Camp Gagnon - Tribal Adventurer's INSANE Baboon Hunting Story w/ Hadza People of Tanzania

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

What up people today we have the Tribal adventurer Mike Corey, aka @fearlessandfar on to discuss being inspired by David Choe to go baboon hunting with the Hadza People of Tanzania, living with the death tribe of Indonesia, getting scarified with the Mursi Tribe, and meeting God in central America. Thank You BlueChew, Morgan & Morgan, Füm, & Freeze Pipe for supporting the greatest podcast ever

I found this amazing mausoleum in the middle of the Romanian countryside. It looked like a cathedral in the middle of Dresden. I find this cafe. There's a couple women there all having some espresso. Bear and I go up and we're like, excuse me ladies, do you know anything about this mausoleum? Do you know if anyone has the key? And this girl's like, oh yeah, we know who has the key. It's the husband of the woman who cuts foreheads.

She's just right down the street. Excuse me? The woman who cuts foreheads? Oh yeah, and so the woman bends over and she shows her forehead and there's a cross, cut a scar right in her forehead. We say, oh, the woman who cuts foreheads. Okay, where did she live? Three houses down. So we continue down the road and we knock on this rusty wooden door. It flies open. And there is a man there. This man has purple sweatpants pulled up to his chest. He's got scabs all over his face. Got a little like postman's cap on. And we say, hi, we're looking for the husband of the woman who cuts foreheads. And he's like, yes, it's me. Do you have the key to the crypt? And he goes, yes, I'm the

Cryptkeeper. Can you go show us the crypt? I gotta feed my pigs and then we can go. Follow this old man up the street. It's the front gate. puts in this key that's the size of a fork and screeches open. We go inside. It's this fantastical again European style crypt built to look like a church. We open it up. Another big key. There's like bats and there's pigeons swirling everywhere. It's incredible in there. We're talking to him asking, what's your role here? Why do you have the key? And he goes, well, actually, the key's been passed down for several generations. My family. He rings the bell when it needs to be wrong. I'm like, oh, the bell still works? He goes, yeah, the bell still works.

Do you want to see? There's two bell towers. One is destroyed. One is still there. So we go in this side passage. There's a staircase that spirals up this tower. There's a rope that comes down the middle. And he grabs it and he bong, bong, bong, two, three times.

Bong, bong, bong, bong. So I say, okay, that's good. There's like bats flying around, everything. He's like, do you want to see the crypt? So we go downstairs underneath and there's like rats everywhere. And then we kind of finished exploring the crypt. the mausoleum and there was still that one thing. We kind of glossed over in the beginning, the woman who cut foreheads.

I say to the cryptkeeper, can we go meet your wife? I heard she's quite powerful and famous. And he says, yeah, she doesn't really like foreigners, but we can go see. And so we leave, but then something's changed because there's people kind of peeking out of the windows and looking up the doors and shutting them when we go by. Didn't think too much of it. But we get to his house again, open the door, and my friend Bear and the creepkeeper go in and I'm behind.

And then the woman screams and she slams the door on my face. And then I hear screaming in Romanian. Yeah, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And I have no idea what's happening. After that, my friend Bear comes out. He goes, we have to go. He goes, no, you have to go. We have to go.

You don't understand. We have to go. All right, so we run out. We get in this truck and we start driving. And I'm like, Bear, man, what happened? What did we do? We were polite? And he goes, no, you don't understand, man.

How many times did you make him ring that bell? I make him ring the bell. I mean, he rang the bell. Did he say why he rang the bell? No, he just said his job was to ring the bell. Dude, they only ring the bell when someone dies. They thought there was a building that collapsed, that a school bus crashed. They thought there'd been a mass murder.

You rang the bell 12 times, bro. This is Mike Corey, aka Fearless and Far. He produces some of the most interesting and fascinating travel content I've ever seen in my life. And for the next couple hours, he's going to basically be telling us some of the most amazing travel stories I've ever heard. He's about to tell us what it was like hunting baboons with the Hadsadza tribe of Tanzania. He talks about living with the death tribe of Indonesia. These are people that literally exhumed the bodies of their relatives to clean it up in a ritual way. It's fascinating and an amazing look at a different culture than ours.

And he's also going to tell us what it was like doing ayahuasca in Central America and basically meeting God. So without further ado, I'll let him explain all the stories. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Mike Corey. Welcome to Canada. The first thing I want to ask you, can you talk to me about hunting baboons in Tanzania? Oh, I've been three times now. Yeah. Three different hunts with the hudza.

Two have been posted. One is still being edited. Oh, really? I can, this story can, as a short story long, let's go long. Short story long. There's parts of this hudza hunting story that I haven't told before, really, that you can't see online. But basically, I'm always out there searching for real experiences. And in this world, that's just getting crazier and more complicated, it just seems like the fundamentals are the most important thing.

And these boys, the Hadsah, they live the fundamentals. Scientists go there to study them because they still live the way we used to live as pure hunter-gatherers. There's lots of tribes in the world, the mercy, the Maasai, that still, they live traditionally, but they have cattle, they have livestock. The Hazza don't do that. They're against it. The Hadsah as well, they won't even touch like a cracker or anything process. They only eat meat. They eat honey.

and also something called Ugali, which is like a corn porridge. So I wanted to find this fundamental human experience. And I first heard about it on some podcast. I think it was David Cho on Rogan talking about it like three or four years ago, about how this tribe would roll up Bible paper. These missionaries would come, give a Bible, and they just take it to smoke joints. And I was in... I mean, you can see God that way.

Depending what you're smoking, like that will get you close to God. Exactly. So I was in Tanzania filming an episode for BBC. So I have the TV show now called Unchartered Adventure in the U.S. Two Emmy nominations, by the way. Yeah, which is amazing. Yep. And at that time, I was filming for a BBC on a show called BBC Travel Show.

I had a guy there named Gumbo, my local contact in Tanzania. Gumbo's the man. And I said, hey, I heard about this tribe called the Hadza that are living somewhere in Tanzania. Have you heard of them? And he said, yeah, maybe there's only a thousand left. They live next to this remote lake. And we could maybe go, I don't know anybody, but I know a friend who knows a friend, which is always the best way to do it. And we put the pieces together.

But at that time, there was no content online about the Hazza. There was just one podcast mention. I put a little pin in my map. And I research later. So when I went to go meet these boys, they hadn't seen too many foreigners before, only a few. And I don't think I was ready for what the experience is going to entail. Can you describe where they live and what that environment is like? So they live, there's a lake called Lake Aasi.

It's near Lake Natron, which is a little bit more famous. Lake Natron is a lake in Tanzania known for petrifying animals. You'll see these birds and bats that are completely encased in stone, so they say. And so it's supposed to one of the most caustic lakes, most dangerous lakes in the world. It's like sulfuric or something? I think it's just very, very acidic or basic, one of the other. And if animals fall in, they turn into basically these calcified skeletons. Very cool.

So Lake Aasi is a bit farther south from that. And there's all of these volcanoes around there. So these lakes are quite interesting and not exactly the most hospitable, but these guys have found a living there. And again, there's only about a thousand left. And they are very, very remote. And getting out there, you have to go through several small villages, hike out, and then you have these small bands of hunter-gatherers living next to this lake. And there you can still find wild animals, right?

Because in the world today, there's not that many remote, remote places. Yeah. And there, it's still remote enough that you can find wild animals to hunt. And so I've got three different stories of three different experiences. But let me tell you one of my favorites, because it was definitely the most intense. So the second time I went hunting with these guys, I fell in love with him the first time. But the first time we went, we couldn't catch the baboons. The second time we went, they guaranteed me we could catch baboons.

But we had to raid their camp at night. So baboons are supremely intelligent. And if you haven't seen them before, man, they are ferocious. Yeah. They got these big fangs. They're strong. Definitely. These huge canines.

And they're fast. They're smart. And they will attack you if you scare them. If you attack them, they will attack you. And are they strategic? Like in the way that some animals will hunt. strategically. Are they sort of defensive in that same way? The way the hodza talk about it is not hunting baboons. It's going to war with baboons. Wow. Because it is a war. And the hodza hunt with dogs. And one thing

I saw with the hansa as well is that day we had tried to get the baboons. And they sent out the dogs. They run. They've got poison arrows. They've got different arrows for different kinds of animals. So the baboon arrows are these serrated knife, almost looks like a sawblade, like really sinister looking. And that's because when they stick in, the baboons can't rip them out because they'll literally try to rip out the arrows. Oh, interesting. If you shoot a gazelle, a gazelle is not going to be able to pull it out. So you don't have to worry about the same things. But with a baboon, they could literally, they have hands. They have human looking hands that they can pull arrows out with. So picture a arrowhead with fish hooks sticking out of the side. Crazy. Now, why are they hunting baboons? Like, is this common for them? Like, why are they not just hunting other animals?

Because the meat tastes good, bro. Really? Yeah. They said it's the best taste they mean out there. Because they said it's saltier. It tastes, it tastes better. Interesting. So if baboon tastes good, maybe people taste good too. Maybe that's why cannibalism was a thing. I don't know. I'm just saying.

I came from Mexico where they used to talk about eating people there, the Mayans. We'll get to that in a minute. Okay. But are they, is it a lot of meat? I look at a baboon. Like, I'm like, it's probably easier to hunt some type of like other mammal than this sort of like muscular, fleshy baboon, right? Do you want to know the best part of the baboon?

I would love to know, actually, the best part of it. ass. Really? Baboon ass was the prime cut. Because if you look at a photo of a baboon ass, maybe you can insert one. Yeah. It's really fatty. They've got fat asses.

Nice. And if you're a hunter-gatherer running through the forest all the time, you need fat, man. That's a great source of energy. So the baboon ass is the first thing to go. That's funny. Yeah. I remember in one of the episodes you put out, do you call them episodes? Yeah.

Okay. One of the episodes you put out, they cut into the ass after they caught the largest baboon, I think, that second hunt that you're talking about. And you were like, why are they doing this? And literally his answer was, they want to check if he's got to ask me. And it was like, all right, whatever. But that's the thing that they go for. That's the best part.

Yeah, that and the nuts. I don't know. In many cultures around the world, it just seems that the nuts are, I don't think they taste good. I've eaten the nuts of four different animals. Okay, which four? So, bison, goat, deer. Human.

Not even. Not yet. Not yet. Never say no. I always say not yet. And so the nuts don't taste good, but I think they be some spunk, you know? Do you think there's a symbolic element of like virility? I think that's exactly it. Really? Because nuts don't taste good. Have you had nuts before? I've never had nuts. Well, not yet. Not yet. Not consensually. But like, I guess I got tea bag going to into middle school. But I could see the, yeah, the idea of like, okay, we've hunted down this human-ish ancestor and we're, are going to now eat the like most virile important part for reproduction right and is it preserved for like a specific member of the tribe like the the nuts or is that just like whoever caught it like what is the hierarchy when generally the one who catches it gets the cut or the chief in the case the the hads are interesting because they don't they kind of have a chief but he's more like the guy who's the best hunter um but they're they're they're they're pretty there's not one leader they all have different roles. Interesting. And so how do they sort of organize, like socially? So there, one thing you don't see very often is the women, because you see the hodds of boys,

they go out, they hunt, that's the exciting part. They are hunter gatherers. There are, there is gathering. It's just not as exciting. So the women go out and usually find gorge, cassava kind of potato things, roots, and they, they cut those up. It's just not as good for YouTube, right, because you're not out there shooting bad wounds with fish hooks. Sure. Yeah. And so for them, the females, and actually they seem to not live as traditionally. Like they wear colorful clothing. If you're familiar with the Maasai tribe, which are some of the cattle herders over there, they wear like bright colored clothing.

The women seem to do that. But the men wear the skins that they hunt. And that's very much like the trophy. Even the baboons they shoot. They take a ring from the tail. They skin off some of the fur and they put it on their bow, like those World War I fighter planes where you had the skulls on your biplane. It's really quite cool, actually.

Whoa. I'm getting deviated from my story, though. So the coolest haza moment. So my second hunt, we still hadn't caught baboons yet. We had gone to war that day with their hunting dogs. There's maybe like 10 of these hans of warriors, and they have maybe 15 hunting dogs. And the wounds these dogs had were crazy. So it's really hard to keep up with these guys because you're running through this forest full of thorns.

So I tried my best. I put gopros on the guys, put a GoPro on the dog. couldn't get the actual attacking of the baboons, but the dogs came back and they had like six inch lacerations, like ribs showing through their skin. And again, it is a war. But the funny thing is, or the interesting thing is,

or the thing to keep in mind is, you see these mushing dogs in the north where people think it's cruel to have mushing dogs. You actually go to one of these camps, the dogs love it. The dogs love to run. They freak out. They're so excited. Mushing dogs, usually the dogs that pull sleds

in parts of, you know, Alaska? Yeah, Alaska, Yukon, Canada, your people. These hunting dogs, love it. Yeah, they come back. They've got these massive scars on their body, open wounds. But you can just tell on their faces they're bred to do that. And they are bred to do that. And we're also, as humans, bred to do this hunting.

And I saw the craziest thing, man. These dogs came back. They were injured, but they were happy. This guy whipped out his dick in front of my camera. And he's like, let me, she's trying to show, show something. And I'm like, he's like, fill my dick. And I was like, so I pressed for court. I didn't know what he was doing.

He goes to the ground and they have these really big land, land snails. You know, like a snail shell, but quite big and white. And he started pissing in this snail shell, filled it up, probably like a half cup of piss, went over to the dog and pulled, then poured the piss into the dog's wound. And it was the craziest thing I'd seen. What they believe, or maybe it's true, I've never tried to. putting piss in a wound before is it's a it sanitizes it oh wow you're supposed to be clean right so they see it as like antiseptic or something like exactly maybe it's the salt uh i don't recommend you try it

at home right i mean but the fact that they've done it and they probably done it for a long time maybe it does something exactly i'm not i mean if it killed a dog they wouldn't do it right exactly obviously there's been some data points along the way that show hey you you're piss in a wound and it fixes it oh wow so they do that anytime a dog gets injured yeah oh wow there was a dog it's like And six inch cut in its ribs full of piss. Yeah. Maybe the dog's dead. I have no idea, but the dog seemed happy.

Like, where do they get these dogs from? Like, my idea, like, growing up in America is, like, you have to go to a store to find a dog. I think they just breed them. But they're all, no matter where you go in the world, they're always the same dog. Little brown, maybe like two foot long, skinny. Yeah. What kind of breed mostly? I mean, they're probably mutts, but like.

A mix. Yeah. So, anyway, so we didn't get. baboons that day. That night, we're on the campfire. We're eating some of these little monkeys and other things we caught, squirrels that they had caught. But the boys really wanted a baboon. It really, really did. And so we set up camp next to a, they call it a fortress, like a castle. One of those, picture of Lion King-type rocks. You know what? They had Simba. Picture that, covered in baboons. But the baboons were looking at us. They could see us. And the Hanson knew

if we went there, they would run. Like the baboons would run. So we decided to go at night. Campfire, roasting some meat, not quite baboon, but meat. And night falls. And so Socorro, one of the, let's call him the leader, comes over. And he starts talking to my local guide and he's like whispering. And then my guide comes over and they say, he's like, Mike, I have bad news for you.

And I was like, gumba, what? He goes, they're not going to. going to let you come. And I said, well, why aren't they going to let me come? Well, listen, men, we have to go and bear feet with no lights and we have to walk through the jungle to the castle. And then we have to raid the camp and they're afraid that you're going to hurt your feet. And I look at my legs, just Swiss cheese from the jungle thorns for the day. And I was like, Gumble, I am ready. I'm here. I'm in the middle of buff fuck nowhere, Tanzania. I am ready to raid the baboon camp bro yeah let's go and he and he's like oh you want to I'm like yeah I do and so it goes

back to Sokoro and he's like you know Mike Mike wants to you know walk to the woods and soccer was like all right in one hour we go so I go back I'm like what do what do I pack for a midnight raid on a baboon camp and so I'm packing like I got my rain jacket like I didn't really know what to pack because the thorns are sharp and I couldn't use flashlight so I have like a water bottle and anyway time time comes to go me and the Hads of Boys roll out. But picture walking through the thornyest thicket you could ever picture

with fish hooks for thorns. Yeah. In bare feet, in the dark. Yeah, this is not like a trail. Like, it's not like you're going on a, like a hike through the woods on a trail.

This is thick brush that you're having to pierce through. Like, how are they even pushing through it? Like literally pulling apart fucking branches and shit? They just, I don't know. I was worried about keeping my eyeballs

and my sockets, bro. Yeah, yeah, right? There's hooks that hang everywhere. And so I had to walk like this with the pit of my arm over my eyes, feeling around with my other hand like an ant with feelers, trying not to fall off the cliff, kick a rock, trip, because we're climbing up these stone steps. I mean, not an actual step, but just like a tiered system.

Right. And can you describe the darkness? Is it perfectly pitch black or were you surprised by your night vision? Perfectly pitch black. Because if it's a full moon, then the baboons will see you too, because they have night vision too. Wow. So they're going during cloud coverage.

Like they're intentionally trying to go. It was a new moon. So there was no moon. Wow. So there was no moon out that night. And so you could not see anything, man. Your eyes weren't even dressing. Like, barely.

Couldn't see your hand? I couldn't even trust looking at my hand because my eyes get stuck by thorns. Wow. So I was just like this trying to follow the sound and feel around and get in and follow the guys. And how are they navigating? I have no idea. Truly. I was in the back.

They didn't have a flashlight. No one has a flashlight. So, I mean, this is insane. Like, they're just, they know the path. They know the way. Is it like an intuition? I didn't ask. I would assume that maybe their night visions tuned in more than mine.

Maybe they just, they can handle the thorns. Maybe they knew the way. Maybe they're following the fucking stars. I don't know the answer. That's crazy. And their feet are much more callous. Like, they can handle the thorns a little better. All their whole skin is.

They've got rhino hide for skin. There's even a viral short that went. big on on YouTube of me showing my legs that just looked like I got attacked by a pack of feral cats yeah and they're totally fine and they're rubbing like jungle plants on my legs my poor white boy's skin is yeah it just falling apart it's just like tissue paper I mean it's it must be so strange what like looking and feeling the skin of what like we used to be or what we could be yeah like we could be yeah like literally feeling it being like oh this is what human skin's supposed to feel like and instead of like our gooey fleshy

marshmallow skin. Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like. Bizarre. Yeah, yeah, so soft. Yeah. So it's so easy to get cut and bruised where they just get to pound it all day and scraped all day. Yeah. Yeah, they're a whole different animal. So you're pushing through the jungle about to go to war with your feet getting cut up, can't see a thing, what happens next? So we get to the top of, there's this Lion King Rock and then there's a kind of another bluff that's a bit before. And we were told to be very quiet. Again, so we're no talking, trying not to kick rocks, not screaming when a hook gets put in our skin from the jungle thorns. And then we get to the top of this bluff.

And I was going to whisper translated through my guide. And it's all right. So there's two groups. Best hunters are going to go around and flank the side. Classic pincer movement. One group's going to stay here. We're going to find rocks, little baseball-sized rocks. When we hear the bird whistle, the signal from the hunters,

we pop up. We start screaming. We start throwing rocks at the baboons. They freak out. They go the other direction. Arrows. Poison arrows to the head. Wow.

Or body or wherever they hit. Yeah. So we sit there. And the craziest thing, like thunder, ominous thunder rolling in the background. Lightning strikes. You see the baboons. The baboons hear us. Even we're trying to be quiet.

So the screeching of the baboons starts. They know something is up. They don't know what's up, but they sense that there's something happening. We're sitting there in the darkness in the quiet for probably 20 minutes with the thunder and the baboons screeching. Then we hear a and we had clicked at our rocks. So when we hear them, we jump up. One of the boys has a flashlight that he borrowed from us, flicks it on, and we just start screaming. And start throwing these baseball-sized rocks, these baboons.

Baboons lose their minds. They are not ready for us. They jump up. We see them screaming and scurrying all the way. over to the other side of the rock, but then they disappear. And there's silence. And so we don't really know what happened because we did our part of the job. We didn't see the other hunting team.

Right. And how long is that? That's like a minute of, we threw rocks at these baboons for probably like five until we couldn't see any more baboons. So like five minutes. Okay. Well. There's maybe like 20 or so on these rocks.

And so then we, we think we got. We didn't know. There's no communication. There's no, you know, yo bro, you know, ring them up on on phone or something. It's just, did they get them? We don't know. So we're sitting around, five, ten minutes goes by. We decided to go over there and we meet some of the hunters.

And what had happened is we did get several baboons. A couple by arrows, but a few were scared so much. They fell off the cliff, crashed down to the ground. And just like the buffalo of North America, yeah, fell to their deaths. Wow. So we got three or four baboons that night. But the craziest thing I saw that night, Mark, was that on the way back, We had a couple baboons in our arms.

There was one baboon that when we raided the camp just came around the edge and didn't fall off, didn't run away, but kind of tucked underneath. And as we're coming back, one of the, one of the hunter-gatherers, a guy named Jabba saw him. But it's like 100 yards away or something. It's far, like 300, 400 feet away. And these guys have homemade bows and arrows, which is maybe a piece of string or tendon. I don't exactly remember. And a stick that they find. You mean tendon?

Like, yeah. Like truly like from an animal. Yeah. I don't exactly know what they use for a bowstring, but it's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, something like that's made from the forest. And they, so there's one baboon kind of cowering at the edge of the cliff and he somehow sees it. And so he were just, they were discussing something and I go over. I'm like, what's, what's going on?

Like, oh, there's a baboon there. And I look and I see it, but it's really far. And they're discussing whether or not to take a shot with a homemade bone arrow from, you know, 100 yards away. And I was like, you know, like, no one can get that, come on. And so Chaba decides he's going to do it. Dude takes his bow and arrow with his homemade poison arrow,

strings it up, shoots it like hawkeye, boom, right in the ribs from that far away. An Olympic athlete could not do that with a compound hunting bow. You say like almost like a football field length? Dude, yeah. Wow. It was, I haven't seen feats of superhuman ability. many times my life,

that was one of the most impressive things I've ever seen a human do. Again, this is not high quality. There's no sight on this thing. There's no advantage. It's a piece of wood with some kind of string and all made by him and he was able to shoot it

from like a football field away right in the ribs. One shot. Dead eye. And what is the visibility like at that point? It was one week flashlight going around. It was a little blurry brown thing mixed in some brown rocks.

So imagine being on the end of a football field in the end zone, you have a shitty flashlight. You see maybe, I mean, these baboons, they're dangerous, but they're not super big, right? No, they're like head to butt like two feet, three feet. Right. So this is a small thing. Yeah.

I mean, unthinkably small from 100 yards. And literally a homemade bow. And those things are pressure too. Like you've got to pull it back. Like these compound bows that people are shooting now have, they'll have like weight distribution. So once you pull it back, it actually stops having weight. Exactly.

But this bow, you're pulling it back. I mean, it's probably how many pounds of force just from pulling back to bow? I tried. I couldn't even shoot it, man. You couldn't even pull it back. I could pull it back, but I couldn't get the arrow. I couldn't pull it back as far as those guys. And I got some muscle, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You work out. But I haven't spent my entire life pulling bow strings to be able to eat. Wow. When you have to do it to be able to eat, you get pretty damn good. Yeah. And this is a hyper-specialized, like, muscular skill movement. Like pulling back, I mean, it's probably 100 pounds, at least.

Just two fingers on string. It's not like you have like this nice, crispy, like padding or something, pulling it all the way back, one shot. No sight. Yeah. No sight. And these arrows are not, like, it's almost difficult to fathom. Like, the arrows that people shoot nowadays, if you're going to go hunting, are specially

designed to fly perfectly straight. Yeah. This is an arrow that he made. And this is costly, too. Like, if you're making arrows, like, that takes time. And also, if you miss, you'll lose an arrow. Yeah. And you lose the poison.

You lose the tip. You lose the feathers. Yeah. Like, this is, I don't know how long it would take them to make an arrow. But I mean, it's not like, there's no time. It's not going to the store. Right, exactly. So there's a cost to every single shot that you miss.

That's why you don't miss. Wow. It was incredible. So now what happened? So you shoot this babbo? Did the baboon see you guys? That one probably, but it didn't know what to do. It was stuck.

It had been scared and now it's stuck on like a ledge. It thought it was hidden. Not for these boys. Wow. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I would feel comfortable being where that baboon was. I'm like, dude, 100 yards away in the dark. Like, how are you?

No way. No ends are going to have an arrow. I bet you that's what that baboon was thinking. See, try to hit me. Yo, try. And then thook right in the ribs. And so you now shoot this baboon. It's got poison on it.

The baboon can't pull it out because it has these fish hooks in them. Right. Do you go, do you try to climb this thing, go 100 yards in the jungle? We came back the next day. And we followed the blood trail, which is crazy. But because we shot it and it couldn't pull it out, there was a blood trail that we then followed through the jungle bluffs and the rocks. And we found it the next day. Dead.

