Steven Rinella recounts his trips to Guyana’s remote Mikushi village, where 300 people live off cassava—processed into flour, syrup, or poisonous cyanide-rich liquid—unaware of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. Their bowhunting, using 12-inch steel-tipped arrows for tapirs and jaguars, clashes with modern conservation like CITES-protected turtles, though guided $7,000 arapaima fishing trips curb overhunting. In Bolivia, a jaguar slaughtered 24 dogs in two months, yet villagers cling to cultural rituals like bullet ant stings for strength. Rinella’s plan to invite them ice fishing in Alaska underscores how deeply environment shapes survival and tradition, revealing stark contrasts between ancient resilience and today’s fragmented expertise. [Automatically generated summary]
They make all this stuff from this root that they grow.
In its raw form, when you shred the root and squeeze the shredding, so it'd be like, imagine you took a yam and shredded a yam and then squeezed the yam between your hands and dripped out a liquid.
That liquid is deadly poisonous.
Okay?
Dogs, chickens, people, anything that drinks that liquid dies.
So, the Jonestown Massacre was a cocktail of The best people think that it was Kool-Aid, Flavor-Aid, Valium, and Potassium Cyanide.
My question coming home from Ghana was, was the cyanide from the root?
Were they doing homemade cyanide?
When I got home, I looked into this, and it seems that that commune, Jonestown commune, Had been ordering actual potassium cyanide, which is used in a number of mining practices and other stuff.
Yeah, and the same stuff with different poisons that people use to poison fish.
What strikes me about it is how, in the village, the Mikushi village I was in is mostly Mikushi, but there's also Wapashana, which is another tribe.
Carib is another tribe, but it's predominantly a Mikushi village.
And there's about 300 people that live in this village.
And how careless they are with the liquid.
Like, if you nowadays, like, picture, like, the type of person that, like, you and me are married to and raise kids with, right?
If you had that type of mom, and you had a big bowl of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a bit, how that bowl would be monitored in your household?
So, if you picture South America, it's northeast corner opening out onto the southern Caribbean.
That's Guyana.
It's bordered on the east by Suriname, on the west by Venezuela, to the south by Brazil.
It's 90% virgin rainforest.
And within that 90% of Virgin Rainforest is only 10% of the population.
So the coastal peoples are like Creole cultures, people mostly descended from slave trade, Europeans.
In the interior are the Amerindian groups.
The government functions, sort of the power in Guyana is the coastal peoples.
And there's not a ton of interplay, and there used to be barely any interplay, between the Amerindian communities and the government.
The government's English-speaking.
So you'll find that there's a lot of English mixed in in the Amerindian communities.
And some people, like this guy Rovin, because he's sort of a...
He's like a...
He has a leadership role in his community, and he's learned just standard English very well.
He's had a fascinating life, just how much stuff has changed for him.
So you can just, like, converse, okay, in a way that...
You can converse in the type of English we're talking right now, almost.
Which creates this weird tension between the things that you're discussing and how you're discussing them.
Like, for instance, to have a guy just in conversational English talking about problems they're having with neighboring shamans and their own shaman putting curses on each other.
There's a strange tension between how it's being conveyed to you.
Like, okay, if you're talking conversational English, I guess like a life, it's almost like you'd want it to be, when he's telling you this, you'd almost want to be reading it in like closed caption.
And he'd be saying it in the indigenous language.
Because it sounds weird to have an idea that's so foreign to us.
Which would be like a battle of shamans, battling over access to wild animals.
To have that delivered in conversational English just struck me as unusual.
Because usually when you're traveling, you're getting all of your information...
Like traveling in Bolivia.
A guy would tell a story.
And he'd tell a story in Simshian.
No, I'm going to say not Simshian.
Chimane.
He'd tell a story in Chimane to a person who spoke Spanish.
The person who speaks Spanish would tell it to a person...
No, no, no.
A Chimane guy telling someone who speaks Chimane in Spanish.
Then that person telling it to a person who speaks Spanish and English.
The language, you've never, like, when he's speaking, you're like, I've never, in all my travels, I've never heard a language that sounds anything like that.
So I guess what I'm getting at is to hear someone talking about something in conversational English that seems so far removed from just our understanding of things.
It takes on a weird quality.
But what's nice about it is you can go to a place where life is so vastly different than anything we understand.
And just get the straight dope right from the source.
It's kind of like what's so cool about Guyana because you can go and converse with people who are very much a hunter-gatherer culture today, but just shoot the shit with them without ever feeling like you're missing something.
Everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and painstaking to wade through.
So I got home, yeah, so it wasn't the same poison, but Jim Jones, he grew up in like a, he was involved in a Pentecostal church, he was involved in the Methodist church, then he kind of became a healer.
And started his own cult.
It was funny, I was reading about him, when I was trying to figure out the poison, I was reading about how he was kind of ahead of his time.
Because the Jim Jones Massacre was 1979. 78 or 79. And one thing that got him sideways with his church was that he wanted to have interracial service.
And that caused friction in his church at the time.
Earlier in his career.
And he moved out to the Bay Area and started this church, and then he got kind of paranoid and thought that his congregants shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities, but he was siring illegitimate children left and right.
They go down to Guyana, go out to the jungle.
There's a thousand of them down there.
People in the U.S. from the Bay Area are kind of like wondering what happened to their loved ones.
They send a congressman down there to try to figure out what's going on.
He shows up with a bunch of cameras.
The congressman says, you know, he's like, I'm going to help anyone who wants to go back to the Bay Area, go back to the Bay Area.
But then, yeah, when you talk to these boys, I'm like, you know Georgetown, like the Jonestown, or the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, never drink the Kool-Aid?
The main river that drains Guyana is the Essequibo.
And if you go way up the Essequibo, you'll get to a stream that comes in from there called the Rupanuni, and you go up the Rupanuni, and then you get to the Riwa.
And at the mouth of the Riwa in Rupanuni is Riwa Village.
And in Riwa Village, you're isolated enough where you don't know about 900 Americans and some other people from other areas dying in a mass suicide.
They grow peppers, and then they grow the cassava.
And the cassava, like, it's kind of amazing.
You know, we always hear about slash and burn agriculture.
So, they'll...
They'll go into a slash and burn in a spot out in the jungle.
But it's like a recycled sort of slash and burn agriculture.
And I'll break down what that means.
So they'll go into an area and slash everything and burn it.
Just to clear the...
Just so sunlight can make it through to the ground.
So they chop the jungle down and burn everything.
Then the cassava, like I said, looks like big yams.
When you grow it, you just take a stalk of an existing plant.
And just bury that stalk in the ground.
And it'll sprout up a new crop.
And so, you know, you're close to the equator, so you don't have seasons.
There's some seasonal variation.
They do have their wet season and dry season, but you always get about the same amount of darkness as daylight, and they don't have the wild fluctuations that we have in the temperate zone.
So they can grow year-round.
And they stage it.
So you have a crop that's coming in, you have a crop that'll be coming in in three months, you have a crop that'll be coming in in six months, you have a crop that'll be coming in nine months.
And once you get a certain number of cycles, I can't remember how many cycles you get off a piece of ground, you let the ground go feral.
give it a few years and then come in and burn it again.
Also intermittently, every time you plant cassava, you, before you replant, you make a little fire and burn some debris in that same spot.
