Justin Wren, a former UFC fighter turned activist, shares his brutal 28-pill parasite regimen and near-death experiences—blackwater fever, vision loss, and five shingles outbreaks—from malaria, dengue, and mefloquine toxicity. His charity, Fight for the Forgotten, combats child bullying (a top cause of suicide) with a 12-week curriculum and funds Uganda wells after Khabib’s shirt auction matched Dana White’s $50K. Wren also details Batwa pygmies’ forced displacement into slums, where HIV myths and sewage threats endanger survival, while his own hyperbaric therapy (used by Phelps and Namath) now replaces pills for brain health. A raw mix of personal resilience, global crises, and unconventional healing—all tied to action. [Automatically generated summary]
It goes along with his New York Times bestselling book called Clear, where you put down your daily habits, and then you just kind of can check them off as you do them throughout the day.
We'll have a morning routine where I wake up and where I'm at I have a Peloton so I jump on that for like 30 minutes right in the morning right when I get out of bed.
But he finished the walk, and he said whenever he was playing stadiums, Drumming, right?
That's the pinnacle of being a professional drummer, playing stadiums with tens of thousands of people.
So he's back there drumming, and it's before his first time he's ever come out and drummed that way.
Well, he's drumming, and instead of him being in the moment, thinking about, wow, I'm at the pinnacle of my sport, or not sport, but of my art, he's literally thinking about how he wishes there'd be a day that he could grab the microphone and just state one clear sentence where there wasn't a stutter.
So he's literally back there.
He's arrived, or at least what a lot of people would say is his arrival for a stadium tour.
And then all of a sudden he's thinking about just having a clear sentence in a conversation with people.
Jeremy would tell you that it was drumming that really helped him because he went from Reading up to Seattle.
He was in the grunge scene.
And then I think his name is Steve Smith or Sean Smith, maybe Steve Smith, that started the Seattle Drum School of Music, the really prestigious school.
They would send kids off to Berkeley School of Music, and then they would graduate from Berkeley, and they'd come back and they'd hire them.
Well, Steve Smith saw Jeremy and said, hey, I want you to be an instructor at my school.
And Jeremy kind of laughed.
I can't read music.
I didn't graduate high school.
How would I ever be a drum teacher at the Seattle Drum School of Music?
He's like, well, I'm the owner.
I'll coach you for two years and then you'll be a drum teacher.
Lo and behold, two years later, he's literally a drum teacher there for ten full years.
So I was at the police and fire training center of Oklahoma City and I was just helping them.
There's some really great guys there.
And I was helping them and the fire chief ended up putting me in the cold shower for like 20 minutes because I got so, they said I got like ghostly white and I started dry heaving and I was just shaky all over.
So they took six spots of hair samples from me, blood, urine, stool samples.
They did two different kinds of brain scans on me.
injected something that was very minorly radioactive in me so that it could light up all the different spots in my brain activity.
So where there's too much blood flow or there's not enough.
And literally, so one of the things I found on the scan, which I already knew, but they can test not just stuff for like CTE or mild traumatic brain injury and TBI before autopsy.
Now these brain scans are, They can also test for like PTSD. And so there's this diamond in the middle of your brain and you're only supposed to have a little bit of activity there, just very, very small.
But if you have this, what they call the ring of fire, this diamond of red and white being lit up on the brain scans, that literally shows that you have PTSD. I had Dakota Meyer in here.
Oh, and Dakota said that, but this Dr. Daniel Amen, he's a 10-time New York Times bestselling author, and he's got a book about PTSD. Basically, he was saying...
That, yeah, that shot really, really does work.
And people have been doing it for years.
And with veterans, it's one of the quickest things.
From some tough stuff in the rainforest, whether it's Uganda or Congo.
We've had to flee from a village whenever a rebel group came into the village next to us, and they killed six or eight people, and we're all fleeing across the river in these little pygmy dugout canoes.
Which aren't big enough really for me.
And we're trying to flee across the river before the sun's even up.
And there's like crocodiles and hippos in the water.
Oh, Jesus.
And then a couple other really terrible things.
I mean, I've held kids that have died and buried them and dug their graves.