Wow. I mean, yeah, because that's like you can get shot with an air. and then you could probably run for, you know, quarter of a mile or something. Yeah. Like, who knows? Yeah. But they were able to find even the little blood drops on the rocks and the leaves and the twigs.

Wow. And is that where the dogs come in? Yeah, the dogs are really good for that. But even then, the dogs weren't, the dogs are better for hearing and maybe smelling baboons. That for to find that one that we shot, they didn't, the hot to just fall the blood. Wow. I couldn't see the blood, but they pointed out and be like, oh yeah, shit, there's blood there. I mean, that's amazing.

And hunting with the dogs is interesting. That's a thing that like I didn't really put together when I'm thinking about like, like homo sapien dog relationship developing over 10,000 years or whatever is that in my mind I was like oh dogs were good of protection. I've heard these studies where it's like if you're sleeping next to a dog your heart rate actually like goes down if you can hear a dog breathing. Have you ever heard this before? No, I love that. It's an interesting study that like literally based like baked in our lizard brain if you hear a dog sleeping near you it will actually put you into like deeper REM and like slow down your heart rate. You'll feel more at ease hearing the sound of a dog sleeping. Crazy. And so

in my mind, I was like, okay, these wolves are kind of coming around, like, you're throwing them food, they kind of like start hanging around more, they're friendly with humans, and then they're used as protection. And I didn't really connect to the hunting element. In my mind, hunting is like, you know, like British aristocracy, duck hunting. But I didn't really connect it with like deep tribal African hunting, which is an interesting element. Everywhere. The whole world hunts with dogs, except for Congo, they, they eat dogs there. So that was just another way to get food. Yeah. So the only tribe I hunted with a didn't have dogs was the pygmies in Congo.

Okay. We're going to get to that. But I mean, that's an interesting element, like the human dog relationship. Like growing up in America, obviously we have this bond with dogs, but our dogs are not really dogs. Like our dogs are. We call them fur babies, right? Yeah, exactly. And there's like almost like this romance with our dogs, whereas they, I don't know, do you feel like they see it as a romance or do they see it as like a partnership?

What is their relationship with the dogs? One thing that I always, I always laugh at is, again, we have fur babies here. We love dogs. We love dogs. See pet dogs. There's a dog here in the studio. It comes up. You know, cutest little thing. We've bred them to have these big, almost anime-type eyes, expressive, right?

But dogs are tools. Dogs were alarm clocks. And that's actually a rooster. Sorry. Dogs were, dogs were. Yeah, I don't want to hear a dog cockle-doodle-dood. Dogs are security systems. Yeah.

Dogs are fantastic for hunting because, I mean, dogs are meant to hunt, right? Like, it was a wolf. The craziest thing is that there was wolves, and then we've just selectively bred them. manipulated them genetically for 10,000 years to have Great Danes, Chihuahuas, pugs, it's all just comes from a wolf, right? So that DNA is still there. Yeah. But the human animal relationship has changed so much from that time to now. So these guys, they don't pet the dogs. Like, they don't, they treat them kindly for the most part. Insofar as like they treat their bow and arrows kindly. They don't want to destroy their bow and arrow. It's a tool. Right. It's what these animals are. Interesting.

There's no cuddles at night, you know? Like the dogs have their spot. The dogs get the scraps. There's people who spend hundreds of dollars in dog food and things here and coddle their dogs. But there, it's just the dogs eat what's left. Interesting. And they're happy to do that. And they're happy to hunt.

And again, like I said, if they get a bit beat up, it's just part of the hunt for them. Do you find the dogs are seeking affection? No. The dog see it as a partnership also like, yo, we don't need to be boys. Like, we're good eating your food. We're going to go hunt. That's fun for us. Yeah.

and take care of us if we got hurt. And like it seems like it's mutualistic in that way. Exactly. They're not really considered pets. They're considered a tool. Yeah, a tool to be able to live together. And it would be difficult for them to live without them either because they contribute so much to the hunts.

And again, if there's a rival, some of these tribes, especially in Africa, rival tribes can come and they'll steal your cows or your women even at times or your weapons. And dogs are the most fantastic alarm system. Wow. Their smell, they're hearing. It's such a great symbiosis between animals and humans and dogs specifically. Right. And their hunting ability is uncanny.

Is it difficult for you? Like you grew up in Canada with dogs, presumably. And you have this like Western relationship with dogs to go there and see the dogs working almost as like colleagues and then also seeing them get injured in such a significant way. I mean, the way these baboons are taking chunks out of these animals. If that happened to your dog back home, you would be like, we got to go to the ER. We got to fix.

Like, that is a traumatic event. Is it difficult? for you to be around it? I love dogs. Fuck cats. Yeah, there's no hunting cats. Cats do their own thing. All right, but dogs are very better.

I love dogs, man. And I don't ever love to see dogs get hurt. But we have this strange attitude where I think one of the problems with our world today in general is that we hear a lot of things, but a very little personal experience. I'm fortunate to have a ton of personal experience about so many strange things from doing this travel gig for 12 years now, right? I've been a full-time traveler for 12 years. I haven't had an apartment in, I had an apartment for two of those years in Mexico City.

Oh, wow. I'm always on the road, finding these strange, crazy adventures, mostly because I just want to learn as much about the world and myself as I can. So when it comes to animals, I grew up, like most of us did, I grew up in Canada, New Brunswick, Canada, basically the main of Canada, small little town. And yeah, everyone's great there. We love animals, love dogs. And I was told that, like, things like mushing were bad and, you know, animals getting hurt. It was bad. But again, I go and I see things firsthand. And I'm not condoning it, but at the same time, you see these dogs using, they're living their purpose, bro.

Right? That's what they're doing. And yeah, they get a bit beat up. But I can say the same thing about humans, if you're not living your purpose, you're lost, right? And maybe you do get a bit beat up when you are living your purpose. But if you don't, you beat yourself up anyway, you know? Like humans are, I think life in general on this planet is meant to struggle, right? And if we don't give ourselves struggle, we'll create struggle if we don't have it. And unfortunately, the world's a violent place. Like, I don't want it to be. If we could choose it not to be, I'm sure we would choose, but violence is how we got here, right? Survival of the fittest. The world fights and survives. That's what we do. Humans especially are fascinating because we are the masters of

survival. We're not going to win the gold medal in anything in particular, right? Like, we're not the fastest swimmer. We can't hold our breath the best. We can't climb trees the fastest. We can't, there's nothing we can do the best besides everything the best. We do literally everything the best. Yeah. Right. We win the decathlon, not the sprint, not the long jump, not the 100 meters swim or whatever. And with that, we were able to adapt in the Arctic, in the tropics, everywhere, basically humans can live because we're so good at struggling and still making it through. That is our forte. You know, adapt, survive. Struggle, adapt, survive, right? We've always fought. And now, more than ever, in the most peaceful time where we have everything, whiskey, we got cigars, we got ice coffee, man,

you know, living in this beautiful box where there's nothing can. really hurt us. We're the most miserable we've ever been. How strange, right? We struggle more than ever. Yeah. What's up with that? Have you heard of this concept of anti-fragility? Uh, there's a, no, but yeah, go ahead. There's a, I forget exactly who coined it. It was a sociologist that basically book, right? Yeah, yeah, it basically points out this idea of anti-fragility, that human

beings and a lot of animals that have persisted for millions of years are anti-fragile. So things like the glass that you're holding right now are fragile. If you drop it, it'll break and it is no longer able to serve its purpose. Right. Humans are the opposite. the more that we are struggling, the better we actually become, the stronger we become, so long as you don't die. Yes.

And to that saying, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is completely true. And that humans have this insane ability to be anti-fragile. And it exists not only in like strength, like you go to the gym and you tear your muscles apart

and then they get bigger. Yes, exactly. That's amazing. That is such a competitive advantage compared to anything else that exists. Like the fact that it can be hurt and then from that pain comes new growth. Not only in physicality,

but I also think like emotional growth, musical growth. I think it's such a unique human experience that from human pain, you can create art. Yes. That is so beautiful that like you going through a breakup and then writing a song about it can help me through my breakup. That is such a cool human thing that we can do that I think gives us the biggest competitive advantage. For sure. That anti-fragility is essential. And it's cool that you get to see it firsthand and be with the most anti-fragile people. I mean, the hads are truly, I mean, it is, I think, significant to be around the people that we came from. Like this out of Africa theory that, you know, we all were this.

We were all hunter-gatherers. And we've lost a lot of the things that I think serve our purpose. And it's interesting to see it firsthand. I'm curious, what did they think of you when you arrived? They, I can't say they hadn't seen tourists before. They had. I was the first one or one of the first to make a video. about it on YouTube. There was maybe a few small little hand, you know, cell phone videos,

but I was the first to make like a proper experience. They, hmm, they were impressed with me. I think, I know they were because they said so after, because they had never seen anybody who was willing to handle the pain, honestly. And going back to what we just said a little bit, I've learned through experience that struggle makes me happy. I love when there's a challenge. I love when I have to push my self through something that's uncomfortable. That's where the biggest gains have been. So when I had the opportunity to hang with these boys, I wanted to go, man.

And also, I feel like it's my duty as a content creator on YouTube, especially one going and documenting some of these people for the very first time often. I want to show the full story. I don't want to be in the guy, the guy in the back who's like, oh, here are some people in Africa eating their food and they go hunt and, you know, let us report back later. Now, I want to be hunting, man. I want to be, I want to be in the middle of it all. If I get diarrhea the next day, amazing. If I get a big cut up, that's fine. I want to show people at home what it's really like. And I went, I go into all my experiences that way. And so

with the Haza, I was there trying to keep front row, like bleeding, like tripping, spraying my ankle trying to keep up with these boys who their life is to run and hunt. And when they bring back the food, I'm the first to try the raw liver when they hand up my direction. You know what I mean? And so I was able to capture them in a way that I, that they hadn't, I was the first white guy to go there and actually be able to capture them in a way that was authentic. Yeah.

And I don't think they understood what a camera was, but they saw someone who was really trying. I always think about it this way. Like what does your grandma, your mother cook for Christmas? Shepherds pie. Shepherds pie. All right. So you invite me over to your house for Shepherds Pie and Christmas. I'm happy to be there.

I sit down. Shepard's pie comes out and I say, oh, actually, no, I don't like Shepard's Pie. It's not my thing. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly, right? Like, why doesn't he like, is he allergic? No, he's not allergic.

Then why doesn't, oh, he thinks it's gross? Yeah, he doesn't like the, we're not good enough. He doesn't like the taste, the texture. Like, who is this guy to, like, what? Even that not liking the taste or texture of something is such a first world bullshit Western. Like, there you eat what you get. Yeah. Right?

There's no luxury. Oh, I don't like the texture of salmon. Yeah. Bro, you'll like the texture of salmon if that's all that's served forever. You know what I mean? And so the whole like taste and oh, I don't, I have no patience for that anymore after seeing people who don't have any other option but to eat what they are able to get. And often it's not enough. Right?

I go to your place. I say, oh, I just don't like the texture of Shepard's pie. We're not going to be friends after that. Yeah. You know, or the terms change, you know? Offense has been made. Exactly the same thing goes over there. Hang with the Haza, hang with the mercy, hang with the Messiah.

Let's say they cut open a fresh cow and they drink the blood. As many African cultures do, because they don't want to kill it, they drink the hot fresh cow blood. Oh, wow. Yeah, because it's protein, right? Protein, iron. You go there, they cut it open, you say it's gross. They're like, all right, well, he's another white guy. You drink the blood.

They're like, okay, well, this guy obviously appreciates what we do. And then you can open up, the whole world opens up. Like, we travel to have authentic experiences. That's why you travel to find truth in the world. If you're going to sit on the sidelines, bro, and you're not going to actually participate, you're not going to get the truth and the actual real experiences. You're robbing yourself of the experience. And it was poison.

No one would eat it. If it really made you. sick all of the time, it wouldn't be food. Yeah. You do a good job, I think, of showcasing the reality of it. Like, I think as Westerners, there's two ways to look at it that I think are both wrong, where there's the one way, which I think was much more common in like the 50s and 60s as like British explorers were kind of like colonizing Africa and showing it. And it was like, oh, look at these savages.

And that, I think, is incorrect. And obviously, I mean, it's like not only racist, but it's, I think, inauthentic to what the experience is as a human being. Like, they are humans in the way we are humans. And they have insecurity and they have hierarchy. and they have respect and disrespect. And so to not show the fullness of the human experience is inauthentic. And you do a great job of showing the fullness of the human experience.

But sometimes people go the opposite way where they have this mentality of the friendly savage, where they go, look, these people, they're peaceful tribesmen and they don't do anything, you know, violent. And they just want to hunt and raise their children. And it's like, that's also not true. They are warriors. They are going out there and they are going to combat, not only with other tribes people around them, but with baboons, with the elements that they are surrounded by. And you have to have a full experience and you have to showcase both.

And that's what I think your content does excellently. It shows the fullness of what it is. It's the antithesis of what I want to do to be someone there, even with a videographer standing in front of people saying what they're doing. Often, I do like to work with videographers. Of course, it's good to hang with your boys and get a third-party shop. But with the tribe stuff, I like to do it handheld because we are there. And I take you, whoever's watching with me, we're sitting in the dirt, we're eating with them, we're doing all the things because that's how it should be, man.

You shouldn't be standing on the sidelines, especially with people, because, again, you can look and think they're so different than us. Anybody else. It could be a Muslim in Russia. It could be a hunter-gatherer in Africa. It could be a sea gypsy in Indonesia. It's just the same person, you know? maybe they believe in a different vision of God, but there is only one thing that is a God, right? Different names.

They still have a wife and kids. They still want to put food on the table. They still just want to be loved and appreciated and listened to and respected. And once you see past that, the religion, the language, you realize, yo, like, we're all just people trying our best. Even I was in Madagascar doing a project. And I used to, you know, think critically of people cutting down forests, right? Sure. He used to picture some dude with a chainsaw and a gold, you know, a gold chain.

Like, ha ha, I'm going to cut down these endemic redwoods to make a table to sell to some rich dude in New York. Same in Borneo, you know, the palm plantations for the oils and everything. And how could they cut down the forest for the orangutans? You see the video of the baby, like dying in the mother orangutan's arms. In both those cases, it's just some guy who can't feed his family. And there's no contraception, like, for example, Madagascar. and there's a famine so he can't even wear condoms when he fucks his wife to then not have as many kids as he wants so he has all these kids and then he has to feed them somehow so he's like shit my kids can die

or i can cut down this forest to make a rice paddy field and then because the soil's so poor in this country after two crops i got to cut down more forest or my kids are going to die then you realize it's not so complicated or so it's not so simple not so simple sure and in the case of borneo the reason why cutting down the forest there for for palm oil is because we can't stop eating junk food you know because everything is palm oil in it so we blame them don't cut down the rainforest meanwhile we're gorging ourselves and like fried tortilla chips yeah and it's in everything and don't do that yeah yeah and yeah we're paying money for it yeah yeah and it really it's the most efficient it's the it's the most efficient plant you can grow to make vegetable oil mm-hmm there's nothing else better than that

so they're doing the best they can just to sustain our needs but we're pointing our fingers saying don't kill the animals but we're the problem yeah yeah it's hypocritical in nature exactly now with the hads a you show up as a foreigner you have all this technology and equipment that they are not really sure what it is why do they embrace you and what is the role of the fixer like can you explain what a fixer is and how they sort of initiate you into the group whenever I film with these anywhere in the world but specifically with with local tribes too is you you want to have a a person who knows them personally before you show up. Otherwise, you might have some North Sentinel Island kind of shit.

Right. Can you explain that story? Well, I haven't been there. But there's this island, I believe it's off the east coast of Thailand, maybe below India, somewhere in there. Where North Sentinel Island is this island that's notorious for if you show up there, you just get filled full of arrows like a pincushion. And there was a very famous story a decade ago or something where some missionary decided to come and introduce Christianity to these people on the island. And he just got completely pincushioned. Yeah.

Because again, people can bring problems. And if you've been living on your island or in the middle of the jungle or foreigners aren't necessarily a good thing. I mean, look at the Western world. You're trying to tell me European foreigners going to a native group is not good for them? Is that what you're trying to say, dude? There's a few data points that indicate otherwise. Controversial take here. Exactly.

Yeah. So, how do you avoid just getting shot with arrows a second you show up with your camera and your hat? Right. It would be making sure you have a local contact who knows what's up. Like, and I've been told before, it's best not to visit these tribes. And I'll always listen to a local contact. I think people assume that I run in first contact style, you know, with an off.

No, it's, it's a, I don't, I mean, these days, there's very few tribes in the world that would, that would greet you with hostility because there's very few places in this world that are truly untouched. Maybe deep Amazon, maybe Papua New Guinea, maybe deep Congo, and some of the small islands, but mainly that one, right? So we, we think the world is filled with untouched tribes. It is, it is vastly untrue. Yeah.

In the last 50 years or so. Exactly. everything is a lot of these places have had contact with the western world let me tell you another funny story about the hudza so that i didn't post online um when i first visited them it was 2021 so a year after the pandemic and tanzania was a country where the president at the time declared cova does not exist in my country oh he's like on some florida's shit let's go exactly nice he acknowledged it exist but not in my country yeah uh so you could live a pretty free life there. I'm an ethical guy. Like I believe in COVID. I think we kind of, you know,

it's accentuated some parts of it, but I went there and I knew I was going to be visiting some tribes. I got tested before I got there when I got there as well. And so I knew I was I was COVID-free. Went and did my first hunt with these dudes. And we're, with day one, we're out there hunting baboons, trying to catch them, caught a bunch of squirrels, caught a bat on the first thing we caught was a bat, which is kind of ironic considering the whole pandemic. Yeah, you guys are talking about. You're going to be. You're going to meet this later bro let's run it back dude yeah yeah patient zero dick two pandemic take two and so then we we catch every time we caught something we rolled up a joint and they weren't using

bible paper like you've heard but they're using newspaper and where do they get newspaper from they just got them to trade it they get all they get most their shit from trading honey for whatever they want because there's some of the only guys brave enough to climb into beehives sometimes because some of these beehives are inside beobob trees i watch this Todd's a guy, go inside this hollow tree. So Beobobs are like, picture like a Madagascar type tree, right? These giant things. Often they're hollow. And there's beehives often in the very top of them. So you have to crawl in this hole in the side. Crawl up it, maybe, I don't know, 40, 50 feet, and haul the honey out. Meanwhile, you're in a tomb full of bees. Crawl back down and you get this

golden stuff that tastes better than any honey you've ever had in your entire life. Really? And these guys get stung so much. I watched them cut open so many beehives. But because the honey is so good. Again, it's pure, pure, pure, pure honey. And it's so difficult to get because you get stung to shit. They trade that honey for arrowheads. Otherwise, how they're going to, you know, forge iron. So there's another tribe. They trade the honey for arrowheads. Also trade the honey for things like, I'm assuming, weed or newspaper or whatever they want. So they were rolling up newspaper joints and smoking. Anyway, so hanging these boys, we go hunting. I told you some of the story. I go back to Arusha, which is one of the biggest cities that's near where.

Lake Asi, where they live. And I'm there. I'm editing. I'm editing. I'm editing. Trying to get all this shit together. Super excited, exhausted, cut up, happy. Abused. Struggled. You know? Love it. And then I had to go to Kenya a couple days later to do a BBC shoot for my show. And I went to the hospital to get a COVID test and go in and get it done. And the results were supposed to be back the next day. So next day, I go to the hospital and they give me a sheet of paper that says,

sorry, we're unable to give you a negative result. Please try again later. And I was like, what does this mean? And they're like, oh, you have to try again later. I'm like, no, but what does that mean? Sounds like positive. Sounds like you're telling me positive. It's positive.

It was a positive, but if the president says COVID doesn't exist, how can you give a positive? Come back in two weeks. Maybe you can get that negative. Exactly. Wow. So then, I go back to this hotel. And I'm worried, it's 2021, 2021, pre, you know,

shot in the arm. And I have this thing. And my throat's like getting a little bit sore and stuff. And so I go back to the hotel and I'm a little bit nervous to tell the hotel that I have the thing, right? Yeah, they'll lock you up. Like, who knows? And so I'm in my hotel room and I call the front desk. And I'm like, hey, I got, you know, a result back from the hospital. Can I speak to the manager? And I'll come down to the office. And I said, no, I'd like to do it. No, no, he's busy coming to the office. So I put on my mask and I go downstairs and I'm there and I'm trying to keep like a distance from the desk. And the guy's like, so what's wrong? I'm like, actually, I went to the hospital and I tested positive. And he goes, oh, um, so I'm like, well, I have to quarantine here for two,

for two weeks? Two weeks? You'll be here. Yeah, of course, because he hadn't had business in like a year at that point, right? He was stoked. So I sit, I set up base camp in this, in his hotel room. And then every day the maid would come and put like a breakfast dish and a lunch dish. And we, we wouldn't see each other. She'd knock, I'd take it. After about a week, though, I was, I got decently sick. I knock. As she knocks, she brings the breakfast, she opens the door, and she's there, like she's standing in front of the door. Normally, she'd always go, because we were trying to keep no contact. And she says, can I give you some advice? And I say, yeah. And she says, I know why you're sick. You never leave the hotel room. You have to go for a

walk. You have to get some fresh air. And she grabs me by the arm. And she pulls me out of the hotel room. she like pushes me down the steps so I'm here like some kind of strange vampire creature who's been in the dark for like trying not to be too close to anybody walking down the streets because they just didn't believe it was real wow and I mean tracing the the lines back together like people always say bringing smallpox to the the Indians or whatever the haza gave me COVID that's so funny because I did it was in contact with nobody else I was with them then I went right back to the hotel room and stayed there and so it was the complete reverse what everyone would expect wow Yeah. And so you don't think you've got it in Arusha? No, there was no. I was with

Gumbo the entire time, right? We were hunting with these guys for probably like four or five days. Before that, we were even out doing stuff in the jungle. So the only possible way and the incubation period was four or five days or something. The only thing that would have would have worked and the van was with us the entire time. I didn't leave the hotel. I was eating there. I was editing. I got it from the Hansa. Did they even know what COVID was? Did you try to talk to them about it? I made a really hilarious video with them during that time, which was asking hunter-gatherers the like important life questions. So I went to the hods and I was asking, like, what's the most important thing in life?

And what do you think it was for hunter-gatherer? Hunting. Meat. Yeah. Meat. Okay. Meat. What makes you happiest in life?

Meat. Meat. It was amazing. And it's like, what happens when you die? And they're like, well, we don't know. I think you go up to the sun or something. No one really knows the answer to that, so we don't, we only think about it. Oh, interesting.

Really cool answers to these questions. And one of the questions was, what do you think of the pandemic? And they're like, oh, it's a city thing. It doesn't exist. We eat better food. They eat poisonous food. It's, you know, like it doesn't sound a problem for us. And that's what they believed.

Wow. And even then, when I was hanging with these guys, they, we, the first day where we couldn't really get what we wanted, the baboons. My main contact, gumbo, hulls out, he brought some crap. and stuff in case we got hungry. Holes out some of these like, you know, sugar cracker or biscuit type things. Hands them to me. I take a bite. We hadn't eaten in like six hours.

And I hands them over to the guys. They looked at me like I was crazy. They looked at me the way you would look at me if I gave you raw baboon liver. Yeah, I'd be like, what the? Like, is this food? Are you crazy? And they're so venomously against processed food and Western type of food. Interesting.

And they are, they wouldn't, I think it's poison. They have a nutritional, like, elitism. Like, they're aware that this other food exists. Oh, yeah. And they believe theirs is better. Getting back to the point. Like, they, they, they're in the network of people. People come through.

There's other tribes like the, the, the, the tugga that have, they make the arrowheads. They're going through with their cattle. Like, there's people wandering through all of the time. They are remote. But, again, uncontacted tribes in this world, it's very, very few and far between. Right. And so for me, again, I would have gotten COVID from them. They would have gotten it from one other tribesman.

Somebody even go to town. The unreleased video that I'll be putting up soon is actually I found out that the tribe leader had a motorcycle. Hmm. He had a motorcycle to go to take his honey into town to trade for arrowheads and other stuff. And so they kind of headed in the bush, hit it in the bushes. But they're still connected. Like they would still go to town sometimes to be able to barter their wares. Wow.

Yeah. And are they going into like the main town where it like there's hotels and things? Or are they going into like more remote towns where it's just other like agrarian tribal people? Yeah. I mean, it would be a, um, wouldn't be a city. It would be a town. But the town itself would be a stopping point for tourists to go on safari and stuff. Got it.