No irrigation.
You're not watering it at all.
Um, and that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the surrounding just detritus scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it.
People in South America, in the jungles, people that use blow darts, so people that hunt with blow guns, it's generally understood, even talking to the Mikushi who hunt with bows and arrows, I asked him, why don't you guys hunt with blow darts, blow guns?
And he explained to me, we don't need to, because we have arrow plant, which gives arrows.
Now, if you were in this other area, you know, more up in the mountains, and there's no arrow plant, then you'd hunt with a blow dart.
It looks like a palm, and the palm leaf puts out these long pieces, and when one of those is ready, you cut it green...
They can make an arrow in no time.
So you go out in the jungle, find this piece, and you know one of the theories on how we domesticated plant species would be that it was a very gradual, unintentional domestication where you would go out.
I'm going to just take something simple.
Let's say you eat a lot of raspberries.
You go out and you gather raspberries and you bring them home.
And you eat them near home.
And then people are eating these seeds and shitting these seeds out.
And pretty soon, there's a lot more grassberries growing around your home village.
Just for the simple fact that you're always bringing the seeds home and discarding them around and creating it.
So, they have...
Except for Maniac, which people don't even really, I don't think it's really well understood what it came from.
It's been domesticated for a long time.
All the plants they use are widely available in the jungle, but tend to also have some around home too, that they've brought home and planted nearby, or they just grow up there now because they've been bringing the stuff into their village for so long.
So Aeroplant is readily available.
They cut the arrow shaft green, and it looks like just a green dowel, but it has some curvature to it.
Then they'll come home and they start a fire, and they heat the green thing just by twirling it over the embers or over the flame.
Twirling it and getting it hot, and it'll let off a little steam, and then you bend it.
And then you twirl it and get it hot and bend it and you'll eventually make it, well, arrow straight.
Then they make four different kinds of arrows depending on what they're hunting for.
So let's say you were making an arrow to...
Let's say you're making a big game arrow.
In the big game they hunt would be red-brocket deer, white-lip peccary, which is a favorite, Collard peccary, which we call javelina, and sometimes tapir.
The arrow they use for that, so they would take that, so let's say they're going to build one of those.
So they take that green shaft and straighten it.
The next step is they find a wood called bullet wood, and they cut what would be like, what's going to form the base of your Tip.
The base of your spear.
And that bullet wood, they fit into the end of the green shaft, which is almost like a picture of having the consistency of bamboo.
And they shove that bullet wood in there, and it forms like a base.
And to that, they take an old machete blade that they cut out and file down to be about a four-inch steel knife.
And that goes into the bullet wood that forms the junction between the arrow shaft and the steel piece.
That's the only man-made material they use in their arrows.
Then they take a plant that looks like yucca.
And they make their own string.
And they got little bits of rubber from rubber trees that they wax the string with.
And they put a bullet wood knock in the part that your bow string actually pushes on.
And that gets tied in to the arrow shaft.
And then they fletch the arrow with feathers from Guan...
Or Black Curacao or Crestless Curacao.
And that's what they fletch their arrows with because they're very water resistant.
They don't call them machete, they call them cutlasses.
In Roven's lifetime, Roven's 32. He's kind of my main friend down there that I hung out with both times I was down there.
In his lifetime...
He remembers people using wood blades, which is made from a bamboo-like material, so it would be like a convex spear point cut out of bamboo and sharpened.
He remembers people using those, but he had always used cutlass blades.
Now, in Bolivia, you'd see people who are just using the old form.
There are other arrows, when they make arrows for hunting birds and they make arrows for hunting fish, the only man-made material on those arrows is hog wire fencing.
So basically wire fencing, they snip out the hunks of wire, smash it down until it's flat, and then they can cut barbs in there to hunt birds and hunt fish.
The bow is, it's not a laminate bow, so they make a bow by just cutting a tree.
Single piece, a single stem tree, shaving it down to what they're after, and then take that same yucca plant, pull out the fibers out of the yucca strands, and make bow strings.
And the length of shot you're going to take sort of depends on...
Well, they don't really think...
The idea that you're going to wound it and it's going to get away doesn't weigh on them very heavily.
In our culture, in our hunting culture here, we've come to really...
The wound loss is something we do a lot to avoid.
There's a lot of talk.
We're always talking about, you know, you shouldn't be surprised to get a good hit.
You should know what's going to happen.
Don't take shots that are too far away.
We really put a strong value on when you let the arrow go or when you let the bullet go, you damn sure know that you're going to have a quick, clean kill.
At least we put a lot of value on that.
In practice, sometimes that stuff goes out the window, but anyone would say that that's your goal.
Not on their mind.
You see them take some Hail Marys, right?
And they can shoot...
If you're trying to shoot a bird, all they're trying to do is get a wire point.
So one of those arrows I described, fitted with a long wire on the end, cut out of a piece of steel fence, with a barb, with a couple barbs filed into it.
And that head is joined by string to the arrow shaft so that once the head makes contact, the arrow shaft can fall away.
But there's a string connecting the arrowhead, the wire barb, to the arrow shaft.
And that allows it to tangle up in the trees.
So when they shoot, all they really need to do is prick that thing with that wire barb, knowing that the bird, or they hunt for a large aquatic rodents, knowing that the bird is going to get tangled up in the trees overhead, and that they can then climb up to go get it.
And when Rovin was a kid, they would go on two-week hunting trips where they're gone for two weeks with their father.
They would go for two weeks to hunt saltfish.
So they were operating out of dugout canoes that they would have to paddle.
And they would make a dugout canoe themselves, paddle the dugout canoe upriver for a week to get to the good hunting and fishing grounds.
Then they would hunt and fish for one week until they would get 100 pounds of salted fish.
Then you'd go back downriver, which would take a day or two days, And then get to the mouth of the Rupinuni River and paddle up the Rupinuni River for two days to another town.
And then they would haul the salt fish, including arapaima flesh, and sell that 100 pounds of salted fish for $75.
So two weeks plus work for a family for $75.
And now they will not touch those fish because they make a handful of people every year go down and give them seven grand to catch one and let it go.
When I was talking about, like, that they discovered sunglasses and shit, there's been a lot, like, they were already on to this arapaima thing the first thing I went down, and it's changed everything about, it's changed that village.
The arapaima fishery.
The way they used to hunt arapaima is they would hunt them out of trees.
They would, so, you're familiar, like, when a river, you know a river flows in an S pattern?
So the river jumps an S and it abandons, and the main channel abandons the curves of the S. Okay.
Those curves become what's called Oxbow Lakes.
Where during high water, during a flood, those oxbow lakes are connected to the main river system.
When the water goes low, the oxbow lakes become isolated.
Arapaimas live in those oxbow lakes and they feed on peacock bass and other stuff.
So when the water got low and the arapaimas were all kind of restricted to very small little spots in the river, they would climb up in trees Overlooking these places and wait for the arapaima to come up near the surface and shoot it with an arrow.
That was a detachable, basically a harpoon head arrow and shoot it with the arrow.
The harpoon head would detach from the arrow and the arrow would float on the surface connected by string to the arrow shaft.
You would then go take a hand line with a hook.
And follow that fish in your dugout canoe until you could cast your hook out and catch your arrow.
And then you're connected by your fishing line to your arrow.