Some public shaming and different things like that.
I think one bullying moment that I even kind of forgot about until going through this with Dr. Amen was I was in the locker room and this little guy named Raiden that I've been hanging out with a lot, he was just beat up in the bathroom.
And he just, his mom said since her picking him up at school in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, kids would just walk up and hit him in the stomach or punch him in the arm.
Feeling a real, those environments, almost every gym I've ever been to, every jujitsu gym that's good, they have this family environment to it and it just makes you feel like you belong somewhere and you get used to being kind to people and nice to people.
So with jujitsu or with martial arts, if you hurt your training partner, you lose the person that's helping you get better.
And so as you help them get better, they make you better.
And it's this give and take where actually the more you give, the more you get in return because you're making them a better...
Training partner, a better person.
And I think martial arts takes it to another level.
I've done numerous sports.
My parents, I grew up with them being the professional or official photographers of like the Dallas Cowboys and the Texas Rangers and the Dallas Mavericks.
And so I grew up around professional athletes.
But what's so different, I think, about martial artists and why people love MMA, one, because the sport's so pure.
And it's like a chess match.
And it's an incredible sport.
But the athletes, they truly are more approachable.
And I think that they're more giving and compassionate and more community-minded and driven.
Not that other athletes aren't, but just martial artists are.
are so more yes because they've had it drilled into them from having mentors in other black belts yeah that are on this lifelong journey of even service to others that's part of the black belt journey and self-respect and discipline and um one of the things that bothers me about all this trash talking lately the trash talking trend in mma that was really i mean when people saw how much money conor mcgregor was able to make it just became this promotion tool just and chael sonnen was a part of it too just guys just relentlessly talk shit about him
i'm so torn because in one on one hand it's very entertaining yeah and i do enjoy it right but on the other hand i'm like man that is the wrong message to send it kind of removes some of the beauty of what competition is The beauty of competition is two people respecting each other but being aware that they're going to have to go to battle.
They're equally skilled, equally trained, and we're going to find out who's got the more effective strategy or implementation, and here we go.
But now it's like...
You can't sell a fight without some shit talking.
It's changed from this martial arts thing to sort of this promotion of this thuggish behavior, which again, hypocritically, I enjoy.
I do enjoy it.
You know, when people talk shit, I clap my hands and get a kick out of it.
Well, one thing pretty cool about jiu-jitsu, what you're saying, one, Rafael wanted me to, he texted me coming in here, that he wanted me to tell you what's up.
I mean, the way that he eats, the way that he trains, sleeps, schedules, everything around him being the world champion, and everyone else has to kind of come around that goal, that dream.
Accusations of steroids with no proof whatsoever seems unfortunate.
Yeah.
I mean, all this Nate Diaz shit that happened, here's the issue for people to understand what happened with Nate Diaz.
Nate Diaz tested positive for a trace element of something called SARM, S-A-R-M. It's a type of, it's basically a performance-dancing substance, but it's It existed in a minuscule trace amount in a vegan vitamin supplement.
And the reason these things are being found is that the tests that they can run now, the USADA testing, the equipment, is so powerful.
It's so much more powerful than it's ever been before that the problem is they're working with tools that are almost too good.
So instead of catching people cheating, they're catching people that just have come in contact with something that's illegal.
It might have been like the tiniest amount that was in a bin that they also used to mix these vitamins.
They didn't clean it properly.
You know, minuscule, parts per million.
It's a little tiny amount, but these USADA machines will pick that shit up.
So then it looks like someone like Nate Diaz, who everybody...
And then we'll fly either from there to Nairobi, Kenya or Kigali, Rwanda.
And then from there you connect to Kampala, Uganda.
And then from there, you get a private missions or humanitarian plane that's just you and the pilot.
And so you take that plane from Uganda to Congo, and then you land, you do customs, and then you get back in the plane, and you go and you land on a runway that...
It used to be the drug of choice for our military.
Now tens of thousands of our military veterans, if you look up mefloquine toxicity, military times, they've done two articles.
One was just a month or two ago.