Interesting. So they're actually interfacing and trading in that regard. And even in the face of seeing what life could be, they're still choosing to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Yeah, exactly. They, they definitely are very aware of, of. how the, like the Western world and sort of the modern world works, but they, they, they, venomously oppose it. And who instills the moral ethic in the group that says, hey, this processed food, evil? Like, this Western lifestyle, wrong. Like, where does that come from in the

group? I think it's just their creed, bro. I don't, I don't think they. There's not one chief that's like, hey, we don't do this. In the Hatsa don't really have a group leader per se. It's, it's more spread out amongst others. But yeah, I think it's just part of how their belief system. Yeah. And even like, again, most, it's very easy. It would be very easy for them to follow the path that most other tribes have, which is get cows.

Right. Because cows are basically like a bank account for a lot of these remote people where you can store value in cows, right? And they can accrue interest. They have babies, right? You can get some like dividends, some interest off them as well. Like you can drink the milk. You can drink the blood.

It is an appreciating asset. Exactly. In a world where you don't really or you can't really have money in a bank, cows are a great replacement, but they completely project that. All around them are other tribes that have cattle because it makes sense. Right. And they have, they've always had the option, but they've resisted that as well. And that would be like the first step into modernization would be allowing themselves to have cattle.

Interesting. Yeah. This is like, again, we were talking about Yuval Harari, his book Sapiens. Have you read that book, by the way? Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was so fun. But he sort of outlines that progress in human history where it's, you know, hunter-gatherer.

And then this hunting and gathering is great. But what if you can't hunt and gather? Being able to go to an agrarian society where you can actually raise cattle. You don't have to go out as much. You can raise crops. You can actually have, you know, different vegetables and things like that is a more simple. It's an easier lifestyle. And it's interesting that they've chosen to not adopt it.

even though as we've seen in human evolution, it is easier. And why do you think that they've rejected it in that way? Is it just the ethos of what it means to be Hadza? I think maybe, I don't know. I would like to think maybe they've seen the evils of modernization. I mean, I went there and I was just so fascinated by what we could be. Yeah. We could be weapons.

Yeah. We are. We could be hunters. Can you describe their physique? Well, to be jacked, you got to eat a lot. They can't or don't, right? So they are generally about five foot, two, four around there. They've got like some chest definition, I think, but they're not muscular men.

The most muscular men I've seen are the guys who have the cattle in Ethiopia, for example, like the mercy I hung with those guys. Last year I got like scarification and also drank the cattle. blood. Can I see the scarification? Actually, man, it's, um, you can see it, but it's barely there now. Oh, interesting. After all that blood, there's only like a few, you can see the Camboscarus from Frog Venom a bit better. Some small little, like, smiley faces below that. Maybe you can't from me here, actually. Interesting. And did they not go as deep, you think? Were you too much of a wuss? Is that a little bit too much of a wuss? Little segue story. When I was getting it done,

they, um, she, I wanted scarification. And so she traced, they put dirt, on my arm first as a stencil. Because if you get a tattoo, they stencil it, right? But if you live in the remote Omo Valley of Ethiopia, you're not using ink as a stencil. So they use dirt. They cover your arm in dirt. Then they take a stick and they stencil that way.

Oh, cool. And she did this almost like McDonald's M&M, like M symbol on my arm. And it was maybe like a centimeter, like half an inch thick, like a V. And like, oh, it looks cool. Okay, sure. I mean, not a McDicks fanboy, but if it's a tribal symbol, I'm down. Yeah. Then I look at her arm and she has this like puffy,

half inch by half inch just thick ass scar that looks like they dug in down to the bone and it's and so i was like listen i'm in remote africa i'm trying my best to evade bloodborne diseases staff infections of course so i'm not looking for the you know half inch deep gouge going halfway down my arm and so i said can we do something a little bit smaller and then so she traced these little, these lines on my arm and they did it with a razor blade and a thorn, actually. Oh, wow. Bled so much. But didn't leave much of a scar.

But I guess if you're using, if you get cut by an axe or like you get in a car crash, your skin gets torn up big time. But if it's with a razor blade and it's not like a gouge where you're taking out actual a chunk you can remove, then your skin heals pretty well. Interesting. Yeah. I also don't know necessarily the biology, the physiology, but I guess your skin might not heeloid as much.

perhaps yeah like some people will get scars and it'll like kind of bubble over it'll become like a larger like raised sort of groove i think it's the trauma of the injury again because if you'll get plastic surgery generally there's no scars because a scalpel cuts so perfectly it's so fine whereas if it's torn then you get a massive scar interesting so these guys there um they they were jacked man like these guys they they heard cattle all day but they're drinking so much blood and milk that they get the protein required to be able to get jacked. Are they taller? Yeah, much taller too.

Like over there in Sudan and Ethiopia, like they're six foot. Like I was one of the shorter guys. I'm six foot like one and those two's tall than me. Interesting. What's up guys? We got to take a break real quick because we need to help you have better sex. That's right. And by we, obviously I mean myself and also my good friends at Blue Chew.

Blue Chew is an amazing service that delivers chewable tablets right to your door that help you have the best sexual performance of your life. 2020 is the year to maximize your sexual performance in the bedroom, and that's why you've got to check out bluechew.com. Oh yeah. Blue Chew is an amazing service that delivers discrete chewable tablets right to your door that have the same act of ingredients as like Cialis, Viagra, all that stuff. But it's the chew.

You can take them any time day or night. That way you're always ready for whenever that special moment happens. Blue Chew is an amazing service because it's so discreet. You go online, consult with one of their medical providers, and then just like that, you can get it. approved to get discrete tablets sent straight to your door. No awkward conversations, no disclosing discrete personal info that's uncomfortable in person. It's all done online safely just like that. Look, I'll be honest, I've used it. That's right. One time I was actually camping with Mike Corey with

the hodza tribe in Tanzania and it started to rain. So what did we do? I popped a blue chew and I pitched a tent for the whole tribe to sleep under. Yeah, that's right. Me and Mike, we were cozy up in our little tent thanks to Blu Chu. You can use it for that. You can also just use it for sexual performance in the bedroom. Remember those days where you could just get it up like that? Well, now you can once again with Blue Chew. Blue Chew wants to help you have better sex. Discover your options at Bluetooth.com.

Chew it and do it, baby. We've got a special deal for the people to listen to this show. This is amazing, all right? You can try Blue Chew for free when you use the promo code Gagnon. That's correct. Gignon, Gag, N-O-N at checkout. All you got to do is pay $5 shipping. That's nothing.

Have the best bonus of your life for $5 shipping? Come on. Cup of coffee. you can get the best boners you ever had. So try bluechew.com. Use the promo code Gagnon, Gagg, N-O-N to receive your first month for free. That's right. So go ahead and visit bluchew.com right now for more details and important safety information.

And thank you so much for Blue Choo for sponsoring this show and making this conversation happen. Now let's get back to it. Do they have an awareness of like obesity? No, no obesity. What do they think of that? I'm sure they've seen obese people. Have they seen photographs of obese people? I don't think they, no, I don't think so.

Obesity is one of these things in the Western world where it's so natural here and it's just, it's just an excess. It's living in excess. It's what it is, you know? And when you live in excess for so long, then you're able to put on that weight, right? And for the HAZA, like they, and again, if you're, if you're a Olympic bodybuilder or you're trying to be, you know, Mr. Olympia, then you have to eat a lot. Yeah. And people don't understand to be jacked, like Arnold or some of these like men's health covers, whatever. You got to be eating all of the time.

Yeah, a lot of HGH. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the hodz aren't strong people per se. Interesting. But they're excellent runners. Yeah, but we're born to run. There's a book called Born to Run about a tribe in Mexico. Like, that's what we're good at.

Endurance, man, suffering over a long time, pursuing these animals. They can sprint faster, but we can push, push, push. Yeah, that's interesting. I remember reading that that's a human advantage that we have over a lot of other animals. Yes, is that they might be faster off the long. But a lot of these really fast animals can only go, you know, three, four minutes at that speed. And then they kind of slow down and then go fast again. And humans, we can just sustain, you know, a moderate speed for a long time.

Exactly. And we're born for it. It's really interesting. And especially being around people that that is their life. Like, they have no concept of not running. And I'm sure it's interesting seeing them just like just persevere for an hour, two hours. Effortlessly. And I mean, they still drink water.

I mean, but they'll find a dry riverbed. They'll scoop some hands of gravel out. It'll fill up with muddy water and they just suck it up. Maybe they have like half a glass like this to last them for six hours. I mean, we're taught to drink liters of waters a day when we're not doing anything. Right. I mean, just perpetual dehydration. What was the longest run that you saw them go on that either you went with them or that you heard about?

Oh, man. Like I train hard for my job. again, professional adventurer. I don't want to hurt myself. Don't want to hurt other people. I'm always training, right? And I want to be able to film things and keep up. And I could not keep up to those guys.

Like when they found something, it was just game on. And again, it's not running on a track. It's running on the most unstable, rock-strewn, thorn-filled thickets. It is torture to move through the landscape. And they just zip through like they're built for it. Wow. Because they are.

Yeah. Hours at a time. We would go for, there was 30 minutes where we'd be basically sprinting. Sprinting. These boys do sweat, by the way. They're not superhuman, but they're just built different. And I mean, I'm 185 pounds. I can't do that.

You know, there may be like buck 50. And how old are like some of the best warriors? The best hunter was a guy named Shakua, who was 25. He was considered the best hunter. The oldest guy that was there, I think, could have been Sokoro, who was like 37. I met some older guys, but they weren't hunting. Maybe they were 50, 60. Average life expectancy is a bit hard to understand, though, because child mortality is so high.

So if you die when you're zero, you kind of throw the average lifespan off a little bit. Sure. I didn't see many guys there who looked above 60. Interesting. But again, I wouldn't say they're not a real. around necessarily. I just think they weren't there at the hunt as a hunting camp, not at a village. Okay. So they have like satellite hunting camps that sprout off of the main village. Depending on where the animals are. And then they kind of track the animals over like long periods

of time. Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. And as far as the like hierarchy goes, when do the boys get to hunt? Like I'm sure they're not taking six year olds. So do you know when that like sort of is there a manhood ritual that goes along with hunting? I think the right of passage for them is just hunting. I saw a boy who was probably nine or eight, and he had a little homemade bow and arrow. And he wasn't out hunting, but he was still shooting stuff around camp at the hunting. Oh, wow. So they start young.

Oh, that's so cool. Is that, I've always thought that was interesting. Like traveling, and I've done a little, but not to the same extent. It's always interesting how children, regardless of culture, are generally the same. Yeah. Like, once the culture kind of gets baked into you, then you kind of start deviating in terms of how you live your life. but children are so similar. Did you find that with the with the hodz of people like seeing this young nine-year-old kid?

Was he similar to like little kids that like you knew from growing up and stuff? For sure, man. And especially in these cultures where I think there is a bit of struggle. You're out there. You're rolling around the dirt and you're happy. The people that struggle the most have seemed to be the happiest. With one exception where I was in the Andes in, in, in, Peru and you live at high altitude when you can't grow bananas in your backyard can't

have three four chickens and a pig and every day is just a struggle to find water a struggle to grow food it's low you know low auction in the air it's it's just it's difficult I used to have the series where I'd go back when face filters were a brand new thing like maybe like eight years ago or something I'd take these my phone to these kids in Madagascar or in Tanzania and I showed them face filters for the first time where they turn into a chameleon or a rainbow comes out of their mouth. And they would love it. It was the funniest thing ever for them. And they weren't sure if it was real or not so they look at each other and it was always. Touch their face. I take it off. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it was great. And it was

always just a great ice breaker. And like how can you break the ice with people when you don't speak the language? That's always a very difficult barrier to break as a travel. Yeah, the language thing is interesting. Like the hodzah speak with this interesting like click dialect. where like and I think people especially Westerners have this idea of like people in you know remote areas that are speaking with clicks it's not just clicks they're speaking of obviously like a verbal language that has clicks throughout the language now obviously you do not speak this language no and so and probably not many people in the world speak this language I mean in terms of like Hadza there's what like 1500 something like that yeah and so it's a unique language to them and you need a fixer like we were talking about someone that knows the tribe and has interfaced with them before and How do they speak the language? So they would be, in the case of the Hazza for me, I had Gumbo, which I mentioned, right? Yeah, taught me a little bit. And also had another local guy who was a friend of Gumbo, who was the one who spoke some Hadzane, is the language.

But they, he wasn't actually Hansa himself. He was the Tuga, and the Tuga was the tribe that they traded arrowheads with. So his Azane wasn't completely fluid. Okay. Yeah. It was okay. But often that's all you need. And what's also amazing sometimes too is just if you speak with your hands and you do some

charades, a lot of information you can get across. It's cool that it gets across, right? Yeah, yeah. And we're so expressive. Humans, we've bred dogs to be the same way. We can communicate even with a little twitch of the eye or exactly. All that means something. So with facial expressions and if you want to even, you know, mime things out like charades,

you can get generally a message across. Have you heard this about Italians? That this is a theory. I don't know if it's true or not. This is a thing that I read, but that Italians are so expressive with their hands as like a stereotype, that they speak like this. And by stereotype, I mean, it's completely true. Italians, you know, like, yeah, what do you blah, blah, blah, like American Italians, but then even in Sicily, whatever. And I heard that there's a reason that Rome was one of this first, like, one of the first metropolitan cities that had a ton of international transients. You had people coming from North Africa. You had people coming from like far up in Europe. You had people traveling from all over that were going to Rome as a point of trade, as a, you know, to live, whatever. And as a result of having all of these mixed languages, and it's not like languages we have now where you can think of like 20. It is like specific dialects. You could be from the same part of Ireland and speak three different languages. So you have people all meeting in Rome that are all speaking different languages. And as a result, in order to communicate, they're using these hand gestures.

And from that Roman empire, they've continued the hand gestures even though they're speaking the same language. I thought it was a great theory. And I'm like, sounds kind of true. Mark, I love that. I love it because I get commented, I get a lot of comments about myself and how I love speaking with my hands. I don't know where I picked it up,

but that's probably how I picked it up. Yeah. Was because I'm dealing with a lot of people who we don't speak the language, the same language. And I have to communicate ideas like, hey, you know, what is this thing we're eating or like over there?

What is, yeah, that would make so much sense. Isn't that interesting? Like, no matter what language, would you speak. Yeah. Right. Literally means what is that over there? Exactly. Yeah, literally like this, what are we eating? There we go. You can communicate across so many cultures just with the same basic hand movements. We come to camp to understand ourselves, right? Yeah, exactly, dude. I mean, that is, again, a human element. That like those things, like surprise, anger, like those little adjustments you're doing with your eyebrows transcend all humanity. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And even

like cross species, like the way you're saying with dogs, like even they understand it. And it's cool that the fixers, is that the technical term? I mean, a fixer will be a television term where essentially I think it comes from the idea that you have someone on location who will fix everything. Someone's late. Something's wrong. They want to kill you. We can fix this. They speak the language.

They know how everything works. They'll fix the problem. But essentially it's someone who's there who knows how the system works and can help make things happen. Yeah. And I'm always curious also like as a comic about humor as it pertains to humans. like the evolutionary advantage of humor. It's a very interesting thing that we like telling jokes, that we like stories and we like punchlines.

And I'm curious, I have some theories personally as like the evolutionary advantage of humor, but I'm curious, in your experience with these remote tribes, what is their relationship with humor and how do they tell jokes with each other? One of the times I was hunting with a haza. So it was the night, actually, we were going to do the baboon raid.

And so we'd come back. back from the baboon raid like we spoke about, right? Successful, which was great. But Baboon was for breakfast, not for midnight snack. We went, after the successful hunt, we went back, chilled around the campfire for a bit, went to bed. Just those guys sleep on the dirt with some animal skins, and the stars are there, the crickets are chirping.

It's fantastic. So I cheated a little bit. I had a sleeping bag. But was there laying with these guys. And so we're there and they're chatting. I can't understand their clicks, but it's just fun to listen because they're very expressive, right? And then there's a few moments of silence. It goes by, this crickets, crickets, crickets, and then someone farts.

Everyone laughs. That's so funny. The comedic timing of the fart was just perfect. And that transcended any, like, language, cultural, religious. All barriers were transcended with one perfectly timed fart. How weird, right? You laughed too, probably. Of course I did, because that's funny.

And that was such a human moment. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, that's so funny. Are they telling stories a lot? Yeah, they're always telling stories, man. It's the entirety of how they operate. I'm sure there's no books there, right?

It's all of these, the dogma, the lessons, the creeds we've been speaking about. I'm sure it has passed down in front of campfires. Yeah. And so there was no, like, literacy. There's no written language that they were using on a daily basis. I don't think there is a written language for Hadzani. Interesting. They wouldn't use it, I don't think.

Interesting. Yeah. And then in terms of like interpersonal relationships, I know you were obviously at like a satellite hunting camp and you weren't in the main village, so to speak. But in terms of like wives, marriage, relationships, did they talk about women kind of in the way that like guys in the West or guys, you know, like you would traditionally think of guys talking about girls? Did they talk about like relationships and women they loved and how did they find wives

and things like that? Did you get to see that? Yeah. I think that we, our view on love and marriage and relationships is just so different than what they think. I was hanging with the Maasai in Tanzania as well. And they have multiple wives, right? And I was hanging with a girl I was dating at the time, who was quite a big YouTuber as well. And she would did a piece, a story about how interviewing these Maasai women about what it's like to share a husband.

And you think, oh, you know, like, maybe. You know, he's with her and the job. But it's not like that. It is a partnership. You know, he's out in the field all day long. The women need help at home with the kids and everything. And so it's not even about sex. Like we,

I think we tie in this multiple wife thing around the world too much with like sexual encounters and sharing a husband sexually. But for them, it's just like it's a business agreement where there's a shitload of work to do. My man's out in the field all day long. I got a kick, cook. I got six kids. You know.

There's two of them are sick. How can we make this work? And often it's even the, his brother died. And so now the aunt's wife's widow, she comes and he takes a second wife. It's not, it's not really like Western marriages. And it's not really like love as we see it. You know, it is more like it's beneficial for our families to get together. So it's an entirely different way to think about it.

And with the Hanzah, I don't exactly know the system there. It's not polygamous. I think the men have one wife, but it's not seen in the same way. One really funny example is, like, I was in Namibia, and I made a video with this tribe called the Himba. Himba are very famous for the women being very... I could use the word aggressive, but more sexually aggressive, let's say, very open, very Amazon warrior type attitude.

Interesting. And also for not wearing shirts. They don't think breasts are sexual. They think ankles are sexual. So their ankles are bound up with goat skin and wire, but the ladies are out to play, man, everywhere. And they're, again, very forward. I went there a couple of years ago just to understand the culture a bit more.

And the first thing that happened when I arrived is that this gorgeous Himba woman with this elaborate headdress and all of these interesting necklaces and her boobs out was like, so do you have a wife? I want to be your husband. What does the guy say? I was a bit taken aback. I didn't ever expect that kind of forwardness from any, from a woman, especially like a tribal woman in Africa.

She literally proposed you. She wanted you to be her husband. Because most of the time men and women kind of segregate in these communities, right? Sure. Men do the men thing, women do the women thing? And you don't cross too much. But she's like, do you want to be my husband? And I was like, I wasn't ready for a marriage proposal.

Yeah. And how long were you there for? I mean, that was in the first 10 minutes. And so it was that forward. Like, there's not like a cultural issue with marrying an outsider or marrying someone that doesn't understand the values. She just saw you and was like, oh, this could be my ticket. Let's go. My clever answer was, I'm from Canada.

It's cold. And she's like, oh, I'll wear a coat. So she was, she was gung-ho. And that was one. And then over the course of the day, there was eight, nine different marriage proposals from nine different women. Whoa. And so at a certain point, like they look at you. It's not a joke.

They want to marry you, man. That's what they want to do. So it's kind of a joke in the beginning, but after a while you're kind of breaking people's hearts. Right. And these women, let's paint a bit more of a picture. So the Himba are famous for, again, not wearing shirts. They have the ankle bracelets and everything.

Also, they don't take baths. They live in a part of, again, Namibia is a desert. Man, it's the middle of nowhere. And they barely have enough water for their, their livestock, their goats and their cattle. So they don't want to waste water by showering with it. So they shower with smoke. So imagine showering with smoke your entire life, never bathing. So they have this interesting, they call it ochre, but it's butter from the cows and red clay and they infuse it with incense and they cover their entire body.

But, I mean, even as a dude, imagine never washing your. junk in your entire life. Yeah. But Parme wonders if it is actually better or like more hygienic. Like our bodies, I don't know. Again, this is maybe me getting a little too hippie-dippy. But I'm on your side though. But like is there an element where I mean, we know like pheromones are important. We know that our bodies have like self-cleaning systems. Like you create earwax that then is cleaning your ears at all times. So is there an element where their lack of Western hygiene that as Westerners we view as gross is actually better or is actually more hygienic in some way, I, it would make sense because we wouldn't be wouldn't have evolved in a way that was detrimental to ourselves.

Mm-hmm. Right? We evolution is a really good job of pulling the weeds, bro. So I would think that all of this circumcision washing your junk is probably unnecessary. Even brushing your teeth is probably unnecessary with a traditional diet. Exactly. The sugar will rot those things out in a sec. Yeah, exactly. You hear all these stories of like once we get sugar cane and it gets shipped over to England and all these people are eating sugar all day, not washing their, not brushing their teeth and their teeth are just rotting out. But over there, they don't have such a sugar-heavy diet.

No. And again, you meet some tribes around the world who still enjoy the seductiveness of jolly ranchers and bullshit, right? Of course. But there, they don't hate it. They think it's poison. And I've never seen whiter teeth in my life. Really? Straight. For real. Straight teeth as well. And that's an interesting story as well. Like the malaclusion where we have a problem with our teeth just drifting different directions is a modern problem that they thought was genetic. But dude, it's because we're not putting our teeth to work. We're drinking smoothies. We're eating white bread. It's pudding. It's baby food. Right. It's not gnawing sinew off a bone. You do that. Your teeth, just like a human are like, I have a purpose. I'm going to put myself in line. Yeah. If you just eat asy bowls and your teeth don't know what to do, right? Interesting.

And so they just drift different directions. And this has been proven as well, like scientifically that without a purpose, your teeth just drift. And so like I had braces. A lot of people, my family have braces. Obviously in the Western world, it's a problem to have teeth go different directions. There it's not a problem. Teeth go exactly where they should because they have a purpose, which is the chew. They don't have, you know, smoothies and protein shakes.

Interesting. Yeah. And even to that point. So I spent a little bit of time in like rural parts of Honduras. I was doing like medical mission trips when I was in high school. And we would go to like these really remote parts outside of like San Pedro Sula or Tugusa Galpa like up in the mountains, like two hours to get up there. And a lot of these people are living sort of like semi-Western.

Like they have Western clothes because people are donating clothing to them. But generally they're living off the land in the mountains of Honduras. And as an American, you think, oh, we smell or we create body odor that is pungent. So we have to cover it up with deodorant and colognes and things like that. And what I found is that when I was around people that weren't wearing cologne and things like that all the time, they did have an interesting smell, but it wasn't pungent. It wasn't gross. It was just a scent.

And it made me wonder, like, did we smell bad because of our diet? Are we eating things that are bad for us that then make us smell worse? Because when I was around people that weren't wearing deodorant and colognes, it did have a smell, but it wasn't bad. And I'm curious if you had a similar experience with any of the people you were with where there is a body odor, but it's not, it's almost like sweet in a way. Did you find that? It's like a big soap's agenda. That's what I'm saying, dude. We got to take down big soap, bro. We got to take them down. Johnson and Johnson, we're coming for you. But did you find that to be the case? Exactly. No, you're on point. Because again, these, in the case of the Hymba, they never showered, ever, man or women. didn't smell bad. Smelt. It was a smell.

But again, our body does a really good job of all these things. And there's even interesting examples of like shampoo and conditioner. We take the oil out. We put the oil back in. And I have my own little story, bro. My lips get a little bit chap sometimes. I know. You soft.

You're not your pussy, but I'm working on it. But if I start using lip chap, it only gets worse. And this could be total conspiracy. I don't know. But I feel like some of these. products we use kind of exacerbate the problem and then they have other other remedies to to fix it. And therefore, we're kind of stuck in this loop of just using shit to make our body healthy when our body, again, would be perfectly fine if we just left it alone.

Interesting. And that's because, oh, but I've seen over and over again in the far reach of the planet. Yeah. Now, I was noticing with like a lot of the, in some of your content, like, they don't necessarily all have like beards and things like that. So do they like trim their beards or do they grow in different ways? Did you notice anything about that? I think massive amounts of body hair is more of a, again, I don't know this exactly,

but more like a cold weather adaption. Interesting. Right, maybe? Because even then, like, those guys, they would, they would go in, like, watch the hansa videos, they would go into town sometimes to get something done, for sure. Like, there's, I mean, everyone in the world gets haircuts for the most part. So even the smallest little town, the dudes would have probably a guy with a pair of scissors and like those little square razor things, you know what I mean?

