going back one more time to film. | ||
| That will probably be July or August right after my fight. | ||
| We'll bust over there and we're trying to submit it to Sundance Film Festival this year. | ||
| We submit it in September. | ||
| Hopefully we get in the festival and we'll be there in January. | ||
| And then it will be out and a lot of the GRE supporters that gave to the Kickstarter will be able to do it. | ||
| But we really wanted to do the story, not the story, we wanted to do the Pygmies and their family and everyone suffering from the world's water crisis. | ||
| We wanted to do them justice, to give them a voice. | ||
| The book was me giving them a voice, but the documentary, they're going to have their own voice. | ||
| And so it's been so cool. | ||
| It's been filmed over three and a half years now. | ||
| I think when it comes out, it'll be four full years. | ||
| That Derek's been able to go back and forth and go get more of the story and show not just like them getting water for the first time, but then also how we're giving jobs, how they're getting trained, how they're starting up workshops, how we're breaking ground on the soap production facility. | ||
| We already have the land. | ||
| We started the foundation of the place and so how it's the full spectrum of it to To hopefully show how empowerment, how much farther that goes. | ||
| Now it's a lot tougher. | ||
| It takes a lot more time. | ||
| You really have to be strategic. | ||
| You have to sit and listen and learn and be humble enough to say, like, it's a learning process. | ||
| Like when you do something, whenever you get out of that lane of truly listening and saying, I think that's the quote that our team tries to live by. | ||
| It's a Swahili proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. | ||
| But if you want to go far, go together. | ||
| And so it's like, how can every community we go in, how can we take this as far as we can? | ||
| Not go as fast as we can. | ||
| Because if we want to go fast, we just leave them out of it. | ||
| But if we want to go far, we'll go together. | ||
| So we do that with our well-drilling team, but we do that with the communities too. | ||
| Because they all live like a saying that's just ingrained in them. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you have a long-term strategy with this? | ||
| How long do you see yourself fighting, and what do you see yourself doing after you're done with that? | ||
| I think I'm going to fight for the next five to seven years. | ||
| If I can go out on top, I'd love to do that. | ||
| I don't think I need to... | ||
| Carry it too long, too far, and go out on a bad note of a string of brutal losses. | ||
| I think I want to get that platform, I want to get to the top, and then I want to leave and go do something else, which is this. | ||
| But man, it's been so cool. | ||
| Our team in Sierra Leone and our team in Kenya, and now we're about to do it in Rwanda. | ||
| We did this crowdfunding campaign that we threw up on World Water Day. | ||
| We're doing it through the rest of the month. | ||
| But we have started water towers. | ||
| So basically, we drill a well, and then we have a water tower, which turns into a water kiosk, where people from the community come up to it. | ||
| They might pay five shillings for a jerry can. | ||
| So a jerry can's five gallons, they pay five cents. | ||
| But eventually, all the people in the community, the one in Rwanda we're doing, is going to serve 4,000 people. | ||
| It's out of school, so the kids will have clean water all throughout the day. | ||
| But then people come there, and the one in Kenya is funding a school, but the one in Rwanda is going to fund more water wells. | ||
| So as these people buy water, Clean water, the only clean water around there. | ||
| That community, the only thing they have to drink, there's a lake that has the cows and everything else drinking out of it. | ||
| Cow patties are inside the water. | ||
| And you can see people collecting water at the same time that cows are drinking from it right beside them. | ||
| People are washing clothes in it. | ||
| They're washing motorcycles in it. | ||
| And then that's their drinking water. | ||
| And so we're putting up this water kiosk where, yeah, we're going to charge them five cents when they get five gallons of clean water, but those are going to turn into multiple water wells throughout the year. | ||
| And so we're trying to do all these sustainable solutions to where after we do that in Rwanda, we're taking that to the Congo. | ||
| That'll be close to the soap production facility and the community development center we're going to have, which will have land, water, food solutions. | ||
| Even the forestry. | ||
| We've helped replant over 4,000 trees now in the Congo. | ||
| And it's like because the deforestation is so brutal. | ||
| So I think it's just sitting back and saying, what do you guys need? | ||
| Listening and learning that need and saying, okay, where can we fit in? | ||
| How can we help in this area? | ||
| Who's a specialist? | ||
| How can we really make an impact? | ||
| I think our lane is definitely water. | ||
| I mean, from that Chief Leome village, or the story that you just saw, Babofi, where he made that knife for you. | ||
| You can see that water changes everything. | ||
| And so that's going to be what hubs... | ||
| That's our hub. | ||
| That's our lane. | ||
| And that's what all of the Water 4 teams are doing. | ||
| But in the Congo, because the pygmies are so vulnerable, we're trying to find the ways to help them come up. | ||
| And as they come up, other people are watching and looking and they're starting to implement the same kind of things. | ||
| So it's pretty cool to see that happening. | ||
| And before I forget, the reason I wanted to show that video was I got you something. | ||
| This is Leo May's wife. | ||
| So you have the knife from Leo May. | ||
| His wife made you this right here. | ||
| And so because from our second JRE episode, I believe, we funded a water well there in Bobofy. | ||
| And so she's really talented. | ||
| I mean, it might not look like too much here, but it's bark cloth. | ||
| So it's tree bark cloth. | ||
| And when they take the bark off the trees, fine. | ||
| But that used to be what they would make their clothing out of. | ||
| Their clothing, they make other materials out of them. | ||
| They can make these little kind of carrying cases or backpacks kind of out of it. | ||
| Do they treat it with something? | ||
| Like, how do they get it so soft? | ||
| They pound it down, and I haven't seen the whole process, but I've seen the bark and where they pull it off, and they kind of beat it down and beat it down until it's this, like, cloth. | ||
| I know that this right here, when I've been doing research, they have those Pygmy, Mbuti Pygmy paintings, That are made out of bark cloth at our National Museum of History in New York. | ||
| They have a few of these there, and so it's kind of cool to see. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just was excited to bring it back to you. | ||
| I think I got a picture of said painting, and it's Mama Leo May, and she's painting it for you. | ||
