The Joe Rogan Experience - #687 - Justin Wren

Episode Date: August 24, 2015

Justin Wren is an American MMA fighter. He recently returned from one of his many trips helping the Pygmy people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On August 28th, Justin is fighting in Bellator 141 to help raise more awareness. Learn more here: http://FightFortheForgotten.org

We're live. What's with the funky bag, fella? Look at that. Beautiful little hippie case you got going on there. You got the bandana rocking. The pygmy has returned. When did you become the big pygmy and not the Viking? Yeah, I think that was just something that kind of naturally changed a couple of weeks ago. Oh, a couple weeks ago? Yeah. So you've returned, everybody. Justin Wren. You're going to be fighting for Bellator now. Yeah, it's Bellator 141. Pull this sucker right up to you.

Absolutely. It's Bellator 141, and yeah, it's Friday night, August 28th. We'll be on Spike. So you talked about doing this when you were here before, and you said it was a good way to raise awareness for your cause, Fight for the Forgotten. I've got the T-shirt on right now. Yeah.

Is it fightforthevergotten.org? Fightforthevergotten.org right now, yeah. And fightforthevergotten.com will be changed in a matter of a day or two. So you decided to make a comeback just to try to raise awareness and help these pygmies. That's the number one motivation for sure. Second would be, man, I love the sport. I love the sport, just like you. But, yeah, I think that's a I love the sport. Uh, just like you, but, uh,

yeah, I think that's a great opportunity to give my family a voice. And how long has it been since you fought? It's been five years, bro. Wow. Five years, two months. How old are you now? I'm 28. You're still a youngin. Damn, man. I think I still got at least seven years. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Especially heavyweights. Right. Heavyweights. Uh. I watched some videos of you training too, man. You're looking good, dude, for five years off. That's crazy. Yeah, I guess in the force it wasn't too much of a fatty diet like here in the States. Well, it's not just that. You didn't take any beatings. No gym wars, no stress on your joints, all that. I got to heal up a lot on the battle wound kind of things. I mean, I went through a lot of sickness and stuff. But besides that, like, yeah, fighting-wise, I healed up from a lot of injuries.

Imagine if, like, you have a malaria actually gives you endurance or something crazy. That'd be awesome. I'd go get it again. You know, because they say that, like, certain things are actually good for injuries. Like bee stings, likeings are good for arthritis. I didn't know that. Some strange way. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. They put bee stings on people that have certain types of arthritis, and it actually helps relieve them. Wow. Imagine if people found out that malaria. Because you were saying you were basically on death's door. Yeah. I was about to die, for sure.

One thing that's crazy, say insect bites. die for sure um one thing that's crazy say insect bites um there's a way that they do sutures or stitches in a congo with these crazy ants and uh they're these army ants or soldier ants that literally they pierce your skin and so they'll just take it and let it bite a wound and then they pull the body off and so they leave the head leave the mandibles or the jaw that literally close your wound that way what yeah i've been a man. They're terrible. That's fucking crazy Yeah, so you just walk around with a bunch of heads on a cut, right? Absolutely. Does it work? It works It works for sure. So it's like a staple. Yeah, it's like a staple. Yeah, it'd be just like getting staples I guess necessity the mother of invention. Yeah, I don't know if you know this but this is a crazy malaria fact

You could throw around. Malaria has killed half of the people that have ever died ever in the world. Wow. That's crazy. That's nuts. Had no idea. But I believe it because, absolutely believe it because it's terrible. I've known people that have died of it.

Look at that picture. Yeah, there you go, bro. That's fucking nuts. Yeah. That is nuts. Uh-huh. Wow, those guys have some really long, we're looking at a photo of the army ants being used to suture a wound. Yeah, and those ones have these crazy long and slender ones, but the ones in Congo, they have these thick, just nuts.

So, yeah, look right there look at that one up top that's crazy that one might be is that fake shop that looks fake as fuck but that's just stitches yeah that's uh well necessity right i mean you got to figure out a way to close things up there's no crazy glue in the Congo, right? No, no. They use other kinds of stuff that's real sticky sap to kind of mend things together from trees. They also use vines to tie up a bunch of stuff like soccer balls. They'll use a t-shirt, old t-shirt or rag, and then they just use these vines and tie them so tightly that it becomes a perfectly round ball. Wow. Not perfectly round, but round enough to kick around. Well, that's one of the things about soccer that people find appealing is that it's not that hard to create a ball,

and all you need is just flat ground. Right. That's why it's such a good sport for people that don't have money. Yeah, they even play with half-flattened balls that they kick around because they still use it. Yeah, everybody's using the same ball. I guess it's not as good But they get beaten up and popped and everything because they sell that really cheap soccer balls anyways They're only gonna last a couple weeks, but now when you say the Congo the Congo itself is really huge, right?

I mean, I think if I'm not mistaken. I think it's as wide as the United States of America Yeah, I think it might be like three quarters of the continental United States. Something like that. It's the 10th largest country in the world, I believe. And so it's massive. It's only got about 74 million people. But I think 85% of those people, or maybe 80%, 85% live on less than a dollar a day. It's, yeah, it's the flip flops between the poorest country

in the world and second poorest, but it is the most underdeveloped country. So least amount of roads, clean water, uh, education, uh, medical, like it's just the most underdeveloped. Like when I go to Uganda, I kind of get the feeling of whenever I come back from Africa to the United States and how it's just like wow this is really developed compared to there when i go from congo to uganda i feel like wow uganda's really developed they got 3d movies a yogurt land um they have a kfc actually they have like four or five kfcs now wow um but they're racist no and then they have a first thing that gets their kfc yeah but there it's uh what's next watermelons assholes they uh they have what is it um oh it's kind of fine dining at kfc yeah they have a waiter really stuff yeah it's

real nice it's uh you got a charging station for your your smartphone in uganda really yeah wow kfc is pretty goddamn delicious i know it's supposedly not good for you, but I'll tell you what, man. I indulge in KFC every couple months. I'll buy some KFC, and I either eat it or I wait until it gets cold, and I eat it with hot sauce. KFC with some habanero hot sauce, get some El Yucateca, the real Mexican shit that you gotta go to those funky grocery stores to buy, or online. Some good stuff. Oh, dude. It's just not good for you. Yeah.

Apparently. And we were talking about how they're putting sucralose in Diet Pepsi. You need to figure out a way to make Kentucky Fried Chicken good for you. Yeah, that'd be great. That's the worst thing about all the tasty food is it's bad for you. Exactly. It's the opposite. Fuck, man.

What's up with that? This is first world problems, like literally. If anybody can talk about first world problems, it's you. I mean, a guy who goes from being a reality star on The Ultimate Fighter, fighting in the UFC, and then all of a sudden you're living in the Congo. For folks who don't know Justin's story, Justin's been on the podcast a couple times, and the story is compelling, it's crazy, it's heartwarming. And the story is compelling.

It's crazy. It's heartwarming. It's an amazing tale of a guy, you, who goes to the Congo and falls in love with these people that don't have a voice. And you've done incredible things. And because of the money that was raised because your show's on here, there's the Fight for the Forgotten website. Oh, yeah. How many wells have you created now? We just celebrated, as of yesterday, our 25th water well. So 25. Yeah. And, and what's so great about that to me is we were, I was there for the first 13 water wells and now we've built.

So what I love and that website that was up was we're partnered with Water 4. Now it's water4.org, so the number 4. But, man, it's kind of like we set up an exit strategy. This is a lifelong goal for me, and I'll be going back wholeheartedly, everything else. But our goal is to empower the locals to be able to do it themselves. And so I was there for the first 13 water wells. there for the first 13 water wells. Had people from the director of implementation of Waterford come in and teach our guys hydrology, geology, all the different ins and outs of how to drill a well and protect it and all the sanitation. But we're investing in the locals so that they can be the answer to their own problem, if that makes sense. And that way,

now we have 17 full-time employees. Wow. Yeah. And we have two well drilling teams. There's 14 guys on that. And then when they go out into a community, we invite the community into the project. We want them to feel a part of it. There's a lot of organizations out there, and I'm not trying to talk bad about them, but they'll go in with a million-dollar drilling rig and Westerners that are, you know, water engineers, and that's great. But they'll go into a community and kind of say, you know, get back. We're here to do this for you because you can't do it for yourself.

And then the parts are so expensive, they're not going to be able to repair it when it breaks. And there's a good chance, like, I think two in three of those expensive ones, or at least, no, one-third of them don't operate after a year of drilling it. And so what we want to do is go in there, teach the locals how to do it themselves, create a local economy for it and like stimulate that, give people jobs. And then, and then let the community feel a part of it. So we look for day laborers in the communities we go to and give them a job while we're there. Invite them in on the process, teach them some of it. We've acquired some of those guys that are just big, strong, love helping people.

Now they're part of our team. But the core of our team graduated from university in degrees of community development. So that's what we want to do. We want to go in there, empower the locals. And yeah, I'm a big part of it. But what I want to do is be able to fan the flames and say, you can do it because a lot of international aid tells the locals that they can't do it for themselves. Um, maybe, maybe they don't say that, but it's kind of the way they

go about attacking the problem. And you got to go about it in a way that, that kind of creates dignity for the locals instead of kind of robs them of dignity where they feel like they can't help themselves that's a great way of approaching it I'm really I'm so happy you're doing that I love that I love that you're trying to help these people become a part of this solution you know instead of like someone solving it for them now when you when you're involved in digging these wells, and you're saying these expensive wells break or the machines, like the pumps, how many parts are involved? Is it like a lot of stuff?

Are there different ways to do it? It's a lot. It depends on how deep it is. Yeah, there are multiple ways of drilling a well. The way we go about it is, I would say, more simple but harder, a lot harder, labor intensive. But it's just as safe. Well, we, for instance, like the deep wells, those are great. And honestly, like in a place like Ethiopia or places where the water tables are super deep, you're going to need those.