But the first one showed that tens of thousands of our military veterans have wrongly been diagnosed with PTSD. And it's been because of this mefloquine.
So they never saw war.
The mefloquine toxicity of the brain, it's like this poison for your brain.
And if you've taken it for like six months, you can have it.
It starts giving you bad nightmares.
You can have different kinds of mood swings and different stuff.
Right.
well, tens of thousands have been wrongly diagnosed with it when they take it for once a week.
So you take the pill once a week, and that was why it was our drug of choice.
Instead of it being every day or two times a day, you just take it once a week.
Well, when I had malaria the three times, I was allergic to the normal malaria medication, quinine and artefan and some other drugs like doxycycline and malarone, I wasn't responding to those well.
I was vomiting.
I was allergic to them.
So mefloquine, my body digested the best or I just took it the best.
So the three times I had malaria, they gave me two in the morning, two at midday, and two at night.
And so I'm taking six in a day for five to seven days.
And these other guys that were getting methicone toxicity were taking it once a week for six months.
I know that's the case with your heart as well, right?
There's a bunch of neurons in your heart that they're realizing now, like that whole idea of trusting your heart, trusting your gut, like these thought processes that people had might have actually been based on some intuitive understanding of how the body actually works.
The doctors in Oklahoma are like, we have no explanation for that.
And then the doctors out here are like, oh, that's because this is connected to this.
And they did all my blood work, even though they did more blood labs before I ever came out here, like a week or two ago.
They still poked me five more times to get more blood at work because, well, three times they were drawing blood, two times they were putting that stuff in me so they could do the brain scans.
And so it's like you're in a plane when you're in the hyperbarics.
And what it does is it pressurizes the oxygen down into your cells.
So it's literally going into your mitochondria.
That's what the new studies are showing.
Now oxygen gets in there and it promotes healing and in your brain, it literally brings blood flow into every part of the brain that needs it.
So it's one of the best things after a concussion.
So I was with Raiden and what's, I'm one of those guys that sometimes thinks, um, everything happens for a reason, you know, or there's, there's not a lot of quince.
I just started hyperbarics two or three days before I met Raiden.
Then I'm doing it and they're saying it's one of the best things for concussions.
Raiden gets a concussion from one of those fights.
Um, or maybe it was one of the ones that wasn't on the fight, but they diagnosed him.
with the doctors and his mom and his dad, whenever the doctor says, I think he really has a concussion, did some testing on him, wrote a prescription and said, Hey, I really think he needs to do hyper barracks.
That's one of the best things for concussions now.
And I was like, I just started.
And so literally that day, the doctor hands him a prescription for hyper barracks.
And then I take him in there and get hyper barracks.
And this is probably the story I wanted to share with you about hyper barracks the most.
There's this kid named Caleb Freeman, and he just made NBC nightly news.
Um, I think Fox news and ABC, um, he's making the news everywhere because of his comeback The kid probably should have never been able to eat again on his own, especially never be able to walk.
His parents were told that he would be left in a vegetative state.
And if you have that Caleb Freeman video, he got in a vicious car accident.
Sixteen years old.
He had just started driving.
He was the number one cross-country runner at his school, but also in his district.
And then he got in this brutal car accident.
Here's the video of him trying to learn to put up the finger number one again.
driving down the road hit hit uh uh what's it hydroplained gotten a brutal wreck um and they thought he would be left in a vegetative state for the rest of his life so you can see right here his muscles are so atrophied because he had been in like a i think he was in a coma or he was um in intensive care for so long um And so his dad's trying to get him to do a thumbs up.
You know, he's trying his hardest to do that.
You can go to the second video.
And they're telling him, you should really try hyperbarics.
They try everything you can.
And so the whole community has rallied around him in Oklahoma.
He's from Newcastle, where one of our board members are from.
And they're trying to help him learn to walk again, assist it.
And then I feel like I can focus better because one of the things that they saw in my brain scans where I have PTSD and then I have real severe ADD. And they can see that on how my brain functions.
I guess there's like eight different types of ADD brains.
Man, I think this is worth trying to pull up one of those videos.
It's New York Post, Eden.
Oh, okay, you can't pose that.