And just do a fresh fade because one of the guys had a fresh fade. Really? Are they trading it for honey? I don't know what they're trading it for. Oh, how interesting. Do you think they're influenced by Western culture in that regard where they see a cool hairstyle and they go, that's cool? Or is it all tribal and like organized within a society where it's like, oh, these people

get this hairstyle? These people get this hairstyle. They would see going into town to, again, buy certain things. they would see people who looked good, right? And then they would potentially be influenced by that. But again, the world is connected, man. You can go to the most rural parts of Africa and still have a cell service, right? Right.

And everybody watches YouTube and influencers do their thing, and especially music videos, right? Like every culture has music, like club music, dance music. And in all those videos, no matter if you're in Tanzania or wherever, you see dudes who have the chains who have the glasses and the girls. And how could you not want that, though? Right. And that's the problem. On a base human level, that stuff is awesome.

Exactly. And I roll in with my iPhone and my pants on and shit and got my gadgets and they see rock stars and movie stars and music stars with the same thing. The hods are one of the few tribes that have resisted that, but generally it's very seductive, the Western world. How could you not want all of these amazing things, especially when you see the most successful examples having all of them, right? You want the girls too.

You want the tech. You want to look cool. Yeah. And so you leave your hometown, whether it be a tribal village or something else. And then you go to the big city to make the money, to have the go to the clothes and have the girls, all that kind of stuff. Live the life that you think will make you happy. Exactly. Was there any shame in any of the people that left?

Like, is there a culture of, oh, don't leave. And if you do leave, you can't come back. I know for a fact that when people do come back, they're treated differently. because I heard a friend speak about that who was a believe it was messi but at the same time one of the ways one of the biggest criticisms I got for for making this content was you should just leave them alone they're happy by themselves yeah I mean that's a reasonable criticism I can understand why some would say that it makes it makes sense because again they many of these tribes a few of these tribes have decided to stay out of the west

World. As I've told you, it's not as clean cut as we like to believe it is, the fantasy of it all, but some have. But the reality is the world has 8 billion people. There's less and less room. Their traditional homelands are being encrouched on. There's struggle. There's properties being bought up and things being built and other tribes grazing cattle on traditional hunting lands. The world's a very small place. And so for the case of the Haza, for example, I was working with the foundation called Malacca Foundation. which is an NGO that helps the hansa and what they're doing is they're sending hansa to school and my attitude in the beginning was like well like no let's help them do their thing you know

that's going to make them modernize we don't have a choice if they're going to modernize they are they have already and they will continue to even if we leave them alone again they're not living on a small little patch of forest that no people visit you know they go to town so then what really is the solution. The example that I love to give is the Messiah who are again these nomadic pastoralist people who have the cattle and they still live quite traditionally. But they've had many people go to school learn how to read and write, learn law, learn to be an engineer or a doctor, whatever, learn how the world works, the system work and then come back and say I'm from this this land, I'm going to fight for my people, I know the

laws, I know the people to talk to and they are able to fight for those traditional homelands. Otherwise people who who know the system are going to take advantage of those who don't. Right. This is like the Native American example we have in the States where, you know, like, again, I don't know the details of how exactly true it is, but there's this idea that New York as a land was sold from the Native Americans to Europeans for like $20. Like an insanely low amount of money because the native people at the time didn't have

a concept of land ownership. Right. So they were like, sure, we'll sell you the land for like, what does that even mean? How do you own? It's like owning air. Like, how do you own this error? Yeah. And as a result of them not understanding these laws that Europeans brought in, they got screwed over.

Right. And so if someone had gone and educated maybe a chief to say, hey, here's what the rules these people are playing with. And they're going to do this with the laws and the deal that you're making with them. And it's not like the deals that you're used to. It's a different set of deals and a different type of, you know, constitution that they're working under. They maybe would have been able to negotiate a little bit better or not have done the deal at all. So to your point, yeah, if you can tell them, hey, here's how the world is working and you can use that to protect yourself and to sustain the society that you choose to sustain, I could definitely be beneficial. That makes sense.

And who's going to fight for it more? Your hometown, wherever it is, where is it? Orlando. Orlando. So who's going to fight for Orlando more than someone who was born there? Of course. Right? I could go in.

I could do a fundraiser for maybe there's a typhoon or a horror, but it's going to be someone who's from there who understands the people who has a person. emotional connections who will fight the hardest. So someone can come in, they can do a fundraiser for some tribe, and we can make some money and support them a little bit. But ultimately, I can't be there every day. I can't make it my life's mission. I could, but there's a lot of interesting things in the world and a lot of places to spread my love and attention, you know?

Right. But if you're from there, you're never going to fight more than someone who's not. So you're always going to fight more than someone who's not. Interesting. So by empowering these people, even though it seems counterintuitive, of, it's ultimately the best way to allow them to survive with some semblance of traditionalism, right? Sure.

What's up, guys? We've got to take a break real quick because I've got to talk to you about some of the best vases in the game. That's right. You see this vase right here? This is a beautiful vase. You put flowers in there. You can smell these flowers all day.

But now this vase is different than other vases, okay? Now, you can use this for a lot of different uses. You know, whatever your imagination can come up with. I use it as a vase. And that's the way that I like to use it. YouTube's monetization team likes to use it. But what's interesting about this vase is it has a glycerin chamber right here. So you know how with normal vases, you might smell some flour.

Oh, it's so hot. All the hot air from the hot summer's day gets in your lungs, makes you start coughing, you feel terrible. Well, with this vase, you put this glycerine chamber in the freezer. It cools it down over 300 degrees. That's right, 300 degrees in like an hour. That's all it takes. So right now, not only is this vase so amazing,

it's also extremely affordable right now to the listeners of this show. because if you go to the freezepipe.com, that's right. If you go to the freezepipe.com and use the code Gagnon, Gagg, N-O-N, you will get 10% off your entire order. That's right. This face right here could be yours. I got one from my mom. I got one from my brother. I got one from all my friends back home.

They like to smell their flowers all day, and they use the freeze pipe. So don't break the bank. Go to the freezepipe. com. Use the promo code Gagnon, G-G-N-O-N-N for 10% off your entire order. That's the freezepipe. and use the promo code Gagnon, G-A-G-N-O-N-N, and say goodbye to harsh flower smoke forever. Now, let's get back to the show.

Have you seen any examples of Westerners trying to come in and trying to help with good intentions that actually ends up backfiring? I know there's lots of this volunteerism stuff where people go in and I'm sure they do. There is some helping at the end of the day. But I think it's mostly as a company will make money off of tourists to be able to have an authentic experience with local people. not the best, not great either way. But again, the best way to save these people, I do think, is with tourism, as much as it does seem counterintuitive as well. But in a world where it's impossible to stay off the grid and it's impossible to be completely disconnected. And all of the young kids, especially boys, will see these rap videos, music videos, even in their local language or even shit over here in the U.S.

And they want to have that. Because what guy doesn't want to have, you know, girls and money and a, you know, you know, stuff. And then go to the big city and try to get a job. Like, people are fleeing these traditional communities because who wants to do what your grandfather's doing? You know? Right.

You want the new shit. You want what the cool kids are doing, man. It's the guy with the fucking glasses. You want to do that. And so you leave. And then who's left? It's the old people. Old people die.

The songs, the dances, the stories, the traditions go away. Big people live in the big city, telling stories from here, watching, you know, movies made here. It disappears. So then what is the solution to keep? people in the in the villages well it can be tourism people going in showing interest saying hey your local culture is super cool you know if you're from a small town like I am in Canada there's shit we do there that I'd never really thought was cool like

for example the leaves changing colors every year in New Brunswick Canada I I just thought that's what the world did of course I went to it was like Dubai or something and I met a tourist there who was like oh I've always wanted to go to the northeast of of America and see and see the leaves change color I would love to do that before I die. And I'm like, that's what, like, why? Before you die, that was the worst part of the year. We had to rake up all the leaves.

It was a chore for us. What do you mean you want to see it? And that's what I associate with it too. Hard work, man. But it just shows you that you don't appreciate shit where you're from. But that girl saying that to me made me realize that's kind of special actually. And someone will travel across the world to see it. So there is value there.

And so again, I'm not there doing, you know, look at the colors of the fall tours. Sure. But there is money in that there. If there's attention from other places coming back to these small communities where not much happens. Right. And then it's managing it well. Can you do that? It gets a bit more complicated.

But tourism, when managed well, can save these cultures that will disappear. Not if they will, but they will disappear. They are disappearing now. People talk about endangered species, man. There are endangered cultures that are going extinct every single month for sure. Yeah. Yeah. And you need someone from the culture in order to,

interface and sort of like screen people coming in. Because if there's no one screening it, you have people coming in and they'll destroy the area. And not because they're evil or stupid. It's because they don't know. They're like, oh, let me pick up this plant. Let me climb this tree. Let me take a photo with this thing. And let me walk on this, you know, part of the trail.

And then they're destroying the local habitat or destroying the nature around it. Whereas if you had someone that's from there that grew up in the community that's able to say, hey, I'm going to invite you in as my guest. and we're going to look at things, but you have to listen to me and you're not going to be unsupervised and I'm going to show you how to actually immerse into this experience.

You know, imagine someone goes to New Brunswick and they're like, oh, this is beautiful, let me take all the leaves or let me take seeds and let me mess up the ecosystem, then it destroys it for everyone. And so to your point, you need someone that is going to receive them

and show them how to be a tourist. Yeah. I think we have this idea of tourism that it's like, go there and it's a free for all. Show up and do whatever you want and explore as far as you want especially when you're in remote places. It's like, oh, this is nature.

Get out there. But you need someone that's going to say, no, don't walk over there. Don't touch that plant. Don't, this tree is sacred to our community. And this is something that we really appreciate. So don't climb it and treat the things with respect. And you need a local to do it. Because otherwise, how do you know?

Even if you're an outsider that learned everything, you don't know everything. And so to your point, I think it is important to, yeah, to have someone that can show it. And what a shame it would be like in New Brunswick. If the people there were like, oh, this leaves, leaves changing thing is stupid. Let's cut down these trees and let's put in evergreens that are never going to shed trees or never shed leaves. Like for pulp or paper or something.

Yeah, exactly. And then it destroys that experience. And then everything becomes one thing. So it is helpful either from inside the community for people to have a really strong moral constitution to resist or to have an education on how to receive people not from the community. Yeah. Exactly. That's really, really interesting.

And I'm interested also in the spirit. drug component. So like with the Hadza, they're smoking weed. Is it weed as we know weed to be? Or is it a different type of drug? No, it's not weed as we know weed to be because I smoked weed with them and it was great. Then I went back home to Canada where it's legal, took one token and was on outer space, bro. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I always tell me. I'm like, I can't like, that's actually such a good point. Yeah, keep going on that idea. Just yeah, no, it's just like even when I was in Pakistan too, there was weed growing. We get out of so we get to the airport I'm doing a two-week tour of Pakistan we're in Islamabad

we the guys like oh it's your first day let's go from the airport to this scenic viewpoint over Islamabad it's in the east and so we drive from the airport to this the scenic viewpoint we get out and there's like a little culvert like you know ditch with some trees and then there's a viewpoint it's filled with weed just wild growing weed all through and I'm like is that pot yes yeah yeah crows everywhere here no problem right and so later we were smoking some weed and it's again you you can smoke it like it's smoke a cigar or a cigarette no problems but the ship we have now man is like yeah god had nothing to do with our weed that is a man-made invention dude i mean like you look at jamaica and people always like point to jamaica as like this big

weed culture and they're smoking natural weed truly a weed like when people say weed like that's how it wasn't pakistan it was a weed it is it is a nuisance like it is literally a weed and they'll smoke it all day but they're not getting to the levels of high that we're doing in the America. I mean, American culture just has such a desire to just fucking squeeze everything out of everything that we do. Break a world record. Yes, dude. The biggest egg, the biggest pumpkin, the strongest weed. I mean, they're doing weed dabs. Like, you've smoked a dab before. Maybe like, I mean, it's like, what even is that? And you can't smoke that all day. No. It is not a naturally occurring thing. But this weed that's growing in the dirt, I guess, yeah, you could just chief it all that.

Maybe it's a bit like cocaine, right? You go to Peru and they, everyone choose coca leaf because the altitude thins your blood and the the coca leaf when chewed with a bit of um he's like some kind of rock or something um it increases the blood flow and makes you have some a reasonable amount of energy but you refine that shit down to cocaine and it's a whole different thing right yeah yeah and i think maybe it's kind of the same thing i mean it's not refining it uh chemically but you're refining it genetically yeah to make it the most potent thing in the world yeah so in terms of other drugs like were you around any of the tribes that were doing like uh like obviously ayahuasca is like a really common one in like central in south america uh was there any version of like a psychedelic

experience that people were having in the mercy or the hadsa mercy and hada um no what's what's interesting with the haza as i was i had heard that um alcohol well i had heard and i had seen that alcohol was a massive problem in Africa. And it's quite sad. In the case of the Hadza, I had heard on my third trip that there was some kind of pseudo-agreement that since they do get very little tourism there, I've probably changed now with these videos, but if there was alcohol found or smelled at a tribe, therefore they would not bring tourists back.

So they were using it kind of as an incentive not to drink alcohol. because it does exist everywhere. And if you don't buy it, you can make it quite easily. And that's fascinating because alcohol destroys people, man, destroys cultures, especially people who were more tuned into the land, right, where they go out every day, they hunt. When alcohol comes in, especially I saw in Ethiopia, it just destroys communities. Men get violent.

They drink themselves to shit. You see people just laying in the street. it becomes a massive problem. And again, it's very hard to be able to police or enforce because you can make alcohol. Anyone can make it, right? Yeah, really easily. Throw some berries in a bag and you got fucking wine.

I mean, they're making it in prison. I mean, weed itself, you couldn't have a functional high for sure. And like they were smoking pot and we were hunting together, right? And that's fine. And in Ethiopia, there was cat, cats this leaf and you chew this whole fistful and it tastes almost, I don't know, man, like you're chewing a tree. It tastes like grass.

And it gives you a moderate high, for sure. But you have to chew a lot to be able to feel anything. But what's really interesting, though, is every culture I visited, right? I've been to 80, 90 countries now. Maybe close to 100, right? Kind of stop counting. Every culture does three things. Everyone sings, everyone dances, and everyone gets fucked up.

Somehow, with something. Even you can say Muslim cultures, but you go chill with the Muslims. They're like smoking cigarettes, drinking espresso. Yeah, hookah, just like something. Everybody gets fucked up. Everyone. And that begs the question, why? Because it was bad for us, we wouldn't do it.

I'm talking depths of the Amazon, you know, sandy pyramids in the Middle East. Everyone has something just to tune, tune the antenna a little bit differently. And I find that fascinating. Because there's something too getting fucked up that is a required. human experience. Yeah, so interesting. I mean, even like natural highs. Like I went to Tunisia and they were talking about like ancient Tunisians in North Africa basically going to like these caves and they would do like these performances where they would bang this drum inside a cave. So imagine how loud a drum is. Now you're inside a cave. I mean, this thing is booming. It's hitting you in the chest.

And like a drum in real life. Like this is a thing, even just as Westerners like you might not hear a drum like a real like a fucking drum. And it hits you differently than a speaker. Right in the chest. It's a different experience. I always tell people this like live music and recording music is different. And they're both cool, but when you get that, like a real vibration from a drum hitting you in the chest, it is a fucking spiritual dude. This shit is crazy. And so imagine you're in a cave. They're doing that. They're burning like

incense. And now it's like changing your olfactory system. Like you're smelling something different. They have candles that they're intentionally putting like baskets over to make like a flicker. And they're creating this environment that is truly generating like a high. Like you're releasing adrenaline and dopamine in your brain. So even if you're not consuming a substance, you're still having almost like this quasi spiritual experience. And what these guys would do is they would do almost like human stunts. Like they would like take cactuses and they would like bang it on their arms. Okay. To like show like their pain resistance or they would like, you know,

like play with fire in a unique way that showed like they were basically ascending into like this like natural high and then doing these extraordinary feats as like entertainment but also as like a spiritual exercise. And to that point, even though they were. weren't consuming something literally, they were still feeling fucked up. Yeah. And it transcends everywhere. But you don't have to consume something. Like, have you heard of holotrophic breathwork?

Mm-mm. So, do you ever heard of breath of fire? Like in yoga where you're like hyperventilation. Let me tell you a couple of cool facts about air first. Please. So, do you know what percentage of air is oxygen? I could guess, but tell me. 20%.

So most, 21, I think. But most of the air we breathe is actually nitrogen. not oxygen. When you hold your breath, the trigger to breathe, right, you would think would be a lack of oxygen. So it's not the lack of oxygen. It's the buildup of CO2. So we inhale oxygen and we exhale CO2, right? And it's a cool thing I learned free diving is that when you feel like you have to breathe,

it's not from a lack of oxygen. It's a buildup of the opposite that triggers your need to breathe. So even when you feel like you're going to die, you're fine. You have lots of oxygen left in your lungs. And that's the trick to holding your breath longer under water. Even you, if I laid you on this table, Mark, and we practiced. It's a little table, dude. Breathing, you could hold your breath for like three, four minutes with understanding these principles.

Another interesting thing. So, when you lose weight, where does the weight go? You breathe it out. You breathe it out. How do you know that? I actually don't know. I just remember reading that somewhere. You're literally breathing out fat.

Because we're carbon-based life forms. We breathe out the carbon when we lose weight. So it's not pissing it out, you know, pooping it out. It's literally we breathe out the carbon to lose weight. So then here's another question. Trees. You have like three potted plants right here. Yes.

Beautiful, natural. Are they natural? No, they're fake. You should know this, dude. You live in the jungle. Come on. How are they getting light here? Anyway, if you did have a real pot of plant and it grows in a beautiful tree, right?

The soil always stays the same, right? You have a plant, you plant it, the soil's there, it grows. The soil doesn't drop as the plant grows. The plant could grow six feet, but it never moves. So then where is the plant getting its mass from? Because there's no holes underneath trees in the jungle. It's like the plant's not sucking out the earth to make itself. So where does the mass come from for a plant?

Hmm. The air, man. Interesting. We breathe out the carbon, carbon dioxide. The plant sequester. esters the carbon, so it gets its mass from the air, not from the nutrients and shit. Yeah, it needs that too. But it's the, but that's why the soil doesn't drop, right?

So it's fascinating to think that air is so much more than we think it is. Getting back to the point, holotrophic breathwork is when you hyperventilate for, it could be 20 minutes, 15, 45, and you get as high as you would doing a few grams of mushrooms. Really? for sure or like getting eating eating enough pot where you feel a full body physical high i tried it for the first time maybe just two years ago and i felt like my dead grandmother had come back put her hands on my shoulders and said it's okay i couldn't make it back for a funeral so i felt some remorse but

it's okay son it's fine i forgive you just by breathing hmm and so whether it be again drugs or alcohol or some kind of plant medicine. Breathing itself is an incredible tool that we, I think we're just starting to re-unlock, because I think we forgot it, the tools breath can give us, the capabilities, the visions, the lessons even. How interesting. Yeah, I spoke with William Trubridge. Have you heard of him? He's arguably the greatest free diver of all time. He lives between Bahamas and Japan and lives in Blue Hole in Bahamas, which is, as he calls it, like, if you were to create a free diving destination, it is the perfect destination for free diving.

And we were having this discussion where he was like, he was like, you know, you hyperventilate. I was like, yeah, you know, you're oxygenate your blood. And he goes, no, exactly what you said. You're extolling all the CO2. Right. And we were talking about drugs. And it's so funny you bring this up because he's like,

I've done a lot of drugs. This is what he said. He was like when I was in college, did Molly, did ecstasy, did mushroom, smoked weed. I liked substances. I liked chasing that feeling. And he said he stopped doing it after like two weeks of free diving. And now he's dead. his whole life to free diving, teaching others to free dive.

And he actually teaches an anxiety course through the breathwork that he learned through free diving. And he's described it like, look, I could meditate for 45 minutes and get to a really contemplative, reflective place that is like spiritual. Or I could swim for 30 seconds. I hit, I start descending. And he holds a world record 365 feet or something, finless free dive, single breath hold. And he says, like, sometimes he'll do training. And he will like go into a cave. and he'll just lay there. He can hold his breath

eight, nine minutes, easy. And he'll go down there, it's like a minute down, and he'll hang there for three or four minutes. And he says, those experiences, he's thinking about his wife and his kids on the boat at the top of the water. He's thinking about being connected to all the oceans in the world, how he's one with everything. Like, literally

the psychedelic mushroom trip that people would have. And he says he has that same euphoria and bliss that he could get doing the substances that he's already felt. But he says through the breathwork and the sensory deprivation of being in the water, he's like it's the same feeling he says the difference is that it's sustainable and that it kind of comes from within like he says like using these substances to put you into a different place externally

isn't really sustainable you know like you know alcohol makes us feel good weed makes us feel good mushrooms make us feel good but if you do it every day and abuse it it destroys you yeah but you could meditate and you can get in the water and you could lay there and feel that oneness clean it's pure and you're getting that same euphoria and peace in a sustainable way you could do it every day And the way he describes it was just like, blew my mind. I was like, wow, what a powerful thing that we have here that, you know, I like to use drugs to inform my sobriety. I never want to abuse drugs. And so even, you know, if I did Molly, I like to have that feeling of like, oh, what does it feel like to just want to love everyone?

And then when I get sober, I'm like, oh, I should do that more. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I don't want to rely on the substance, but it was useful to use the substance to get to that place. And I think people can get to it through meditation. And it is interesting, the desire to want to disconnect from reality. across every culture. I mean, it's such an interesting thing. And I'm curious if it's struggle.

Like we, like as human beings, the human experience is struggle. And it is hard. And when it is not hard, it's kind of like a fluke. You know, at least it should be. And so I wonder if the desire to be fucked up or to create disconnect. I almost think fucked up is like almost like a pejorative for what it could be. And I know you don't mean it that way. But I think it is the desire to disconnect, to create a little bit of distance from this realm and this plane that we're existing in to kind of get into a

headspace. What do you think that why? Like, why is it across all cultures the desire to disconnect a little bit? Three months ago, I had a pretty intense mushroom trip. How many grams? Four and a half. Wow. Yeah. And as I was there, I had a little cigar, one of those cigarette rios, kind of little cigarette style ones. Probably hit those later. Buss one of these up. And I was looking at it, and they were individually wrapped, as they are. Take a look at this. They always are. Right. And I was there and one thing I've seen a lot of places, tobacco's used everywhere. Not cigarettes, but tobacco.

Whether you smoke it or snuffing up your nose, like Rapay in the Amazon or use it as an incense, there's lots of ways tobacco is used ceremonially. And I was looking at this, and I thought it was so similar to what we are. Inside, there is this wholesome thing made of earth, right? Tobacco leaves, that's it. On the outside is a fake layer of plastic used to protect.

what's inside. Humans are exactly the same way. We have our true selves on the inside, but to weather the storm of real life, you never know where this thing's going to go. You know what I mean? You have to build a fake synthetic layer on the outside to protect what's inside. The problem with humans is we can't really get rid of that layer easily. We got to, you know, try something else. We've got to bend it. We've got to take it off through, in my opinion, whether it's smoking, drinking, doing something to just bend reality a little bit. then we can live a little bit more freely, right? And there's lots of ways you can do that.

Even tobacco itself just helps take a bit of an edge off things, you know? And so I think that it's the same thing. And I would argue that plastic is fear, man. We are so tuned into fear humans are. You'd think that we would have figured it up by now, but I think because the most fearful of us were the ones that survived the wars and the beasts, therefore fear has become such an important survival mechanism. So not feeling fear would get you killed.

So feeling fear is as human as breathing. And now in a modern world where we don't have struggle, we fear so much. We don't have experience either. One thing I noticed with the Hads as well is that they have small groups. Are you familiar with Dunbar's number? Yeah. I love that realization. Can you explain what that is?

For sure. There was a scientist that studied. brain size in primates. And what he discovered is that at a certain point, primate groups would fractal. They would break at a certain number and form smaller groups, and it was in correlation with their brain size. So orangutans, chimps, bonobos, would all do that. And for humans, the size at which they would fracture based on our brain size was 150. And then from there, we would, again, fracture and fracture again. So that, I'm kind of extrapolating that information. But if you think about it, so that means our default brain setting is 150, right?

Our brain works at numbers of 150. So it ties very interestingly into our risk assessment because generally the odds are always 150. If some dude gets bit by a snake, one in 150, you know? If a guy gets eaten by a shark, one in 150. And so now we have a world where we have the experiences of 8 billion freaking people, all happening all at once. We receive the worst things, the kidnappings, the beheadings, you know?

the guy mauled by a rampaging zebra, that gets blasted because it's good clickbait, that goes to us and our brain set on one in 150. And so we assess risk so poorly. We're terrible at assessing risk. We'll do things like, you know, drive cars, right? Super dangerous. The two things I'm most scared about as a traveler is infected cuts, staff, MRS, and driving cars. Statistically, super dangerous. And And even in the States, there's like a one in seven chance you'll die of obesity, man. Yeah. That means the most dangerous thing you can do is nothing. Right?