And your arrow is connected by the tether to the harpoon head.
And you would hand line in and slaughter the arapaima.
When we're out fishing, they're salt and fish all the time.
They would salt that fish and then sell it.
And then that became a very threatened species under that thing.
And the other thing that they would hunt for is they would hunt for giant river turtles and sell the meat.
And greatly depleted.
Because their whole lives occur on this one river.
And once those market influences came in and they had moved beyond...
Subsistence hunting and fishing and they moved into market hunting and fishing.
They did the same thing that we did to our own country in the late 1800s and early 1900s is they were on course to entirely deplete the resource through market demands because their village gets more and more people all the time.
It grew considerably in the five or six years between my two visits and their environment just couldn't support that level of market hunting.
So this arapaima thing It gives them a way to make money, to buy staples and run a school and stuff like that.
It gives them kind of an out.
And it's funny because I'm a lot more interested, like personally, I'm a lot more interested in a guy shooting fish out of a tree and salting the meat than I am a dude like me going down to catch an arapaima and let it go.
But these arapaimas, they can just keep excavating a little spot in the bottom and just wait, praying, or their equivalent of praying, that the water level comes back up and liberates them from the oxbow they're stuck in.
So, they found 26 that were out of the water and their backs were all messed up from birds and other predators grabbing the arapaimas, trying to grab the arapaimas.
So they realize there's just like a finite, they have like on their river, the river that they call home, the river they kind of control, there's like a finite resource.
But the thing is, other groups, so they're mostly Mikushi, and my friend Rovin's Mikushi.
His wife is Wapashana.
and there are other wapashanas in other places who will come down to hunt their area and they have very different these other groups that come in have different hunting practices like Roven was telling me one time that he was going up the largest snake in the world is a green anaconda their river has the largest thing in the alligator family which is a black caiman
some people say oh it's not a true alligator but the largest member of that familia black caiman they get big you know They get bigger.
So they have the giant river otter, which is a river otter.
River outers get up to 100 pounds.
They have the biggest snake, the green anaconda.
They have the largest aquatic rodent in the world, the largest freshwater scaled fish.
By some definitions, the largest eagle, which is the harpy eagle.
The Philippine eagle has a bigger wingspan, but when you measure them by weight, the harpy from there, and then there's another harpy that's a giant, like the Papuan, the Papua New Guinea harpy.
The male face, you're looking at it, it just is like a...
It reminded me of the first time I saw Lynx, where you're just looking at it, and it's just so freakishly different than anything you'd looked at, like that Harpy's face.
He's telling me this story, how the Wapashana will come down and hunt, and they hunt different than the Mikushi.
Like, the Mikushi aren't that big on killing tapirs, but the Wapashana will come down in their area, and he says they come down with arrows that got 12-inch steel tips on them.
He's like, you know those boys are hunting tapirs.
But he said one time he was going up the river, and he sees a green anaconda.
And he goes to look, and it's got an arrowhead stuck into it.
And he said, and I told my companion, the Wapashana are here.
And they go up the river a little bit, and of course they come to a Wapashana camp.
Because the Wapashana, he said, he's like, talking about this particular, there's Wapashanas all over, but he's like, this particular group of Wapashanas that travel ahead of Christmas.
Because they're like, they have animist...
You know, mystical systems, but it's also infused with a certain level of Christianity.
So, ahead of Christmas, the Wapashana will go on a couple-month-long hunting trip to get food for Christmas celebrations.
And they'll travel overland and by river to come down and hunt the Mikushi River.
And when they come down, they're there.
They're playing for keeps.
So they come down, they're hunting arapaima, which the Rewa, Mikushi do not.
And I asked him, like, does it make you guys mad that they come down?
because now the like the people in Rewa Village the predominantly Mikushi Rewa Village is on to a they're on like a pretty progressive conservation program like they can just they through their market hunting practices they got a glimpse into the future and didn't like what they saw and they're on a pretty aggressive program about sustainability their eyes toward the future the Wapashana are This group of Wapashana are not.
And when I ask them, does it piss you off that the Wapashana come down here?
When you're trying to do a fish kill, we in the U.S. use a thing called rotenon.
It's derived from a South American plant.
And then there's another plant called barbos...
Well, some people...
It's like different people in different areas.
In the Amazon drainage, there's a thing they call barbosco.
And that is a leaf that you just pulp.
And it would look like you're just like taking, if you just imagine if you took a bunch of thyme or rosemary and put it in a mortar and pestle and pulped it, and then you take and spread that in the water.
That'll kill fish.
I think they act in two separate ways.
There's two types of fish poison.
One inhibits the fish's ability to pull oxygen from the water.
So I watched them apply this poison.
And you need to get an area where there's not much current because it'll just wash the poison away.
So you get into one of these oxbow lakes, apply the poison, kick back 20 minutes, and pretty soon all the fish are up gulping at the surface.
No, but they were telling me that if you're poisoning a pond...
You need to watch it and make sure dogs or any livestock don't come down.
It doesn't last long.
And they were telling me usually the fish you don't shoot will recover.
If there's some amount of water flowing through it.
So they might go in and build a temporary dam to block whatever inlet.
Let's just say it's an isolated channel off to the side of a river.
They'll go in pretty carefully with rocks and logs, block the flow coming into it, poison it, and then once they've gotten whatever they want, they unblock it and let the clean water come in and it'll resuscitate the fish.
There's like a handful of things that people get lost to.
They had mentioned people dying from anacondas.
They had mentioned people dying from black caimans.
I know that...
Injuries from piranhas are common.
Snakes are everywhere.
I remember we were sitting in Rovin's friend's house, his outdoor palapa kind of house with hammocks strung in it, and there was just being a giant tarantula, like a two-and-a-half-inch diameter tarantula, and not even doing anything to it.
There was some sort of a nature documentary where something tried to eat it, and the electrical eel zapped it, and you see this animal just lock up and fall over sideways.
We missed the sighting by, we missed the sighting, you know, narrowly missed the sighting when we were down there.
Tracks are everywhere.
So particularly because the time I was just down there now, the giant river turtles are nesting.
So just like how you picture sea turtles crawl up onto a sandy beach and dig a hole that night and lay their eggs and then retreat back into the ocean.
Giant river turtles lay like that.
So the sandbars are covered in busted turtle shells.
And there are vultures, so like black vultures and king vultures and caracaras are on the sandbars feeding on turtle eggs and jaguar tracks all over.
Because the jaguars come down to wait for the turtles to come up.
Because they now know they can't traffic in this turtle anymore.
So they got the eating turtle and the Cites turtle.
But an image that will forever burn in my mind.
There's two things that...
There's two, like, sights that'll forever be stuck in my mind, and one of them is a Wapashana woman in a DKNY t-shirt up to her armpit in a riverbank digging out 150 turtle eggs, giant river turtle eggs, putting them in a handmade woven basket.
Like donated clothes, like cast off clothes wind up.
You know, getting bundled.
So you see people with, like, crazy American t-shirts and stuff on, where, like, I have, like, a Bob's Pizza, Santa Cruz, California, or whatever, you know, and it's just, like, something sent down there through Goodwill Donation Centers, whatever.
So they'll have, like, brands, you know, like, famous brands that you see, like, people, you know, in our culture wearing, but there'll be, like, hunting monkeys in them, like, And like the Langer thing, it creates that kind of tension, you know?