So those are absolutely part of the solution. We need those water engineers. We need those so those are absolutely part of the solution we need those water engineers we need those people doing that but whenever say in the Congo it's a place that is dangerous there's lots of rebel groups lots of instability they're not going to drive a million dollar or half a million dollar drilling rig deep into the forest over these bridges that are notorious for collapsing and taken and washing away uh big lorries or 18 wheelers they're not going to drive them across there they can't get on the roads that we go on because they're heavy they're dense the parts

break on the travel just out to the villages and then once you get there like going into the pygmy villages where we are sometimes it takes it's taken up to two days i think to get our equipment into the village after we traveled there because we have to hike it all in and we can hike an hour off the nearest road to the village. We can hike three hours from the nearest road to the village. And so we're hiking in over a ton of, so when I'm saying this is hard, like our guys are, I think they're just as much fighters or more than I am because they're gritting down, they're hauling this stuff in from the augers. The way we do it is we use a tripod and we use augers and ropes and pulleys and we use these chisels that go down and they're

single prong, triple prong. And so we have all these tools we can use for each obstacle that we're going to hit as we go down in different geological layers. This is incredible. So you're walking three hours with a ton of equipment. Yeah. Walking. Like anywhere from gravel to bags of cement that are 100 pounds to the rock breaker that can be 40 pounds. Another one that's 80 pounds and another one that's like 130 pounds. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, and we're taking in all the PVC pipes and the galvanized pipes and, yeah, everything that you can think of. Sand, bricks, and we have to hike all that in from the roadside into the village. So it can take two days of going back and forth to the truck if we're walking that long with all the supplies. Two to three days of just walking with giant augers and steel pipes and sandbags. Normally it's like a day. We get there and we take all our stuff. But, yeah, it's taken a long time before because, yeah, it's a fight to even get there to start the work. And then once we dig, man, that's the biggest fight.

Yeah, you must be exhausted by the time you even get there. You're hiking with all this weight. Yeah. Wow. And then, and then once we start drilling our average well, um, in other parts of the world where the obstacles aren't as, as big, um, they can bust out a well in a week, um, 10 days, but where we are, we average 10 to 16 days per water well. And so our guys are out there and living with the pygmies. That's something that we selected every member of our team based on can they survive in the forest? And more than that, can they love my pygmy family? Because that's important because other people around there, a lot of them don't love them, hate them, or discriminate. And so we want to find people that are passionate about the people, passionate about the water crisis.

And then that way, yeah, we can then teach them and put the tools in their hands and invest in them. And so that's what the last four years has been for me, really investing in good people, people that believe in it. And then from there, we can fan the flames for them Is it perplexing for you to have discovered this place and you know to being alive in the 21st century with all the modern? Communication and all that and to to know that these people are out there and no one has tried to do this before and that You're you're stumbling across these giant groups of people that don't have anyone looking out for them Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. I mean, I would say that I'm not the only guy that's ever tried to help them,

but I would say that maybe we're trying to take an approach, and that's what's so awesome about the university that I'm partnered with. They've been working with the Pygmies for years and years. The guy that's leading the way, the dean of the School of Community Development, he's been doing it since the year I was born. And then he started with the university there for the last 10 years. So I went to them to say, like, hey, how can we do this in a strategic way that the impact will last? It'll keep going on and on and on instead of a lot of I don't know if it's American culture or what, but it's so fast, you know, and we want the quick fix. And the quick fix a lot of times isn't the best route

that the results can just be a temporary one where we have a, I call it the show up, blow up and blow out technique. We show up, we do the show, we take the pictures and then we leave and we never come back. And so what we want to do is be opposite. We want to build relationships, get in touch. We want to be like a family with them and then show them that, Hey, we're not just here for, for land. Because that's what we started with first. We got them 2,470 acres of land. That's 10 square kilometers in the forest. Then we did the water and now we're doing food. You got them, meaning you purchased it for them or had a purchase for them? Right.

We petitioned, lobbied, and basically said, yeah, we went to battle saying, I mean, in a peaceful way, but said, these people are the first people of Congo. Not just that. A lot of people say they're the first people of Africa. They're one of the oldest people groups. They're so peaceful. They're so alive. Well, if that's true, then that's the origins of humanity.

I was just reading this Bill Nye thing about humans. It was just some quote that he had said about the human race. It's been proven now that we are literally all one race. And the only thing that's different is our exposure to ultraviolet light and different environments have changed the way we look and how our bodies react to the environment. But if that's the case. I didn't know that, but I love that standard effect. Well, we know that all people, as far as we know today, the knowledge kind of grows and changes over the years. But we know today that all human beings, as far as we know, came from Africa.

So if that's the case, these people you're dealing with could very well be the oldest humans in the world. And it kind of makes sense if you really think about it. I mean, that's where the primates evolved and came down from the trees and started experimenting and moving along and trying different environments and spreading out throughout the land. It's pretty nuts. You're like at the cradle the land. It's pretty nuts. Yeah. You're like at the cradle of life. It's really a bizarre place. Yeah.

All I know is, man, it's the culture there, their hearts. They're such sweet people. And I don't use that word a whole lot, but they're just, they're sweet as can be. And so whenever we went in with my team, basically're sweet as can be. And, um, and so whenever we went in, um, with, with my team, basically it was like local led. Um, I mean, I was, I was in the, in the picture, but kind of playing behind the scenes when it came to the negotiating. Um, and they went in there and it was the Dean of the school of community development. It was my guy. That's, uh, the director of fight for the forgotten in Congo. And they said, these are the first people of Congo.

Why is it that they have zero land of their own? Because shouldn't they have some land to call their own? And, and we know that looking through history and, and whether it was, whether it was you or whether it was your grandfather, we stole this land from them. We stole it.

They have none of their own and don't they have a right to have some land? And so that's kind of where, um, yeah, we just lobbied on their behalf and then said, so if I bought the land in fight for the forgotten, if we would have bought it in our name, we would have gotten a five-year certificate and we would have had to renew things and fees and everything every five years. If we bought it in the name of the university there that we partner with, it would have been a 25 year certificate. But then at the end of the 25 years, we'd have to pay the same price that we purchased it for 25 years earlier, would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars every 25 years, maybe more. And then we were thinking, it's kind of cool. So in Africa, I would say a lot of the countries, at least my understanding

is that it was it was the colonialist or colonist or however you say that they were the ones that set up the boundaries of the countries. It wasn't the tribes. And so like say Rwanda, the Hutu and Tutsi, they probably wouldn't have put their country together right there because they've had a long history of disputes with each other. So they wouldn't be in the same country. They would have been two different countries. Same thing in Congo. There's over 200 tribes. So in Congo, what's very, I don't know, here we're all America, America pride or Texas and things like that.

But in Congo, it's about what tribe you're from. And so in a lot of parts of Africa, they're really proud about their tribe. of parts of Africa, they're really proud about their tribe. And so on the government level, the strongest thing in court was buying the land in the name of a tribe, because that's what they respect. That's what they value. And yet nobody was petitioning and lobbying on behalf of the pygmies. So that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to go in and say, these people deserve some land. What we did was buy it from the people that originally stole it from them, whether it was them or their grandfather. And so that benefited the people that originally stole it from them, whether it was them or their grandfather. And so that benefited the people that were basically oppressing them financially.

And we gave them years and years worth of salary to work with us. And then on both sides, we said, so they benefited financially and the pygmies benefited by having their own land. You can't give them a water well without them owning the land that they're on. And so then we said, how can we give you both water? That's what the next step is. And the next step after that is food. How can we start a farming project, teach the pygmies how to farm correctly or farm really for the first time? Um, a lot of them worked for their former masters and stuff like that. But then, um, with the Makapala, which means non py-pygmies, we're like, how can we teach you better farming practices? How can you need to plant your seeds deeper? You need to put your seeds farther apart because they're not producing fruit because or the corn's only half of a cob instead of a full cob because your plants are basically choking themselves out.

So we have three agriculturalists we're interning right now. They've already done a great job, but we're wanting to expand from three villages to 10 villages. It's just an immense sacrifice that you've done, that you've taken on. And it's probably quite difficult to find people that have the same kind of passion for it that you have. Do you find that to be the case? Your passion has has got to be infectious I mean a lot of people I'm sure like I have been moved by it so thank you but it's got to be hard to get people to go to the Congo though dude yeah well that's that's that's the reason we invest in the locals they're there yeah they're there in Congo and they they

want I mean the people we selected to solve the water crisis, I mean, they know what it's like to go without clean water. Right. So if they can be the answer to that, they're going to be the ones even more passionate about it than me. Also, it's the old adage, teach a man to fish. Right. And, you know, fish for life. Give a man a fish, and he's just, one fish, that's it.

You're teaching these people. Now, we got off the subject of the wells like yes The tripod and the auger so What kind of a machine is involved in digging this thing? Yeah, so we're it's it's been developed by water for and they're awesome An actual machine that that is small enough that we can carry it into the villages. How much is it way that? Don't don't know maybe I shouldn't quote myself on this, but I think it's around 150, 150, 200.

So you guys have to carry that for hours. You could. Some of the land is only like a 30-minute hike off the nearest quote-unquote road that's just dirt and clay and silt and big boulders. But, yeah, most of them are 30 minutes an hour, two hours, one's even three hours off the nearest road. So yeah, we got to hike that stuff all in. But I would say that the manual drilling method, which has been approved by UNICEF and USAID and all these other major organizations that say it can be just as clean, just as safe as the deep water wells,

as long as we do it to a high standard and keep a high integrity when we do it. Which means we backfill it with a clay sanitary seal. We put a cement plug on there. So that way there's no sort of bacteria or anything else that can get down into our well. We got to protect the water table. And so we do that every single time to a high standard. But, yeah, so whenever we're doing it, the machine is us. The manual drilling method, we have wrenches and those augers. And so those augers would look like kind of like a folder. Like an ice auger?