Sit at home and worry about the world is the most dangerous thing statistically you can do. Yeah. Right. Skydiving is like one in 200,000. Yeah. Right. And even like shark attacks, there's 10 maybe fatal shark attacks a year, 510. From there, do you know how many sharks people kill a year in comparison?

thousands, hundreds of thousands. 100,000 sharks a year. Right? And those odds are just tiny. So we're just so bad at assessing risk that way. You know what I mean? I mean, that 150 is so interesting that we're assessing everything based off of that number.

Exactly. Yeah, like, I mean, if you're in a remote tribe and the amount of people you're with is about 150, someone gets bit by a snake and you're like, okay, yeah, that's the risk. You're making an actual judgment. Yeah. Did you find that the people you were with were,

had a different relationship with risk and fear. Oh, they feared snakes, right? And they feared the poisons of the modern world, man. How interesting. Have you ever seen that there was a recent study that I saw was like an infographic again. I don't know. It might be dubious, the veracity of this information.

But it was dreams, like nightmares people have across society, across the world. And so like the most prevalent nightmare people have across the entire country. So in America, do you know what the biggest, most fearful, reoccurring nightmare could be. I would say falling? It's the tie between falling and losing your teeth.

Oh, I've had a losing teeth dream. Of course. Why, though? I don't have no idea. I'm assuming it's connected like vanity or so like, well that's like our social currency. If you're missing your teeth, things are not going so well. You're other old or poor or whatever. And in basically every other place in the world, it snakes.

Yeah. The nightmare across almost everywhere is literally like, oh, I got bit by a snake in my sleep. wake up oh there's no snake yeah because snakes are a real problem i love snakes snakes are killed for for bad reasons all over the world often cultures will kill a snake upon seeing a snake because they assume it's it's venomous but i've got a super cool story about that too so um my channel my channel is called fearless and far right not because i am fearless i was probably born more fearful than most but i've realized that fearlessness is a choice you make in the face of fear so anyone can be

fearless, it's just making a choice in a moment, deciding to do it anyway. That's what I preach. And so I've done a lot of research about fear, and I found the most fascinating story about snakes. So they were doing a study with babies, six months old, so just barely alive, right? Just barely born. Very few experiences. And they had photos of snakes and fish, spiders and flowers. And they were all blurred. Okay, so you couldn't really tell which was which. And if you blur them, you could see how they would look similar, right? They would slowly unblur these photos for these newborns, again, who have no frame of reference what a flower or a spider was.

And every single time, the baby's pupils would dilate when it became a spider. Because epinephrine dilates the pupils, which is one of the fear hormones, which means that fear isn't learned. We thought fear was something you learned from your mom. You see a, your mom sees a rat. She jumps up. she's scared. Okay, rats bad. I'm scared. No, no, no. We have fears embedded in our brains already when we're born. How interesting is that? Fascinating. Mostly ancestral threats. So snakes would have been a big deal. Spiders would have been a big deal as well. But it begs the

question, right? So if there's, if it's proven that there's fear pre-baked into our brains, what else is in there? We're a social primate, man. We need to be part of the tribe. So if we're kicked out of the tribe. We're ostracized. That's even, that's even scarier than snakes and snakes. Yeah, it's a death sentence. So then no wonder we have social anxiety. No wonder we're afraid of public speaking. Naturally. Because again, if snakes and spiders are that scary, man, getting kicked out of the tribe means you are dead. You need your boys. Interesting. And the whole tribe. So that I found that fascinating. That's me kind of taking the data forward, but at the same time, it would make so much incredible sense. Absolutely. I mean, have you seen it? I know you hate cats,

but there is a lot of really funny videos where people will like prank their cats where they basically put a cucumber behind the cat and then when the cat turns around they jump three feet freak out because they think it's a snake they think it's a snake oh fascinating right so they have like this sort of like elongated thing that they're not really familiar with

and my cat has never seen a snake right well maybe it has it was like a little kitten when we found her in the bushes but not attacked by a snake no of course not I mean it's attacked by a snake we wouldn't have a cat and so literally like we put the cucumber behind her cat cat freaks out, has never seen a snake before, doesn't have any concept of what it is. And I don't think the cat's afraid of veggies.

No, hopefully not. Exactly, right? It is this fear that's built into them baked into their brain. And that is a little, like, concerning for me, because I'm like, how many generations does it take for it to get ingrained? Like, we've heard this idea of, like, ancestral trauma that a lot of people talk about that people kind of assume

maybe is, you know, like new age hippie bullshit. But I'm like, what if your great, great grandfather developed a fear. Right. And that maybe is abnormal from like the rest of the human experience. Something hyper-specific. Is it possible that could get passed down

genetically without ever being taught to you and it is built into your DNA? Right. That's a fascinating question that we don't have an answer to is, is it one experience or is it a collective experience that just kind of sunk in there? If it's one experience, that's almost like a collective consciousness.

Yeah. It's fascinating to think. Yeah. Another example with cats is that there's the same again embedded fear and instinctual fear response was shown even greater in an animal study where there was mice who had lived some like eight, ten generations in a lab. So again, like, mom was in a lab, born babies, babies down ten generations. And then they took these babies who had lived

10 generations in a lab and they put them into a cage with the scent of a cat, just the scent and the baby's fruit. Ten generations removed from ever seeing a cat and still the smell of a cat caused a fear response. How bizarre. It's cool, right? Yeah, it's really cool. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break real quick because you need an attorney. That's right. Someone you can trust, someone you can count on. And that's why if you're ever injured, you could check out Morgan and Morgan. Yeah, Morgan and Morgan. Those are good people over at Morgan and Morgan. And this is why they're good people. Anytime you get injured, you got to find an attorney, you got to go online, you got to go through all these sketchy websites, find a guy in your area. It's a nightmare. Am I going to get ripped off?

Is he actually going to be good? That's why you can cut out all the hassle with. with Morgan and Morgan. That's right. They have a proven track record. They've recovered over $15 billion for their clients. That's amazing. And here's the greatest part. It's so easy to submit a claim to Morgan and Morgan.

You can go to their website for the people.com, submit a claim in eight clicks or less. You can basically do it from sitting at your couch. You got rear-ended, you slipped, you fell, you hurt your hip. Morgan and Morgan could be the people for you. You can submit a claim in eight clicks or less. It's so easy.

It's never been more simple to submit a claim to an attorney. Now here's the greatest thing. Morgan and Morgan won't charge you a single dollar unless they win your case. That's how confident they are that they can recover some money for you. Not only is Morgan and Morgan as a personal injury law firm solid, I've had the pleasure of knowing some of the people within the organization. That's right. Dan Morgan, aka Demo Swag, this guy is multi-talent. He's a triple threat. He's a future S&L writer. He has a rap career. As a rapper, this guy literally lays down bars, okay?

And he's an attorney. I mean, what else do you want, dude? You want to be on the team with people that have multiple talents, all right? And you've got to get in while they're hot. Dan Morgan, Dimo, Swag, he might blow up and just become, you know, the next Judd Apatow. Who knows, right? This guy can do it all. So if you're interested in freestyle rap help, if you're interested in potentially getting an attorney and submitting a claim, these are the people for you, they can do it all,

specifically Dan Morgan, specifically Dimo Swag, all right? Check out blowing all my stacks on SoundCloud. If you're interested in this for potentially attorney help, but also some freestyle rap help, who knows? You could check out for the people. That's right. That's for the people.com if you're ever injured or if you have other creative needs that you might need. You can go to for the people.com slash gagnon. That's correct. For the people.com slash gaug-G-N-O-N. Submit a claimant eight clicks or less. It is so simple.

For more information, go to for the people.com slash gagnon, Gagnan, Gagnan, Gagnan, G-A-G-N-O-N, or dial pound-pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That's for the people, F-O-R-the-P-O-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-L-E-L-E-L from your cell phone. Stop blowing all your stacks. Start saving some money. Start recovering some money if you're ever injured. You could check out Morgan and Morgan. Now let's get back to the show. We're back.

We just had an experience that is my least favorite thing about living in the city as I hate peeing inside. I hate it. I hate peeing inside. That feels unnatural. That is gross to me. Tell me the pros and cons. Peeing inside is like, okay, I'm peeing into water. Perfectly good water.

It's splashing up on me. Sometimes someone else peed in there. I'm splashing pee on to me. People shit. in the water now I'm peeing into shit splashing shit particles up I'm inside this room it smells weird I hate it I'm like it's the worst experience now in Florida where I grew up I got a pee go outside backyard that's an experience I like that what's your best diarrhea story I'm trying to think of a good one I mean I'm I

don't want to talk about today's but I'm trying to think I have my best diarrhea story oh this is a this is a bad one I was like 12 years old plant's I played soccer all growing up. And I was playing at this field in Orlando. And these soccer fields in Orlando are like big giant fields. And then there's like one porta potty like half a mile away. So it's this big tournament. I'm playing.

We're at the age where there's still girls playing on the team. And the girls were the best ones. I mean, like boys pre puberty, girls like basically post puberty. Like, of course. These chicks were beasts. Right. And so they were fucking us up. But there was a girl on the team I really liked.

I was like kind of had a crush on. And I'm like a kid, right? And so I'm playing the game. And in the middle of the game, I'm like, oh I don't feel so good I don't know what's going on dude I was drinking pasteurized milk probably should I have my mom's unpastorized and so I'm like not feeling good I'm like

oh no I literally run off the field I don't get subbed off I don't tell the coach I just like the ball's over here I'm running towards the ball the ball gets pushed to the other side of the field and I just keep on running other priorities yeah and the coach is like no more the other way and now I'm in the other field I like on another game and just

running through that field my coach is like no the goal is done this one and I'm just fucking booking it right butt clunged run where your hips are forward. Oh my gosh. I mean, it's not even, you're not even running at this point. Like, I'm like, it looks like an idiot. And so I'm running over this port potty and there's an effect.

I can't remember the name of it. It's like the porcelain effect where once you see the toilet. Oh, yeah. Your brain goes, it's time. And so literally I'm running. I see this port of potty and I'm like 20 feet away. Pets. Fertilions.

The fields. Explosion, dude. Oh my God. And I'm far enough away from my team that no one knows. But now I'm in my soccer cleats. I'm in my socks. I'm in my shorts. loaded. I mean, just absolutely plastered, right? And it's like filling up my shoe. I'm dumping it out.

I mean, it is an insane amount for just a boy to have. And I am just like, I'm so nauseous. I finally make it in there. And I'm just like, it's like my, like literally, it's like dumb and dumber, dude. I'm like covered in fucking chocolate shit. It's like the grossest thing. And I'm sitting in there and I'm like, what do I do? Because now I made it to the bathroom. I feel okay. But I got to get out there. And you got shitty shorts. I'm covered in shit. Like I can't even explain to you. It's like, it looks like fucking slumdog millionaire, bro. Like I landed in the fucking, and I'm in it. And it's all over me.

It's like fucking war pain. I'm putting it on. And I'm like, okay, what do I do? I literally sat in there for like 10 minutes. Just like, I can't leave. Where am I supposed to go? I'm not going to walk back to the field.

And then eventually I hear the knock. Oh, my God. And I'm like, oh, no. Like, what am I going to do? Like, there's only one porta potty. There's a line. I've made a mess of this whole thing. And all of a sudden I hear my mom's voice.

Okay. Thank God is your mom. An angel sent from heaven. Yeah, yeah. I open up the thing. Marky? Yeah, literally. I'm like, hey mom, I have a problem.

I have an accident. And she knows there's a problem. It's like she followed a baboon that got hit with a poison arrow. Like there is a trail leading to the porta potty. And she's like, oh, this is bad. Stay right here. And so I lock up the porta potty again. And now I'm like, oh, thank God.

My mom's here. She's going to take care of me. She pulls the car, like, drives it onto the field, like, fucking hit in a concession stand, like popped a soccer ball. Like fruit cart goes over where. Like, fucking bananas fly. And she like makes it right in front of the portobie. Like, she like rolls open the door.

Like it's a fucking hostage situation. Like bank out of it. She's like, get in the car. I open it up. I literally get in and she goes, take off all your clothes. And I was like, okay. So I just like, take everything off. And I just like, my mom has a bag.

We throw it in the back of the bag. And then we just leave. We leave the game. We drive to like a store, like a Ross or something. She buys me like these giant basketball shorts that don't fit. And I'm like, okay, fine. I'm in my clothes. I'm good.

And she's like, so, you want to go back to the game? Like, no. I'm not going back to the game. Are you kidding? It's over. Yeah, dude. Like, we lost six nothing. Like they're missing a player for half of it.

Like, what are you talking about? And so literally, I'm like, no, we can't go back. And so we just leave. And then we finally, we go back to practice. And I'm expecting everyone to make fun of me. It's going to be a whole thing. And I'm like, fuck, dude. Like, this is going to be the worst day in my life.

I show up to practice the next day or like two days later. And I walk on the field and no one says anything. You got away with it. Wow. No one said anything. I was like, this is amazing. Like, no, I expected to have jokes. I had like my thing lined up.

I was like, no, fuck you. Like, I had like, I had ammo. No one says, anything. And then the coach comes over to me and goes, hey, Mark, sorry for your loss. It's like, sorry for your loss. Like, you guys lost the game. I fucked you over. And apparently my mom had told the coach, hey, Mark had to leave the game and because we found out that my mom had passed away. I was like, what? So she told the coach and basically was like, yeah, just like be cool about it. And the coach was like, why did he just run off in the middle of the game? And she was like,

oh, well, I told him before that at a certain time he had to leave. Like your grandma died. Literally. Yeah. Lied to the whole team that we had a family emergency. We had to leave. What an angel. And I was like, wow. Your mom deserves the gold star, man.

I know. Purple heart. Dude. So she took one for me. It was like, nah, that's what it is. And he was like, oh, man, thank goodness. I thought he should himself. There was shit all over the port.

It's like, this is a big issue, bro. It was a crime scene. Literally. I thought that was him. I thought he died. I thought he got sucked into the tube. And she took one for me and we fucking no one, no one brought it up. No one even knows that story.

What it synced. until everyone hears it now that I played soccer with. That's what really happened, okay? Listen, every real man has a good diarrhea story. Yeah. Well, what's yours? So I was hanging with a death tribe in Indonesia. Okay.

That was the name of my soccer team, actually. Yeah, yeah. So in this place called Toraya in Sulawesi, Indonesia, there's like a tribe there where they have different views on death. I'm with my local contact. We're bouncing around funeral to funeral, visiting these places where they sacrifice. 30, 40, water buffalo per funeral, and they put the bodies in the cliffs, and then they

take the bodies out of the cliffs 10 years later, and they have family reunions with dead bodies. So it's already a pretty intense experience. And there's no really schedule of when these funerals happen. You just have to fucking get on a motorcycle and bounce around and ask people. So we're on day seven of watching dead people walk around being held by other people. And I'd eaten some bad curry. So my buddy Andri's motorcycle had this shitty seat in the back. My pelvis was rattling against this frame for seven days, bouncing around the backwoods of middle of nowhere, Indonesia.

And I realized I got a shit real bad. And it wasn't one of those polite moments where it's like, oh, sometimes soon you may have to visit a bathroom. You know, this polite diarrhea. Then there's like aggressive, offensive. This was like, you need a bathroom now. T minus 10. Exactly. Nine.

And so I'm like, Andrew, I need a bathroom. But we were traveling on the side of this kind of cliff hill. And so there was no place to pull over. And he's like, all right, up here, there's a small village. And so we're going and that we can't pull over. Otherwise, I'm sitting in the street. And so eventually on like five from 10, countdown from zero, we get to this hut that's kind of like half perched in this little plateau on this mountain side.

And so we go run up. He knocks in the door. And he's like, oh, my friend needs a bathroom. Of course, they don't speak English. And the woman gestures around the back. And so I run around the back. And there's three doors there. I go with the first one, knock, knock, knock, knock, open, open, open, open, nothing.

Locked. Second door. Pull open, open, open, shake, shake, nothing. Third door, same thing. Locked. Fuck. And so I realized there's a little patch of forest that's off to the side. So I run down the stairs again, go, and it's not a forest, it's their pumpkin patch.

And I'm going to shit my pants at this point. And I pull down my pants, and I shit all in their pumpkin patch. And I turn around, and because I had rattled and shook in every single door, it was like, grandma, No. Grandpa. Nine year old daughter all watching my bare white ass shit. No. That was, my back was facing them.

Shit into their fucking pumpkin patch. In their crops. This is their food. Yes. Bro. So what happened? What can you do? I ran away.

I went to the front. We got back on the motorcycle and I left. With a shit ass. I wiped on a fucking pumpkin. But like, how am I going to, what can you say though when you shit in someone's pumpkin passion. Happy Halloween. Happy. Bro, that is wild.

And then you just hit it. I mean, if anyone is allowed to hate, like, white Western tourists, it's those people. Exactly. They should be allowed. I'm so sorry. But I didn't know what, I did not know what else to do. I mean, that is brutal. Damn.

Yeah. Okay. Now, before our pee excursion, you were mentioning the drug culture of these different tribes. And I want to get into, like, the drug and also, like, the spirituality. Like, like, everyone. has this need to get fucked up and then music and dance, what is that ayahuasca experience like and how does it interface with their belief about God and existence? I've traveled quite a bit in South America, like Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, a lot of places. And that changed my view on

some of these psychedelics in particular because I was in this remote community in the middle of Brazil and I was trying to do Cambo. Cambo's this frog poison ritual where they they literally take a stick, fire, they burn your skin, they rub poison in. You have a severe allergic reaction. Your face swells up, you throw up. And then supposedly, and maybe truthfully, you see better, smell better, hunt better. So these people would do it for, they would say it boost your immune system, but also increases your senses. I didn't bring a eye chart, but it really did feel to work. So I was there to do that, which was an experience in itself. But the night before, I was with all of the village elders in this long house they had. And they were sipping ayahuasca,

doing rapé. Rapais is a blend of probably tobacco, probably coca, probably a lot of different things. And they've taken a hollow eagle bones, since birds' bones are hollow, and they blow this powder into each other's noses. And they were saying they do that, again, tobacco and coca leaf, to speak to high-level spirits, and they were sipping ayahuasca to speak to low-level spirits. And so through my translator, I'm like, oh, so like, you know, heaven and hell. Like, no, no, no, just, you know, not good or bad. Just different, you know, because death doesn't have to be bad. Death is what happens to everyone. It's the natural cycle of things. So it wasn't considered the underworld to be a bad place, just the next place. And that was interesting perspective, being using these substances to be

able to speak to spirits. And spirits can be all sorts of different things, right, in our modern lives or in their traditional lives. And I got quite interested in the land of psychedelics and being able to talk to the spirits of my own life or spirits of past lives or other people's lives. And so I pursued different ayahuasca spirit experiences in different places, different jungles around the world. So I had one recently, which destroyed my foundation, fundamentally rebuilt me. from the ground up. Fuck me up for weeks. And so again, I'm Mr. Fearless and Far, traveling the world to fight my fear. So I've done, like I'm a certified skydiver, certified scuba diver, free diver. I used to have a deathly fear of public speaking. Now, obviously, that's been gone over as well.

So I approached this third Iwas experience in the jungle, previously having two before, with an attitude of let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes because I think I've seen my demons. Mark, man, there is shit hidden underneath the surface that you are not ready for, that we are not ready for. So let me sit the stage. I have been traveling around the Yucatan Peninsula, right? And this is the land of the Maya. And we talk about the Maya like there are people of the past. like the Maya don't exist anymore.

There's still 7 million Mayans existing today, many of whom who still speak the original language, Maya, that still exists. You go an hour from Cancun, you could find boys who only speak Mayan. That's it. So in that, there's lots of caves filled with artifacts. There's still guys who sacrifice animals to the rain god, Klaok. Like, Chuck, sorry, Chuck. That still happens.

But it's not well known. In Belize, there's a particular cave that still has a lot of artifacts in it, human remains of virgins that were hauled down to the depths of these caves and sacrificed. In Belize in particular, there's a few ones called ATM cave where there is something called the crystal maiden, which is a crystallized skeleton, a virgin that was sacrificed there a couple hundred years ago. And because of the calcification of the limestone, she's now a crystallized skeleton in the base of this cave. You have to crawl through rivers to get there. Fuck. That place is, I don't want to say well-known, but it's an attraction in Belize. You can go.

There's no videos about it. You probably haven't heard of it because one of the first people to bring a camera, maybe 10 years ago, drop the camera and crack this poor crystal skeleton skull. And now they're like, no cameras. Imagine being that tourist, man. What an idiot, dude. I mean, fuck. Drop their point shoot, crack the skull. And now no cameras.

So it's not as popular globally as it should be. but it exists. ATM cave. You can look it up. But there's another cave. It's called the black hole. So there's the blue hole in Belize, which is the big scuba diving place.

It's like a blue eye in the middle of the ocean. It's one of the wonders of the worlds, they say. But there's a black hole in Belize, which is a cave you have to repel down into, and you can hike two hours inside of it through a river. And inside there, there's a sacrificial site where Mayans would have sacrificed humans to their reign god.

Because the Mayan civilization, a lot of reasons, it fell apart, but one of them was no rain. So at the end of the Mayan Empire, they were sacrificing more and more humans to hopefully appease the gods and get more rain. There's a skull there that was lopped off the head of a virgin

and placed in one location for probably the past, they don't know exactly how long, but several hundred years. And because it hasn't been moved, it's been completely calcified. A crystal skull still exists, just like real life Indiana Jones.

Bro. So we were on expedition to see this thing. We had to crawl through this cave, pressing yourself through cracks the size of your chest, climbing up these massive cave formations that are millions of years old and found this crystal skull. And so we had been really tuned into Mayan sacrifice, right? Like we had spent days and weeks even going to many of these caves, finding these things, finding Mayan obsidian blades. They would have cut heads and wrists with to give blood sacrifices.

Also on top of that, you hear like they gave blood. They would offer blood by two ways. the women would take an obsidian blade and plunge it through their tongue and then run a thorny vine through the hole in their tongue or a knotted rope to get the blood out or dudes would use their foreskin. So blade and then run a knotted rope through a foreskin piercing to do to do blood sacrifice. God damn. So where was I going with this? Right. We had been tuned in. So a picture of these Mayan guys with shaved teeth because they They sharpen their teeth with files. With gemstones inset on their shark teeth, they would also take the heads of babies, and they would tie wooden planks to their foreheads and then tie a rope.

So they had flat foreheads on that plank. They'd also take a small stone attached to a rope and dangle it in front of their eyes. So they become cross-eyed. So picture cross-eyed, flat-headed people with shark teeth imbued with diamonds, infusing themselves in the ass with hallucinogenics. because they had these special trumpet-shaped things where they'd put hallucinogenic in their assholes bent over going into these caves for sacrifices.

This was the world I was immersed in. I did not rectally do hallucinogens. Not saying I wouldn't. But that's how the Mayans used to do it. So I was all about this world. And then the opportunity came up to do an ayahuasca retreat. And I had just come straight from finding the crystal skull. And also had done a few before.

And so I went in with the attitude, let's see how deep this rabbit hole goes, right? I think I've confronted most of my fears, you know? So there's a small group of us. We meet in the jungle. We're in this kind of yurt thing. There's a shaman there. He has a kind of ayahuasca. There's hundreds of kinds of ayahuasca.

We speak about it like ayahuasca is a hallucinogen, but ayahuasca is a vine that then unlocks the DMT of other plants. So, and there's quite a few plants. So you can have all sorts of different concoctions of ayahuasca. This one is called sky, sierra, sky ayahuasca. And so generally what happens with these ceremonies is you all sit in a circle. There is a shaman in the middle who has this gourd or something. He pours you a glass.

You take a shot. And what does the shaman look like? This guy, so this guy was actually a white dude. However, he something like 30 years ago, went to Gabon, I believe, in Africa. And there's a plant there called Iboga, which is the most dangerous and powerful hallucinogenic in the world. It's an African plant. And generally how you become a shaman in this culture in Gabon is you ingest some dangerous amount of Iboga. It can kill you.

And then you go into a coma for one week, two weeks, three weeks, and then you die. Or you awaken and become a shaman. So this man had done that some 20, 30 years ago, was in a, I think, a two-week coma in the middle of Africa, awoke again, and then was Christianed with becoming a shaman. So he's put in the reps, bro. Whoa. So in this tribe, he was the guy. And now he's made it his life mission to be able to help people with these experiences. So he travels to the world.

And I don't know if there's anything more legit than that. So maybe he's not, you know, a shaman from the depth. in the Amazon, but the dude is put in the time. And so he, from there, gave a round, you take a shot to ayahuasca. It tastes like the shavings from the bottom of a gas, of a gas run lawnmower. Gasoline, grass clipping. It doesn't taste good. It tastes nasty. So first shot, I sit back. Notoriously, I take a while, like I can drink alcohol and smoke and it's seriously pretty fine. So first shot, I don't feel very much. Second shot, I start to feel hallucinogenic. Things. are painted on the walls patterns mandoluz things like that you start having emotions joy awe

like how often do you feel awe true awe these things you had never felt before and so i'm starting to trip like pretty good after two shots and then he opens the the ceremony again and says if anyone wants any more you can come in for a third shot i'm already 75% gone knowing that the trip is continuing but i got a piss and i've done two shots before so i'm like yeah i want to take a third Biggest mistake of my life. So I go up and I kind of hobble over in the candlelight, take the third shot. All right. The plan was to take a shot.