| That's awesome, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And thank her, please. | ||
| I will. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| I will. | ||
| They just... | ||
| When I go back, sometimes they're like, hey... | ||
| Oh, that's her making it there? | ||
| Thank your friends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that one's not the same one. | ||
| I actually didn't think to... | ||
| Or I didn't get a picture of it whenever she was painting this one. | ||
| But I got a picture of her doing some other ones. | ||
| That's Mama Swazee. | ||
| And she's pretty great at it as well. | ||
| And so they just... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a little bowl, little leaves. | ||
| This paint that you actually have there, they had some leftover black paint, but sometimes on that other photo, they just use like cassava or berries and they beat it up, pound it down and make this paint out of it, but it kind of fades over time. | ||
| So this one's one where, yeah, that's it right there, where they just... | ||
| Pound up the stuff and it's part of their culture. | ||
| It's what they love to do. | ||
| Kind of how you saw Leo May passing down the farming. | ||
| And that video was actually San Gi over here from that hand print that you got. | ||
| It's his grandson. | ||
| And this is what the women pass down to their girls is how to make the spark cloth and how to paint. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's pretty neat, their culture. | ||
| They just do everything together. | ||
| They rally around each other. | ||
| They're happy together. | ||
| They sing, they dance, but they also suffer together. | ||
| If one person in the community is lost, even for instance, it might sound weird in our culture, but let's say a mother passes away who's breastfeeding, right? | ||
| And she passes away, but the baby survives. | ||
| Some other woman in the village will take the baby up and start taking care of that little one. | ||
| There is an adoption in the pygmy culture. | ||
| No one needs to be adopted because the community rallies around them. | ||
| When someone's lost, they all mourn the death together, but then they rally around that family and see how they can all help and put in. | ||
| So it's pretty cool. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I've learned a lot from them. | ||
| Well, that's how people used to be, man. | ||
| That's the original sort of tribal life of human beings. | ||
| They would all raise each other. | ||
| Christopher Ryan had this whole... | ||
| Take on it in Sex at Dawn. | ||
| And McKenna had a take on it as well, where they were talking about these ancient cultures. | ||
| Because of these small groups of people, they were much closer. | ||
| They knew everyone in the community. | ||
| It was intensely important. | ||
| And there's a lot of people that think that some of the problems that we deal with today in society are because of this disassociation that we have with our neighbors and we don't have a real sense of community. | ||
| I mean, I know like two or three of my neighbors and I see them once a year. | ||
| You know, I say, hi, wave, how's everything, man? | ||
| Everything cool? | ||
| All right, good seeing you. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| You know, there's no real community. | ||
| There's no interaction. | ||
| There's certainly no contribution as far as like working together to gather food or water or anything like that. | ||
| And I would imagine that these people were just intensely close. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That must have been a big part of the attraction to you to them like when they took you in and you were living with them and Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I think the average Mabuti Pygmy village is only 85 to 150 on our 10 villages that we help and have the 3,000 acres of land It's over 300 for each village Do you know about Dunbar's number? | ||
| Dunbar's number is a number that, I mean it varies, but the number is somewhere around 150 for most people. | ||
| There's a number of people that you can keep close relationships with. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| That you really only have room for 150 people in your head. | ||
| You essentially have hard drive space. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, and that seems to be related to ancient tribal communities that people had. | ||
| That we developed that way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We developed these small groups of 50 to 150 plus people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then when you get larger than that, things get weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, no, that's so true. | ||
| Whenever I went through the six-year battle with Oxy and just narcotics or pain pills, I don't know. | ||
| I would always be able to isolate. | ||
| Super easy. | ||
| Because when you're in your home, you're completely alone. | ||
| And so it's different when you're in a village and with the pygmies, you saw some of those huts, how small they are. | ||
| Seriously, in several of them, whenever I'm sleeping, I have to sleep in the center and I have to have my feet out the door because it's so small. | ||
| But you only go in there when you're going to sleep. | ||
| Or if you're not feeling good and you need some rest or the sun's right over your head and you're hot, But besides that, your cooking, your kitchen's outside. | ||
| That's where the people is. | ||
| That's where you do life, is outside of your home, around the campfire. | ||
| We call it Campfire University because that's where we've been taken to school from the Pygmies. | ||
| That's where they teach us the most about life, is around the campfire, learning their culture, learning about their kids, learning about the hunts, learning about how they make this, make that. | ||
| And it's where you get to do life together. | ||
| It's something really, really cool. | ||
| Honestly, I told them they want to know a little bit about my life, and I told them that I went through drug addiction for six years. | ||
| And, you know, they don't really struggle with that at all. | ||
| And then I told them I got really depressed, and I told them I got really sad. | ||
| I told him that I got so sad that I decided one time to take as many pills as I could and drink half a bottle of Everclear or more and snorted a bunch of coke and just wanted to end it all. | ||
| So, I mean, I told him that I was suicidal and I won't ever forget how they... | ||
| How they looked at me almost dumbfounded in a way of like, and then one of the questions the chief asked me said, well, wouldn't hurting yourself only hurt you? | ||
| And so the whole concept of, I guess what I'm getting to is they had never heard of anyone killing themselves. | ||
| Like maybe they had heard stories or something like that, but they have never known anybody that actually killed themselves or heard of it. | ||
| It's not something that their community, their culture, the pygmies kind of untouched out in the forest or even not up in the cities. | ||
| Like that's just something that they don't struggle with there. | ||