Yeah, very similar. It would be almost like a coffee can with two claws on the bottom of it. And at the top, it's got a stem that attaches to a drilling stem. And then at the top, I mean, whenever you're starting from the first, down the first two or three feet, like you can see the auger and you just. So it's totally by hand. It's almost like twisting. Yeah, you just twist. Almost like a pummel.

Good for the forearms. Oh, yeah, man. Dude, my forearms and my right bicep over here, my left tricep over here from it. You got to switch it up, dude. I know we need to, we need to have the augers changing, but as of now it's just the same way. Um, but yeah, so it's, it's us just drilling and we can go, we can go up to 150 feet deep in the ground. And so when we're doing that, it's, it's crazy. I think the deepest we've gone is like 70. So when you're doing 70 feet it's brutal. That's crazy. I think the deepest we've gone is like 70. So when you're doing 70 feet, what kind of a pipe is, do you have to keep attaching a longer and longer pipe to it?

Six foot, or sorry, six meter, 20 foot long. Segments? Segments of this drilling stem. It's a square tube that's really thick, really strong, really heavy. And then we just, we attach that. the bottom. We have a rope that's, that's secured to it so we can crank it up. So we crank it up on the way up. But, but we, we drill down. So you're doing it all by hand. You get to a certain distance, depth rather, and then you put another segment on and then you start off, start from scratch. Right. We, we attach the segments, the deeper we go. So once we're 20 feet deep, we've got to attach another drilling stem.

And once we're 40 foot, we have two drilling stems. Once we're 60 foot, we have three drilling stems. And how do you know where to drill? Do you have one of those dudes with one of them wishbones walking around? Did we talk about this before? No. I always wondered if that divining stuff is real. I have no clue. I hear some people say it's it's legit but i haven't ever

seen it i hate that expression yeah i hear i hear yeah no i i have no clue to be honest uh the validity i just don't know how it could possibly really work i have a friend who uh had a well dug out here and he they hired this guy to come over and they had the two sticks and he's like standing there and like he's telling them where to dig that's not how we go about it we we we have a ves machine which is basically um we hook up a car battery and some of these other like electronic devices and throw it in the ground and um and then it kind of you have a laptop out there and and it shows us all this on a graph um but the way i did it for the first 13 wells, now our team's been trained in that as well. So that's, what's so cool about

us partnering with Water 4 is they're continually training our guys on the better drilling methods. But whenever I was out there, Hey, we're in the rainforest, there's gotta be water, you know, underneath our feet. So let's, let's dig. And, uh, it was real tough the first time because we had eight failures, um, over and over and over because we were hitting sandstone. Now with the VES machine, we can see if it's sandstone, if it's quartz, if it's a granite, what, what kind of rock is underneath where the water table is. We know how deep we need to drill. Um, but at first for the first 13 wells, we were just trial and error. We'd dig, and we even had one spot where we drilled for 10 or 12 days, and we hit water,

but then all of a sudden we hit a layer of quartz underneath it. And so there was just about six feet of clean water on top of this quartz. It was deep, but we needed more. We needed to break through that quartz and then be able to have, hopefully, what would be right underneath that is a rushing, awesome aquifer for us to tap into. That would make that well sustain a lot longer. But we couldn't break through it at that time. We just didn't have the right tools. Now we do. But we just had to pick up and move. So we picked up, moved, maybe a football field away. And we went down the hill a little bit

and said, hopefully we don't hit the quartz layer. And yeah, just a football field away. The geology was different. The water, the recharge rate was great. The water kept coming into our well. And then we have to do a lot of different things like we have to plunge and bail and develop the well to where it'll be clean we put a gravel pack around it all this different stuff to make sure the gravel pack acts as a filter is that how it works kind of and what it does is it keeps um so we we put down a pvc uh like four inch um uh sorry it's it's um but we put the pipe down there and the gravel pack goes around it and the gravel pack kind of keeps any any dirt silt sand um depending on what what layer we are we're in it keeps that from coming into our well so that way

the water that is inside of our casing, there we go, our four-inch casing pipe that allows, it has like little slits in it. Maybe it would be like the size of a saw if you just kind of put a saw in there and it's every like centimeter apart from each other. And that way inside of our casing and before the water touches our pipe, like it's crystal clear, it's clean, we test it, all that stuff. And so the gravel pack keeps the sand, the dirt, the silt, anything out of our well. Wow.

Yeah. That's incredible, man. It's just incredible the amount of thinking and planning and all that's involved in just getting people what everybody here just totally takes for granted. Water. Yeah. It's taken us a month in one spot. A month. Because we had a failed well.

And, man, it's brutal. And sometimes, man, I'm thankful that I was a fighter. Because sometimes you have to bite down on your mouthpiece and just keep swinging whenever you want to give up. And you have a team out there that's tired. So in between the failed well and the other one, we took two days off, but we can't go back to, we call it Bunia, the town where we can kind of rest and get some good food and come back out. What we did was go to a little market and get more dried fish and some more rice and some more beans. And we're like, Hey, we're out here. Uh, we're not

stopping until we, until we finished till we get these people clean water. And when you look at what they're drinking, we, we do the water walks with them. I love telling my team, like, let's do the walk that they have to go on to get water. And man, I've gone 45 minutes, uh, an hour walking with the women. Cause it's the women that collect the water in that culture because the men are off in the fields or they're off hunting or they're off doing stuff. So the women go and get the water and it can be a 45 minute hour hike with these 20 liter jerry cans and 20 liters I think full is like 40 or 44 pounds whenever it's full and they're going to get dirty water dirty water that is a 45 minute hike away from them and they're bringing back one or two of those 44 pound jerry cans so

some of these mabuti pygmy women are literally carrying their body weight or more in water and it's dirty tiny people right wow yeah most of of the hunters, we were given this filaria treatment. A filarial worm is this crazy kind of, it comes from black fly bites, but it's from like contaminated water that the flies go to and breed in. They come and they bite you and then you can get river blindness from it. What's river blindness? River blindness is a disease that also, there's a pygmy woman named Mama Miriamo and I love her to death and she's so great. But she's lost five of her seven children due to this illness and her husband. And there's a there's a video on it, too.

I think it's called the Opportunity at Freedom or something that's on the Water Force site. But five of seven children are gone and her husband. It's all waterborne disease and she has river blindness so not only has she lost all her not all of her children but five and her husband but she's blind and she's blind because of of river blindness and so the the worms get in your body and there's five different kinds of filarial worms and one kind of the worms like the babies go to your retina, I think, and they like attack and eat and live and sleep, um, in the retina of your eyes until you have,

until you have no vision left. Um, and four of the five don't, don't do that. Um, but what it does is it irritates your skin. Supposedly I've had it. Um, I've had to take the treatment. Um, whenever I took the pill, it made my body itch. And that's how, you know, if you had it or not, um, is if your skin itches, it's killing the parasites, right? It's killing the worms, killing the parasites. Um, and so what I was like, man, if I have this and if our team has it, because we treated our well drillers first and some of them broke out in rashes and hives and really were itching. And it's just a part of it. If you go to that region, you're going to get it if you're out there long enough. Maybe not if you go for a week, but if you go for an extended period of time,

you need to at least take the treatment to make sure you don't have that. Wow. And so I was like, man, if I supposedly had it and if my team has it, then I know the pygmies means it's like ravaging them You know and so we went to the different villages and took a scale and and from that we knew how much medicine we should Give them I talked to this guy. Dr. Peter Hotez he's He's an expert in

Tropical diseases. Okay, and he said that he blew me away He said that 100% of people that live in tropical climates have parasites. Oh, yeah. I totally 100% believe that. That's insane. I know it's insane, but you live there, you know it. This environment that you're in, that you're going and you're digging these wells, like, describe to us, if you could, like, what is it like? I mean, you're talking about intensely dense vegetation.

What kind of like animal life and what kind of wildlife is around you and bugs? Oh, yeah, bugs, it's nuts. Yeah, my wife's first camping trip ever was in the Congo. You showed us photos of it. It's hilarious. Last time you were here. Yeah. So it was a big eye-opening experience for her.

But the vegetation, it's nuts. So the Amazon is the biggest rainforest in the world. But the Congo is the second largest. But it is the densest, the thickest. It's the hardest to navigate through. There's parts in Uganda that barely touch the stuff in Congo. But they call it the impenetrable forest. Um, uh, there's parts in, in Uganda that, that barely touched the stuff in Congo, but they call it the impenetrable forest because, uh, there's sayings that it's, um, uh, I forget,

but it's harder for a fish to swim through the, the rivers there because even the rivers are thick vegetation and all this stuff. And, um, in some parts, but dude, it's, it's crazy. Like walking through and hiking through I have a picture That's gonna be in my book of been walking and I was like how much of this do we have to walk through it was We were literally machete using a machete to get through to this pygmy village And I'm like dang they walk through this every day where it's like the you're just walking through the thicket That's going across your face going across your arms. There There's bugs latching onto you while you're doing that.

There's mosquitoes like crazy at all times. There's the ants. The ants will literally look like a small creek or rushing river. I've seen them at least, literally at least two foot wide, and you can hear them. You can hear them. It's two foot wide and you can hear them. You can hear them. It's two foot wide of ants and it's just a black river because it's these ants that are just rushing, running in and out of things. Um, and yeah, so it's, there's bumblebees there that are like bright, uh, like the,

or they have a bright blue or purple on their back. I'm kind of partially colorblind, but, but, uh, but I can see them. And literally they're the size of a golf ball they're like perfectly round they're perfectly round a golf ball a golf ball for a bumblebee god for a bumblebee 100 like like a golf ball and what we would do is emily and my wife brought a a racket that had those little it was like a little taser for, for bugs. Um, and it's in the shape of a tennis racket and we just, there's one village, uh, Andy Kwakwa and it's got, um, tons of those golf ball bumblebees and they're vicious too. The butt on those things is just, it looks wicked. You don't want to get stung by it. And whenever you do it, it leaves like this. It looks like

you got shot by like buckshot and a little bitty golf ball size whelp. Wow. But yeah, we just smack those things with that little taser racket thing. It's got to be one of the wildest places on earth, right? I mean, next to the Amazon, it's probably like right up there. Yeah. It's nuts. You know what?