As they become more aware of conservation, do you see them recognizing, like, hey, there's some stuff that we have to leave alone, we've got to let it recover?
I mean, obviously they're aware of the cycle of life when it comes to their slash-and-burn agriculture and leaving spots alone.
Are they becoming more aware of what animals they've kind of...
Yeah, and it's like, I don't even know how much is coming from the younger generation, because talking to guys, talking to a guy who's, I'm 43, this guy just a couple years older than I am, and talking to him, and he was a market hunter.
He's glad to see what's happened because he, in his own lifetime, saw how much they had depleted everything.
So he, in his lifetime, saw it from market hunting, not just from subsistence stuff, but as that village grew, because the village was a handful of families, right?
Now it's 305 people.
As that village grew, he watched the giant river otters.
They were hunting giant river otters to sell the hides into Brazil.
I think that if you went down, this is speculation, I would think if you went down and gave, if you went down with a dozen of these things and left them there, I think that along that river corridor, You would see a diminishment of a handful of bird species for sure.
He was speculating that at some point in time they'll probably have to get rid of that jaguar and that it would be a firearm issue they would have to figure out a solution for with a firearm.
So even people that might have a firearm...
Have limited ammunition, and it's sort of a tricky spot in a legal situation for them to have a firearm.
But bows, I think they would knock the shit out of curasows and guans if they had good bows.
But they might not hunt them as heavily because they didn't need the fletching.
Yeah, but that was after me asking the same question a thousand times and finally kind of getting...
Finally kind of getting to a spot because they contradict.
Because one time I pushed him and pushed him and pushed him.
How many days a year do you hunt and fish?
And we talked about this for forever.
And he came up with the figure maybe 200 or 250. Then later I'm like, how many days a week do you hunt and fish?
And I asked him that a thousand times and got two.
Now if you do the math, one of those numbers is wrong.
It's just not.
And also like what you like most.
Do you like this most?
Like that most?
Another thing is why don't you eat X? Right.
But, if I think about it, imagine if someone came from another country to here, and you're driving them around, and every single thing they see that's alive, if they said to you, why don't you eat that?
If I had a week, I would get a satisfactory answer out of that.
So, the white-lip peccaries will come into the village...
And raise holy hell.
Everyone run and grabs their bows.
And then they start shooting, and then they'll chase them into the jungle and maybe even track them for a day, trying to whittle away at them because it's a great meat.
It's like the favorite game meat is whitelit peccary.
They like it better than collard peccary because they're bigger.
If you handle it properly and keep it clean, it would never be regarded as good as pork to the American palate.
But to the Mikushi palate, it's the best.
So their whole thing, like, we don't hunt all these animals, various animals, because we have so many fish, flies out the window with white-lip peccary.
But a lot of the white-lip peccary hunting is also related to the protecting of crops.
Now, as long as Rovin can remember, Rewa Village has had a group of white-lipped peccaries that would come through the area trying to raid the gardens.
And when it came through the area raiding the gardens, they would kill some number of them.
And then they would track them into the jungle and stick with them and kill a handful.
And when that happened, it was a very good thing.
They liked the peccaries.
There's been a number of years where no peccaries, where something happened to this group of 1 or 200 peccaries.
They haven't, for years, they have not been through the village.
It's not attrition, because he was saying, at the most, when we get, when they come through and get us, he would say, on average, we would get, actually kill between 1 and 4 when they come in and hit the crops.
If we stick with them, and a group of guys goes after them, we might kill between one and four.
And there's 200 of them.
So it's not like they slowly whittled away at them, right?
They just would never account for that.
But they vanished.
Robert never wanted to explain to me why they vanished.
But I kept pestering about it, and eventually he told me, here's the deal.
Since Rewa Village is now so wealthy, and we have so much food...
Other groups and other villages have grown very jealous of us.
And he told me that a shaman in another village got so insanely jealous of Rewa's prosperity...
Through fishing for arapaima and through all the good hunting and fishing that they have.
He got so jealous that he locked up, that this shaman locked up their peccaries.
He doesn't know where.
Perhaps in the mountains.
They're locked up.
Now...
Getting them out, getting them unlocked is difficult because at the time that this shaman locked up their peccaries, they happened to be without a good shaman in their village.
And it's so interesting to me, and also gives such an interesting glimpse into how most cultures and societies were structured long time ago, in pre-Christian times, right?
That it's just like, it's just educational.
So I'm not in any way, I'm never saying like, well, I don't buy that.
Yeah, so I'm not in any way, I'm never like, but here's some things that were explained to me.
If you're having a problem where your archery skills go downhill, like you have a few misses, the way to correct that would be to go up and take the hand that holds the bowstring and punch a beehive.
And then hold your hand up to that hive.
Because they don't miss.
And they will demonstrate their accuracy when they bombard you.
And Rovan was saying that most of them even know to hit you between your fingers where it really hurts.
I'm torn even talking about it because I have such a love for him as a person that I wouldn't want to say that would dispel that idea that he's not perfectly rational.
I would go anywhere with this guy.
Extremely capable.
But you're talking about just like some long-held belief systems.
I'm going to make a point about the way to sort of see a culture in transition, right?
Because it's always so relative.
But there's a staff writer at The New Yorker, one of my favorite journalists of all time, John Lee Anderson.
You might be familiar with his book, Che.
He wrote sort of the definitive Che Guevara book, Che.
He's a war correspondent, writes in troubled spots around the world, John Lee Anderson.
He wrote a piece not long ago in The New Yorker about a group of people that were making first contact with the outside world, just recently, 2015. They had been...
They were initially regarded as an uncontacted group that lived in the border between Peru and Brazil in the jungle.
And for whatever reason, they started coming out to a main river where they were having some contact with other groups and they killed a couple people with bows.
So, the government was in a situation of, when dealing with a first contact group, you can't go in and just start putting people on trial and shit.
Like, it only leads to more problems.
So, they were trying to, it's an article about the difficulties of leading, of introducing a first contact people into sort of a constructive engagement with the outside world.
A trick there is some people look and some countries have a policy of isolation for uncontacted people and try to enforce isolation.
Other theorists on this or other anthropologists think that that's completely unfair.
It would be laughable that I would come to you and say, Joe, I'd like to prevent you from meeting the French lest some aspect of Frenchness rub off on you.
Now, they're worried about other things, too, but they're worried about disease and stuff, but also a tendency that alcohol can be destructive, being lured into prostitution, all forms of exploitation, trying to protect people from this.
Have you seen those photos that they took from the helicopter where they see these people, they're covered in war paint, they're pointing arrows at the helicopters?
Now you might come up and be like, oh, I was in the U.S. in the pre-internet days, and I came to the U.S. in the post-internet days, and man, is that place different.
But you're watching it like wherever you live, you're also seeing that happen too.
So you're living that transition.
But to go there and then come back five years later, And see things different, it really...
Yeah, man.
As much as I hate to admit it, and as wrong as it is, but just to be absolutely upfront, it kind of bummed me out.
So when you talk about it from a hunting perspective, because I tend to view the world through a hunting and fishing perspective, but when you talk about bringing bows down, my first thought is, oh, that's no fun.
They shouldn't do that, because I like watching them hunt with the homemade bows.