But literally, there's an Eden Carlson video on YouTube, and it's wild to see how she's recovered and how they told her she would never be able to eat again, never be able to go to school, never be able to do that.
Six months from now, I have another follow-up appointment here in March, and we're going to have a lot more data to show, like from my blood work to my bacteria in my stomach to those brain scans are going to be the big thing that show how my brain has started to heal, how my body started to feel, and show my health just increasing.
Right.
That's the goal.
I'm on this mission to get healthy so I can fight again, but also just so that I can function better and have not these big swings.
So, Raiden, his parents say that he was always up and down in the middle of the night and that they'd have to try to put him back to sleep.
And now he just, once he's asleep, he's asleep until they wake him up.
They think it's helping with his autism, his diabetes, his AC1 levels or whatever those are called.
Those have started to come down.
And what the doctors have told us is like there's nothing better.
The doctors take an oath that say to do no harm.
Like that's first and foremost is to do no harm.
And like if someone has a concussion or if someone has autism or if someone has this bacteria or a parasite that might be in the brain, why not flood the body on a cellular level?
Oh, you're going to love this part.
That can increase your stem cells by eight times in your body.
So it's one of the best treatments for whenever you have the stem cells injected in you.
So I had the MSCs, the mesenchymal stem cells from my hip put in my shoulder.
They said one of the best things I could have done for it would have been to get in a hyperbaric chamber because that would promote the stem cell growth and life of the stem cells because they're cells and you're pushing oxygen into the cells and increasing blood flow into it and you're extending their life and helping them reproduce.
So it's one of the best things out there, Joe.
I wouldn't be talking about it like this without Rafael is getting into it.
Joe Namath.
Joe Namath has his own clinic now for hyperbarics.
So what's the prognosis, like with you, with the doctors that have looked for parasites, they're doing all this blood scan, do they think that they're going to be able to straighten you out?
And so he's saying that anyone that's in a brain-damaging occupation, and he said whether that's fighting football or even being a firefighter, because that is a brain-damaging occupation.
You're breathing in burning couches, which are putting off all these harmful chemicals.
And so he said you want to protect it.
And promote your brain health as much as you possibly can.
Well, that plus some of the other things that you guys were talking about, they're all in his supplements where he tells you, go get these supplements from here and here and make sure that you're optimizing your brain health.
So for that fight, which was basically the modern-day Rocky story, the undefeated Russian, they're building an arena for him.
Yeah.
Arguably never lost a round, potentially, or at least a fight.
And Dustin goes there, the underdog, and he started the Good Fight Foundation, his own foundation with his wife, Jolie, and they're awesome.
I was actually on my first ever bowfishing trip, and I get a call or a text, Instagram message from Jolie, saying that Dustin and her want to help us raise funds for this fight.
So I get back to them, then they call me, and I literally have a bow fishing thing in my hand.
It was my first time going.
I didn't get anything.
But anyways, they say they want to help us raise funds.
I'm like, this is awesome.
They put up a fundraiser for $25,000 to help us drill a well for an orphanage.
So this orphanage for the Pygmies there, it's a school, but they've all lost their parents, a lot of them because of HIV. And their water source was taken out by a flood, a torrential flood that happened there.
So in the 80s, they had built this kind of sort of well.
It's more called a spring box.
It was like a mountain-fed spring.
Well, the mud got all in it.
It busted up the pipes from the 80s.
There was no way to recover that thing.
So they needed a new one.
Um, and so Dustin decided to set a goal to help us raise funds for 25,000 to be able to put a big water tower with a big solar system that put piped water into the classrooms, into, um, their living quarters, into the kitchen or the cafeteria.
And so, um, through the fight, we had it funded.
And then after that, the fund just kept coming in.
Dustin and Khabib exchanged shirts.
And then Khabib said he was going to auction off his shirt and give 100% of it to Dustin.
So that brought in $100,000.
Dana said he would match it.
Dana matched it.
And so we're going to be able to drill seven wells now, not just one with a water tower.
But I think it was just from this chicken that we had.
It's like chicken soup.
I don't think they maybe cooked the chicken long enough.