| They're struggling so much day in and day out with struggles that are so deep and they see their family and they do life together. | ||
| I think they just have so much more of what we were just talking about, so much more of a support system. | ||
| People that will rally around them. | ||
| When you lose a family member, everyone rallies around you. | ||
| Like, whenever I go to the funerals, it's the worst thing in the world. | ||
| The sounds... | ||
| Like, people don't try to compose themselves. | ||
| They don't try to... | ||
| Dress the body real nice and have flowers all around. | ||
| Now, losing loss of life is always tough, always terrible. | ||
| But there's something we do here in our culture where we try to make it as nice or smooth or almost pretty as possible. | ||
| You know, the person's dressed really nice and has the flowers and you compose yourself to come there. | ||
| You gather yourself. | ||
| You prepare the eulogy. | ||
| There's a, there's a program when you step in there, people get handed something and you know what's going to happen there. | ||
| So you kind of can all compose man there. | ||
| It's just so ugly. | ||
| It's so raw. | ||
| It's so real. | ||
| And it's so like in your face and it just rips your heart open to where people are mourning. | ||
| I saw Jay Lua, um, whenever Bobbo, I was the one, me and Ben were the ones that told Jay Lua, he's the chief. | ||
| About his grandson passing away. | ||
| We were there when it happened. | ||
| He wasn't around. | ||
| He was out collecting or gathering. | ||
| And we met on the same path together and he saw it in our face. | ||
| He knew Baba was sick, but now he knew that he was gone. | ||
| And I remember Jay Lawal just falling on his back into this, off the side of the footpath, into this pile of brush, like probably two, three foot tall, where he sunk into it. | ||
| And he was just squirming on his back. | ||
| He's in his 60s. | ||
| And he's watched so many of his grandchildren pass just because they don't have clean water. | ||
| And seeing him squirming, almost wanting to crawl out of his skin. | ||
| And so, but... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't want to be a bummer. | ||
| Just express yourself. | ||
| Don't worry about that. | ||
| But then how the whole community, all 150, 200, 300 people that were there, all mourned together. | ||
| We shared it. | ||
| I cried in a way that was like... | ||
| You know, like wiping my tears with everybody because everyone was mourning. | ||
| Everyone was crying. | ||
| It wasn't just a few people. | ||
| It wasn't just his mom and his dad, his mom macho. | ||
| It wasn't just Jailua. | ||
| It was the whole village cried together. | ||
| And so, I don't know, but for me, that makes it seem like I don't know if this, I don't want to make too many connections between our culture because they're completely different or a lot different, but I think here a huge cause of divorce is the loss of a child. | ||
| But there, it almost unites the parents so much so whenever they lose a little one. | ||
| And I don't mean to make this comparison, but it's like, I think it's because when they mourn, they truly go to the depths of the darkest place. | ||
| And they're able to truly almost get it out, if that makes sense. | ||
| Where when you're at the funeral, you let yourself go. | ||
| You just let go. | ||
| And it's okay, however ugly or however you handle it, whatever emotions come, you just ride that wave, if that makes sense. | ||
| Do you think that because their life is so difficult that life itself becomes more precious and the loss becomes more powerful, more intense, more raw? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I needed you to sum that up for sure. | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| I think whenever you struggle so much, you become so much more appreciative and grateful of life, of every breath you take. | ||
| Well, that's gotta be connected to their lack of understanding of suicide because our, you know, our idea of what a difficult life is, it's difficult, but there's food and shelter and there's, you know, and really the easiest place to live in the world. | ||
| All those things connected. | ||
| Whereas with them, just staying alive is such a struggle and getting water, which is so easy for us. | ||
| Anybody can walk into any bathroom and any gas stop, turn the water on, water comes out. | ||
| I mean, water's not hard to get in America. | ||
| Even with droughts, it's easy to get water. | ||
| We water fucking golf courses with millions of gallons of water every day. | ||
| Our understanding of what a struggle is is so different. | ||
| Yeah, and I think whenever we struggle here, we can go hide away and we don't have to deal with it. | ||
| We don't have to have conversations about it. | ||
| We can we can almost escape it. | ||
| We can escape it with our with our toys with our technology You know we can we can just bury our face in our phone or a computer or sit and watch a movie and like whenever those uncomfortable feelings come up we can try to Ignore them or suppress them if that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, and there they're so it's almost man. | ||
| This is gonna be a weird strange curveball or left turn But it's almost like I've started floating recently. | ||
| And whenever I go in there into the tank, it's like you have to... | ||
| You're left alone to your thoughts, right? | ||
| You don't have that technology. | ||
| You don't have this. | ||
| And so you can deal with stuff. | ||
| And you can try to focus and let go. | ||
| And for me, it's been really beneficial. | ||
| And so I don't... | ||
| I know that sounds weird for me to make that connection. | ||
| But whenever you're just left alone with your own thoughts, you can go deep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I feel like our culture here, well, okay, if we compare, and I love our culture. | ||
| I'm not saying there's so much wrong with it, but I feel like there in relationships, you go an inch or two wide and you go a mile deep in the Congo. | ||
| You get to know people. | ||
| And then here, a lot of times, you go a mile wide, but you only scratch the surface. | ||
| You don't go beneath the topsoil that much. | ||
| So you do sometimes with few people. | ||
| There's only few people we trust with that, you know. | ||
| But it's almost like there, everyone's so open to... | ||
| To go in deep with one another and because of that you get to know each other better You get to truly hurt when they hurt you get to laugh when they laugh you get to cry when they cry And I mean, I don't I don't have to keep going on about it, but no, please listen, don't apologize. | ||
| There's a real There's a real argument for the the way that we live right now is not a way that we were designed for Meaning that not that it can't be sustainable or manageable and you can't figure out a way to live a harmonious life in the modern context, but that a lot of people think that we're just, we would naturally fit right in in a tribal environment, that it would feel natural. | ||
| And a lot of people experience that when they go camping for long stretches of time and they're out in the woods together, you know, for whatever reason. | ||
| They just decide to... | ||