You know, as much as you know about the American West, as much as you told me about the history of the American West and the Native Americans, to see these people that are essentially, like, in some ways, like the Native Americans before the colonial people arrived.
I don't even know it and have no idea what it meant.
Before he adopted the name Crazy Horse.
He would have been 13 years old.
And Francis Parkman traveled with them as a tourist, and they went into the Black Hills of South Dakota.
They went in there to get lodge poles.
Because that was a time of year when they would go and fit out their lodge poles for their teepees to replace broken lodge poles.
They went up in the Black Hills, killed some bighorn sheep by throwing rocks down on them off a cliff, went and shot a bunch of buffalo, and he was out there as a tourist.
So tourism in the American West, now you've got to remember, the last free roaming, the last non-confined Plains Indians didn't get rounded up until, depending on your definition, 1876, 1877. So he was out there way before that.
There were still what they described at the time as hostile wild Indians were running around, and he was traveling with them as a tourist.
So I just bring that up to bring this idea that here's this group of people who are very much engaged in tourism.
I was down there.
I was down there because...
I wanted to go on a river trip.
And it's something I've done a handful of times.
I wanted to go on a river trip and participate in their hunting and fishing and food gathering activities as they engage in them.
The same way they might engage in it if I wasn't there.
That's why we weren't fishing.
That's why we weren't catching aeropimers and letting them go.
So there's that in the internet era.
But there's that thing I always return to.
It's like you're still...
Hunting and fishing all your own food, or growing it in your yard.
Broven has been shooting that bow at fish for, he's 32 years old, he's been shooting that bow at fish for, let's say, 27 years.
It is not an unusual thing to him.
So when you go pick it up and you're like, man, you got to give props to these guys for being able to kill fish with this bow, it's like, well, kind of and kind of not, because if you spent 27 years doing something, you're damn sure going to be good at it.
The same way is if you took someone, like one of these first contact peoples from between Peru and Brazil, and handed them my laptop and said, hey, pull up my Gmail contacts from scratch, and He might be like, man, I gotta give props to you guys.
I had no idea, right?
It's just like absurd.
I was having this conversation with someone the other day where the first time Daniel Boone in 1760, Daniel Boone went through the Cumberland Gap for the first time and dropped down into what's now Tennessee and Kentucky.
And he stayed there hunting hides.
He was a hide hunter.
Stayed there hunting hides for two years.
Ran out of gunpowder and made his own gunpowder.
And made it out of bat guano Your own piss, potash, right?
You can cook this shit up, right, and make your own gunpowder.
There's a place in Detroit, on the Rogue River in Detroit, that the Rouge River, Rogue River, depending on what dude in Michigan you're talking to...
There's a place there called the Detroit Carbon Works that used to...
When you're watching movies, including The Revenant, you know that giant pyramid pile of buffalo skulls that turns up in everywhere, every book, every movie?
That photo was taken at the Detroit Carbon Works, and what they were producing was bone fertilizer.
Those bones were picked up in the American West, shipped by rail to Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, turned into bone fertilizer, and then shipped back out for people tilling up the Great Plains.
In my book about buffalo, I'm describing that picture, and I say that the man standing on top is like an exclamation point at the end of a long sentence about death and destruction.
Because, like, look at him.
It's like he somehow realizes the weirdness of what he's involved in, but that was post-extermination.
There's a crazy podcast from Dan Carlin on the Wrath of the Khans on Genghis Khan, and they describe how the Charisman Shah sends a group to check out Jin China, and they got there like about a year after Genghis Khan had killed everyone in the entire city, over a million people, and they thought what they saw in the distance they thought was a Snow-capped mountain.
As they got closer, they realized it was a pile of human bones.
Yeah, I mean, anybody listening, Wrath of the Cons, it's a five-part series, and I think Dan Carlin, he charges for them, you can buy it on iTunes, but I think it's only a dollar per, and it's the best dollar you'll ever spend in your life.
But his main focus of study, his entire life, has been history.
When he does these things, if he calls what he does a podcast, I need to change what I do.
What I call a podcast pales in comparison because we're just sitting here talking.
What he does is he prepares for these things for months and cites different sources and references and then essentially does an educational entertainment piece.
Yeah, I think I told you, and I've talked about this a thousand times, after the Custer Massacre, The guys that were following the other soldiers who were coming in after the Custer massacre, they didn't know what had happened.
They hadn't got word yet that Custer and his entire command had been wiped out by the Sioux in Northern Cheyenne.
And they're riding up the valley, and they're looking off in the distance, and they see all these sort of white, bloody-ish things, and all these dark brown things.
And one of the guys wrote that their initial impression, looking at it, was that Custer must have caught the Indians in the middle of a buffalo hunt.
And what they were seeing was, it was summertime, and they were seeing fatty buffalo carcasses that had been skinned.
And that the brown things were the buffalo hides laid out next to the carcass.
But on closer inspection it was the brown things were horses, cavalry horses, and the white things were stripped and mutilated soldiers.
Wasn't one of the guys, one of the Native Americans, that was in the Little Bighorn whatever event, wasn't he one of the guys who toured with Wild Bill?
Yeah, so you could go down, and this would have been in your own lifetime.
The people who, the families of the men killed at the battle of Little Bighorn could have gone down and got their photo taken with and paid to watch and interacted with the gentleman who likely clovered their father's head in with a tomahawk.
I tried recently, briefly, to go back and find the article.
Here's how the story went down.
The way I remember, a detail that I remember very clearly is that this guy, it was his neighbor kid, and he had told this kid's parents, they were going down to wash the airplane and look at the airplane, and he decided to take the kid up for a flight.
I don't know if that's true or not.
I was trying to find that article to confirm that aspect of it, but I lived on a lake called Middle Lake, and everybody remembers, for whatever reason, this guy buzzed our lake a couple times really low.
There was a guy down on the east end of the lake, Named Mr. Rupert.
And I remember what was unusual about Mr. Rupert was he would eat freshwater clams, which we were forbidden from doing by our dad.
When it dove down over the lake, it went up but then dove down again and never came back up.
And he even told some neighbors this.
The next day when we wake up, the sheriff's posse, the mounted, like our area had a mounted, like a bunch of volunteers who had horses.
And they were like the mounted sheriff's posse, right?
Like deputized individuals during emergencies such as this.
They were all loading up their horses.
To head out into the woods to look for some plane.
And another detail that was told to me that I wanted to verify...
I just need to go back and go through the microfiche where I grew up and find the article.
Because it was something like it had a signal on it and the signal was picked up by some other country even.
But they knew that a plane had gone down.
And that was a matter of fact.
Everyone at this point knew that this plane had gone down.
Um...
And we were riding around on our bikes out in the woods just kind of following these sheriff's posse guys as they were sort of combing through the woods.
And eventually a news helicopter was hovering over a spot like right at the end of White Lake Drive.
And there was a news helicopter hovering over there.
My two brothers went directly there on their bikes.
And I was younger.
And for some reason I went and got my mom And then we drove over and we got to the end of White Lake Road where you had to walk into the woods.
And there was a guy there that tried to block my mom and me from going in there.
And I always remember he said, if you're going to go in there, you better have a strong stomach.
And she's like, well, my kids are in there.
And so we go in there and Matt and Danny are just standing at the edge of the hole there.