And so she got a little sick from that.
But no, I think going back is going to be okay and then doing strategic smaller trips.
What really messed up Chris was – so in Uganda, the pygmies lived in the Similiki National Forest, which was bordering Congo.
Well, they were kicked out of the rainforest by the Ugandan Wildlife Authority to protect the forest.
Now, they're the protectors of the forest.
Why do you kick them out of the forest?
They're not poachers.
They only take what they need and their hunter-gatherers.
But they – yeah, anyway, so they got rid of them in the forest, put them behind a slum in this little town.
And so they put them on one acre of land, over 300 people.
Over 300 people living on one acre of land that's actually their land that they can call theirs.
So we're walking around and they did that six years before we get there.
And the chief told us that there's now 35 families, only 151 people, and that they're scared that if it goes another six years, that they're all going to be gone, that their people group won't exist anymore.
And so that was Chief or King Zito that told us that.
And so we're walking around, and Chris...
Chris kind of gets tripped up a little bit on this mound.
She looks down and she looks down and sees all these mounds around her.
If I can't go there, we're really starting to expand our mission and vision here stateside to bully prevention because, Joe, it's nuts right now, the second leading cause of death.
So Butch is Raiden's grandfather, and he is an old bull rider, and Raiden lives with Butch and Claudia, his grandparents, right now.
And they found him in his forearm.
He wrote, I want to kill myself in Sharpie.
And he's 12. He's 12. Butch said the first time Raiden wanted to kill himself that he knew of was whenever Raiden was 9 years old.
So he's 9 years old and already suicidal.
And Butch said that just makes his heart want to fall out of his chest.
You know, I'm his grandfather.
How does my 12-year-old grandson not have enough to live for?
And the leading, second leading cause of death among kids from 10 to 14 is suicide.
If you're between the ages of 10 to 14, that's the second reason.
So they do think that and the easy way to remember that is hurt people hurt people right hurt people hurt people whether that's an addict or a bully but here's a statistic from the CDC it's funny the CDC found out that I had dengue fever and then also the CDC did the study on bullying and the number three at risk of suicide is the bully the person that acts out by being a bully number two Surprisingly, it's the victim.
They're the second highest risk.
So then you think, who's number one?
Well, number one is actually the one that does both.
They are bullied, and then they act out by being a bully.
So it's mostly character development with bully prevention inside of it.
So it's a 12-week program and it's 12 weekly lessons.
So we have it online.
It's digital.
It's on our website, fightfortheforgotten.org.
And if you click Heroes in Waiting, you'll find it.
That's our curriculum.
What's called is Heroes in Waiting.
And what that is, is there's a digital curriculum where I teach the teacher or instruct the instructor how to instruct the lesson that week.
But then there's a video for the parents and for the students that's the weekly hero challenge.
And so they get a weekly lesson or Matt Chat discussion, and then they get a weekly challenge, which the challenge will be something like, recognize when you're being a bystander.
Or my favorite is probably go out.
Your mission this week, your hero challenge, is to go out and complete a secret random act of kindness.
So the rules are you have to be safe.
You have to be smart, but you have to be completely anonymous.
And you have to go out and make someone feel great.
And so journal or report back to us, you know, what did you do?
How'd that make them feel?
How'd that make you feel?
How can you build onto this for next week?
And you go out and you complete these missions because I think first you have to educate the kids that they are part of the solution and part of the problem.
They just have to pick where they're going to be because in bullying, if you stand by and you watch, if you laugh, giggle, like in that video, there's 12 kids in the bathroom, four or five are filming it.
You filming it is encouraging it.
You standing by and not doing anything, you're actually not an innocent bystander.
You're a silent supporter because you're standing there and you're not doing anything.
They're actually trying to pass laws about kids in schools filming other kids getting beat up and making them somehow a part of it, an accomplice in some way, shape, or form.
They're minors, so I can't really talk about what's happened, but the school has taken appropriate or at least in their eyes appropriate and swift action.
The parents are thankful to the school and the school district for them taking this serious.
I know that the family has felt this has been going on since he was nine at least, and now he's 12. So three years, and they say the only reason now something's being done is because it was filmed, because it's on video, and it went viral.
some fun stuff.