| Find a place and live off the land. | ||
| I mean, that's why I think a lot of those shows like those, um, subsistence living shows like, um, the homesteading. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's very good. | ||
| It's a very attractive to people because I think there's a longing in our DNA even where it just, there's a pull. | ||
| There's a pull to that. | ||
| Man, I would love to just grow kale and raise chickens and live off the farm. | ||
| There's a lot of people that feel really, really attracted to that. | ||
| And I think it's something deep in our being that we're longing for this connection to the real world. | ||
| We've done an amazing thing creating cities. | ||
| It's stupendous. | ||
| It's almost beyond our comprehension because we're a part of it. | ||
| We're a part of it. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| You get on the subway, you get in your car, you drive through the city. | ||
| It seems normal. | ||
| But it's so far removed from every single aspect of our history. | ||
| It's so new. | ||
| It's so recent. | ||
| I think... | ||
| These people are just more in tune. | ||
| It's horrible that they have to deal with these situations like the lack of water and toilets and the diseases and all the other struggle. | ||
| But man, there's a part of what they're doing and the way they're living that just seems like they're more in tune in a natural way. | ||
| You would think that they would be more depressed and But you heard Leo Mays laugh in that when they asked him about the bananas and he just got tickled. | ||
| He couldn't hold himself from just laughing and saying, I can't count that much. | ||
| You take someone from Beverly Hills and say, hey, this is what we got for you. | ||
| You can grow bananas now. | ||
| They're like, fuck you. | ||
| How do I get out of here? | ||
| First class only. | ||
| Where's my iPhone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's weird, man, because essentially this life is a temporary ride for all of us involved. | ||
| No one has ever got out of this thing alive. | ||
| No one. | ||
| No one will. | ||
| It's not going to be you. | ||
| It's not going to be me. | ||
| We're not going to make it. | ||
| No one makes it. | ||
| No one's ever made it before. | ||
| No one's ever going to make it. | ||
| So it's essentially like, what is the quality of your experience while you're here and how many people are you touching? | ||
| By that life, by that definition, you've lived one of the richest lives that a person could ever live. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Do you realize that? | ||
| You trip me out every time I'm around you. | ||
| I feel like a piece of shit. | ||
| No, I don't want anyone to feel that way at all. | ||
| I don't really mean that. | ||
| I'm kidding, but in a way, you're so selfless in that regard. | ||
| Well, I just... | ||
| Okay, if I just connect it back to that, I remember little Jippy. | ||
| He got about 10... | ||
| He's Chief Alondo's grandson. | ||
| Chief Leo May's brother is Chief Alondo. | ||
| And his grandson, Jippy, had gotten paid basically 10, 12, maximum, probably 14 or 15 peanuts. | ||
| He worked all day long. | ||
| He's a 5 or 6 year old child that worked from sunup to sundown. | ||
| And that's what he got paid was up to 15 peanuts. | ||
| And so a little handful in his little hand and he came and he sat by me and I just kind of put my arm around him and said, how you doing? | ||
| And he just instantly like put his hand out for me to have. | ||
| And like he went like this and he got like half for him and got half for me and just put half of his peanuts in my hand. | ||
| I'm like, you just worked all day long for that. | ||
| You know, like, from sun up to sun down, but they're just so incredibly generous. | ||
| You know, hey, what's mine is yours, and what's yours is... | ||
| I mean, like, it's fun to kind of sit around the fire sometimes and eat, because, I mean, it's rude in our culture and everything else, but I just enjoyed it whenever people would start eating off my plate, and I'd eat off their plate, and it just kind of becomes part of it. | ||
| This is how they do it. | ||
| Or there's just kind of a pile in the middle or big plate, big thing, and it's like, hey, this is what we have. | ||
| Let's share. | ||
| Let's make sure we share everything together. | ||
| Now, sorry to interrupt you, but besides the farming and besides the clean water, what other changes have you witnessed? | ||
| Okay, so Jippy, which is so cool, he's like my little buddy, getting to watch him grow up, and he's going to be chief one day. | ||
| They determined that like that young? | ||
| Yeah, so his father had passed away and he would have become the chief. | ||
| How do they decide who's the chief and who's not? | ||
| Is it not an election process or anything? | ||
| Basically, there is just among the village whenever I think I forget I need to ask Chief Alondo how he got kind of voted in or whatever but he was just the one that showed the leadership qualities the one that everyone followed the one that was most respected the one that was kind of the most knowledgeable or caring that's a huge thing for them who's gonna think about our interest the most and then be strong enough to like be tough whenever he needs to be tough and And so Chief Alano, | ||
| he's got incredible leadership skills, like just a great guy. | ||
| He was one of the first ones that bought into the vision for us to come in with the land, water, and food. | ||
| A lot of people didn't trust us, thinking, oh, they're saying this. | ||
| And they have those tools that look like they're going to drill wells, but really they might be surveying for gold or diamonds or coltan. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| They're just maybe using us as a cover. | ||
| But he was one that stood up in the community and was like, no, we believe them. | ||
| We're going to work with them. | ||
| And so from that, he's been able to go out and Tell other communities what's happened in their village. | ||
| And so one of the things that he's able to go do is say how water has changed everything to where they were able to get land to secure that so we could come in and drill the wells for them. | ||
| Then after that they're able to start farming and then you saw them go in and selling it at the markets to where they can buy clothes for their kids. | ||
| Well, it's not just about clothes. | ||
| Little Jippy, last time I was there, getting ready to leave. | ||
| He's always around, and I had just been able to go for the weekend, and I was only being able to stay there for three days this trip in that village, because we were going to some other places. | ||
| But I always stop and see him. | ||
| And so we're leaving, and I don't get to see my little buddy. | ||
| And I'm like, where's Jippy at? | ||
| And I go, oh, you'll see him as you go. | ||
| And so we got in the truck, and we start driving out, and all of a sudden, little Jippy comes out of the schoolhouse, and he's running to us. | ||
| And I got to get out and give him a hug, tell him bye. | ||
| But what's so huge is he was the first Mabuti Pygmy ever in school in that region, that area. | ||
| That they know of. | ||