And they're trying to sort out.
They're trying to sort out who was who inside this plane.
So some of those guys, like Wild Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok actually had a dispute over who got to have the name Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok.
There were some other Wild Bills, I guess, and it was like a popular name, right?
But they were combatants, too.
So they engaged in these wars.
And the fact that you would later get both sides of the war.
It'd be like if you went and got a bunch of Germans who were defending the Normandy Beach.
Omaha Beach.
And you got a bunch of the Americans who were storming Omaha Beach.
And you had a traveling road show in which they would pretend to inflict mass casualties on one another.
Sorry, William F. Cody, so I don't know which one is which.
But he found a 14-acre swath of land where he set up stands for 18,000 people to watch each show, and over 2 million people saw it during the World's Fair that year.
And later, some of these individuals, like Gall and others in interviews, said that even at the time, Our understanding is that these people were all hopelessly drunk.
It was either that he just didn't really comprehend what they were telling him or he was so, you know, he was a decorated Civil War figure and probably was a very ardent believer in the superiority of We're good to go.
And they were just killed.
And in popular depictions, they always show Custer the last guy standing.
There's a mountain of his dead guys around him.
And he's still firing his revolver with long hair.
In fact, he had short hair at the time.
But some people think that in looking at it, he probably...
It's so funny that we've done that, you know, that people have taken what they know most likely were historically inaccurate accounts and they pass them down generation to generation.
It makes you wonder, like, this is what we know now because this is only a hundred and so years ago.
But the problem we have as a culture, I think, is when someone goes to challenge our popular perceptions, it's branded as revisionist and somehow loses interest.
Right?
It becomes almost like its credentials are tarnished.
Do you remember the guy, I can't remember what politician, Jamie, you'd be able to pull it up.
There was a politician who said, he famously said, you know, after we realized that Paul Revere, the ride of Paul Revere was...
And to this day, it's still amazing that they celebrate that guy when you find out that he was a fucking monster.
I mean, the...
What was it?
I believe it was a...
A minister or someone, some religious person who came with him at the time, left a journal about the atrocities committed directly by Columbus and his men when they hacked off arms for people who couldn't bring them back gold.
I mean, just horrific shit.
Smashed babies on rocks, did it right in front of them.
And this guy was a first-hand account of what we're supposed to believe.
I mean, who knows how much of what he's saying is accurate, but if any of it is accurate, Columbus was a fucking monster.
Now that sort of the consensus, right, the popular consensus is that...
He was one of many players involved in putting together what was here and outlining where it was and how to get here.
He was one of a bunch of players, almost certainly not the first.
No one cares about that meaning.
What they mean is you're saying, I uphold The idea of Western civilization's annexation of the New World as being a good thing.
So, when someone gets pissed at the revisionists for questioning the legitimacy of Columbus, they're not actually talking about what he specifically did.
It's become a proxy For the cultural annexation of the New World.
And to say, oh, I hate Columbus, he's an asshole, they take it to mean you're saying that you're questioning our claim on the Western Hemisphere and that it was a bad thing.
I'm generally, like, little movements, like little cultural movements like that, I'm generally not receptive to?
No, I don't try to read too much into them.
If I woke up tomorrow and told me that we had decided, you know, that people got together and decided against Columbus Day, I wouldn't, like, do a lot of soul-searching on that day.
Or to think that one day, and this is not too long ago, You know, some of our grandparents remember this, to think that one day we had devised a contraption that was capable of ending life on Earth, and that these contraptions could be initiated by the distant actions of a handful of people.
Yeah, and to then have it be that it's a staple of American life.
Not just where other people...
Like space travel, you're like, okay, it's this flood of information, but it's not...
But with that, that's now how you get around.
At a time, when you wanted to cross the country, you would lose a large percentage of your party to death.
You had to plan ahead.
It would take many, many months to being just a thing you just do on a whim.
Now, I do believe, I accept that we are in a state of upheaval right now, and I think that we're probably impacting ourselves in ways we don't fully understand.
My friend Rourke was talking about a conversation his wife was having with someone where someone said I was in Starbucks drinking a coffee, just sitting there staring at the wall like a fucking lunatic.
It's a big thing, but one of the helpful things, I guess one of the helpful things, just to bring it full circle, one of the helpful things about traveling or about just reading about history is you lose some of that sense of specialness about Thinking that the life you're living in the moment you're living it is this great test of humanity or some like super peculiar thing going on and realize that people have always been involved with and struggle with cataclysmic upheaval You
know and then to go and then to go witness some other people in some version of that transition Is pretty healthy man Maybe in the long term, like just traveling, going to see how other people do stuff.
It's unsettling, but probably ultimately pretty good for you.
A couple years ago, when I was mentioning that, I mentioned to you that a couple American companies that have some conservation spending they do, they were training some guys from Rewa Village.
They were training some of them to just how to interface with Westerners.
And as part of that, he went up to, he might have even gone up to the Bahamas.
But he's never, like, if he hadn't done that trip, or just all of his siblings and most other people in those villages, they never experienced 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Yeah, they complain about tick bites and stuff, but it doesn't seem to bother me like we do because it's just a part of everyday life.
You've got to get used to hanging out in Bolivia.
You get bit by bees and wasps.
At about the same rate that you'd get bit by mosquitoes if you were at like some 4th of July thing out at your uncle's pond, you know, shooting fireworks off at night on the edge of a cattail marsh.
No, the reason they call it poor man's lobster, it doesn't really taste like lobster, but it's suitable for boiling it and dipping it in butter and cocktail sauce and eating.
Imagine that you hunted and fished and farmed, and that's all you did.
So you're always on the land.
And you've done it all within a 25 mile, a 20 mile radius of your home.
So you're outside hunting and fishing or farming or gathering in the jungle every day and you're in your 30s or 40s and you've done it in a radius of 20 miles.
Like most days, he's not engaged in that activity.
So the spatial awareness is the thing that's most striking to me in spending time with these individuals is everything.
I'm interested in what they notice and what they never miss.
It's like you realize that all of the bits of information that you're able to contain in your head that allow you to function and carry on, right?
You're like a comedian, and you do shit with MMA, and you have a very successful podcast, and you have a family, and you're digitally very astute, and you have opinions about fucking coffee, right?
All this shit, you're widely read, right?
That's like all...
You sort of fill up your brain with as much as it can hold.
But for them, it seems to be, from my perspective, it's like all of that breadth of knowledge but crammed into the natural world to where every plant, every tree, what are its uses, what are the other things?
In a way that our breadth of knowledge, which would probably be astounding to them if they realized all the shit we knew about, but all those bits of information are just applied in a different way, down to a granular understanding of the jungle.
Listen, there was never a moment when I heard a bird call.
I never said, hey, what's that bird?
That everyone there didn't say what the bird was.
Bird sounds.
Just from sounds.
It's like you can't, like, and the shit that, like, it's almost just something you have to go see is the ability to just, like, move through the jungle and notice everything.
If he's any good at his job, you will be seeing some crazy feet in a moment.
Another thing I wanted to share with you, I mentioned sort of a surreal image, is watching a woman in a DKNY shirt digging turtle eggs for food.
There's flowers.
Everything's in bloom, right?
It was just the beginning of the rainy season, so there was some rain, like everything was in bloom.