Maybe this would give you an idea. Jamie, maybe we get those pictures. You can start with that what is this right here this i wanted to bring you a gift man um from the congo but uh actually go behind those pictures first and check out uh but if you leave them that or great but that's san gi and I knew you would really connect with this little dude we should have a picture up of uh do you have a genie the first one and uh and San Gi here is from uh we call it Tundu and Tundu it just means hole but we call it the hole in the forest and um he's a little dude and and in that village, they make those little handprints, or actually the cloth. So the cloth is this, like, bark cloth, and it's like a traditional way that the Mabuti Pygmies, like, make stuff for artwork. So that cloth that he's holding is made out of bark?

Yes. Actually, reach in there, and you'll see the actual cloth that's his. reach in there and you'll see the the actual cloth that that's his so this is kind of a thank you um way that that they kind of gave me a few things to remember them by and to say like tell your friends and people that supported this like thank you um but san ghi is he's probably 12 i would say this is bark yeah it's bark wow bark cloth so it feels kind of like a canvas and uh sorry on the plane it got a bent up a little how do they how do they do this what are they doing um i'm actually not sure it's it's the bark and they beat it down they like beat it down pressurize it or something and and uh or put a lot of pressure when they're doing it what kind of tree is this do you know i don't actually don't know it's but it's. There's so many trees out there.

It feels like a flexible cardboard. Yeah. So they'll do like their own kind of paintings and stuff. It's really like traditional. And you can like even Google bark cloth, and I think it comes up with the pygmies. Wow, I'm going to get this framed, man. That's awesome. Thank you very much.

That's amazing. Dude, that's his handprint. Wow. God, his hands are so tiny. Yeah. He's probably 12. None of them really know their age just because they don't really have a calendar and don't keep up with it and don't have school or anything like that. No iPhones?

No iPhones. No iPhones. No whatever it is, Google calendars. Wow. But the next picture, that's right there with you, but it's their village. And there you go. On my right, so if you're looking at the picture on the left, that's Loringa. And he's my translator and our director of implementation.

To his right, the guy with the hat, that is Leo May. That's a dope hat, by the way. Yeah, he's awesome. That's the chief? Yeah, Chief Leo May. And he's such a great dude. And he's the grandfather of Sang Gi. Two over from me, the lady that I have my arm around him, and then, yeah, right there, that's Chief Leo May's wife.

And they're basically the parents of Sang Gi. Sang Gi's right in front of me, squatting down. Right. Right in front of my right leg. And so they're raising him because his parents passed away. But what I want to show you about Sankey is he has a passion that's common with you. And I got to be there for two really cool things. You can go to the next picture.

And that's the stack in your thing, too. But here's the village at night and that dude's got a sweet little guitar thing he made he used the he used wire from a tire uh to make the stringed strings of the string instrument like steel belted radial tire like that kind of yeah i think so i mean it was like a old abandoned tire and he just made this thing out of wood to make a guitar so he got the wire like stripped it out of the rubber stripped it out of the rubber and made himself a stringed instrument but if you sang he's over my back and this is just us this is how we learn the most about how we can help them when we sit around

the campfire with them we we've kind of made a goofy name for it, but we call it Campfire University because that's where they take us to school. Whenever we're sitting around, that's where we can hear the truth about how they're really treated. No one else is around, like any of their oppressors and stuff.

They're able to just be themselves. Sometimes we would pretend to be asleep so other people would leave, but now this is on their own land and they have like freedom to to just chill and relax wow um and then if you go to the next picture but uh i just okay so you got that picture also but that's uh one of the first antelope wild kind of bushmeat that I got to eat. So they call everything bushmeat, right? Yeah, basically. I've had monkey, which now I realize I probably shouldn't do that again.

It's probably not healthy, right? Yeah, you can get Ebola. And so that's how Ebola from monkey and bats. And I shouldn't laugh, but I didn't know. I didn't know about uh that's how you get a bullet and then all of a sudden the bullet virus broke out like literally a month or two after i ate the monkey and all of a sudden i'm like oh geez uh so this uh antelope did they shoot this with bow and arrow yep they got that one with the bow and arrow san gui got his uh in

the next picture uh he got his with a spear and this is uh jesus christ yeah this is his fur what they do is they chase it into a net so they string these nets up uh through the through the trees and then the men and the women sometimes too they go through with like leaves and other things and make sounds and they scare the antelope into their their nets i've seen them how they string this out these nets can be man they can be a football field in length. And then they scare the antelope into it, and then they have to catch up to it before it escapes. And they spear it.

So Sankey speared that. That's your little dude. Wow. And then the next one's pretty cool. Just holding the head. So they probably cook that head too, right? Oh, yeah. Cook the brains. Eat every cool. Just holding the head. So they probably cook that head too, right? Oh, yeah. Cook the brains.

Eat every part. Cook the tongue, the eyes. Yeah, you don't waste anything. And that village was the first time I saw them eating a turtle. And not that turtles are that strange to eat, but they even eat the shell. What? Yeah, I know that sounds crazy. I saw them.

I'm like, doesn't that hurt? But they would cook it over the fire, and I guess it would weaken the shell, I think. But it still sounded really crunchy. So they're chewing on the shell. Eat the shell. Eat every part of it. What the fuck, man? Yeah.

But, I mean, for them, though, that's the only food they got. Wow. I had no idea. I saw a crocodile once eat a turtle, and I thought that that crocodile was fucking crazy, but that's a crocodile. I didn't think a human ate a turtle, a shell at least. Yeah, and I've been out in Louisiana with my grandpa fishing. Turtle soup? Yeah, and a Cajun guy just came over because we kept catching turtles, and he would cut off the head because you can't really get your hook back.

And then he would just open it up and see if they had eggs in them. And right there, without cooking it, without really cleaning it, he would just pop the eggs in his mouth. And I was like, this guy's crazy. So that was in Louisiana. It was down in the bayou.

But we can go to the next picture. So do these people have a hard time finding food? Or is this fairly common to eat all these different antelopes and whatever this is? What is this, a cat? This is Sangi's second kill. So I was there for his first kill and his second kill, and they were months apart, though. This is, I think they call it a large spotted genet, or I think I'm pronouncing that right. It's G-E-N-E-T.

bodded genet and or i think i'm pronouncing that right it's g-e-n-e-t and it looks like a cross between i don't know a mongoose and a baby leopard or something like that but i've been someone tried to sell me okapi meat have you ever seen that animal it's uh it's got the butt of a zebra it's got the body of an antelope and the head of a giraffe i know it sounds crazy it's only in the congo and that's what it looks like at least but it's in the giraffe a an antelope and the head of a giraffe. I know it sounds crazy. It's only in the Congo. That's what it looks like, at least. But it's in the Giraffidae family. And so it's the only other surviving animal in that family. It's actually with an eye.

Whoa, look at that freaky fucking thing. Yeah, I have seen these things before. They look fake. It looks like a mythical creature. In the giraffe family. And someone's tried to sell me the meat of it. It's an endangered species. It wasn't a mythical creature. In the giraffe family. And someone's tried to sell me the meat of it. It's an endangered species. It wasn't a baby. It is?

Yeah, endangered species. And I would have gotten in a lot of trouble if I got caught doing that. If you got caught bringing the meat back? Probably even try to put me in life in prison or something. Really? Probably, yeah. If you had the meat. But how would they know where you got the meat from?

How would they know that it was an okapay These you selling me the butt. Oh, I see what the People eat zebras too, right? I believe so. That's gotta be insanely tough me Yeah, so but back to my original question Is it difficult for these people to find meat or is it yeah like a really rich a lot harder than it used to be? A lot harder because a lot of the deforestation is happening and so i've literally been able to look up see the uh the sun see that the sky's clear uh through the canvas and stuff and then

it sounds like thunder um and it's because they're cutting down these huge trees and so that makes it really hard for the pygmies um to hunt because the animals are skittish they get scared they get frightened they they're a lot tougher to get wow um so yeah there's the that's when he came back and first showed me this tiny little uh cat thing and so how do they cook that um they skin it they keep the meat or sorry they keep the skin to uh make a hat or a little trophy out of. And then that's the spear he got it with. That was a smaller one. His grandpa has one that he killed an elephant with.

But yeah, they put it over a tripod of sticks, and then they wrap the meat and leaves. And they kind of smoke it. So that it seems to last. I mean, they smoke it and it lasts longer so dry it out yeah that's um and then and then they'll they'll soak it again and like boil it so that it kind of gets back it's not so dry huh at times like i mean it so they do a fish too and other things this is so it's a method of preserving it's sort of like um the native americans did that with buffalo and they do that in Mexico, too. They take the buffalo, and they make really thin slices, and they dry it in the sun, and then they rehydrate it again and cook it.

So kind of like with their situation of them being the first citizens of Congo, that's what we always use with them, the terminology. of them being the first citizens of Congo. That's what we always use with them, the terminology. Similar to the Native Americans and what we did here. Pushed them off their land, took their land from them. That's what happened to the Pygmies. And so that's kind of, it's similar to something that I was thinking is, hey, we could get these people these little kind of reservations.