Go take a piss outside. Come back in the year. So I take the third shot. Go outside. Kind of hobble through. I see this world almost looking through one of those symbols, the prism. Yeah, clidoscopes. Everything's interesting patterns.

I can still kind of walk. I get to the edge of the forest. I go piss in nature. The best way to do it. And then I'm like, shit, I got to puke because puking's part of it. I'm not a puker, but after three. shots of this horrible lawnmower clipping beverage, you got to puke. Normally after one you puke. So I take a knee and I puke and I puke and I puke and I puke and I puke and then I stand

up and I'm like, all right, I had to get back because, you know, this is going to get bad. And I realize I have no idea where I am anymore. I can't even tell, I can't even see the path back. I may be 30 feet from the front door. I wasn't far. I could not see anything but patterns. So I take three steps and I'm like, looks like we're camping here tonight. I lay down, there's a pile of dead leaves and sticks. I curl up in the fetal position in this pile of dead leaves and sticks. And this was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me. When you drink, you smoke, you pot, whatever, you do drugs.

Generally, you can always know where your body is. Right? You can feel, okay, you know, like I know where I am. Maybe your mind's spinning. Maybe you've got the rolls, whatever. I was laying there, curled up in the fetal position, and I was squeezing my hands and it felt like, One hand was drifting way up there. One hand was down there.

I was losing sense of where my body was. That is a scary feeling because now you are adrift at sea in your own mind. There is no ground anymore. There is no body. There is no body. You have become the earth. You've become the universe. And my heart started thumping like I had never felt before my life because there goes any buoy.

Any safety is now gone. And the patterns that I would see were very similar to what you'd feel maybe with mushrooms or any DMT, but these started to get aggressive towards me. I get pulsing, vibrant patterns. And then if you've done these things before, again, these patterns are quite beautiful, but the intensity, they started to shake and then literally the world ripped open. So I saw a tear blast open. And it became a horrifying white light.

I can only compare it to, let's say you've never seen inside a human body before and someone just tears open a human body. It is horrific, but kind of fascinating. Oh my God, look how complex and beautiful this machine, this biological machine is. But how horrifying it is at the same time. That was the feeling that I had. But an undeniable presence that I was being watched by someone. There was someone there.

There was no one around me. I was in the middle of fucking jungle. There was somebody observing me who was like, oh, you little mortal, you wanted to see behind the curtain. You were not ready. You poured little moat of dust. It was like, I felt like an earthworm being shown the schematics of a rocket ship. I couldn't even understand the paper that it was printed on, let alone what it even meant. I was shown the entirety of the universe.

and I knew in my entire lifetime I would never know what I saw. I was shown the answer. I was shown the purpose, but my little feeble brain, my earthworm brain could never even come close to understanding the paper it was printed on. And with that comes a little bit of fear, right? Like primordial, visceral, all-encompassing fear, panic, terror,

like you've never felt before. I am nothing in the world. the face of this. And in that moment, there was a beautiful comparison that all I wanted to do was give myself the best gift, the ultimate thing I could do with my life, was just giving myself to that. I didn't want to die, but my entire existence would be justified by giving myself to that thing. And then I got mine sacrifice. I had seen the skulls in the caves, the crystallized remains of of sacrifice victims. Not all were involuntary. I'm sure some were. But if you hit hit that point, you feel like there's no greater gift. Your life purpose is to offer what, like what can you

offer to this thing besides yourself? So I sat there in this pure terror trying to give myself to it, not even trying to die per se in the case of like suicide. I think it's a very, superficial way to think about it, but that it felt like the right thing to do. And that's all that was going to quell this, this presence, this force in my life. And so there I am trying to offer myself to this thing, trembling. And I remember there just like laying and shaking and being like saying some some silly things to myself, like, it's okay, baby, it's all right. And one thing that I had to keep on saying is it's it's just the trip.

Every trip has an end. Every trip has an end. Every trip has an end. But I was reduced to nothing. I was a cork floating in an ocean when I didn't even realize I was a cork. I was lost man. But in that beautiful, terrifying moment, I understood what human sacrifice served, right? And how you could in a moment of pure, just authentic.

like pure being, you know, with no filters, no plastic in between you and this thing. Be like, yeah, this is what I would do in my life. There's nothing else I can do besides give myself to this thing. Wow. So came back from that and could not find my feet for several weeks after. I would just stare off into the distance. Like, is that God? Yeah, I guess it probably was.

Is it the guy in the white robe or the dude with a bunch of arms? No, but it's, it was undeniably something that I felt. undeniable feeling of there was something there with me that was showing me this what is this i can never understand but it was something and from there i i appreciate psychedelics i appreciate tuning the knobs of consciousness to try to understand our purpose why we're here even like paying penance in the sense of it could be as simple as going to the gym or doing the thing you're afraid of like all of these things suffering in itself shows that shows this thing that you are worth it and you are working to live your best life and you are paying penance to it. I kind of feel it all came together

in that moment. And as crazy as human sacrifice seems now, so removed from it, it felt like the exact right thing to do in that moment. Wow. Yeah. That is heavy. Life changing, right? And so what were you seeing? Like you said you were seeing patterns and then this whiteness. It ripped open. And was it the continual whiteness? Was it consuming? Was the whiteness all around you? It was just like, if anything, you know, when a spaceship hits hyperspeed colors, you know,

in the sci-fi movies where you go into light speed and then everything just, a force just kind of pushes it. It was a bit like that. Yeah. Whoa. But an undeniable presence that somebody and something was there. When I was laying in the bushes, there was someone else. who had a bad trip as well, who was nearby.

And like maybe within, let's say, three, four meters. And that, that was not presence. Like, I, it was an acknowledgment. Someone was there, but that wasn't, that wasn't presence. Like, there was someone there seeing parts of me that I did not know someone could see. And then from there, it's hard to gather the fragments back to take, you know, some bullshit fears you have in your own life seriously when you feel that. that creationary fear, like that primordial ooze, pawns, scum, you are just a little thing

and a massive web type of fear. Whoa. Yeah, man. And so what was that come down? Like, how long did that experience last for? What was your sense of time? Well, so that ayahuasca is a bit similar to mushrooms in the sense that it doesn't fuck you up for like a day, right?

So probably had my dosage around seven and was. was pretty good by 12. Wow. So my trip to the depths of my soul was maybe, again, I didn't have a watch, but like an hour and a half, the longest hour and a half of my life, but probably about that.

And then they lit a campfire outside, and we just sat around and kind of chatted, man. The shaman, they're good, a good shaman doesn't interfere because, again, if you're facing your demons, that's not a bad thing.

Like bad trips don't have to be a bad thing. They can change your life and they can give you new perspective. It's horrifying, but there are lessons to be gleaned from the back of the Dragon's Cave, you know? Yeah. Did you discover things about yourself, like specific things in that moment that you still take with you? Well, I had always suspected some kind of interconnectivity with the world. And that showed it to me very vividly, right? And I still don't consider myself, like, religious.

I used to think I was atheist, but now after something like that, I can't say I'm atheist, or like agnostic of anything. But feeling that, that fear that was so overpowering made me come back to my own life and realize like all of this bullshit we feel with, you know, like in public speaking or asking for a raise or approaching a girl or pick it, you know, being on a podcast, whatever, speaking to a guest who's famous, those little. butterflies. What is that exactly? Right? I think a lot about fear and our interpretation of fear is really interesting because like biochemically fear and excitement are almost identical. And one is

just your focus on a negative outcome and the other is focused on a positive outcome, excitement and fear is negative outcome. And that fine line is so interesting. Why do we focus on the negative? Why do we obsess with the small things? And again, if my greatest gift is to give my life to this presence. Like what are these stupid little bullshit I get upset about in my life every day? It just makes you see the, I felt the bigger picture.

I can say I saw the big picture in a way that I didn't think existed that most of you don't get to experience. Can you specify the fear? Was it a fear of death? Was it a fear of this being forever? Was this a fear of you never coming back from the trip? Or was it a fear of the presence

of eternity staring at you? That's a really good question. None of those. Eternity. It was the fear of, it was just realizing everything, which is very hard to explain. Because all of the fears that we feel in a normal life are attached to something, a result, normally. Death, failure.

This was just a fear realizing that we're all just so insignificant, but also so significant at the same time. You know, like it doesn't really matter and everything we do doesn't matter. but that sounds depressing but at the same time it was beautiful you know it was just a realization that everything i thought was important is not and that there is this thing that could just whisper at me and turn me into dust right it's like meeting um some kind of power like gangis con or something you know just that's again very small comparison compared to what i felt but somebody who could just go and you are just vapor right that's just what it felt like Like an undeniable power at which could just erase me at any given moment, but it shows not to.

And how that could exist any moment of every day. Did you feel grateful for like the mercy? Did you feel like there was mercy to not eviscerate you? I felt like I paid my penance. I felt like I gave my gesture and that it was like, I see you kind of thing for a blip. And the gesture was that I will sacrifice my life. I'll give my life. My confidence in feeling that I would, I would do that if I had to.

And also the gesture of, you know, let's see how deep, almost like some kid going to like a Muay expert being like, you know what, I want to learn Muay. Let's let's spar for real. And he guys like, bro, like, you don't want this. He's like, no, for real. You know, I want to see what Muay's about. Like, here it is. You can't help but respect that guy a little bit.

You might kick his ass, maybe break his nose, knock him unconscious. But at the end of the day, you've got to appreciate the bravery, right? Because most people won't even step up to the plate. That's a bit of how it felt. Or that's how I interpret it. How do you even know, right? Like, your mind is so good at interpreting things however you want to feel it. Even like the patterns you see.

I have these sacred geometry tattoos. I wonder if you never saw mandalayas or fractals. before in your life and you drop some acid or mushrooms or DMT what would you see like is my mind expecting to see these things therefore creating these things or do they always exist right and then taking these substances allows you to see the fractals and patterns we'll never be able to find that out because you can't give DMT to six or six months right yeah but it's interesting to think you know the chicken or the egg dilemma which one's there? Are we making it or is it already there?

Sure. I mean, what is the cultural discussion about ayahuasca amongst the people that use it in these ritual experiences that have used it for thousands of years? I mean, they must see similar things. They must see Mendelism and things like that, right? I'm not brought my nose, let's see. If you want to re-up, you got more in there. Go. Did the shama discuss that? Like, oh, that experience is common amongst what people have historically seen. Was there a discussion like that amongst the other people that did it? I just thanked him for his guidance. He's not there to make sense of it.

At least generally, I don't feel like that's what they do. They're there to just help facilitate it. And yeah, help you. And also, I think part of the reason they're there is to help guide you through the experience. And generally, they don't mind if you take too much. Because they know themselves that, again, the dragons are on the back of the cave. And that back of the cave is dark, man. Yeah.

Have you got shook? Good. What was the darkness, though? Was it the darkness, the insignificance? I guess I used darkness in the sense that that's where the fear is. Right. And there was lots of fear back there because I'd never ventured there before. But I guess I used this analogy of the dragon in the cave because there's a quote by Joseph Campbell that says the cave you fear you fear to enter hides the treasure that you seek.

And the sense of the dragon and the cave is this analogy of fear and sense. setting forth into an unknown place where there are terrible guardians that will try to hurt you, but there is treasure back there. And the darkness is the fear, right? And so the darkness there was just treading into a place where I thought I had some idea of what was back there, but I didn't even know how deep the rabbit hole could go. And was the, in the way that the, the Mayans described, you know, seeing high level spirits and low level spirits, and they're not good or bad, they just are powerful. Right. Did you feel that the presence that was seeing you was good or bad, Was it comforting or discomforting?

Was it just pure power? Yeah. I don't believe the wines did ayahuasca. They had something else that was similar. They had mushrooms and some other plant. Okay. This was in the south, but... Oh, sorry.

Yeah, no, it was. But the... No, I don't feel like it even was good or evil. It just was... It was just a thing that was... I wish I could explain it better. It was the cause and solution to everything. It was the creator and destroyer.

I mean, can you say that the creator of the world and the story of the world is good or bad? He's doing both, right? It's thinking about good and bad. It was almost like it was a human construct. Right. There is no good or bad. It's just what is. That's kind of what it felt like.

So it wasn't like he was out for good or evil. It was just he has made this thing with maybe there's an agenda, but not one that I could understand. Wow. Yeah, I was actually just talking with Maas about this, about the idea of like personal insignificance. Like, I was raised very Catholic. Right. And I still really appreciate the virtues of Catholicism. And I like the structure of how the religion works.

Right. And I think that virtue of insignificance is really instilled. And at times too much and people can feel guilt and things like that, like some negative side effects from the organized dogma of the religion. But for me, the insignificance is really liberating. I really like the feeling that, hey, posting this clip, making this episode, doing this joke, these things are not significant in the grand scheme of life and I won't really be remembered two or three generations

and if I do a really great job maybe I'm remembered for five but who even gives a fuck and to just do what is good and give of yourself to people and be a good human being is like the utmost thing while you're here for the tiny amount of time that you're here exactly and I really like that feeling and I can understand how people feel imprisoned by the insignificance and depressed by it but I don't have that feeling at all. I find it a really comforting feeling, the insignificance, and that we're all going to die and we're here just for such a small period of time that just do what is good to the people around you and take care of the people around you, and that's enough. But for you,

you have to leave this experience and then go into this insignificant world. You're posting episodes on YouTube and an episode doesn't do that good, or you get an argument with your girl and you guys are fighting about something. How do you deal with the insignificance of the day to day? Because we're all doing insignificant things in the face of this, like, eternity that you've got to for a brief period. Yeah. I think you nailed it. You said twice there, which was doing good. And for some reason in this world today, we have forgotten that intention is really important. And we're taking face value for what we say and do without the intention put behind it. And yeah, I do some interesting things. And if you take those things out of context and don't show the entire

storyline, then they can be considered a lot of different things. And I do have a fair amount of haters but I think the solution to purpose and even haters is just knowing you have good intentions knowing that you're operating out of love not with some sinister motive knowing that you're trying your best knowing that you're going to make mistakes and if you want to take that it's like me putting a knife on this table right if I make some content and someone and you take it and you stab yourself on the chest and say why are you why are you hurting me that's what I feel like haters are doing if you have good intentions and you make content and it could be controversial content But again, trying to show a part of the world in my case or trying to have an opinion that's

different, right? And someone wants to take that knife and stab themselves in the chest with it and say, why are you hurting me? That's not my, that's like you are inflicting self-harm. And I feel in this whole like woke culture situation now, people just love harming themselves. What's up, guys? We've got to take a break real quick because I got to tell you how you can take the bad out of your habits.

That's right. This right here is known as fume. If you know me, I'm a holistic guy, all right, I'm a natural dude. I don't like harmful chemicals. I try not to drink out of plastic bottles. I don't like vapors or electronics or none of that. And that's why I like fume. Fume is an amazing product.

It's an award-winning design that gives you all the fun and pleasure of taking a little hit with none of the negative effects. Instead of electronics, fume is completely natural. Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air. And instead of harmful chemicals, fume uses... all natural delicious flavors. That's right. You've seen Schultz, he just ripping this thing on Flagrant.

If you're a fan of the show, you've seen him just puffing away. On the road, he's got this thing with him all the time. I mean, don't trust me. Trust Schultz. He uses this all the time. Imagine you're out late with the boys. You had a couple drinks.

Instead of reaching for a bad habit, reach for a good one and try Fume. Fume has served over 100,000 customers and has thousands of success stories. There's no reason that that can't be you also. Join Fume in accelerating humanity's breakup from destructive habits by picking up the Journey Pack today.

Head to Tryfume. That's TryFum.com and use the code Gagnon. That's right, G-A-G-N-O-N-N-N and save 10% off when you use the Journey Pack today. That's Tryfume, TryF-U-M. Dot com and use the code Gagnon, G-A-G-N-O-N-N to save an additional 10% off your order today. Kick the bad habits. Pick up a good one. Let's get back to the show.

I get a bit emotional sometimes because I go tell stories about people who are doing very interesting things. And like I told you before, the world, the interesting things in this world are going away very quickly, right? We speak about endangered species. We don't speak about endangered cultures, but they're going away even faster. And so unfortunately, a lot of these interesting things are done by village elders. Dudes, they were like 60, 70, 80, right? I can give three examples off the top of my head.

So I film this food in Philippines called Etag, which is a smoke. pork where the maggots live in the pork and village elders bring it and they cook it and eat it with the maggots in the Philippines. It's a ceremonial pork. All right. I met an 85 year old who was doing that. I was in Turkey and I went to this abandoned monastery where there was this one man who was trying to preserve this hidden abandoned monastery and he's the only one who knew about it and he

took me up there and he showed me. He was maybe like 65. And just recently I was in Yucatan, a couple hours from Cancun and I met a Mayan man who takes scrap metal from junkyards and makes shotguns. He takes a water pipe, a muffler, some pins from a bicycle, a spoke, and makes a shotgun out of this. It's an old Mayan way of how they got independence of making guns out of scrap metal. He was maybe 70. All three of these men have died, right? I was the last one to tell their story. They'd never really seen many tourists. Maybe they came in for whatever, take some photos. I made a documentary about their life,

what they did, the special thing they're trying to preserve. And then, you know, five, sometimes, like even recently, two weeks after I finished the mine video, the guy died. Just because he was in poor health already, he helped us. But I had heard that he took massive joy in helping his apprentice make one last shotgun for us. And he was brought to life. But then unfortunately, because he had some kind of illness, he cancer or something, he'd be passed.

So if haters want to come to my doorstep man and talk shit about what I do, like, I just love showing the world how incredible it is. And people can come in and see one piece of content, call me a neo-colonialist or call me, you know, a beauty. You're using that man for his story, you know? Fuck that. Like, I just want to help the world see how beautiful it is so then we can all appreciate how special these things are before they're gone forever. And when things like that happen, it breaks me. my heart, but the silver lining is, at least I captured some essence of this person and this dying craft that now, and maybe hopefully years in the future, people can continue to see this

and see how the world once was because the world was changing too fast. People don't understand. But me firsthand, being in the trenches, going to these remote places, in 20, 30 years, it'll be like a monoculture of just fucking iPhones and blue jeans men. Hmm. Would you do this even if you didn't film it, even if there was no financial or monetary connection to the content? I did. I did for many years before I picked up a camera. Yeah. That was my original motive to travel was one thing that's very interesting too is when you get into travel television sometimes, not necessarily travel television, all television, there is a push for inauthenticity. We need the shot. This is the story. Let's make this happen, right? It doesn't matter what's real. One thing I've been very passionate about from the beginning is keeping my travels authentic. Because I began traveling because I felt lost.

I went out into the world because I felt out of place. I didn't feel like I felt fed in. I wanted to go find answers and find truth to then be able to find my place in the world. I think everyone's born with a lens, right? And that lens of the world, it's built by your culture, your upbringing, wherever you're born. And for some people, it's just blurry. Some people can see exactly where they are, right? And they're happy.

They can have, you know, a kid and a job by 25, whatever. They're happy. They do the thing and life's good. But for many, it's blurry. And they just live with a blurry lens, not knowing where they should be, how they should act, really what their purpose is for their entire life. And they're unhappy. They get divorced.

They make bad decisions. They drink. But I feel like if you travel, you can smash that lens and you can pick up, you know, the views from this culture, day the dead in Mexico. Or you can pick up, you know, how the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the haza, eat and hunt and, and, and find struggle and survive. And you can build your own lens in which to see your place in life so much more clearly. And that's what I did. So there's always a push, especially

in the TV industry, to be able to just make it happen. Who cares if it's real? Like reality television, hate to break it to. It's not real at all. It's script, you know, right. Scripted. So fundamentally, that's a very important part of travel. So from the beginning, I came from a place of trying to find my answers to my own questions, my own views on death, my own views on significance, you know, what's really important? And then from there, I found a lot of lessons. And I was able to overcome a lot of my personal fears. And I realized that these things I was most afraid of if I leaned into them and did more of those things, life, the universe, God, pick, pick whatever you want. Just, oh, here's everything you ever wanted. Oh, there it is. You've paid your

pedants. You did your thing. Right. That's what's in the back of the cave, bro, is the treasure is everything you've ever wanted. I get to be, I've been traveling the world and paid to do so, to do the most epic adventures. I'm probably like top 0.01% of people because I decided to grab a torch and a compass and go do the things I was afraid of most. Right. And originally it was being a center of attention. I had several traumas when I was younger. grade four, a teacher brought me up a bunch of times, made fun of me in front of the kids. And then like anybody, when you're when you're a kid, those things stick, right? Why did they make funny?

It was so silly. Like my hamster died and I was super sad. And the teacher made me to go in front of the class and explain in French, by the way, it was my first year French immersion. So I'm Canadian from the East, from the Atlantic provinces. So it was my first year French immersion and I had to explain in front of the class why I was upset. And the teacher kept saying, en Francais, en Franca. And I know how to say, I know how to say, like, where's the post office? You know what I mean?

I didn't know how to say, my homestead. So I'm not the biggest hardship someone's been through. Right, but as a kid. And your first experienced in front of a class, right, it stuck. And I, for many years after, treated the world like it was the classroom. And authority figures like it was teacher. So I used to, like, really hate authority figures and really get it. Hate French Canadians.

Yeah. Is this your last immersion being across from a French Canadian? Are you fresh Canadian? Of course. I'm English. Get on. Exactly. Exactly.

Both of my parents are from, my mom was from LaValle originally, but my dad was from Quebec City. Oh, shit, no way. Yeah, yeah. And then they moved to Florida, obviously. Yeah. And then that's actually where they met. So yeah, I'm technically full French Canadians. Right on.

So yeah, I'm from like the next province over to the east. Do you want to leave or is this? No, that's right. It's okay. Trugging some trauma right now. No, but again, like any kid, man. In French. Okay.

I don't see. Les en-en-en-a-go. There you go. But like any kid, you're a ball of clay, you take some dense, or like you're a piece of paper, man, you're, you fold, you get a couple folds, you can't unfold paper, right? There's always going to be a crease. And it's just your your relationship with those creases. And if you can accept those, then, oh my God, man, the world gives you everything. And so my journey and the reason why I am fearless and far is because I like to speak about and help people through that wall you encounter, that gate when you feel fear in your life, that the successful will have to walk through, right?

The successful will choose to walk through. And it's always a choice. It's not a lack of feeling. Like we spoke about the ancestral, instinctual fears that are embedded in our head. Everybody feels fear. It's just the successful people choose to go through the gate anyway, right? And do you still struggle with any of those insecurities? Yeah.

And what does that look like? I don't think that you can ever be rid of it. It doesn't matter what the trauma is. I think your life is always going to be defined by it. And it's just being able to treat it as a friend or at least acknowledge those parts about yourself. For example, I was a perfectionist for a lot of my life. right would work really hard to get something done and when I got it done it was always excellent but it would take me a lot longer that's just fear man you know like it's just that adult manifestation

of that original fear of being judged right because I was judged and so we maybe um even like I had gotten more comfortable speaking in front of a group right there's still those sneaky little adult fears if you're afraid of the ocean it's it's it's a loud fear it's visceral you get to and near the ocean, you feel, okay, I am afraid of the ocean. But things like perfectionism, jealousy, anger. It's abstract. It's abstract. The connection is not as solid of a line, but it's all still fear.

Usually some kind of trauma that made you that way that you haven't tied together yet. That's super fascinating to think about. Like resentment, for example. If you're never going to find someone say, I hate cooking, who actually, has learned how to cook. It's the person who tried to cook maybe for their mom or their girlfriend. And then they're like, oh, this is disgusting. And then now they put the plastic on their life. And it's like, I hate cooking. Cooking stupid. I'm never going to cook again. Right. It's self-defense. I'm not bad. The form is bad. You just, you try to unsubscribe. You don't play the game, right?

You say, oh, I'm not even participating. And therefore you protect yourself from it, but it still exists. Of course. Yeah. And I think that probably goes for everything. Like musicians feel this where they're like, oh, you know, this music sucks and then musicians internalize it, but really the person that's saying it to them dealt with the rejection perhaps in some other art form or some other creative pursuit and they capitulated and they don't pursue something creative and as a result, they lash out and they want someone else to feel the pain that they felt in that rejection. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I'm interested in stand-up comedy, man, because I feel like that probably is the arena in throw yourself to the wolves the most. Hmm. So you do some stand-up, right?

Yeah, of course. So then what has that been like for you? I always was drawn to it. I always really liked it. It was like rewarded in my family. My family would like would play it all the time. Like I would drive to these soccer games with my mom. We'd listen to Sirius and play comedy like through it over and over and over.