| And so from kind of getting a little bit more equal rights, but then also being able to pay for themselves. | ||
| You know, there's supposed to be a government program where the pygmies can go to school and go for free, but they're like the only ones. | ||
| They're kind of like the Native Americans of Congo. | ||
| rights, but that's one that the government has said, but normally it's not honored. | ||
| And secondly, um, they don't go to school if they need to be spending time hunting or gathering because no kid's going to sit in school while he's hungry. | ||
| He's not gonna be able to focus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So for him to be able to have food to take to school is a huge thing so that he can sit For them to be able to pay the school fees on their own. | ||
| They didn't take that. | ||
| They said, no, we don't want the government program saying we can come to school for free. | ||
| We're going to pay his school fees. | ||
| He's going to be chief one day. | ||
| We're investing into him. | ||
| And so to know that once there's some educated Mabuti Pygmies, that takes away the last excuse that I see for the government to not honor them as true citizens of the country. | ||
| They have no representation on the government level. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| But there's over 200 tribes there. | ||
| All of them have representation. | ||
| But for years, it was because, or for always, it was because they thought they were half man, half animal. | ||
| Well, now, it's because they say no one's educated. | ||
| No one's ever graduated from primary school or secondary school. | ||
| No one's ever graduated with a high school degree. | ||
| And so until that happens, no, Mabuti Pegme can, or they don't have representation anymore. | ||
| So we're hoping that as they get schooling, they'll be able to go to the courts and represent themselves and have more rights in their community and culture. | ||
| I don't know if I've ever told you that, but a real dark part of the pygmy history or Congolese history and what people have done to them, what we have done to them. | ||
| 1902 to 1906, we had a Mabuti pygmy from the Ituri rainforest right where I've lived and stayed, and we put them in the zoo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Did I say that? | ||
| Yeah, we did talk about that. | ||
| I think we talked about it on the podcast, but yeah, it's horrific. | ||
| Yeah, his name was Otabinga, and we literally fed him bananas in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York. | ||
| So we threw him bananas while he lived there with the monkeys. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| And a human being like that. | ||
| And so, you know, that was over 100 years ago, but it's almost like in those regions where they don't have running water and electricity, And a lot of the education that we do here, some places are kind of stuck in this pocket that's kind of about 100 years back. | ||
| And so some of that mentality still exists. | ||
| So this could be the beginning steps in just completely changing their culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Educating them. | ||
| That's what we're seeing. | ||
| Having a chief come out and say, this is the first official ever land that Mabuti Pygmies own in our government's history. | ||
| This is the first water well, clean water source ever among the Mabuti Pygmies that they've ever owned. | ||
| First time they're ever farming for themselves and going to the market and selling it. | ||
| That had local radio station. | ||
| There's only like one, and it's in the rainforest a few hours away. | ||
| But they came out to the market to do a story With Chief Leomay and them because they were actually selling their produce. | ||
| And they're like, what? | ||
| Pygmies have always been hunter-gatherers. | ||
| Well, the deforestation has made it basically impossible for them to completely sustain themselves off hunting and gathering. | ||
| Animals are scared and skittish and they run away from the trees that when they fall, sound like thunder going through the forest. | ||
| So it makes it really hard to go hunt and be able to feed a whole tribe, you know, a whole village. | ||
| And so, yeah, to be able to say, this is the first time they're farming and selling this. | ||
| They're getting more and more, I don't know, it's like they're catching up with the people around them. | ||
| And we want them to do it at a slow pace that they want, so keep everything culturally sound for them. | ||
| But what they do want to bring into their culture, we want to rally behind that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's powerful, dude. | ||
| You're there at the steps of their culture changing. | ||
| I mean, you're right there. | ||
| Well, it's been changing or it's been corrupted so much because of the outside influences coming in with the chainsaws that are the mechanized ones. | ||
| Where they can just start cutting the trees down at such a crazy rate. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen those monster machines. | ||
| They're terrifying. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They strip the bark off of it all in one movement, cut it down. | ||
| Oh man, isn't that nuts, some of those? | ||
| It's scary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like science fiction movie stuff. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, so they have that because a lot of it's not as advanced as that, but they have guys just constantly, day in and day out, that it's almost like ants following each other through the forest, but they have bicycles and they throw these long 20-foot planks of mahogany. | ||
| I think it's ebony, that other really heavy hardwood. | ||
| And they're just taking those out of the forest all day long, just in lines. | ||
| There's a line of people going with empty bicycles, and there's a line coming back out with it full of wood. | ||
| And they just start legally deforesting, putting it in the back of these 18 wheelers that normally have two trailers on the back of them or two containers on the back. | ||
| And they fill them to the top. | ||
| And that's where a lot of the bridges collapse because they're going over. | ||
| They're overloaded. | ||
| I have a picture of that. | ||
| That was a wild time where we got behind this lorry that was ahead of us. | ||
| We didn't see it collapse or anything like that. | ||
| But we knew that they were carrying way too much weight to cross the bridges that we had crossed earlier. | ||
| And so we knew, oh, man, I hope that bridge is still up and running by the time we get back. | ||
| And then it just completely caved in and crashed. | ||
| Wow, look at that bridge. | ||
| That bridge is ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that was built in... | ||
| How did they get across that? | ||
| They drove across that? | ||
| They were driving. | ||
| Was there planks on top of it or something? | ||
| Yeah, wooden planks. | ||
| And that's what we would drive across all the time to go out and drill our wells and stuff. | ||
| But the guy's legally logging and carrying way too much weight. | ||
| Legally? | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| Illegally. | ||