We have 10 different plots of land. All of them are 247 acres, eight of them are two are ones like half a square kilometer. So like one 20 and the other is like close to 500 acres. Um, and so, but that's their land they'll pass down. And what we want to do is on one of them, we started replanting trees that are targeted for deforestation. So one of our agriculturalists that were interning, we gave them a goal. His name's Dramani. Great dude. Um, we want him to replant a thousand trees and we're like, Hey, you can feed the, anyone that helps you, you know, the pygmies, give them breakfast, lunch, dinner, uh, and we'll give them like a day's wage and

teach them how to, to, to, to make money. Um, and how to, you know, work for the first time making money. And so when he came back back we were blown away because he had replanted 3,500 trees 3,500 so that's also what we want to do too is preserve their culture they love the trees they don't cut down the big ones so the market where are these trees going to because this is an issue that's going on the amazon as well there's like mahogany hardwoods out there yeah big heavy heavy hardwoods and they take a long time to grow too right yeah yeah they take a long time so they're chopping down 100 yeah and they're doing it on a daily basis like trees that you could drive an 18 wheeler through so that's why there's there's times that a tree falls and i'm like is it about

to rain is it thunder because it's it's this huge massive old tree that's being cut down. You could literally drive in it, like the redwoods they have in the Pacific Northwest? Yeah, I would say they're not as big as the redwoods, and some of them are that big, but some aren't. I mean, some you could drive a Mini Cooper through. Wow. But, yeah, some are massive, and they're just cutting them down. Just the perspective that you must gain from being in this insane environment. It's gotta be a really, uh, for a lack of a better word, enriching experience. Yeah. I mean, it's so good for the soul. I would say just your heart, you,

you feel, um, you feel like you're a part of something greater than yourself, something bigger than yourself. And I would say that that's where a lot of my struggles in life came from was when I was so, um, focused on something small, which is myself. I was like magnifying glass or putting myself under microscope in my life. And it's like, whenever I took the focus off of me and put it on others, like it, it gave me such a greater sense of purpose in life of, man, I don't need to live for myself. Like this problem, like what if I could be part of a little, a little part, a little link in the chain to help, to be in the, in the problem.

And whatever small problems anybody here has in comparison to the issues that they have there, it's one of the things that happens to people when crisis takes place when there's any sort of a crisis like after 9-11 one of the weirdest aspects of being in New York was how friendly everybody was like everybody kind of had this newfound perspective they had this new instead of dealing with the stress and the the grind of the big city in the traffic and all the nonsense and all the aggro behavior that people normally had, it wasn't there. It was like people were friendly and they were nice and kind.

It's like they had put it in perspective because of the attack. Right. And it's just, it's a shame that human beings are like that, that we have to have something kind of crazy happen to us for us to pretty yeah to unite us and to appreciate right yeah and i would say i would say there it's almost like they are are like that the kind of what you're saying about new york and not that they're constantly like that right constantly like that yeah they're constantly like appreciative for anything that they get anything that they get for that day the even even whenever they're working underneath their slave masters and they're getting, um, a minnow for a full day's labor or two bananas, um, for a family of four or five that are literally working from sunup to sundown, they get two bananas to

share. Like there's like, whenever we talk to them about it, yes, they'll, they'll say we need more. We, this is slavery. This is slave labor. Like it's terrible. It's, about it, yes, they'll say, we need more. This is slavery. This is slave labor. It's terrible. But whenever they get that food at the end of the day, they're thankful for it because they've got to have it. But the oppressors use that as a way to keep them hungry so that they have to come back the next day and work. Yeah. Similar story.

Yeah. That's the story as old as time, right? Yeah. Hey, could we show that next picture in that sorry i'll try to bust this out so this i love this is sangee's uh grandmother she's wearing bins bins on the the right with the blue shirt he's our director and uh kakura is behind him in the blue shirt and right in front of him with the sunglasses on is Mama Leome. What is she wearing around her waist? Leaves. Leaves.

Yeah, leaves. So she tied vines and leaves together. And, yeah, whenever, if cameras probably weren't out, like, it's not a big deal, like, clothes or not clothes or anything like that, but whenever we bust out a camera because it's like, Hey, this is going to be a cool celebration. So why we bust out cameras different than the show up, blow up and blow out so that we have pictures. What's so cool. One of the greatest gifts I've ever given mama Leo may, uh, is a picture of herself, a picture of her and Sangi, a picture of her and and Leo-me. What we do is we print up these pictures, we get them laminated,

and they've never had a picture of themselves, ever. And so we're able to go back and give them these pictures, and they'll always be able to cherish and remember this moment. Do they have mirrors? There might be a half-broken mirror that's, like, I mean, very tiny. Like a woman's compact yeah right it might be like crushed or broken and they might have that for the whole village wow um so it's but some places no some places not at all some places i give them my iphone and they get to look at themselves and they're just like oh my goodness because they've only seen themselves really in uh

and in reflection of water and stuff like that. How long before they start taking selfies? Give them the iPhone. Is it immediate? Does it make the kissy face or no? Right. No, I've even had the duck face or duck lips. But, man, on my Instagram at the Big Pygmy, there's some pictures of me actually given this village pictures.

And, dude, some of their expressions whenever they get to see a picture of themselves for the first time, it's like the craziest looks in their eyes seeing themselves on a piece of paper. Yeah, I would only imagine. I could only imagine seeing yourself in a photograph for the first time. Yeah. Wow. Another thing that we just a photograph for the first time. Yeah. Wow. Another thing that we just completely take for granted. Right.

Oh, I also brought you something that's inside that bag. I know you're a hunter. That's why I got you those hunting pictures. I also got you some handmade knives that are from there, from the congo how do they make these um by hand they like hammer on them and then uh where do they get the metal yeah oh so like they're like butter knives yeah it looks just like a american they made this yeah how actually josh helped me come up with a joke to try to. This is a joke?

Yeah, that one's a joke because. I was like, what? But I try to get a joke on the comedian. This is the real one. You rascal, you. I was like, dude, there's a copyright on this. That one looked too pretty. It was from our hotel.

Oh, wow. But this one's the real deal. So they made it out of a nail some of the the the people that were working on like doing deforestation and like cutting down the trees and they'll they'll build themselves uh ladders and so they're able to take the old nails out of these ladders and stuff and make themselves a knife. And so that's actually handmade from Sangui's grandfather, the chief, Chief Leome. Is his hand so small that he can actually use that? Or do they use it with like a few fingers?

He might use it with like three, but yeah, I mean, the dude might be four foot eight, four foot nine. The average height of a Mabuti pygmy man is four foot seven so yeah their hands are smaller and stuff like that and so they I think this into a piece of wood somehow mm-hmm you grab the other one I'm not actually they push it down on that wood that's that's the original way see how it's a nail yeah so wow so this nail flattens out to be that wide A nail. Wow. This is nuts. Yeah. So. Wow. So this nail flattens out to be that wide. That's incredible.

And what he found was the old piece of, so in Congo, the Belgian, Belgian Congo with like King Leopold II, who was due to as evil as Hitler. I mean, they, they say during his like reign of Congo, he, he, he said in Europe that he was like the savior of Congo, that he was helping all the Congolese, but really it was extorting them for, for mainly rubber, uh, and ivory. And there was a estimated 20 million people. And there's a book called King Leopold's ghost. And the guy had a big old beard kind of like i have in one of those pictures uh with with sangi um but uh but what what they say is that it's an estimated 10 million people half the population of congo that that he was responsible for killing and murdering jesus

so they call that like the african holocaust or one of the first holocaust because there was you know six some i mean i'm not sure about the jewish holocaust six one of the first holocaust because there was you know six some I mean I'm not sure about the Jewish Holocaust six million or something like that but this was eight to ten million people half the half of the Congo was was murdered and everything else just over rubber the rubber boom and and ivory and I had I had a slingshot for you from like the original rubber, but it kind of like rotted and broke. So anyways. The original rubber.

Yeah. It's like white whenever it first comes out. And they just made a slingshot. It was sand gi. And so I brought it. So do they hunt with those? Yeah. They know like birds and stuff and trees.

So I've seen them eating parrots and African gray parrots and stuff. Yeah. Anything they can get me, they'll, they'll knock a, and it might sound bad to our culture or whatever, but this is their food, you know?

So, but they'll, they'll shoot like a nest and whatever comes down, you know, if it's baby birds or mama bird or eggs or something like that, that's, that's free game. So,

yeah, I mean, we are very privileged that we can just go to a supermarket and buy food so we have these ideas of what you should and shouldn't do but when you're starving to death you you will eat whatever you can get a hold of yeah and whenever the outsiders make it so much even harder for you to hunt because they're cutting down the trees and it's making the animals skittish and scared and so much harder for you to find them yeah so there's no regulation whatsoever on how many trees they can chop down. Not at all.

And I would say, I mean, this might not be a real stat, but in my mind, 80, 90% of the logging in Congo has got to be illegal. They just go out there. Here's a big old tree. Let's cut it down because it's worth so much money. And who was doing this? What country? People all over.

And they'll bring in trucks from Kenya and Tanzania and Rwanda. And there's some like big businessmen that then sell these hardwoods to China, the U.S., Brazil. I mean, just different big countries that they send it out and i've i've seen these hardwood on these roads sometimes three-fourths of a i'm serious three-fourths of an 18 wheeler or a lorry is what we call them there um it could be completely sunk in mud or it can just be fallen off of a face of a cliff because it's so overloaded they fill up these containers just so full with this heavy heavy heavy wood because if if they can get it back um then they're going to make a ton of money off of it um so they just overload it because it's so hard to get from point a to b um to like mombasa and kenya to where they can ship out this

stuff it's just so depressing sometimes you think about the damage that people are capable of and the insensitivity that people can exhibit yeah it's just that that they just go there and just take all that wood chop it all down fuck all these people over the the just the fact that it's a small amount of people that are doing it too but yet it affects an enormous amount of people worldwide. Absolutely. Absolutely. From, I think, I think they said, I forget where I got it. It was a reputable source. But the size of Texas has been cut down from the Congo rainforest in the last like just 20 or 25 years.