If we can pull up some of those Raiden pictures, I'll show you.
So they're going to start doing martial arts training after Raiden's done with his hyperbarics and his concussion has settled down.
He's going to come into the mats and be part of the kids program, the little warriors for Rafael's school, which are the best youth program in the state.
Is there a way to pull up some of those pictures of Raiden?
And this is kind of cool.
I'm going to give you this because Raphael really likes this.
And it's some Tenth Planet guys.
Um, there's Raiden after, uh, after a, uh, uh, actually a press conference, all the news wanted to like post pictures of them, um, or they wanted to get exclusives.
And so as parents are being chased all around town, people are literally posting their home address online, doxing them, but doxing the bullies mainly saying here's the 12 year old girl's address and go, go find her.
You can go through a couple more of those pictures.
There's some pretty cool ones where...
unidentified
He's eating Chick-fil-A? Yeah, he likes Chick-fil-A a lot.
And then you have a competition tracker, so you can record your opponents, how it went, and you can also, at a tournament, start scouting out your competition.
And then they're going to have it to where they make new additions and things like that.
And so as it grows and as it scales, every planner they have from now on, 10% is going to go to Fight for the Forgotten.
If I know if I haven't written it down, I'll probably forget it I keep notes like comedy notes.
I keep them on my phone But then when I go to do a show I always write it out.
Hmm always.
That's really smart They say the writing things just so there's something about physically putting a pen to paper that like really commits it to memory Yeah, anything else.
And it was because they were fundraising on our behalf.
This year, we've got a top ten.
Instead of the top one fundraiser, gets a prize.
Now, the top ten get a martial arts draft pick.
So martial arts superstars, world champions, whether it's former, current UFC or Bellator champions, Hall of Famers, martial arts coaches of the year that will fly out to their academy to do a seminar or a training day or a fan experience for fundraising on our behalf.
So yeah, I guess for now though, we're doing that tournament.
That competition, and last year, the last four or five kind of top gyms or schools competed for it all the way until midnight of New Year's Eve, central time, because that's when the cutoff was, and the winner was going to get their gym renovated.
So there was four or five at the end, and we raised like $30,000 on the last day because everyone wanted the gym renovation.
So this year, we've got a top three prize pack that's like that.
The first one gets like a $25,000 gym renovation from Zebra and Century.
They get featured in Black Belt Magazine.
They get featured in MA Success.
I think Bruce Buffer is going to announce them as the winner.
They're going to get a trophy and a medal.
They're going to get a championship belt for the champion, and then they get the first-round draft pick of guys like Rashad Evans, Justin Gaethje, Chris Cyborg, Rose Namajunas, Pat Berry, Rafael Lovato Jr., Shanji, Laborio, these people are going to fly out.
Frank Mir are going to fly out and do a seminar at their academy.
He wrote a few jokes for Theo and Theo said that they were too dark.
Uh, he couldn't, he couldn't share them.
Um, but him and Theo, uh, when Theo came to OKC, Jacob and us hung out.
And, uh, anyways, Jacob has started this GoFundMe for Raiden because he knows their family and Raiden has like $8,000 in medical bills, um, is going to need counseling.
So So $3,000 to $5,000 of like a counseling budget.
And then they want to do something practical for the family.
And I've gone to 20 hyperbaric treatments with Raden now.
We've had family dinners at my house, at their house, at our offices.
His grandma can cook.
She can cook some meatloaf.
And she had me over there.
And they live in this mobile home park.
outside Oklahoma City.
And the boys, so the dad, he had worked in automotive industry and then at a dealership.
And then he came and kind of took over the family restaurant.
Well, it started to struggle.
The family restaurant did.
And anyways, his dad now has two jobs.
He's trying to make ends meet.
His mom can't really work because she has to take him to appointments, whether it's counseling or for his hearing aid or for his diabetes or for his autism.
She's taken them to all these different appointments.
And so they had to take in Scotland's mom because of health issues.
So the parents now have one of the grandparents living there.
So they're in the bedrooms.