And these flowers, flowers of all variety, hang out over the river.
And sometimes you'll pass through and it just has this warm, floral smell.
It's astounding.
It reminded me of, you know, in the end of Apocalypse Now, when Kurtz, when Captain Willard finally catches up with Kurtz, and Kurtz asks him where he's from, and he mentions Ohio, and Kurtz tells him about a river trip he took with his father on the Ohio River when the gardenias were in bloom, you know, and he talks about the smell in the end of Apocalypse Now, but these flowers would smell like that.
So what we're looking at for people that are just listening to this, it's like at the middle of their foot, especially that one foot in the middle to the right, it's like he's taking a turn, like a hard turn, like a 15 degree plus turn.
Go back to it for a second, Jamie, because what we're seeing in this is this massive spacing between the big toe and then the first toe to the point where it looks like a hand.
Yeah, and given the different environment, that's insane.
Like what we're looking at here, they literally look like thumbs.
Like they're sticking out of the side, but it's the same structure as a human foot, meaning that it's the same length of toes and just you see that from using it that way, they've just developed this incredible...
You know what's really crazy?
What is one of the hallmarks of civilization that shows like the really poor choice in footwear?
When your feet go the other way, when they go in an ineffective direction, they get that hammer toe and they climb over each other.
These people have functional feet to the point where they could probably hold something with their feet.
What part of the world was it where they have that...
Incas, where they have those lines, the Nazca lines, you know, and they've found all these skulls from people back then where they had stretched their heads out and almost made their heads look like aliens.
Have you ever been down to, do you remember those, they're held in Salta, Argentina, I went to see them one time, but those children that they found, they were entombed at the top of a mountain, and they were basically freeze-dried?
Well, they were taken up and given as an offering.
So first, it seems, based on the stuff they had with them, that they were paraded through the Incan Empire, and people lavished them with gifts.
And when they look at the isotopes in their bodies, it's like their diet, their whole lives, they had just had potatoes.
But then you can see that toward the end of their lives, they were very well fed with meat and fish and all kinds of stuff.
And they had just innumerable treasures, gold pieces, carved pieces.
So they were taken, it seems as though they were taken throughout the empire.
And what's really funny about this, speaking of Columbus earlier, is it was like, yeah.
Wow.
It's like, it's best that they haven't dated it exactly, but it seems like, I mean, it seems like we're talking about, you know, Columbus 1492. It's like we're talking about 1491. Wow.
So, the height of this empire, the height of the empire budding up against its dramatic and sudden collapse with European contact.
But they took, yeah, I went to see, and, um...
They made a deal with the indigenous people where they only put one on display at a time, but she was on display when I was there.
They used to do a very similar thing by just taking potatoes and storing them at high elevations.
Where what freeze-drying is, is your liquid.
It's like you freeze something and then expel the liquid where the liquid goes from a gaseous, where it goes from a solid to a gas without passing through its liquid state.
So when you freeze dry food, you like freeze dry it, you put it in a freezer and get super cold and then you start, then you start putting it under a vacuum to a point where all the water It goes immediately to a gaseous state.
It doesn't pass through a liquid state, so it holds its form, but all the water's gone.
If it goes to a liquid state, then it collapses, but it just holds its form, and the non-water parts of the cells just stay bound in their natural shape.
So they were in this position and eventually just expelled tons of water without ever thawing out.
And when they found them, you can even see that they had been chewing coca leaves because of the high elevation.
The kids still have dried coca leaves on their lips.
People just now start all of a sudden calling like...
I'm not saying that hardly everybody messes up, but it's like a thing that gets messed up.
What was I getting at?
What were you asking about?
I was asking about dehydrating food.
I never dehydrate a bunch of different things and combine it into a recipe that I then bring with me.
The reason I use dehydrated food, and a lot of backpack hunters use dehydrated food, is because If you have a dish made up of dehydrated ingredients, they have different hydration times.
So if you do beans, like a piece of meat is going to be digestible to you.
A piece of dehydrated meat that's then hydrated is going to be digestible to you.
A dehydrated bean might take 30 or 40 minutes before it's going to be in a condition that doesn't rip you apart.
If you want to fuck yourself up, eat straight dried beans.
Yeah, your stomach doesn't know what to do with it, man.
Well, it knows what to do with it.
It starts producing voluminous amounts of gas, right?
It's awful.
It's horrible.
But if you take food and cook it to a ready-to-eat state, And then freeze dry it, you can rehydrate it kind of like simultaneously if you do everything right.
Now it wouldn't work with like a hamburger, right?
If you dehydrated a hamburger and then you add water to it, you're going to wind up with a soggy ass bun.
So the trick is like finding things that are going to, in a hot water bath, are going to all come back to life kind of at the same time.
But places that make backpack food out of just dehydrated but not freeze dried ingredients is a recipe for disaster.
And then you put it into a sublimation chamber and pull a very strong vacuum on it.
And the air pressure gets to a point where the liquid sublimates and goes directly to a gaseous state.
And you condense it on another surface inside the chamber.
But it's out of the food.
Then you take the food out and it's like glass.
You can shatter it.
That's freeze-dried food.
But it rehydrates in a real nice way.
I have heard, we eat a lot of it, because we do a lot of backcountry trips.
I've heard everyone's complaints about it, but it's like, from my perspective, which I will argue is a well-informed perspective, it's like, it's the lesser of two evils.
For day-in, day-out consumption, I think that the companies that do freeze-dry, it's just better, in my opinion.
Now, when I say that these children were freeze-dried, I think some people are going to challenge that because it's not technically freeze-dried, but a similar thing going on where they're keeping their form but shedding their water and, you know...
Shedding water, keeping their farm and being frozen and preserved for a long time.
Because I was reading a podcast, or reading a podcast, listening to a podcast, rather, where this guy was talking about how he's doing that with his own food for backpacking trips.
And the same guy that one time our dear late friend was getting married and his bride...
The wedding was at his bride-to-be's house, and a neighbor was away on vacation.
And the neighbor that was away on vacation said, you know, since we're out of town, if you guys want to use our home for some of your wedding guests, go ahead.
And so, all the groomsmen were lodged up in this house of this man we didn't know who was the neighbor of his wife's parents.
And, uh...
I don't know why, but my brother got to snooping around in this guy's freezer and found that he had a bull elk in there that had been in there for seven years.
And he had this crisis, this moral crisis, where he's trying to figure out, is it morally worse to steal or morally worse to allow this man to waste this meat?
So he weighed it out in his head, and when he left, he had a bunch of that meat with him and took him home and ate it, because he just hated to see an elk go to waste.
But throughout his whole life, he always is running into these situations where he just cannot let food go to waste.
If I talk to him right now, there's probably 10 more things like that that have happened to him since I talked to him last.
When he found in his alleyway one time, and he's living in Montana, he still lives in Montana, living in Bozeman, found in his alleyway a discarded cash from a homeless man and ate all that guy's food.
The first time, here's where he kind of, not where it came from, but he drew a bear tag when we were in Michigan, and it was hard to get a bear tag at the time.
And he drew a bear tag, and the only way to hunt bears in the UP is like...
You're not going to spot and stalk on them because it's flat ground and you can't see shit, right?
You're going to use dogs or you're going to use bait.
You're not going to see a bear.