| Oh, so they're illegally logging. | ||
| Illegally. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I thought you were saying legally. | ||
| No, sorry. | ||
| Illegally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| So what kind of reinforcement do they have in their laws, like the deforestation laws? | ||
| Basically, nothing. | ||
| I mean, they say it's illegal, but everyone turns a blind eye because they're getting paid off the bribes. | ||
| There's a lot of money involved in hardwood, especially those rare African hardwoods. | ||
| And that's where the rubber boom basically started was Congo by the Belgians, King Leopold II. | ||
| He wrote a crazy or there's a crazy book written about on King Leopold's ghost. | ||
| Talks about how that was the African Holocaust. | ||
| And basically that Congo had 20 million in population, but eight to 10 million people were killed throughout the Belgians coming and colonizing the Congo. | ||
| And he paraded around like he was the hero of Congo and we're bringing infrastructure and business and they're getting rich and they're growing and they're getting water and buildings and they're advancing so much. | ||
| And he would go on these public campaigns basically talking about all the good they're doing in the Congo. | ||
| But basically you can see these terrible, brutal pictures of basically a father, I think, reaching out to his child's hand that's on the ground because they took a machete and cut his kid's hand off. | ||
| And he's reaching out to grab it and he doesn't have hands because they had already cut his hands off too. | ||
| And so it's just been since... | ||
| It's just been brutal there always because it was the rubber and ivory boom. | ||
| And then after that, now it's the rare hardwoods, the gold, the coal tan, the uranium, which they use to make cell phones with. | ||
| Yeah, it conducts electricity at a really high rate, but it stays cool so it doesn't overheat or blow up on you. | ||
| And I think 80% of the world's coltan comes from the Congo and basically all of its illegal mining ran by rebels and everything else. | ||
| Yeah, that's the dirty secret about people's phones and a lot of the electronics that we use. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but it's been an incredible journey to be part of because I couldn't have dreamed this. | ||
| I wouldn't have thought it up or didn't have it on my goals list, didn't have it on my radar as a kid. | ||
| Yeah, but you're so perfect for it. | ||
| That's what's so crazy. | ||
| It seems like it's kind of changed you as a human being and solidified you in a lot of ways. | ||
| Like the conviction that you fight with, it's not just that of a competitor. | ||
| It's like a man with a... | ||
| Not even just a goal, like a destiny. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| You know, you're doing something that's bigger than most people can even comprehend. | ||
| And I feel like the weight of that is pushing you forward in this really incredible way to watch. | ||
| I don't know anybody like you, man. | ||
| You're the only guy I know like you. | ||
| You're the only guy I know like you, my friend. | ||
| So interesting and so many awesome people that you've been able to interview and have them pour into your life and you pour into theirs. | ||
| And because of that, there's so many... | ||
| Cool things that are happening, man. | ||
| I mean, honestly, I'm just grateful to have your friendship and have this opportunity to share because it's helped out so much us be able to do this. | ||
| Wow, I'm very grateful as well. | ||
| Very grateful as well. | ||
| And I also feel like this, I mean, I can't even take credit for this thing. | ||
| This thing made itself. | ||
| Yeah, how did this turn into this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know what this thing is. | ||
| This thing, I just have to show up and try not to fuck it up. | ||
| That's what I try to do. | ||
| I try to show up and not fuck it up. | ||
| Yeah, but it's so nice. | ||
| Oh, you know what? | ||
| The float tank center that I go to in Oklahoma, it's called Float OKC. On my first, no, second time in there, they were like, oh, you didn't check the box of how you heard of this? | ||
| And it was like friend, family, this or that, and then Joe Rogan. | ||
| Because they started up because of you, and they were talking about, hey, there's probably 20 or 30 in the country before Joe started talking about it on the podcast, and now it's just grown so much. | ||
| There's hundreds of them. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I think there's over 300. Yeah, people say, do you have a piece of those? | ||
| I'm like, nope. | ||
| No, good, good. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| I don't want any money. | ||
| More power to them. | ||
| I think it's an amazing way to change the way you look at the world and see yourself. | ||
| Be alone with your thoughts. | ||
| And I just think it's one of the best tools for human development. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I just think it's incredible. | ||
| I was shocked when more people didn't know about it. | ||
| I had one in my house in 2002. Wow. | ||
| Somewhere around there. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Yeah, 2003. That's awesome. | ||
| One of the reasons why I got this house Was because it had a basement. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, perfect place for a tank. | ||
| I'm like, you know, I look at houses all fucked up. | ||
| I'm like, do I have enough room in the backyard to shoot my bow? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Is there a tank room? | ||
| I mean, that's like how I look at houses now. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| So how do you, if it's okay, how do you use, I floated eight times now, and I've finally done a two-hour float, which was... | ||
| I think a lot more beneficial doing it a little bit longer. | ||
| That's the game changer. | ||
| Oh man, that was awesome. | ||
| And then, but Wednesday before my fight on Friday, March 3rd, I went in and I had this intention where Neil from Florida KC was like, hey, why don't you instead of just rushing in here from training or rushing in here from the office at Water 4, like come in 30 minutes early, kind of sit down and Chill, close your eyes, set an intention, and then do it. | ||
| And I came in and I had watched a documentary called Float Nation. | ||
| And it was cool because it was like an hour, hour and a half, and it showed a lot of different things, but it showed some scientific stuff of... | ||
| Of sports psychologists and basically visualization. | ||
| And then I've done some more research. | ||
| And there's this place in Tulsa that has some brain doctors. | ||
| I mean doctors that are researching neuroscience and different stuff. | ||
| But they're finally doing a clinical study with people with anxiety and depression. | ||
| It's finally fully funded. | ||
| And the guy was talking about it and was saying that basically the same exact results that anti-anxiety medicine has, the float tank can do 100% naturally and that the studies are coming out to back it up. | ||
| And so it's just really cool. | ||