They had to send Raiden and his brother Brock to live with the other grandparents down the street.
So still the same mobile home park, but they put them in like the three bedroom kind of nicer one with more space.
And so Jacob's like, what would really help this family and bless them in a way?
Because his dad doesn't want to hand out.
He's not asking for extra stuff or he didn't come up with this idea.
But Jacob's like, what if we could reunite the family?
So get his hyperbaric treatment covered.
Get his counseling covered.
But then what if we could even raise funds for a...
Either a single-wide, three-bedroom, two-bath, or maybe it's a double-wide that just reunites the family that gets Brock and Radin back in the home with his parents.
And so Jacob brought that idea up.
We shared it with his parents.
They started bawling, just saying that that's their greatest need is just to have the boys back in the home with them.
And so there's this car dealership in Oklahoma City called Hudeburg, and they're really community-minded.
They give to Fight for the Forgotten, and they give to a lot of organizations.
And so they have a campaign called Hudeburg Helps.
And so Hudeburg Helps is sponsoring this.
I think they've already raised like $8,000, $9,000.
It's called Stand with Raiden on GoFundMe.
So it's GoFundMe, hashtag standwithraden, and I think it's already at $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 of like the $50,000 goal.
So that's something that we're focused on now.
My wife was like, hey, why are you...
Fight for the Forgotten couldn't send funds to one kid individually.
That's showing bias, and we have to have like a...
And a pool of people to choose from, applicants, and it has to be unbiased for us to fund something.
So I can rally around him.
I can be his friend, but we can't pay for his medical treatment or pay for his counseling.
But GoFundMe can.
And so Jacob started this.
It was his idea, and he just wanted to rally around Raiden.
And my wife asked me, why are you doing all this, even though the funds can't be raised for Fight for the Forgotten?
It's like, well, you know, I don't know.
I just, I really connect with Raiden.
And she goes, I know why you're doing this.
You're just trying to be the guy that you needed whenever you were his age.
And that really...
I don't know.
That one kind of hit home because when I was 12 or 13 years old and was suicidal, being bullied, it would have been cool to have someone rally around me.
A few years later, I had coaches that rallied around me that made me believe in myself.
But it's been awesome, man, seeing Raphael come alongside Raiden and his family, scholarship him, the Steelers, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the LA Chargers.
That Baker Mayfield, all these people posting videos and support for him.
Mick Foley is their favorite wrestler.
WWE, Mankind.
Anyways, he made a video for Raiden and his mom and dad literally cried because that was their favorite wrestler and he knows exactly what they're going through because his son, Mick Foley's son, has autism.
And so to see that support go out to Raiden, like that just blew them away.
I mean, everything you do is helping other people.
Your goals and your desires, even for you fighting, with people maybe they don't know, some people don't know, you got back into fighting so that you could raise awareness for Fight for the Forgotten.
And, you know, became a world-class heavyweight.
You really became a better version of yourself than you were when you were fighting in the UFC. Yeah.
You know?
And then, I think also through Rafael Lovato, training with him, your jiu-jitsu skills came up big time.
And I think this is what I've learned through Rafael.
And through a guy out here named Ed Milet that's become a friend, these guys say it's usually, it's either Raphael or Ed that says it's usually the person with the most reasons that usually wins.
Unless you're fighting Anderson Silva in his prime.
We should tell people that we're going to be doing a charity event in Los Angeles.
We're just trying to get a venue.
We're trying to move it now to the first quarter of 2020, but we're going to do a charity show at one of the big theaters in LA. Yeah, that's going to be incredible.
Well, so what he's going to do, and hopefully this isn't...
I'm not committing him to it, but they kind of said, we're going to do this for this fundraising tournament that we're doing right now, the competition.
They're going to give away, and we'll have to update people later.
But for $15,000, $25,000, someone donating, they're going to get an exclusive VIP experience at Tyson Ranch, the resort.
I was thinking there might be a way, we can talk about this more afterwards, but we'd maybe give a fan experience to someone at the comedy show.
We could give like a VIP front row tickets or something like that.
If someone donates to help kickstart our fundraising competition, because what we're doing right now, last year raised $137,000.