Last 20, 25 years of the rainforest in Congo, the size of Texas, which that's where I'm from. I mean, it's huge. It's 13 hours from east to west, maybe more in Texas on good roads. So just to imagine like the size of the impact that's insane. That's insane. And then to think about the fact that it takes hundreds of years to replenish those forests if they do get replenished because the environment that they're growing in, it gets changed as soon as you chop everything down then the sun bakes the land and then there's less rain and there's fuck man absolutely that's got to be such a strange place to go while you're there and you're

trying to help and you're trying to replenish and and help these communities and give them water and help them sustain and then you're hearing these trees fall and knowing that there's just these insensitive people just chopping down trees left and right and fucking the whole thing up. Yeah. It's nuts. Like, uh,

when, when my wife came, we walked through a field that had been just ravaged by the, the illegal loggers and stuff. And, um, she was blown away because these trees were so much, fallen on their sides, they were so much taller than I was.

Like it made me look like a dwarf by them. Just enormous, enormous old trees. Yeah. And literally the first trip she came on, which was only like six months before that, like all those trees were there. All those trees were there. And it was, and now we walk into it and it's probably like 10 or 20 acres of trees that were just leveled in that amount of time. And the way that they were doing it there wasn't by, these guys weren't using the big chainsaws and everything else they were just like going at it with axes and stuff and uh a lot of it actually isn't just for the the hardwoods um a lot i mean

i would say that's the majority of the problem but another big problem in in congo or sub-sahara africa is the charcoal everyone uses for cooking um they get it from these trees they cut them down they throw uh they chop them up into little they cut them down they throw uh they chop them up into little bits and then they they throw uh a big mounds of dirt over them and they set them on fire and they smolder it for two three weeks i think and then it comes out in these kind of hard compressed uh little charcoal uh pieces and um so then that's what they cook with everywhere and it's uh so that's that that's another thing that's a big issue. God.

You know, there's a photograph of a tree somewhere in California. I forget where it was. But one of the captions was this tree is somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 to 600 years old or something like that. They were talking about when this tree would first came up Columbus was sailing Wow and this is a tree that you could see today I can there's trees that are I don't know what is the oldest tree I mean how old are trees not being I'm not I'm not even sure but there's a little tree somewhere yeah I mean in the Congo it's got to be so the oldest i mean that's got to be the oldest right yeah probably one or up there it's uh it's it's crazy and then and then there are times that

that the trees just the cycle of the forest um these trees can fall over um but uh like we we took a family of five to the hospital here's one one right here. Methuselah. 5,000 trees. 5,000 years old? Yeah. A Bristol Cone pine tree from California's White Mountains is thought to be almost 5,000 years old. Oh, my goodness. The oldest non-clonal tree in the world. The exact location that Donald twisted Methuselah

as a Forest Service secret for its protection. Wow. Wow. That's insane. That's crazy, man. I had no idea they could be 5,000 years old. And then some asshole can just come along and make charcoal with it. Yeah.

And something nuts, like I came in here and remember I had gotten sick and I had to postpone on you. And anyways, I went to a hospital down in, uh, or up in Valencia, I think. And they had thrown me in a room for three hours and they were thinking about getting hazmat suits out and all this stuff. Cause I thought you might've had Ebola cause you came back from Africa, right? Yeah. Right. Right. After the Ebola crisis, but it had been, um, I had been back for like two months or something or maybe even close to three. And, yeah, they were going all crazy and stuff. And this is just a stat that I like to – it's something that grips my heart.

So that's why I want to say it now. But, man, I think I looked it up right before I got in here. And it was around 11,000 people that Ebola took out. 11,000 people, that's a ton. It's a ton. It's a brutal crisis. But I just remember the uproar and the fear, like the outcry that happened publicly all over the United States. And only a couple people got it here. And then still, that's terrible still that's terrible. Um, but whenever I compare that 11,000 people total in this Ebola crisis, and then the stat for children, and this is on water fours website and stuff and, and on ours and dude, it's what I want to fight and let people know,

because there should be a real public outcry and uproar that 5,000 kids, 5,000 kids under the age of five years old die every single day, every single day because of dirty water, because of waterborne disease, because of waterborne illness. That's a legit stat from like UNICEF or one of those like legit places. 5,000, 5,000 a day. It's like, it fluctuates from like 4,700 or something to 5,000 a day. And like, for me, man, I've, I've, I've held two of those children, you know, I've, I've, I've dug the grave. I've had blisters on my hands. I've had a little dude named Andy Bo his blood on my hands. And like, like, bro, it's, it wrecks me. And like, that's why I'm so passionate about this thing. And like, I come back and like, I get it. Ebola is terrible and we need to knock it out because it can take

out so many people. But why, why are people not like, why don't they have their eyes open, their ears open, their heart open to hearing about 5,000 kids dying every day. I've been to the funeral of five other kids. I've seen the grave of nine or 10 others besides that. Like, and these are just among the pygmies. I've been to the, I've seen the funerals going on of the, of their oppressors, like the, the slave masters and the Machapala, the non pygmies that surround them.

Their kids are dying in the dirty water. And it's not, I don't, I don't mean to go crazy, but. No, it's not crazy at all. That statistic is crazy. 5,000 a day. A day. And they're under five years old. So, I mean, I don't know how many with the six, seven, eight, nine-year-olds, you know.

I've been to the funerals of those kids. We are very strange about what we have, what we focus our attention on. And the Ebola thing is just something that was over here because we were worried about it coming over here. We don't see a problem over here. We, we're, it's so convenient for people to not look at impoverished third world countries, people that are just, they've always been in this sort of state of poverty. So we just sort of accept them at being like that. And we don't think that they necessarily, that they have to live the way we live or have access to clean water and medicals.

We just don't even think about it. We worry about Cecil the lion. Yeah. You know, this fucking outrage about Cecil the lion where everybody's going nuts and freaking out. Yeah. I mean,

look, poaching is terrible. It's awful. The animals are beautiful. It's, you know, i get it but the way we reacted to that to know your statistic to know that what you just said that 5 000 little kids die every day from dirty water and people aren't freaking out about that i think it's like every

20 seconds that's insane i think it's every 20 seconds. That's really hard to swallow. Yeah, and bro, like I, wow. That was my second. 5,000, that's so crazy. Just think about 5,000 dead bodies every day and have them being little kids. Yeah. Wow. And the thing that really wrecked me with that was, so I spoke at this university in Oklahoma. with that was, so I spoke at this university in Oklahoma, it's slipping my name, um, or the name slipping me, but their students, um, is right when I got back from Congo and they had heard about what

I was doing. Um, you know, Southern, um, it's in Oklahoma city, uh, S S and U. And, uh, and they, they said, come, come speak to our students. We want to try to raise enough for a water well. And, dude, they set out in their courtyard. They set out in their courtyard 5,000 white flags. And this is a massive courtyard. They set out 5,000 little white flags. And on it said the stat that's 5,000 kids every day die of dirty water. And so I saw that right before I went up and spoke and I went and saw the

courtyard and it just wrecked me because like for me, like the people that see that, like the stat can go in one ear, it can, it can Jack with you for a little bit. It can mess with your mind. It can mess with your heart. Um,

but it's so easy to go in one ear and out the other. Once you sleep, you know, you're not going to wake up thinking about that just from seeing those white flags. And so I grabbed one of those white flags and I, and hopefully some of the people just from seeing those flags will get it. But like I had to write Andy Bo on the back.

And, and then when I got up and spoke, I showed him, I'm like, Hey, every one of these white flags, you see it, you saw it. Like it's a terrible statistic, but this, the real statistic is that each and every one of those flags has a name. Like it's a person, it's a human being. It's a little kid. And like, he didn't have to die dirty water, not in today's age, not in today's age. When we have the answer to the problem, when we know what we can do about it and just people decide not to, or, or, or like you said, When we know what we can do about it and just people decide not to or, like you said, make the uproar about Cecil the Lion. I mean, every American probably knows the name Cecil the Lion or at least 90% probably do.

And, like, I bet not even 10%, not even 5% know that 5,000 kids every day are dying just because of 31. I don't even think it's 1%. I didn't know it was that many. That's nuts. Yeah. It's nuts. Yeah. It's hard to internalize those numbers, too. Even if you hear that number, it goes in your head and it sort of bounces around. There's no point of reference. For me, man, I absolutely 100%.

So that was when I gave the chief, Andy Bowe's chief, my, my first promise ever made the pygmies, which was, was we had buried him and he had told us that he was rejected hospital treatment twice. Um, so he didn't just die of waterborne disease, but, um, his, his other brother, his father had died of waterborne disease and his mom was all alone now. And she couldn't even cry, bro, whenever I met her or whenever I saw her at this time. She was topless and I could see every single bone in her sternum, like every single rib attached to her sternum because she was so hungry and she was so malnourished and she was so thirsty. and she was so malnourished and she was so thirsty. And so our team went and we got, we got mangoes, passion fruit, um, or mangoes and passion fruit juice, uh, rice and tilapia. And we brought it back and fed it to her. And it wasn't maybe 10 minutes. And I was wondering, is she in shock? Why is she not crying? Um, what, like, why am I messed up from this so much more

than the mother? Um, and it was because she was so malnourished. She just didn't have the energy to produce a tear over her son's death. So she got the mango. She drank the passion fruit juice. It wasn't 10, 15 minutes later that then she started sobbing because she had like that sugar and that energy a little bit. And then after that, like, dude dude the next day was so brutal and um i had blisters on my hand from digging the grave and that's when the chief came up and said the first time we went and got treatment they told the mother you're too dirty to come in here

um and she said what can you give them treatment i know it's just a pill or a shot and they said you have money she said i'm a slave i don't get paid money and they said well do you have money? She said, I'm a slave. I don't get paid money. And they said, well, then go away. And then the second day, the whole village, and this is like 85 or 100 people, they grab everything they can, which was like almost two dozen eggs. They brought a chicken. They brought a bag of charcoal. They brought firewood. And then they were able to beg because they don't make money, or these ones hadn't at this time. And they were able to beg enough for $3.50 worth of Congolese franc.