So it was like valued within my, my little community. And so I was always drawn to it and I like performing. And there certainly is a fear. and an anxiety that happens. But to your point, fear and excitement are the same feeling just focused on different outcomes. And as a result, being able to harness that energy and put it towards excitement will always make

the outcome much more fun. And that judgment obviously exists and the pain of failure still exists, but it's also exhilarating. And I view it as like, you know, I think a lot of comics overemphasize the importance of comedians. You know, obviously because we exist in that world and we're like, dude, we're the best

and we're the philosophers, blah, blah, blah. I don't necessarily see it that way. But I see it as a really cool way to interface with human beings. Right. That it is one of the last bastions, it feels like, of pure connectivity, where there's not, you know, it's just me on a stage talking to a group of people and all having a shared emotional experience. It's just really, really fun.

I think music does similar things, any art form like that. The thing I like about music in better, you know, in certain ways, is that it transcends language. Whereas comedy is confined really by language, even physical humor, typically falls within like a cultural strata, which I wish could, you know, transcend, but it's a little difficult. But yeah, obviously with comedy, there's a fear of rejection and failure, but that's also what makes it so exciting. Right.

There's a little bit of a risk, but it's one thing I noticed speaking in front of large groups versus like one-on-one is that there was a whole different, I don't know if it's strategy or energy. And I feel like every time you tell a story, it could be one person, could be two people, could be a groom, there's a ball of energy. And you're both energy shapers. Just adding, taking away, like we're doing some kind of Harry Potter spell combat. Absolutely. Where you add some, you take some away.

And it changes on the group size. I mean, I haven't, the most of my presenting to large groups hasn't so much been storytelling. It's more YouTube tips or I always try to throw stories in there. But I've realized that it is. it is a fascinating spell to cast. And it's different every time. And it requires a lot of intuition. You can't just practice at home in front of a mirror.

Especially in a group. You have to feel the group. It's like a living entity. And I would love to hear you speak about that a little bit. Because in my brief experiences speaking in front of large groups, it's been so fascinating to see how they all react together. Yeah, absolutely. There is a group energy.

And it's so interesting. like you can be like the audience can sense fear yeah in a very bizarre way and it's not only comedy it's just all public speaking like you can go to a conference if you know you work in business and you'd go to a business conference you can feel the fear and in a group setting it's so tangible even if they're not admitting any physical language characteristics like what is that is that a collective consciousness is that a pheromone that's on like some metaphysics shit where it's like you can like the energy is palpable it's such a bizarre thing and their anxiety induces anxiety in you and it makes the experience bad.

I don't know why it happens, but it is so fascinating to me. And simultaneously, they can feel comfort. Even if you're acting anxious, like there are comedians that have an anxious energy, but they're comfortable. And the audience will laugh at the anxiety and feel comfortable.

They'll feel comforted. There's no worse experience as an audience to see someone bomb on stage. Like, no one wants that. If you paid money to go to a comedy club, you want to sit there and enjoy and laugh with everyone and with the person. You don't want them to bomb.

Right. And yet, you can see someone up there and they're bombing and you feel anxious. and it is almost disconnected from the physical body language characteristics. Like it's something you can feel in the voice. It's intangible. And there are levels to stand up, and I think all public speaking, that is a sharpened intuition to what the group energy is.

And I think musicians do it. I think DJs do it. I know people will shit on DJs and be like, oh, you're pushing buttons. A great DJ will feel the intuition of the group. And so I opened and tore with this guy, Andrew Schultz. He's excellent. He's one of the best comics today. And not only for the joke writing, but for his ability to feel energy.

Truly. Like, I don't think he really talks about this much. And there's levels to comedy where, like, you write a joke and you go on stage and you say the joke and people laugh. And the difference is that Andrew will have what he's going to say. He'll have jokes. But he will change the words and the language and the profanity and the order and the energy and the emotion and the facial. accuse everything to what the audience needs in that exact moment. When I was starting stand-up, I was really good at writing jokes.

I was good at being able to be like, here's a setup, here's a misdirect, punchline, you laugh. But if the audience wasn't giving energy back, I had no way to pivot. I would just keep going through my script. I have my five minutes of jokes and I'm going to say them the exact same way every night, over and over. And if the audience is hot, I'm killing. And if the audience is not, I'm bombing. Even though it's the same jokes.

It's funny regardless. It is objectively a funny misdirect. I told you a joke and it is objectively funny, but yet the audience won't laugh. And the difference between a great comic and a good comic is that a good comic goes in front of a good room and kills and goes up in front of a bad room and bombs. But a great comic goes up in front of any audience. And I think a great public speaker, a great artist, a great musician, the greats are able to feel the intuition of what the energy needs and what it necessitates in order to get them all

to acquiesce. And that is when you're in the presence of like an expert artist, That is what they do, I think, on a level that good artists don't do. And that's something that I'm trying to ascend to, that I'm trying to get to the level of. And you can only get there through experience and repetition and being in those states where you feel the energy is off. Oh, they might need a joke that is less aggressive. They're feeling nervous. Or they don't trust me as a comedic person.

So I need to show them that I have control of this situation. Someone heckles something. and it sets the whole room, the energy's off. And I need to be able to assess the situation in a funny way to show them, I'm in control of the situation, we're all okay, you're still having a good time, and we're all okay. I've seen situations where someone will, I've been heckled before, dude, I got heckled in time in a show.

I was like two years in, and I didn't know how to react to it. I had no, I had nothing. I wasn't in control of the situation. I was in control so long as the audience let me be in control. And then as soon as someone wanted to take control back and they heckled me and they shouted, you suck, whatever, I didn't react. I didn't respond. I had nothing. So I just kept on going. And I was doing great. That person said something and it was a bomb. Right. And it's like, but the jokes are the same. But it is just losing control of the intangible energy in the room. Whereas now I would assess the situation. I would try to, I would pull energy back. I would kind of put them in a place where they're part of the group and then we would all keep going. And then the audience would go, oh, he knows what he's doing. We're okay. And they'll respect you more. Yeah, of course. And it's again, it's not a comedy thing. This is like an art thing. where a great musician, a great DJ, anyone that's in front of people interfacing in like a pure, like oral perspective,

will be able to assess the energy, know what needs to be done in that moment and then change jokes around. I mean, I've seen Andrew do it where like we do one show, he does a joke one way. The next show, he does a joke a different way. I go, hey, you messed up that joke. He goes, I didn't mess it up. I go, no, you said it completely different. I mean, the laugh, you got a laugh either way, but you did it wrong. And he goes, no, no, no.

The audience in that moment needed the joke to be different. Right. I like a thing that people will bring up is like if you say bitch especially in New York City there is a certain progressiveness if you say bitch too much they don't like you and some audiences if you say bitch they don't care and it's knowing what they need oh I said bitch twice and now they're starting to be like is this guy hate women and then you have to just and it is a fascinating thing to do that just comes with experience and I wonder if it's just the the chirping

like the just the is it the sounds they're making is it the because really it's not just if there's laughs or not there is something else there that isn't spoken and you're not looking at people's faces per se right sometimes sometimes maybe but like in general

I feel like there is an energy for lack of a better word that comes off that is not just one person and maybe it could be the shuffling of feet and the laugh or lack thereof. Yeah. But I'm really fascinated with that.

And I'm a man of science, man. I have a BSC in biology. And I grew up very analytical thinking in science. But then I travel and I see and feel things like that that science cannot explain. And people think science is like a party pooper. Like, oh, it's not proved by science. It's more like, okay, prove it and we'll get on board, but it doesn't discredit a lot of things. It's more like prove it and we'll start talking about it.

Absolutely. And there's lots of things out there. Like, for example, dude, do you know about the humor theory, like humorism? So, like germ theory, what we believe now, like germs cause sickness. That's only a new thing. That's like a hundred years old. Right. Like we only started believing in germs like around 1900 or so.

Yeah. Before that, it was like the miasma theory where we thought that it was stinky air, bad smelling air, caused sickness. And just a few years before that, like 150 years ago, we thought it was, it's called the humerus of human. blood, bile, I think of red, sorry, yellow bile, black bile, blood and phlegm. Semen. Seamen. Yeah, whatever they are. That's the fifth one.

And by leaking those, you could adjust someone's health. And so cancer or, you know, the black plague was some imbalance of humors or some bad air. This is new, man. This is new in the past 150 years. Yeah. We've been around for so much longer than that. And we think we know so much right now, but 150 years ago, we thought that bad air and too much mucus caused fucking cancer. Yeah, I mean, malaria.

Malaria literally means bad air. Does it? I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. Mal. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It means bad air.

So people were believing like, oh, you're breathing in bad air. And so you got malaria not recognizing like, no, there's a mosquito with infected cells that's biting you that's then giving you this disease. And yeah, it's just so funny. I mean, that's like the whole plague doctor thing. Have you, have you heard of this? With the mask, right? Yeah, plague doctors would have this big beak on their mask, and they believed that they were somehow like purifying the air.

They were creating distance from the air that they were breathing in, and it was purifying the air or something like that. When the plague had nothing to do with that, it had to do with, you know, a germ infection. Exactly. But that's not that long ago. So we don't even know what we don't know. We were still very modern 150 years ago. But we had such a bad, and do you know how they found out about germ theory? There was a hospital somewhere in Europe.

and there was two wards in this hospital. There was like the midwife ward and there was like the maternity ward. And the maternity doctors would also go to the morgue and they would handle dead bodies. But the ones who worked with the midwives didn't. And so the babies born there were generally would live. But there was like a high mortality in the area with the maternity ward. And some guy had the crazy idea that if you hold and touch dead bodies and go deliver babies, some of those babies get sick and die.

And this guy came with this idea and he had a sanitation station with like chlorine and water. And he's like, let's just try this out for a little bit. You know, just an experiment. Oh, Steve. Oh, Steve. And he proved that if you wash your hands after touching a dead body and touch a baby, more babies live. And everyone laughed at him. Made fun of them.

Didn't believe him. All the doctors like, you're crazy. We can go, you know, take a head off a dude and then pull a head out of a vagina. No problem. And then he died. And then a couple years later, like, oh, shit, he was right. You can't do that. I mean, my wife is going to love this story.

My wife is a midwife. Okay. That's what she does all day. She does homebirths. And so she goes to people's homes and delivers babies. And we've actually talked about the idea, like, she's always wanted to try to do, like, work in India. India has a really high child mortality rate.

I think it's one of the highest in the world. And she would love to go and, like, do work with, like, the mothers of, like, rural areas and, like, help deliver babies. Yeah. And I think that would be so cool. And in your time traveling, did you ever see, like, birth rituals? or things like that amongst tribes that you visited? Generally, no, because it's quite sacred.

And again, for most of the time, guys and girls, like if I'm a foreigner, I'm hanging with the boys. You know, and girls do their thing, guys do their things. Unless they're trying to marry you. Yeah, unless they're trying to marry me. Christ. So I haven't seen that, though I have seen some really interesting bloodletting happen. Oh, yeah, didn't you get leeches?

Yeah, I got leeches a couple times. In Poland, in Turkey. and dude, I was traveling in Romania. I'm going to give you one of my little secrets how to find cool places, okay? You remember? Taking notes? Pay attention.

Is if you find a cool photo, let's say, on Instagram or online. Instagramers have this thing where they don't tag places, right? Like, planet Earth. You can screenshot that image or save it and then do a reverse image search in Google to find where the photo's been posted. So from there, I found this amazing monastic, a monosolium, a crypt in the middle of the Romanian countryside.

This looked like a cathedral in the middle of Dresden, like this incredible church, decaying in the middle of a countryside in Romania. And again, with no location. So reverse image search, found some Russian dude who went, took a photo and was able to track down the coordinates. So I've got a friend in Romania named Bear.

Bear is a mushroom forager, and also he's a big guy, like maybe 250 pounds, and also is the drummer in a medieval punk band. in Transylvania. Medieval punk? Yes. Whoa. And he's great at it. Awesome, dude. So he has a little Robin Hood cap with a feather and I contacted him and said, hey man, I'm looking for this monastery. It's near this small town. He's like, oh, yeah, actually, my dad has a cabin near there. If you want to go check it out, we can show up and see if we can get in because this monastery looked, sorry, mausoleum looked incredible. And so we get in his dad's car. We roll down, have a little party

at his cottage, and then head down to this small town. This is like the sleep. leapiest little town in Transylvania. Nobody's there, right? There's a couple little brick shacks with corrugated steel roofs, and there's this giant, again, like downtown Germany, Baroque-style church, it looks like, but it's a mausoleum in the middle of town, decrepit. Really strange why it's there. So we couldn't get in.

There was a giant fence, big padlock, huge spikes on the fence. It's like 8 a.m. And so we're walking around and we're trying to find anybody who knows anything about the story. Damn. And we find this cafe. And there's a couple women there, maybe like mid-30s, all having some espresso at 8.30. And so Bear and I go up and we're like, excuse me, ladies, do you know anything about this mausoleum? Like, it's incredible.

It's in the middle of town. And I'm like, oh, actually, yeah. No, it's there. It's lock, though. And we ask, do you know if anyone has the key? And this girl's like, oh, yeah, we know who has the key. It's the husband of the woman who cuts foreheads. She's just right down the street.

Huh? It's like, excuse me? The woman who cuts foreheads? Oh, yeah. And so the woman bends over and she shows her forehead. And there's a cross cut a scar right in her forehead right here. And we say, oh, the woman who cuts foreheads. Okay, where did she live?

Three houses down. So we're a bit bewildered, but we have a lead. So we continue down the road. and we knock on this rusty wooden door. And it flies open. And there is a man there. This man has purple sweatpants pulled up to his chest. A bunch of holes in it,

seeing all sorts of bits and pieces you don't really want to see. He's got scabs all over his face. He's got hair growing and tough set of all sorts of bulges and bumps in his face. Got a little like postman's cap on. And we're like jet blue eyes. And we say, hi, we're looking for the husband of the woman. who cuts foreheads? And he's like, yes, it's me.

And like, do you have the key to the crypt? And he goes, yes, I'm the cryptkeeper. Can you go show us the crypt? And he's like, I got to feed my pigs and then we can go. And so he closes the door. We hear the squealing of happy pigs. And he comes back out. He's got a hula hoop, like old school style with the keys.

And so he just takes off walking. And we're like, all right, I guess we're in. Follow this old man up the street, gets the front gate, puts in this key that's the size of a fork, puts it into the gate, it screeches open. We go inside. It's this fantastical again, like European style crypt built to look like a church. We go to the front door. We open it up. Another big key. There's like bats and there's pigeons swirling everywhere. It's incredible in there. We're still really well preserved. And so we're exploring doing this video for YouTube about this really interesting abandoned place. And we're talking to him asking, you know, like what's your role

here. Why do you have the key? And he goes, well, actually, the key's been passed down for several generations. My family rings the bell when it needs to be wrong. I'm like, oh shit, the bell still works? He goes, yeah, the bell still works. Do you want to see? I mean, of course you want to see. There's two bell towers. One is destroyed. One is still there. So we go in this side passage. There's a staircase that spirals up this tower. There's a rope that comes down the middle. And he grabs it and he was like gestures like to start filming. So I press record. and bong, bong, two, three times, bong, bong, bong, 12 times it rings the bell. He's looking at me like he's waiting for me to give the answer to stop.

So I say, okay, that's good, like 12 rings is enough. There's like bats flying around. Everyone's waking up. It's two in the morning. Exactly. And then so at that point, he's like, you want to see the crypt? So we go downstairs underneath and there's like rats everywhere. It's covered in seaweed on the floor underneath this thing.

It's dark in there. He was saying that they used to fill the coffins full of scyps. seaweed to keep the dead skin all supple and that tomb raiders had come in and ruin the coffins and and taking the bodies and the seaweed's now on the floor really interesting stuff and then we we kind of finished exploring the crypt the mausoleum and there was still that one thing that I didn't we kind of glossed over in the beginning it's like the woman who cut foreheads so I say to the cryptkeeper can can we go like meet your wife I heard she's quite powerful famous. And he says, yeah, she doesn't really like foreigners. We're in a small town, but we can go

see. And I don't want to offend her. I'd love to go see. And so we leave. But then something's changed because there's people kind of peeking out of the windows and looking up the doors and shutting them when we go by. But again, he said that they don't get foreigners there and like, what are we doing with all this fancy camera equipment? So didn't think too much of it. But we get to his house again, open the door and my friend Bear and the crewkeeper go in and I'm behind. And then the woman's screams and come and she slams the door on my face. And then I hear screaming in Romanian. And I have no idea what's happening. I'm outside for five minutes, 10 minutes. And then after that, my friend Bear comes out. He goes, we have to go. He goes, did we offend somebody? I didn't know.

He goes, no, you have to go. We have to go. You don't understand. We have to go. Like, no, let's stop. No, no. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. And so, shit, all right. So we run out. We get in this truck and we start driving. And I'm like, Bear, man, what, like, what happened? What did we do? We were polite? And he goes, no, you don't understand, man. Listen, like, how many times did you make him ring that bell? And I say, I make him ring the bell? I mean, he rang the bell 12 times. And he goes, did he say why he wrung the bell? And he said, no, he just said his job was to ring the bell. Dude, they only ring the bell when someone dies. So we rang the bell 12 times. The village thought that the 12 people had died. They thought there was a building that collapsed,

that a school bus crashed. They thought there'd been a mass murder. You rang the bell 12 times, bro. What the hell? Why did he ring it? I don't know why he rang it. She was saying it's common knowledge. When you ring a bell, someone died. Oh, my gosh. And so we had to get out of there because we had convinced this small, sleepy Romanian town that there had been a mass.

There was a massacre, dude. What the hell? And then people high tail it out of there in a car and they're like, oh, those guys killed everyone. Exactly. Bro, that is wild. I mean, that guy's kind of dumb for ringing it. Like, dude, he should let you know, like, oh, I wish I could ring the bell, but I'd have to kill you. And then you'd know, oh, I understand what's going on.

Whose fault is it? I don't know. And the fact that he was treating it like an olive garden waiter, just like, tell me when. You're like, bro, what's the time? I didn't know when to tell you when. What are you talking about? It's exactly the look. It's like more parmesan?

More. Yeah, yeah. You know, 12 rings. Okay, we're good. When? Yeah, dude. That is crazy. Yeah.

I haven't gone back. I don't think I'm going to. And so she was a blood letter. That was like her thing. She was a blood letter. So they would still believe, I'm assuming in the humors. Mm-hmm. And that wasn't that long ago.

Right. I mean, isn't that like how George Washington died or something? I think so. Again, this wasn't that long ago, man, that we thought that's how the world worked. We don't know what we don't know. Yeah. We barely know. Will we ever know?

The sad thing is, I don't think in our lifetime we're going to know. Yeah. Right? That's a scary part. Right. We think we have a good idea of how the world works and, but we'll never know. Yeah. You just try your best.

Now, if I'm listening to this and I'm hearing all your cool stories and I'm like a 20-year-old old kid living in Florida like I was, I would hear this and be like, yeah, yeah, that's cool. You get to travel and stuff. But that's not. I'm not going to travel. Like in order to travel, it's, you know, $1,000 plane ticket. It's thousands of dollars in equipment.

I got to quit my job. I have to find some place to go. I got to get a hotel. That's going to be another 300 bucks a night. I got to eat food. That's going to be expensive. Like, traveling is a luxury that's reserved for people like you and not for people like me. So how can people travel?

And is this a lifestyle opportunity that can be opened up to everyone? Why do you think that, though? Because that's what traveling is. Well, why do you think? that's travel. Like I think what's happened is we have spent too much time on Instagram and think traveling has to be, you know, floating breakfasts and baths in Bali and luxury. That's, that's the curse of what Instagram or this like photographic focus society or style of tourism the curse that's caused is that, is that. There's no glamorous photos that go viral necessarily

of the guy with the backpack paying $3 for a hostel eating $1.00. are noodles on the side of the road, right? Where's the glamour and aspirations in that? There is some, but it's not broadcasted to the world. What we see is luxury, expensive, in affordable travel, that those people themselves can't even afford for most cases. And it's broken travel, man. Why is it broken?

Because travel you see about finding truth, man. Now travel is about taking photos, right? And looking cool for your friends. It's like fucking Pokemon catching. You go, you take a photo of the Eiffel Tower, the great wall, you come back, you show, well, before it used to be slideshows, now it's Instagram. right I mean I I'm a little bit hypocritical come on I I make online content but at least I I can help people find truth because I'm going to find truth and I think that's where

people think they can't travel is because they think it has to be a certain way based on what they've seen right in my eyes like I'm a professional adventure right I got this adventure travel YouTube channel I have I've had two different adventures TV shows one of which is still on air and has two Emmy nominations I love travel I love adventure, but those things don't have to be to Bali or Cancun or Dubai, right? You want adventure, bro. Go find some woods and go camping by yourself. You'll be safe, but you'll be terrified.

You know what I mean? Go get a cheap plane ticket to wherever, jump on the train, travel across the continent. You'll be safe. You'll be scared. You might cry, but God, you'll have good stories, man. Men should have good stories, right? We've been telling stories around campfires forever. And now the problem is we've warped risk so much that we think the world is a dangerous place

where everything is either expensive or dangerous. And we see people like me do these crazy things that I could never do. Man, I'm just doing what you could do, right? The main thing is just get a local contact. How do you do that? The biggest thing is if you have any hobby or anything you want to learn, you go do that there. Let's say you want to learn Bacatta or salsa, right? There are Bacotta and salsa clubs in, again, like Karate.

Lackas, Venezuela, or even Taipei, Taiwan. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter what you do. Could be football, soccer, right? Could be jiu-jitsu. Could be whatever. You go, the easiest way to integrate yourself into a foreign culture is just go do a sport, learn a thing and be there with those people because they'll see you differently, right?

If you want to go stand in front of the Eiffel Tower and take a selfie, you're not going to have an authentic experience. You go try to learn a skill, even if it's your first time, you're going to get that respect. Right. And then from there you can build out itineraries. Like, how do you find off the beaten travel? You can type in off the beaten locations, Mexico. Yeah. BuzzFeed, the best places to go.

Cancun. Exactly. Places no one knows about. Yeah. Cabo. Exactly. Right. Maybe they could be a bit different than the normal sites.

But if it's easily accessible, it's on the beaten path. So then how do you find? off the beaten path. Well, that's where things get interesting. And that's by finding local contacts and people. And the world does seem expensive when all the travel you see are the people who are posting about it. But often, the problem is that people posting about it are sponsored. They're given money by people to post things, right? The mom and pops dive shop or the hostel or these, you know, rag tag roadside noodle stands, do they have a marketing budget or a team that's going to pay an influencer thousands of no they exist right so therefore there's a giant

skew towards luxury travel because these brands have a lot of money to say hey come my my shit's the best come do this thing and so we have that but we don't see the other thing right and if you're an influencer trying to make money which you you do like you have to make money of course it's going to be much easier to go to the path of luxury because there's more money how do you make money you know sleeping on a beach in Thailand and making a vlog about that there's no sponsor You can do ad rev, but that's a long slog for most people. Should it be about making money, though, for most people? For you, this is your business.

But if someone wants to do what you like to do, it doesn't necessarily have to be about money. Right. If you're looking to make a profession out of it at a certain point, you do have to think about money. And that was my greatest challenge was transferring that attitude of just, you know, rag-tag backpacker to, okay, well, if this is a business,

I got to stay in the positive, right? Right. But in the beginning, of course, you should blow your money. For the first five years of my travel, I'd just work at whatever job I could find, then blow it all. What kind of jobs were you doing? So I worked in a pet store for a while. Yeah, just like a regular job. Regular Joe pet store.

I worked at a pet food company for a while too. I worked at a fish farm where they would raise salmon. So my family actually, my father owns a company that makes dog food and fish food, like for salmon. So I would work there sometimes, but also I have. other jobs at pet stores. So my life's always been animal focused from the beginning. That's why I did biology. Your parents didn't just give you money to be like, hey, go travel. No. So you work there, nine to five, save money. I mean, I can't say my parents didn't help me. Like they helped me a lot. Like they, they were pretty supportive with my crazy adventures. I was able to have a job working

for the family company for when I wanted in the summers. But even then, I didn't always work for them. I often did. And it was a big challenge for me over time, too, to not get. getting more involved with the family business, especially when I had a love for animals. Of course. Yeah. But they're in your hometown, friends or family. And you say you want to go travel the world and go to Turkmenistan, Mauritania, Venezuela, Pakistan. There's not generally a ton of people cheering you on.

Sure. Some people will try to hold you back. My family was good. They just said make good choices, I think. So I was lucky for that. But I still like paid my dues, man. I lived in Toronto for two years when I was just trying to make this work in the shittiest apartment that I could, that I could afford. And an apartment building with two other men that were probably 60 filled with cockroaches.