| But the tank Wednesday, I basically visualized the fight exactly the way it went down on Friday. | ||
| I just had this intense time. | ||
| That was the best float I've had. | ||
| Just sitting there thinking about the fight, thinking about the fight, thinking about the fight and saying everything that I wanted to do. | ||
| It was almost like I went to training before, and I was drilling the moves I wanted to do in the fight. | ||
| Then I went into the tank, and right before that, so I was drilling early that morning, everything that I wanted to do in the fight, kind of visualizing before I went into the tank. | ||
| Then when I came out, or before I got in the tank, after training, I started to watch fight film on him, see how he's moving. | ||
| And then I went into the tank and I was able to just think about what he's going to do, think about what I'm going to do, how I'm going to implement it. | ||
| And then it's nuts. | ||
| The only difference was I got two big throws instead of one big throw. | ||
| In the vision, I had one throw. | ||
| And then in the fight, I had two big throws, but the ground and pound straight into the arm triangle. | ||
| Exactly what I had been envisioning. | ||
| So when you say personal development, I'm like, man, I get it. | ||
| Like so how do you do it? | ||
| What do you I mean? | ||
| I don't know if that makes sense like I'm wanting to learn how to go deep with it Just let go and use it as a tool of personal development Yeah, the more often you can get into it the more you get relaxed and the more you can sort of slip into that comfortable state of Not feeling the water or feeling the air and just being in your mind see nothing feel nothing released from your body and And then I'll either go in there with ideas, like maybe I'll go in there. | ||
| I've gone over jujitsu in there. | ||
| I've gone over different martial arts techniques in there where you sort of visualize movement. | ||
| But a lot of it I use, I'll go over material, like I'll have ideas. | ||
| Sometimes it fucks up my float where I have an idea that I can't let go. | ||
| Like I have to set something up where I have a voice-activated recorder inside the float tank where I can talk. | ||
| But part of me doesn't want to talk while I'm in there. | ||
| I just want to be alone with my thoughts because I think when you talk, it'll take you out of it. | ||
| But there's some ideas that don't want to escape me. | ||
| Because ideals are slippery, man. | ||
| You have a great idea. | ||
| Sometimes I'll have a great idea when I'm in bed, and I'm like, I'll remember that. | ||
| I don't remember it ever. | ||
| Like, you fucking ever. | ||
| I might remember one out of ten that I think I'm gonna remember. | ||
| So I'm probably gonna have to figure out some way to record things while I'm in the tank. | ||
| But for me, you know, it depends on what I'm trying to do. | ||
| Just trying to just be balanced. | ||
| Think about life. | ||
| Think about my behavior. | ||
| Think about my interaction with people. | ||
| You know, do I have as much energy and appreciation as I should? | ||
| Do I have as much gratitude as I should? | ||
| You know, I want to I just want to optimize my thought process, you know, and I'm definitely not claiming that I do or that I always have it right. | ||
| I definitely don't. | ||
| It's an ongoing process and that's one of the realities of being a person. | ||
| The idea of the perfect person, it just doesn't exist and I think it's a bad model to strive for and instead you should strive for doing your best whenever you can, as much as you can. | ||
| And I think that reviewing your thoughts and reviewing your whole mental process is a very important part of optimization about being your best and just I think it's one of the rare moments where you're actually alone with your thoughts, where there's no influence of the body, the distractions of the body, just even the weight of sitting down, feeling your butt on the chair, your elbows on this desk. | ||
| All those things are factors and they're being calculated by your mind. | ||
| The analogy that I always use is if you and I were having this conversation, but right next to us was a jackhammer, it would be super distracting. | ||
| But that's just input. | ||
| That jackhammer is just profound input. | ||
| And I think that everything is input. | ||
| Social cues, looking at people, sounds, feeling, touch, gravity. | ||
| All those things are input. | ||
| That is going into the mind that your mind has to calculate. | ||
| In the absence of any input, whether it's physical touch, you feel like you're flying through space, you feel zero gravity, you don't feel the water because it's the same temperature as your skin, you're floating in it, it's total silence, total darkness, in the absence of that... | ||
| I think your brain becomes super powered. | ||
| I think it becomes super charged. | ||
| And I think you get to see things in a much clearer way. | ||
| And I've seen myself at fault when I thought it was innocent. | ||
| I've seen myself happy and fulfilled when I thought it was longing. | ||
| It's given me a much more balanced perspective and a better way of addressing the realities of the complexities of life. | ||
| Man, that's great. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| It's a powerful tool, man. | ||
| It was weird to me that around 2002, when I really started talking about it, that nobody knew what the fuck it was. | ||
| I was like, how is this a weird... | ||
| How am I the guy who's talking about this? | ||
| How's the UFC commentator the guy who's talking about floating? | ||
| It just didn't make any sense to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I don't think I... I mean, you had talked about it, and I knew about it, but it wasn't until I got in the tank and came out of the tank for the first time that then I got it. | ||
| It was like, oh man, this is awesome. | ||
| And the physical aspects of it, the way the magnesium makes your body feel and the looseness of the being in zero gravity environment, what feels like zero gravity, everything gets loose. | ||
| It just relaxes, the back relaxes, the arms, the knees, the neck, everything just gets loose in there and you come out just feeling good. | ||
| You want to hug people. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, that's exactly how I came out. | ||
| I came out and had a smile from ear to ear. | ||
| When I came out of it, they're like, oh, you have that post-float glow. | ||
| And I actually gave the guy a hug. | ||
| I didn't even know his name, but gave him a big hug. | ||
| And it was so cool, man. | ||
| And it's neat. | ||
| The float community seems like... | ||
| Like, everyone just chill. | ||
| Everyone has a deeper appreciation for life. | ||
| That might be too much, but it seems like everyone's got a deeper appreciation for life where they just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think there's something into what you're saying. | ||
| It sounds pretentious. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| But you're right. | ||
| There is something there. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| It's like saying that... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's something special about it. | ||