So he started a bait pile, and the way he was feeding his bait pile ahead of the season was just dumpster diving.
So, as he's dumpster diving, it's like, he's living off, not only is he baiting the bear with the dumpster food, but he's, like, living off the dumpster diving food that he found, too, because he, like, discovered his great richness.
The people, like, put Cheez Whiz, shoot Cheez Whiz into the open end of that bugle.
And I even got a picture of him.
He'd just walk through the woods with boxes of bugles under his arm and get out, and he'd be, like, dumping them out for the bear and then just eating the bugles, too.
And then he'd walk back with a handful of bugles.
Just hates to see wasted food.
His old girlfriend had a job cooking, like, the brown food in the Albertsons, you know, like, the display case where they fry all those, like, burritos and shit.
And, um...
She was bringing all that home and they were living off the food that was going to the garbage.
And they came to her and said, you can't steal this food.
It seems to me like it's a neck issue, because when you start getting elbows and things where your arm starts atrophying, usually it's a cervical disc, which is somewhere up in here.
What you should do is get a neck decompression device.
Because sciatica is, what sciatica is, is a disc that's bulging, meaning the disc, the soft tissue in between the two hard bones is pushing out and it's pressing up against the nerve.
And it causes pain that shoots down your ass and your lower legs.
And a lot of people don't even recognize it as a lower back issue because maybe their back is not really that painful, but the leg and the ass is painful.
I had a similar issue with my neck where I was pushing on my ulnar nerve and I was getting this elbow pain and I was like fuck this really hurts like down my arm and in the back of my tricep and then I started getting numbness in my fingers and that's when I started figuring out what was going on then I went to a doctor I went to a chiropractor first which is a fucking giant mistake I spent a year But do you not believe in chiropractors?
I don't believe in chiropractors at all I think it's 98% horseshit.
That's what I think.
And I don't know, but I think chiropractors that are smart, they incorporate things that I think are beneficial.
Cold laser, massage, a lot of different things.
But I think that manipulation that they do, unless you have like some sort of significant scoliosis or something they're attempting to slowly put back into position, I think most of the time it's just popping your neck and it just feels good.
I went to a guy that's a very nice guy and he was trying to tell me that I didn't have a bulging disc because he was pushing down on the top of my head and it didn't hurt.
I'm like, okay.
So I was listening to him.
I listened to this guy for like a fucking year.
I had treatment with him and I still have these neck problems and back problems.
Then finally I got an MRI and they're like, yeah, you got a bulging disc.
And I remember being angry.
I remember being angry.
Because I was angry that I was being treated by someone who was a professional that really didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.
And they were treating something that was a significant issue that I was experiencing.
A real deterioration of my function, Pain.
I wasn't able to do jujitsu correctly.
There was a lot of problems that I was dealing with that I was like, well, what the fuck is this?
And then I started talking to doctors about it.
And when you have a bulging disc, man, they want to cut you open like you're a pinata and you got gold inside of you.
Boss Rutten, former UFC heavyweight champion, he fucked his neck up and went through a bunch of different treatments and then eventually wound up getting it fused.
He's got, I believe, two discs and maybe more.
And his neck fused together, where he doesn't have any disc tissue.
They just screw the bones in together and remove the disc tissue and stabilize the area.
But his right arm is significantly smaller than his left arm, to the point where he calls it baby arm.
And this is a former UFC heavyweight champion of the world.
And what's ironic is that some of it came from fighting, but the last thing came from doing a stunt on Sons of Anarchy.
He was in some sort of a fight.
I believe it was Sons of Anarchy.
Some sort of a fight scene where they were doing something and some guy was supposed to throw him on the ground and he landed on his head.
And then a lot of people go on to think that they always have it, but they're like, You had a thing, it's treated, it's gone, but it'll live with you for so long because of the damage to your nerves that it's so slow to recuperate.
About medicine and about people and about mysterious diseases is like...
I quit doing it now, but I would get in arguments with people.
Where I was trying to deal with it and finding out about it, and people were telling me, here's what's happening to me.
I'm like, no, I was told that's not how it works.
Because there's so much...
The same thing you were bringing up earlier about a doctor or a chiropractor telling you the wrong thing.
There's so much subjectivity in the fucking medical world.
Yeah.
It's like, on one hand, all these people are sort of going through this regimen, this educational regimen, which is, you know, there's government oversight, there's certain criteria you need to meet, things you need to pass, and you think it would sort of have this unifying effect, but people come out on the other end.
Who've gone through kind of the same educational system telling you fucking wildly different shit.
He was telling me that he had a cyst in his balls, and he thought he had ball cancer.
Went to a doctor, and one doctor told him that he has excess cum stored up in his balls, that it's sperm, that's stored up in his balls, and that's what's causing this knot.
The big thing when it comes to health, and this is one of the things that I have a big problem with when it comes to anything dealing with the back, is preventative maintenance is one of the most important things for back health.
We're sitting in desks all day, and most people are not sitting up straight.
A good thing is one of those balls, those gym balls, those big balance balls.
Those are great to sit on because they force you to kind of stabilize yourself.
And use your core muscles.
Or some sort of an ergonomic chair forcing you to stabilize.
But doctors are not telling you, hey man, you've got to take a yoga class a couple days a week.
You've got to do something to straighten out your posture.
You've got to do something to make sure that your spine is strong enough to be carrying your butt.
You can't slump forward because you're putting undue pressure on these different portions of your back.
There's a significant amount of doctors that are just not fucking telling you that.
They're going like, oh yeah, your disc is bulging.
We're going to have to do a disectomy.
No worries.
It's outpatient.
It's an outpatient procedure.
What they're not telling you is they're chopping off a chunk of this finite material.
There's a small amount of material that separates your discs.
And when they talk about, oh, I have disc degenerative disorder.
It's a disease.
My disc...
No, stop!
It's not a disease.
What's going on is you're compressing your body through weightlifting, through extreme exercise.
Your body is slowly getting smushed down.
You're not allowing it to recover.
You're not stretching it out.
You're not strengthening all those core muscles.
You're not giving it some time off.
You're probably engaging in the same damaging activity over and over again and toughing it out.
If there's one thing you should never fucking tough out, it's a back issue.
Anytime there's something going on with your back, don't tough it out.
Don't try to work through it.
Just don't.
Because you're going to fuck it up worse, and then it's going to get to a point where it just does not recover.
Because when your shit's wiggling around, then it like, I don't know, it doesn't like make you stronger, it just makes you more inclined to like fuck something up.
Well, the straps are on my back or on my hip, like this, and then there's like a chain in between my legs, and the kettlebell hangs in between my legs.
You've got to make sure your legs are separated so it's not cracking against your knees, but when you're doing chin-ups, it's just...
Hang in there.
No shit.
Yeah.
They say that that's the best way to get more reps in with your chin-ups is not to try like 19, 20. The absolute best way is do less, but with heavy weights.
Do like, you know, put a weight vest on or hang a 70-pound kettlebell between your legs.
Seasons 5 and 6. Seasons 5 and 6. Yeah, 5 and 6. We'll have more.
We got more.
We got a dozen episodes that are new that we're going to be releasing.
So just stay tuned.
And then, you know, months ago, a couple months ago, if you go to my Instagram, Stephen Rinella, you'll scroll back and find a bunch of pictures from...