And there wasn't even a bathroom in my bedroom. We had to share a bathroom with no shower. It was only a bathtub. Wow. So I had to share a bathtub with two 60-year-old men for, it was probably there for like a year and a half. A couple of bell rayors, huh? Yeah, man. One of them I never saw was a hermit.

the other one drank on the porch every single morning. Whiskey. Whoa. Yeah. But again, that's paying the penance, man. That's putting the time in the trenches to be able to make it work, right? And by doing that, I think you prove to yourself and the universe that you want it. And it's amazing.

If you're not afraid to be uncomfortable, it's only matter of time. If you believe in yourself enough that you're going to make it work and you got to sleep in your car, maybe your parents' basement, maybe in a cockroach-filled department and share a bathtub with two grown men, who cares, right? You end up in a chair like this and you can talk about your stuff, you know? Now you, no, let's say you didn't have supportive parents. You think you still could have done it where you just saved up money and then found the local people, got a cheap flight and then made it work. That's still an option?

Of course it is because, again, the flight is generally the most expensive thing. And if you can take care of that and you can, again, if you just keep an eye on flight deals, a few hundred dollars can get you a lot of faraway places. People are still existing everywhere in the world. Like, sure, you can go to Bangkok or Antanarivo, Madagascar, and you can live a luxury life of Starbucks and, you know, Marriots. But there's people who are living there on dollars a day. The question is, are you willing to be uncomfortable enough to sleep in a place that costs a couple dollars a day, eat food that costs a couple dollars a day? Or do you need those luxuries of a modern life? Right.

And if you are willing to forfeit those luxuries in favor of growth, stories, experience, hardship, finding yourself, then the expense solely becomes the flight. Right. And that's not that expensive. Sure. Now, there's someone, I don't know if you can tell that's listening right now that's typing in the YouTube comment section. Right now, if you listen close, you can hear them typing. I can hear them. And they're saying, yeah, but Mike, you're a handsome white man.

you don't have to worry about someone fucking with you because you're a dude you can fight right you're charismatic you can talk your way out of situations and you're a white guy so people like you know if i'm a black kid that goes and travels there's going to be racism i got to deal with prejudice people want to take advantage of me what is the answer to that kid right but i mean i was a soft-bodied nerd for most my life bro just just through travel i was able to kind of define my path and i've experienced i mean i'm not comparing my race the racism i've received to to some other people but like you go to Japan, it's pretty racist. Like, I went into a restaurant before and simply walking in, they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no American, no, no, no, and just slowly push you out of the door.

Yeah. Um, that being said, uh, of course, like passport privilege is a real thing. That's, that's probably the biggest thing. And something I got hung up in the beginning because I used to just sprout like, you know, travel the world, do your thing. And then there was a kid from Bangladesh who said, I want to travel like you, but I can't get the visas. And I'm like, passport is very, very important and that is definitely luck right you're not control there's no control where you're born you fall out of a vagina in a hospital and that is your citizenship and therefore you get a book and that book dictates where you can go yeah and it's very hard to get away from that especially if you're born in an impoverished country yeah that's not fair that's just what it is that that that's life

it is what it is and there are ways of course to to work in and be able to to get other citizenships or be able to work around the system. But unfortunately, that's, that's, is the reality of the world. But now you're a dude also. So, you know, maybe you can travel certain parts of the world as like a black guy and be cool because maybe you can deal with some of the racial dynamics. I mean, like, should black people be concerned going to some of these countries in terms of like how they'll be treated in terms of prejudice? Obviously, you're not black, but have you seen things like that? I have a friend of mine that I've heard speak about it who's a woman who's black. And she was saying that oftentimes she'll go to countries and people,

assume that she can be a prostitute because I guess black women with money in certain countries that's associated with that. So I can't speak to all of the like the racist traveling around the world. I know that white people are often a target. And if you have white skin in places, it can be a problem. Sure. But I, yeah, I wouldn't, if you, if you're traveling, you seem to kind of come over those barriers. people see you as a traveler and realize you're not from there. And therefore, the kindness comes through. Again, not the expert, of course, but one thing that I think we get misconstrued is that the world is as violent and aggressive and quick to cast judgment as we

are in the modern world. I've found it's the opposite, that the tourist-friendly countries are often the most unfriendly and the tourists unfriendly are the most friendly. Whereas you come to the modern world here and we can be pretty, you'll stand on the bike lane, bro. You get you getting clipped. You get pretty unfriendly. Yeah. You get lost in Pakistan or Congo even.

Like I got lost in the Congo jungle for a week with these pygmy tribes and they were just like, like how did you get here? Why are you here? You need help, right? Same thing if you saw like a Congolese in your neighborhood back in, well, where your parents are from in Quebec or even in Florida, whatever. You see some guy who's obviously at a place, right? Wearing different clothes, looking lost. You're not going to be like, oh, let's go, let's go fuck with that guy.

You're going to say, okay, like, let's help that guy. Right. And that has always been the sentiment. In the most dangerous places, the faraway places, I've always been treated with the most respect. Any traveler who goes to these places, regardless of skin color would be treated that way because, obviously not many people go there. And people have fascination. Also, they see your appreciation.

One of the biggest problems going to Mauritania, which is right below Morocco, which is one of the most, again, dangerous places in the world is I had to, I'd walk in the street every 15 minutes, someone would invite me over for tea. And tea in Mauritania is a 45 minute affair where they pour tea back and forth four or five times for every single glass. So to even have two glasses of tea, you've got to wait 45 minutes. Yeah. I had tea dates all day.

Like we spent an entire day doing tea with people just because they wanted to invite us into their house and talk about how were you here? Oh my God. What have you seen? The world's a friendly place. And in 12 years of travel in almost 100 countries, I do not have one example of intentional harm towards me. Really? I've been pickpocketed. I've had cars smashed and things taken out when I wasn't there.

So there's opportunistic crime. There are hyenas out there. Yeah. Many. But that could happen in New York. But also, these people, I've got a $1,000 iPhone. I can buy another one if I lose it. They get that.

Maybe they sell it for a couple hundred. That feeds their family for a week or a month or two, several months. It's, I can't say I understand it, but I, I understand the appeal. If you're in a really hard place, just like we spoke about those people cutting down the forest, they don't want to do that. But when it comes to that of your family starving, man, you'll do desperate things, right? Yeah, desperate people will do desperate things. It's not necessarily their fault. It's a circumstance that they're in.

Right. Yeah. Now, should women be concerned? If there's a girl this and this, it's like, oh, I want to travel the world like you. Should there be a slightly more precaution than just like an average dude, just due to like gender dynamics that exist in the world and self-defense and things like that. Yeah, of course. I mean, if you're like a strong-looking guy, you can strut yourself around most places and be okay,

depending on the neighborhood. If you're a woman, it takes a little bit more common sense, but both sexes require common sense. Right. Like, I've seen people make poor decisions. I was partying in St. Martin in the Caribbean, which is an island that's half owned by. France, half a one by the Netherlands. And I was partying with this group of people and there was a girl with us, a white girl, and these group of guys came over in a car and said, hey, you want to come party with us?

We got a liquor and she's jumped in and went away. I never saw her again. She may be fine. But you don't do that stuff, you know? Right. It's problems. Right. Most women, I would assume, would have some common sense.

I can't speak to that experience. But there are women out there doing it. Like Eva Zubek is a good, a good prominent example. She's probably the biggest adventure solo female traveler, and she has been all over the world doing a lot of, like even in Pakistan, spent two years living there or something motorbiking around. So it is possible, but I always recommend two things. Number one, never listening to the fear that you're given. Advice is, in my opinion, hand me down fears, where someone gives you advice, but really they're just, they have fear inside of them. And they're like, here, take my fears and hold them and then guard them close.

it's not from real experience. It's like getting advice on how to fix your car from a baker. Like they might have heard something once, but they don't actually have practical experience. Right. And generally in your hometowns, you're not going to find someone who's traveled the world for 10 years and I've been to these places.

And it's going to say, traveling the world solo is the best thing you could ever do. But once you leave, you meet infinite amount of people who have done that and say literally it's the best thing you can do. You don't need money. You just got to do it. And the number one thing is not holding that hold and the number one thing holding you back is not finances or family.

It's just fear. It's fear of the unknown, right? Because when you sit in your hometown, all you digest is just all of the horror stories of the world and how the world is so dangerous. Right. It's not a dangerous place. And you make that risk assessment to 150. The most number, right? Exactly.

That's our default risk assessment. Yeah, exactly. And I guess, yeah, people look at that where they're like, oh, I don't have a buddy. I don't have a person to go with. And I think, I'm sure your experience is similar to this where when you go. go solo, you're forced to interact with other people. Like, if you're sitting alone at a restaurant, you're not talking with one person the whole time. You're looking around. You're seeing what's going on. You talk to the waiter a little bit. You talk to the guy at the bar. You talk to the person

that's, you know, bringing the rice over. Like, you're now, you're forced to interact. And that forced interaction is going to open up way more doors than if you're with another person. Definitely. It's a handicap to travel with a friend. I was supposed to originally. I didn't just wake up one day and say, oh, I'm going to travel to the other side of the world. I didn't read a motivational quote or watch a YouTube video and just decide to change my life. Unfortunately, how humans work is you've got to get kicked in the nuts and drug through the dirt first before you do any drastic life change. And in my case, that was exactly it. Like I was just graduating university, felt super lost, had a girlfriend and a really bad

breakup, had a grandparent die, the first death in the family, and had a car crash. Boom, boom, boom, trifecta of terrible shit. Had a friend who was going through bad times too. There was a poster on the wall saying, hey, do you want to be a volunteer on this island in the middle of nowhere in Indonesia called Hoga off of Sulawesi? And different than the Death Tribe, but same, same island. And if you want to come, raise this money and you can go. So me and my friend were like, yeah, me and you against the world, bro, and saved money for months and months. Day came to pay the deposit. It was like five G's to lock in the trip. And so I text them, I'm going to go pay, catching the pub after. He's like, yeah, see they're after. So I drop.

the five G's like shaking hands. Okay, like it's locked in, but I got my bro. And then, um, go to the pub, get a pint and then get a text like half an hour later. Hey, sorry, I couldn't get the money together after all and, uh, can't go. So sorry, bro. Let's talk about it. Oh, my, my heart just pinballed down my leg because now I had paid five Gs to lock myself into an island, Hoga off of Waccatobe, off of Bhutan, off of Sula. Luezi, middle of nowhere for three months by myself. And I was horrified getting on that plane like a week later. My parents were at the airport.

I was like young, like 22 maybe. And wave goodbye and thought I would never see them again. It felt like I was walking to the electrocution chamber and got there and had the best time of my entire life. Went there. It was an island in the middle of nowhere. No running water. Okay. No mirrors, three months with a research team, we were scuba diving, doing assessments on the coral reef.

I had thought that the only way to live life was the system in which we were born, where like you got to dress fancy, work at a bank, be a doctor, all this crazy shit. And looking good was so important. I went there and after, you know, first day, everyone shows up. They've got jelled hair. They've got their nails done. Everyone's looking good in their new adventure gear. Week one, starting to fall of pieces.

Week three, month two, you are just hobos, man. hair going out of places, you know, mosquito bites, sleeping in hammocks. Again, the only shower was a bucket in a hole with mosquito larvae poured on your head. You haven't seen yourself in a mirror. This is kind of back before like smartphones too. And I realized the cool kids who were like, you know, the hot guy, the pretty girl day one, they had worked so much on their outside that they had nothing on the inside. And the people who knew some magic tricks or some funny jokes or some stories or how to like twang on a guitar,

they became the cool kids like because the whole thing shifted because without the exterior the cool kids had nothing but we live our society that way right how you dress and how you act on the outside is really important right but we don't really work on our inside or being able to handle hardships especially living on this island for three months and that changed my life again that broke my lens and I was able to take one little fragment from there and insert it back in and I and I came out of there addicted to travel because I realized that there was people who have chosen to live different lives. I met a guy who was even older than me.

Like a few months later, I was in Honduras on Utila, one of the Bay Islands. Went through Tugusa Galpa, by the way, rough place. Yeah. Yeah, especially in that time. I think San Pedro, nearby city, was like the murder capital of the world per capita for a really long time. There was like narco shit. It was crazy.

Yeah. rough place. There's two islands. There's Roatan and Utila, both like scuba diving mechas. And Utila was more backpacker. So went there, spent, I can save my money, went to do another internship, so a bit cheaper than a normal experience to be a basically slave for a dive shop, but live in paradise. And there, I met a dude who was a banker in the UK who had his, this was his mission. It's hilarious. I love telling me a story because it is kind of shows what's possible. And I don't condone doing this, by the way. But his mission was to be high enough in the banking system to get a car, like an Audi or something, and then drive the

Audi to Poland or Romania, sell it in the black market, take the cash and travel the world forever and never go back to the UK. So you meet these characters who have just chosen these crazy life paths that are just so different than yours, right? And you realize that you can live on a couple dollars a day, right? If you have to, if you do something insane like that. And other people who just have decided to reject the modern world and play in a different playground. And when you have much more examples, then you realize you can do it. And then from there, meeting people who have found many creative ways to make a living around the world, then you realize you go back home and you think people are just trapped in these prisons of their own making, right? They think

you have to live that way. And because there's no data points of people living otherwise, they just go with the herd. We're tribal creatures. We'll do. do what people do. And by going and meeting other people who have already done it, the road is paved and it allows you to be a bit more free thinking. So it's easy to go, you know, maybe get a dive master certification and teach. You're not making a lot of money, but you're meeting cool people, you're partying, you know, maybe you'll meet your wife or your husband, or maybe you'll just, you know, break your leg and learn something. And my story is that I went down there, I got flesh eating disease on my foot because it was a place where you didn't wear shoes came back it was an infection

that wouldn't heal when skiing in vermont for a week put that thing in a ski boot just incubation chamber gangrene dude like and it erupted and i spent four months on a couch because the blood pressure of just sitting up from bed was so excruciating it would take just a massive amount of time and energy to get out of bed to do anything and in that moment I had a friend send me a link to a competition saying, hey, bro, you love to travel. If you want to join this competition, it's like a video competition,

you send a video of yourself saying, you know, why you like travel, this company could select you to win and you get to travel for free. And again, this is me a long time ago. I was still, didn't never want, the last thing I wanted to do was put myself in front of a camera, ever. And so I said, no, bro, it's not my thing, you know,

like it's stupid, whatever, like resentment, right? Again, the thing that I was most scared of, I'd just say, no, it's stupid. I hate it. Yeah, of course. That's what you do. You build a plastic. And then so he said, well, listen, what are you going to do? Sit in the couch for four more months? So I was just getting better at this point. And I was in that point of desperation when I was drug through the dirt again that I was finally in a spot willing to make a change. And so I remember recording my first video, did 40 takes of saying my name and where I was from. Fucked up 39 of them. Right. Then like another 40 takes of why I like travel. Fucked up. And then just frank and stuff.

signed a vlog together that was okay, submitted it. My friend saw it, oh my God, you're a natural. He's like, dude, you have no idea. I was like weeping in my closet. And then felt like a phony. And then so, and I had made it to like the next round, like top 25 or something. And then I had to submit another video. So I Frankenstein another monster together.

Submitted it. And we all know what looks good from watching news and movies. And so it just faked my way for the first few years entering these competitions and ended up winning a couple. But it wasn't by talent, bro. It was, it was, it was, I think my lack of talent that enabled me to try extra hard and watch speakers and watch myself. And even if I was really hard on myself, that allowed me to perfect it after a certain amount of takes and eventually do that for long enough and you perfect the craft. I'm not the perfect speaker. But I used to stutter, you know what I mean? Back in the day. So like a legit stutter? Like, whenever I started a

sentence, I would always take two tries. Oh, wow. Yeah, even just the, the anxiety sometimes of starting a sentence. And again, there's no videos of this because I didn't make videos. Yeah. I cut those ones out in the beginning. But that was a very real thing. So now, but again, the cave you fear to enter hides the treasure that you seek, because I decided to do the thing I was most afraid of, not just waking up one day and doing it, but because in moments of desperation, I was like, fuck. Well, you know, I've been in this bed for four months or like, like, like, If on this side of the planet is so shitty, let's try the other side, those were the moments in which I was able to find my path.

And I think if I had one thing I wasn't natural at is what it's when I was drug through the dirt, I said fuck and then decided, okay, how can I, what can I do differently from here? Yeah. And in your travels, do you have any regrets of things that you did that, looking back, you're like, I wish I hadn't had done that or my boneheaded. in this situation. I hooked up with this girl and it fucked everything. Like, was there anything you did that you're like, oh yeah, I wish I could not do that and that you would recommend other

people not do. Ringing that bell. Convincing a small Romanian town that there'd been a mass murder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's definitely, that's definitely one of them. But I don't try to be too judgmental on myself. Because again, like we spoke about, if I really feel if your intentions are pure and you know you're not out to offend anybody, I think that's that's it like you're going to offend people if you have a strong a strong message you're going to offend people right yeah mistakes are okay and and most people are pretty uh they're pretty generous when it comes to mistakes they go oh your intentions are good you fucked up so i'll give you a pass especially traveling like the first time i went to to Cuba again on another

internship where um i was able to travel cheaply helping the university of havana on a sea turtle project in the beach where we slept in a tent for a week on a beach which sounds good but man the sand flies and when that sun comes in at seven o'clock damn i remember meeting the the father of one of the students and um so i met the mother first and kissed her on the cheek and met the father and kissed him on the cheek and then caused a very awkward moment where i realized oh you don't kiss everyone on the cheek hilarious you just you just kissed i didn't know it was supposed to make out with everyone. You got to understand. And the funny thing was he didn't, because normally you turn. He didn't turn. So I kissed him like right. Oh, God. Not like right here. It would have been better.

I don't even know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe the lips would have been. At least that's intentional. Yeah. I mean, you're like, hey, I'm smooching you, baby. Let's go. Man. Right on this little sauce. Yeah. The last thing. So you asked, I think, the hods of people, what is the purpose of existence? Why are we here? Right. And so many of them, their answer was like, you know, hunting, meat. things like that. I'm curious actually if you felt if you were almost disappointed by their answer. I think a lot of times Westerners like we seek like sage wisdom and to go to a yogi and, you know, Bangalore and he tells you unthinkable wisdom that changes your life. And more often than not, the wisdom is simple and kind of obvious and in front of you the whole time. So I'm curious for

you, what is the purpose of this? Why are we here? Why are you on earth? Yeah, great question. the that's exactly it i i assumed that these people in faraway places would have these elaborate answers about you know their belief systems and everything but every single time just translating what is the purpose of life it doesn't translate it's it's this philosophical questioning that we have does not really exist there right there's a way of doing things and the purpose in most of these It's called them more primal cultures, is the bare bones, man. You know, you go, you get food, you bring back, you get a wife. If you hunt really well, that's the best thing to do.

And I feel like we just overcomplicate so much. And try to find this purpose is it's, I don't know if it's possible. It's just being able, I think, to find purpose through struggle. And I think if you do put yourself through struggle, you stop worrying about the purpose so much. It's just we have all this free time now and all of the luxuries in the world at our fingertips. We have the and the luxury of sitting back and wondering what it all means. But if you're out there grinding, like imagine if you had to wake up and hunt for breakfast every single day. Right?

It wasn't just there in your kitchen. Your life changes, right? If everything is a mission, your life changes. I think men especially are like sharks, not necessarily with the big teeth, but that sharks and the lot of these fish that live in the big ocean, like tuna too, have something called ram ventilation, where the only way they can breathe is by forcing the water through their gills. They have to keep moving in order to breathe. I think men especially are exactly the same way. If we don't have something we're going towards, if there's no forward momentum towards something, we suffocate.

We get in fights on Twitter. You text me saying, you failed to mention something that I did or didn't do whatever. It's only now that with all of this free time, we're able to sit back and start to criticize others for the mistakes and really have these existential crises about our existence. If you fill your life full of passion and fire and with reckless disregard, go towards the things that excite you, it could be badminton. It could be fucking finger painting, man. It could be whatever. If you just follow that fire, like a moth to a flame, the rest figures itself out. That's what I've learned. Amazing. Well, I truly have appreciated this so much. This is so fun. Your channel, fearless and far, has honestly been an inspiration for me. Like when I first even started

doing this show, one of the original dreams of it that I hope to actualize one day is creating like long form conversational content with people around the world. And, you know, obviously not everyone can speak English, but through your experience, there's a lot of people that actually can, and they actually have a pretty good grasp of the language and communicate things, you know, despite never coming to America or living in an English-speaking nation. Right. And so that is on my bucket list to do, to find, you know, someone that has lived in, you know, Turkmenistan that can talk to me about what the culture of that place even is,

considering that myself and I think a lot of people live in America have no idea that that country even exists. So the idea of having, like, a long-form conversation like this is one of my dreams that has been partially propelled by the content that you make and the experiences that you've had is so cool and so exciting to me. And I feel like is one of my passions in life. And I'm really grateful for the stuff that you've made that has shown me that there is a way that's feasible to do that. And that's ethical.

And it can really give, I don't know, a different perspective and different truth to what existence really is. Yeah. Well, thank you, man. And I think we both share the same. interest and maybe we didn't realize it from the beginning or maybe you did but again I have a biology background I wanted well I started traveling to see animals landscapes you know jungles and then time and time again I'd come back and I'd the things I'd remember most were the the goat farmer who brought us in for milk tea

or the the shaman who showed us how to use this vine and and he brought it back home and I watched him cook it or make a pipe out of it it's always the people that that made the deepest mark. And so I used to think I traveled for places, but dude, it was always the faces, the people, right? And it is the biggest thing out there. You see a location, maybe it's a mountain, but you see the person there and you can relate to that person. And so the greatest stories come from people. And I'm just out there to find amazing people with amazing stories. And it seems like when the podcast is very similar. Absolutely. Has there been any person individually that you met that really touched you in a unique specific way or even like made you cry

just through interacting with them. So many times I've gone to places with, I couldn't help it, but a critical eye. For example, eating that maggotty meat in the Philippines. So in this remote part in the north, there's a few interesting characters. One of them is a woman called Wangod, who is a 103-year-old or probably 107-year-old tattoo artist who used to tattoo headhunters and this woman gets a lot of attraction up there. People make a pilgrimage up to this town. She taps some dots on your arm or on your back and usually grabs your penis. This woman, she has a little sick pleasure of whenever a foreigner

comes up and gets a tattoo with her, she thinks it's really funny that, like, oh, you want a photo with Wang Odd? Yeah, of course. That when they say cheese, she grabs your dick and makes a funny face. So if you type in Wang, odd penis, you'll see all these hilarious photos of her grabbing tourist dicks. Anyway, up there is like the Wild West bro. And there was a man up there named Patrick who was the village elder who smoked this meat. And so, again, I had heard about this meat. I always hear whispers of certain things and I have to go figure it out.

And it was probably the most repulsive food that I had ever heard up. Again, a flank of pork riddled with bugs. How could you ever eat that? I met this man. He was against 70, 75. And he explained so beautifully the tradition. So he is the village elder. And he has two, he has two requirements whenever there's a wedding or a funeral. He has this pork, which he smokes, and there's pork for the living and pork for dead. So he keeps them. And one side is for funerals for the dead, and one side's for the living, for weddings. And he smokes them because to, I guess, try to cook it, I don't know, but because he does it in his

closet, it gets filled with maggots. But he brings this pork to these events. And another very common thing there is called pinnick-pican, which is a beaten chicken dish where they believe that if you beat a wild chicken with a stick, it's screaming, calls the attention of the gods. And also it tenderizes this bush chicken that's lived its entire life in the jungle. And so hang out with these guys up there. I realized that when we ate this beaten chicken and this maggotty meat for a four-year-old's

birthday, that, and they all thought it was perfectly normal and the whole community got together and that this has been handed down by generation by generation, and that the smoked meat, yeah, there's some bugs, but it's extra protein, it tastes like spoiled milk, and with the chicken, now the

gods are paying attention, and now we have this big party and the four-year-old's stoked because it's like his favorite food and everyone's getting together dancing and singing and the time comes up. It's like, Mike, try our special dish. And it's like shepherd's pie. You know, I watched seven men cook all day while the wives went around and entertain the kids. What do you say, man?

You say yes and you eat it and everyone's super happy and you have those just genuine moments living like the locals do. Those moments always touch my hearts so much. And again, that hadn't really been captured. before. And again, if you hear about people eating maggoty meat, you're like, what savages are those? But you get to see the beauty around it and you get to see that these are actually human beings just with a bit of a different practice. You know what I mean? I got diarrhea for 14 days after. Well, bro, I would not trade it for the entire world, right? Amazing. I mean, you inspired me.

You make me want to fucking get out there. So thank you so much. I subscribed to your newsletter. It's amazing. Thanks. It's awesome fucking content on there that's super helpful for travel and just like cool stories and shit. Your channel is awesome. Your Instagram is great. And I actually haven't checked out any of the TV shows yet. But I'm... So the one night now you can watch is called Unchartered Adventure on the Weather Channel in the States. If you have a TV with Weather Channel, you can find me. Amazing. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. Let's do this again soon. Let's do it. Peace.