| And I think a big part of what that something special is, is the alleviation of tension. | ||
| And I think tension, much like inflammation causes a lot of diseases and a lot of disorders that people have pertaining to diet and that inflammation causes like what you were talking about with your celiacs. | ||
| Oh yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I mean that is a lot of it is based on inflammation, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think tension is, in many ways, the physical tension is also another real boundary to comfort. | ||
| And that physical tension is alleviated greatly when you're in that tank. | ||
| And I think when you're more comfortable, you're more relaxed. | ||
| When you're more relaxed, you're more open. | ||
| When you're more open, you're more loving. | ||
| I think all those things sort of cascade. | ||
| You know, they feed on each other and they help. | ||
| And when a tense person that's, like, stressful, like, fuck, fuck, fuck, you know, goddammit! | ||
| You know, it's really hard to, like, be calm and kind. | ||
| You know, it's like you're so wound up. | ||
| I think that thing removes a lot of the physical aspects of being wound up. | ||
| And then on top of that, the deep meditative effects of being in that tank, especially if you go into it like you did with a vision or a direction and a thought to work on. | ||
| I think it does wonders for your thought process. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I'm still learning about it because the first couple times I was just trying to just wipe my mind clean and coming out completely stress-free, feeling completely stressed, at least, was awesome. | ||
| And then going in there with an intention and with a goal, with a fight just a couple days away. | ||
| I don't know that this is what happened, but in training, I had been feeling great, but then it felt like something just turned on or started firing where it connected the mental visualization to the physical of actually going in there and doing it the exact way that I saw it. | ||
| Was something that just kind of blew my mind. | ||
| It was cool to see that happen. | ||
| Because you'd want to see the match or the fight a hundred times in your head before you ever go out there and do it. | ||
| I mean, not put things in it to where if it goes bad or if it doesn't go exactly your way in the fight that then you freak out during the fight. | ||
| But you want to have a goal and an intention and know what you're going to do in there. | ||
| I think that's probably what Conor did when he was fighting Aldo. | ||
| He knew he was going to go in there and end it quick. | ||
| And he saw that happening. | ||
| And so, not saying... | ||
| I don't want to put words in his mouth. | ||
| Do you remember when he talked about it after the Eddie Alvarez fight? | ||
| He said, I had a vision of me standing here with the second belt. | ||
| Like, where the fuck is me other belt? | ||
| He's like really upset. | ||
| Like, he's like, I visualized this. | ||
| I want it. | ||
| And then Tyron Woodley, of all people. | ||
| They had to give his belt, right? | ||
| Oh, it's really cool that they did that. | ||
| That Tyron allowed that to happen. | ||
| Kudos to him. | ||
| But that... | ||
| The visualization of a goal is very important to solidifying this idea of what that goal is in your mind. | ||
| There's been studies done on visualization as far as athletics and skill learning, and some people believe it is as important as physical practice. | ||
| Which is kind of crazy, you know? | ||
| Yeah, no, I can see that. | ||
| I mean, Kenny Munday, who's been involved in the MMA community quite a lot, he was my high school wrestling coach, and he told me to go home, write a goal, put it somewhere you can see it. | ||
| So I wrote down, he told me to write down state champ, but I wrote down national champ, and I put it above my bed. | ||
| And then over, you know, working with him, training, getting some wrestling moves, I put a step around body lock on the left and I put a lateral drop on the right. | ||
| And so my favorite wrestling move on the left and my second favorite wrestling move on the right. | ||
| And when I won my first national championship, it was with the move on the left. | ||
| And when I won my second, it was with the move on the right. | ||
| And so it was I was going to bed, thinking about it, dreaming about it, waking up, starting my day, thinking about it and and wanting to really put that in action. | ||
| And so I totally get it. | ||
| And I need to be more conscious of it and dive even deeper into it because I'm like you. | ||
| I agree that, or at least I can see the point and how it's valid that the mental focus and energy and visualizing is pretty much just as important as actually physically doing it. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| And all of them together are really what it's all about. | ||
| It's none of the, no aspect. | ||
| Yeah, no aspect can be ignored. | ||
| I got to get out of here soon. | ||
| Is there anything else you want to tell people about or wrap this up? | ||
| Man, we can get to wrapping it up, but real quick, we have two goals going on right now. | ||
| At Water4.org, we're doing a World Water Day campaign. | ||
| We threw up a goal to raise, it's an audacious goal to do that water tank, water tower, water kiosk system. | ||
| It's going to serve 4,000 people and then create more water wells. | ||
| It's a $50,000 goal, but we've already raised 35. Someone yesterday gave 25 grand to it. | ||
| And so we've got about a week left, and we're hoping to get another 15, because if that happens, we're able to really make that sustainable, that team there in Rwanda. | ||
| So for that, people go to water4.org? | ||
| Yeah, water4.org. | ||
| If they go to my social media, water4.org, and then it's like campaign. | ||
| It's our World Water Day campaign. | ||
| I think I have it up right now on my social media, on Twitter and on Instagram. | ||
| It's the link, like the website or the link in the bio. | ||
| It's the actual campaign link. | ||
| So if you just go to at the big pygmy on Instagram or Twitter, you can just click right there and get right to the campaign. | ||
| And yeah, and for people that can give one time, that's where you can give one time. | ||
| And if you want, we're trying to make us sustainable here. | ||
| And so if we had people that bought in and did $25 a month, over the course of a year, you'd give 15 people clean water for the rest of their lives. | ||
| And the reason that is is because we train up the locals to go out and be able to repair the wells and always be able to serve the community. | ||
| And so $25 a month goes a real long way. | ||
| And yeah, so brother, I appreciate you so much. | ||
| I appreciate you too, man. | ||
| It's always a pleasure having you in here. | ||
| And thank you very much for the gifts. | ||
| And please tell your pygmy family, thank you for this. | ||
| I'm going to definitely have this framed. | ||
| Absolutely, man. | ||
| Justin Ren, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| See you guys soon. |
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