This year we're shooting for $200,000 to $250,000.
And then we want it every year to become kind of the premier fundraising event of the martial arts world, the combat sports world, where everyone knows about this charity event.
And you can win once in a lifetime experiences with martial arts superstars or personalities or things like that to where we could build it into a sustainable.
This is going to bring in seven figures a year, a million dollars a year.
And then that way we know our budget, how many wells we can drill, how much land we can get, how many farms we can start.
How many kids here we can help with the martial arts curriculum?
It takes us close to $500 to get into the martial arts academies with the bully prevention curriculum.
Now, as this expands, as Fight for the Forgotten expands and you do more and more work in the Congo, do you anticipate moving to other parts of the world?
We started that last year, but we really kick-started it April with this big kind of celebration on new land, five acres.
Yeah.
Because of Dustin's donation, we're going to take that up to 30 more acres, so 35 acres in Uganda.
We want to get that to 100. We want to get it to even more than that.
There's a potential that with Fight for the Forgotten, we could potentially start up a social enterprise or what are those called?
B Corps or something like that where it's a social entrepreneurship gig where we start up maybe a coffee farm, maybe a honey farm in these mountainous regions.
They start a fire at the bottom, and then they throw a vine around it, and then they just walk up it with your feet, and you're holding onto the vines with your hands.
And it's crazy.
You take an axe up there, and then you just start hacking into the tree with Africanized colonies of bees, which are killer bees.
So they start that fire underneath and the smoke goes up.
So that helps keep them off.
Then if two people climb up, the sole person's job on the back is to have these leaves from a twig and they just are hitting the bees off of the guy raiding the hive.
And then midday, during the heat of the day, right, 3 to 5 p.m., they're normally just chilling, napping, or in their hut to where they're out of the sun.
And so they're up working before that, they rest, and if they need to go back out before the sun's down, they go back out a second time, hunting, gathering, come back in, prepare it.
That's the new land, five acres of land that we were able to get them.
So this is a celebration, just kind of transitioning into dancing with the drums and the leaves.
But now they have hope that they're going to survive.
And here's at the school where they're getting new water and they're in class for the first time.
They were told that they couldn't go to school, that they couldn't learn.
And now, actually, the top five students at the school over the last six years are all Batwa, pygmy children.
That's the new well that they're drinking from, one of them.
So it's just celebration.
They're learning some MMA. And we're there to help come alongside them and say, hey, how can we, with our vision, to defeat hate with love, our mission to knock out bullying worldwide, how can we do this in a practical, sustainable way?
And so, yeah, Joe, like that little boy, Paulo, that you saw, has scars on him from people holding him down and slicing him open, collecting his blood because they think he's the cure for HIV or the women there being sexually assaulted.
Some terrible stuff.
But what we want to do to kind of sum up this documentary when we get there is...
Is have new land for them, them back in school, them farming for themselves, them selling it at the markets, and then also stateside here.
So kind of the two things to wrap up, the two or three ways that people could support.
If you're a martial arts academy, jiu-jitsu school, you do MMA, taekwondo, wrestling, boxing, any of that, you can join our end-of-the-year fundraising competition.
And the top 10 are going to win incredible prizes, gym renovations.
There's also a raffle prize where every $500 you raise, you get the opportunity to have your gym transformed.
If you're an individual and you want to support that way, we just started our Fight Club.
And so our Fight for the Forgotten Fight Club, first rule is you do speak about Fight Club instead of you don't.
Yeah, it's our monthly giving club.
People can give $5, so the price of a latte, and that would make us a sustainable nonprofit where we know what our budget is every single month, how many wells we can drill, how much land we can get, how many people here stateside we can help.
R-A-Y-D-E-N. So it's StandWithRaiden, and you can go check out my Instagram, TheBigPigme, or Twitter, TheBigPigme, and that will point you into the direction of StandWithRaiden.
And then as we come to a close with Sober October, I got one thing for you.
I always feel like a piece of shit when you come here.
I always compare myself, like, God, this guy's going to get malaria and fucking worms, and he's always traveling over there helping people, and your focus is always about helping people that are in need.