And $3 was the treatment. $3 was where I think it was $1 for the pills that would have helped Andy Bo. They were probably too late for the pills to work, but maybe $3 for the shot, the injection that would have helped them quicker. And it was something like $45. It's in the book. I got the real number.

$45 for his casket that I buried him in. And, and it's just like blew my mind that like the, the oppressors, the people that the Machapala, the non pygmies that surround the pygmies were thinking like these people are so worthless or, or they're like animals or whatever, that it's, it's easier for us to let them die or cheaper for us to let them die than to take care of them. and um and so that's when the chief grabbed me and pulled me to the side and said fa which fa osa um is my first pygmy name it means the man who loves us and um he pulled me aside and said fa like we don't have a voice nobody knows about our suffering can you help tell people can you be a voice for us and that was when i said yes and now because i couldn't promise some clean water i couldn't promise some land like i didn't know how all that stuff was going to go but i knew that

through mma and through like some of the other stuff like a platform that hey i can i can at least help these people have a voice. Wow. Dude. Whew. Boy, Justin. Sorry, bro. I went heavy. No, but I don't apologize at all. Thank you.

Thank you for just being you, man. But what you've experienced and what you're talking about is so removed from almost everyone that lives here. When we talk about poverty in America, our poverty is almost ridiculous in comparison to the poverty that these people are experiencing. Right. What you're talking about is just it's not even human. even human i mean it's it just it's it's so outside of the realm of our imagination to even imagine living in a world where someone won't give someone a three dollar shot or whatever it cost to treat a baby that's dying and this woman can't even cry because she doesn't have any food she doesn't have enough energy for tears. I can't imagine that world.

And you continue to go back there to try to help these people. And now you are going to fight, like not just try to build them wells, not just try to help them and get them food, but now you're going to fight in Bellator and try to raise more awareness for this. What is it? Man.

You make this decision. You decide to come back to America. You're training in Dallas, right? You're training a team takedown. We're Johnny Hendricks, former welterweight champion trains, big, giant, modern facility, one of the best places in the world. And you are preparing for this fight, but your main goal, you love the sport, but your main goal is to try to bring awareness to the pygmies. Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of a crazy way of a roundabout sort of a way of getting attention to them to compete in a sport and arguably the most brutal sport in the world.

Yeah. Yeah, I think for me, I always thought I could only do, or for the last four years, almost five, or yeah, five, I thought I could only do one or the other. Yeah. do one or the other yeah um first and foremost like the the my family the people there like i'm not ever going to give that up and like so it's worth it to me if i never had to fight again fine so be it you know like that's okay with me um so i was just so focused on that and building the team and getting something legitimately started that will really impact them long-term um not just a flash in the pan and um but i saw fighting as something that that is a platform i mean i'm i'm here with you now just because i was a a fighter and then

the other stuff that came about but um, um, that's the link together. And so my wife started talking to me and other people started talking to me and kind of said, well, what if you could do both? And yeah, fighting the lifespan of it, that's kind of like a flash in the pan. It's just, it's a short limited window. And, um, and the thing, the problem there is going to take life, lifetime worth of dedication. And so what if, what if we're a season in my life for, it could just be a year or two. I'm planning on it being five to seven years. That way I can really make a run if I can.

Um, that's what that can set, set it up in a way that, that the longterm solution and impact is bigger, better, greater, more sustainable. People know about it more. Um, and people want to get involved. Like I, I think that it's hard kind of living in the two different worlds, going back and forth, um forth because they're so different. I kind of feel like I don't like I go there and I see what's wrong and I'm like, oh, it's not it shouldn't be like this. But I come back here and I'm like, ah, what's wrong here? And it shouldn't be like this. And so I feel like I kind of don't necessarily belong in either one. And if I do, I belong more in the forest with them because our hearts are so connected.

And so it's like culture shock here. And I don't get culture shock there at all. I love it. But what if you get culture shock when you come back to America? Yeah, absolutely, man. Absolutely. From being in the Congo. The culture here messes with me.

In what way? Kardashians? That kind of shit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that. in what way? Kardashians? That kind of shit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That. And, uh, and I went to, to Popeye's right when I got back and it was after I had buried Andy Bo and it was my second trip back coming back. That was in like 2011, I think, or maybe 2012. And I get back and I'm in a,

I go straight to Popeye's and it's in Atlanta and I walk inside and there's this mom and daughter and they're there with a group that's going to do like some kind of international aid in Haiti. They got their Haiti shirts on and it wasn't too long after the earthquake and stuff, maybe like a year and a half, two years after. And the daughter is sitting there and she's saying, year and a half, two years after. And the daughter is sitting there and she's saying, uh, I'm going to get a Coke. And I'm waiting behind them at the Coke machine. And so she starts filling up with the Coke. Her mom goes, pour that out. You're not going to have that. And she goes, mom, they don't have Coke in Haiti, which Coke's in Congo, Coke's everywhere. Coke's like, that was the first thing I wanted to say, like, Hey, there's, don't worry guys, there's

Coke there. Um, but, but right after that, like the mom's like, if you drink that you're grounded, she goes, mom, you're going to ground me over a Coke. And then they just went back and forth bickering. And then all of a sudden turned into, you are grounded two weeks when we get back. Then all of a sudden the girl got pissed, looked at her mom and said, mom, I hate you. I hate you. And she stormed out. And this is at the airport. They got their shirts on. They haven't even gone on their trip yet. And I'm just thinking like, I wanted to grab them, not in a mean way, but grab them and just say, look, love each other. Like you're fighting over a Coke. You're fighting over sugar water.

Like, stop, like, stop it. Like love each other. Like you're about to get a rude awakening when you go to Haiti. And I've been there and I've seen the people walking through snow drifts of garbage to take a bath and walking back out and having to climb up that snow drift of garbage to get out after they took their bath. And I've seen them digging in the trash to find food. I've seen kids sniffing glue to fall asleep. Like, I'm like, you guys are about to get wrecked. And like, it wrecked me too. Cause I'm like, I just buried a kid over dirty water and now you guys are fighting over sugar water. And so like, and I'm not like, this is one thing I don't want to offend people in a way of like saying our culture is terrible

or bad, but I want to point out certain things that like life's bigger than our small problems. And if we can get our eyes off of those small problems and get, get our eyes onto the big picture, like you'll do a lot of good. It'll change a lot of things in our own, own lives, our own hearts, our own relationships. I think with people, it's, it's just simply a matter of perspective. And when we don't have real problems, small problems become real problems like this coke thing for this little girl i mean it's probably you know it's it's just a natural thing that human beings do in some sort of a weird way we just lack perspective if it's not right in front

of our face yeah god that's so crazy yeah so i went into a long story there but uh no it's a great story and i can imagine that i mean that would cause culture shock yeah for you you must be just like so baffled by it all yeah and i went i went to one thing water for has been an organization that has like believed in us since the very beginning kind of like you um whenever i had come back and i'd seen you know the two things but practically I hadn't done anything yet I hadn't like gotten land to start a water I didn't know I just had the passion and the dream and you put me on here and let me tell people that water for kind of did the same thing and they they gave me the tools when I had none the the training and knowledge when I didn't know

anything and just got behind me but I got back and three days later, I was at their gala and, um, and, uh, and it was awesome. It was a great event and man, I was crying cause they did a video, um, of me in the Congo. And, um, then I had to get up and speak and it was real tough, but I, I, I go right from there. And three days later, I'm at kind of like a black tie event. Um, and women are wearing fur and all this stuff. And, uh, and so it just was like, Whoa, from one world to the other, but I see it as a way to, um, like there they do, they did so much that night for this project, for the people with their families yeah with their furs and their tuxedos wow but yeah honestly though they were people with hearts in the right place and i get it it's just cultures are different we live different we and and so i don't want people

running around here and you know leafs and stuff like that i don't want them sleeping on the ground right well you don't want anybody doing yeah no yeah No. Yeah. No, not at all but uh But it's been cool me and like the the water for thing what a little update for you like Fight for the forgotten has gone into a dormant Stage and our nonprofit and we have officially partnered with water for we joined forces with them Because when it comes to like the reporting the business We joined forces with them because when it comes to like the reporting, the business, anyways, even the logistics and the training, their water engineers or hydrologists, the different kinds of things that they can add to us are so great. They've given us a truck, all the tools, all the training.

They've really been a huge like component behind us but one of the things i love most about him is uh is yeah we're partnering in a way that that how would i explain it we we see the eye to eye on something like the owner or i mean the founder he says water for isn't about charity it's about opportunity and like dude i love that because when you just do charity, like you just help for such a short amount of time. But the Water 4 method is like, hey, we're going to put the tools in their hands, the knowledge in their heads. And then we're going to look to create an opportunity for them that goes beyond what we can do from the West or from our short term mission humanitarian trip. from the West or from our short-term mission humanitarian trip. We want to give this thing a life of its own, that it becomes a breathing, living thing, or even a business. You know, like there's, they're in 31 different countries and they're, they're helping these entrepreneurs

do social good. Like they, they get paid to drill water wells and, and to train nationals and the jobs don't have to go outside. They can stay inside the house. And so I've just, I've, I've loved that about them. And, and the cool thing that I love is that it's not about us being the heroes. It's about, it's about the, the locals being the heroes. Like I, that's the thing. I don't want to be the hero of this i want to be uh a spark plug if that makes sense uh in the engine i want to get it started get it running but the the people are the strength the engine the thing that makes it run the spark plug gets it started but but the locals and investing in them telling them you can do it fly on your own wings like you

just need the training you just need the knowledge you just need the tools once you have that you're golden you know do this have once they have fresh water though there's still gonna be the issue of food though right I mean it seems like with the logging you're saying it's more difficult to hunt yeah so what we've been doing is we're interning the three agriculturalist right now and we're about to hire them. It's awesome. I'm so pumped.

But the guy that did the 3,500 trees, he's great at farming. And so in three of the villages, we wanted to kind of start on a smaller scale first because it is land, water, and food. And there's kind of a process to it. You know, you can't start growing food or having water without the land. And then first you need, I mean, you can't live without water for more than three days, I think. Right. Or at least some of it. And then food you can live for like three weeks without. One's tuned to, and they're the ones that Sankey's grandfather, Leo may, he's one of the most brilliant men I've ever met. Like maybe he's never gone to school maybe, but, but I promise like the dude is just a problem solver and he inspires his people to get like the whole village to get around the vision and let's do this. And so we basically said, start with what you have. That's kind of the water for method to, um,

start with what you have and we're going to come and we're going to, we're going to fuel it. We want to empower you to be able to do it for yourself. Um, and, and that's what people need. They need a little, a little jumpstart. And so, uh, so anyways, in this village and just Leah maze, I wish I would have brought in the list of what it is. But from the time I came back and got married and went back about 10 weeks ago, I got to celebrate the 20th water well that was dug and drilled. And it was such an awesome celebration.

But one of the most exciting things to me was that I walk into Tundu and at first I was like, like, no way, how is this happening? Like all of a sudden I was walking through a forest of, of, of bananas, like, uh, and, and, and they had planted on their own. We, we had helped to, um, we, we help when we can and we want to help so much more, but they had planted over 250 banana trees out there, over 250 surrounding their village. Um, they had done a corn, a whole, whole field, huge field of corn, uh, cassava, which is kind of like a spinach type, um, tastes kind of like spinach. Uh, they make Sambay out of it. Um, they had done potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, uh, maracuja or a passion fruit. Um, and yams, uh, that's eight. I think the list might've had nine or 10, but, uh, but they had done that all from, Hey, if we get you your own

land, do you think we could help you with water and you could help us with the labor? Some of it like taking the tools inside the village like they love that they come and help us. Then it's like, hey, we want to get a farming project started. Can we empower you to do that? We gave them some tools. We gave them some seeds. We gave them some banana trees and they just ran with it, man. And so I don't know.

I just I just love seeing that if you empower someone instead of treat them like a charity case, if you give them an opportunity instead of saying, you can't do this for yourself, get out of the way, I'll do it for you. Well, it's definitely a much more intelligent approach and it's definitely better for them in the future. For now, uh, it gives them that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that they're, they're improving and that their life is getting better because of their efforts almost dignity it gives them something to be proud of instead of something to be sad about like i can't do this for myself oh i can do it

yeah you know that's got to be cool for you to see yeah dude i love it and then and one of the other villages um that we call it mapinda uh and it, and it's, uh, anyways, it was, I, I've, at first my heart sank because they really loved their, uh, in nine of the 10 villages, they really loved their huts. It's very culturally important to them, the twigs and leaves. Um, but whenever I walk in on, onto their land, all of a sudden I saw huts that were just like the Makpala, just like the non pygmies. It was the mud huts that were, I the makpala just like the non-pygmies it was the mud huts that were i don't know four to six inches thick walls they had the leafed roofs but but there were much stronger houses and all of a sudden i'd come back i'd gone back and then all of a sudden to that village what was important to them the other one the farming and yes they

this village also mapinda started farming for themselves as well, corn and beans. But they started doing the huts because they were like, hey, if we're really equal now, we're equal to our neighbors, then we can live in the same kind of houses that they have. We can stay out of the rain better. We can keep our kids warmer at night. It's warmer at night. And so to them, what was of value to them was one of the reasons they get called animals and subhuman and other things is because of their twig and leaf huts. And their neighbors will say they live just like animals or they live in a nest or different things like that. Well, now this place is now they have houses just like the others. We're equals now. Like that's kind of their their motto like we're equals now and uh so that blew me away at first my heart

sunk then all of a sudden they told me they're proud they walked me into every single one why did your heart sink because i thought i thought they maybe had had gotten pushed off their land and that the the makapala had taken the land back and, and we have strict agreements and paperwork and like stamped in the courts and law, uh, that, that, Hey, this is the agreement that is going to be a peaceful way of doing this. And we're going to help the community come up together. So it'd be, it'd be dumb of us to go in and say, we're just going to help the pygmies. So we, we, we, we helped the community all together. I thought these guys had gone back on their word, but then all of a sudden it was, whoa, they're living just like everybody else now. Do these people have any idea of the impact of

your work? Like, did they understand like that you could reach, I mean, you're probably going to, a million plus people are going to hear this podcast. Yeah. The, the, the impact that you're going to have when they talk about it on Spike TV, probably just as much. I mean, I don't know what the number Spike's been getting for fights, but it's got to be probably close to a million or at least. Yeah, I think it's over. There's a lot of fucking people that are going to be.

Did they understand that? Did they have this idea of who you are? They know me as F.A.O. So my booty, my bow bow that's my name but to like like to try to i don't mean to interrupt you but no you're fine to you or to me okay like you tell me that 5 000 people 5 000 children die every day because of lack of water i can't get that in my head i mean i know i i'm trying and uh it's i know it's horrific but i mean my head is like what like this this is almost like there's no place for it it's like it's moving

around in my head it doesn't there's no you tell me your grandfather died i'm like fuck man dude lost his grandfather you know what i'm saying like it fits it makes sense you tell me 5 000 kids die every day because of a lack of water and i'm just blank it's I'm trying to find a place for it when you tell them that you are going to fight on Spike TV and they're going to show a video of why you're doing this and they're going to show a profile on you and do they understand what you do do they do they understand these people are going to see you have they ever see you fight have they seen a video of you they've seen a Topps card a Topps card that's it Topps card do they ever seen you fight? Have they seen a video of you? They've seen a Topps card. A Topps card. That's it. Topps card. Do they know what you do? Do they know that you were

on the ultimate fighter? Do they know about the UFC? Do they understand? My drilling team does, the well drilling team. Right. And sometimes we'd put on little entertaining things where the pygmies would come around and I'm not going to wrestle one of those guys, but, but I'll wrestle some of our well drillers. There's one guy that's at least 6'5 on our team. And so I'm wrestling with them and throwing them around a little bit. And I think Ben will tell them sometimes that, you know, hey, in the United States, he was a wrestler, he was a fighter and people know who he is. But for them, for a frame of reference, kind of like you're saying, you don't have the frame of

reference for 5 000 kids dying every day i don't think they really have a reference for um for professional sports television like i've never met a mabuti pygmy that has a cell phone um that has electricity uh i've met someone with a flashlight or a couple guys with a flashlight that's like the cool dude yeah it's kind of absolutely so uh and and we've we've left behind some of the cheaper like radios and they can get like two stations or one um and uh but but for them like i mean soccer i don't even think they really know that that's a professional sport maybe they do but they don't have a reference because they don't know any of the players they They don't watch any of the games. They know kick a ball around.

And a lot of times it's just in a big circle. But there's, oh, I should not misspeak because there's a couple places that with the Makapala, they have some teams and have some fields and stuff, but that's only in two of the places. Other than that, it's just a circle and you kick the ball around. So no, I wouldn't say that they have a reference for what what i'm trying to do for them but like that's not what it's about um for me no i know it's not about that for you but i mean for them it's got to be so odd this guy the first white person they've ever seen and there's a video of you uh that was going around reddit a long time ago of you uh meeting them and them touching you and they can't believe you're white and they're freaking out.

But this guy who shows up out of nowhere, like a mythical creature. I mean, if you if if if no one else could ever reach them and if if you stop going there and if if all contact with the outside world ceased, you would be like a part of their religion. I mean, do you understand that? You'd be like some Jesus Christ type character that comes out of nowhere. Some magical man from another world who shows them how to get water, who loves them and cares for them. Here's a video of you where they're grabbing you and touching you. And that's actually the Makapala. That's the non-pygmy kiddos.

So their parents, most of them, were kind of the slave masters. Even from that village where the reason Andy Bo was denied hospital treatment. But really, I believe this was a moment used in my life especially how it blew up i just put it up for a couple of my friends to look at and it had like literally 40 views before all of a sudden it went viral and it was up for like four months three months four months um but then look at their beautiful smiles millions now right yeah on on youtube it's 1.8 i think but on, a bunch of people ripped it and posted it, and it was over 12 million. So 12 million on Facebook.

You literally are like a religious character. I don't know about that. No, I mean, I know you don't know about that because you're humble and you're not looking at it like that. Humble and you're not looking at it like that, but they're just the sheer Perspective like for them to to be living in that world where their number one concern is feeding themselves parasites trying to get some clean water and some guy comes from a Place on the other side of the planet and this guy does this thing called mixed martial arts and he fights and they broadcast it on television something they've never seen before in their life they've never seen a

video they have no idea what mma is they have no idea the impact right and then you're going on podcasts and talking about it and you have websites to to help contribute. I mean, this is a, it's to them. I mean, I can't imagine that they would understand what this is. It's so funny. They're rubbing your head. Yeah. They're going crazy rubbing your hair. They were doing my beard a minute ago.

It's so funny too, because when you backed up, when you looked, they're like, back up. He's standing up straight, run away. Right, yeah. Like they didn't know what to do with you. Well, I've gone into some villages before and literally the women grab their children and dive into the huts the men run and hide behind trees um and and grab their bows and arrows and spears and stuff oh my god and uh and it's funny because in those cases it's only happened a few times like three or four times

um actually pretty much every new village, so maybe ten times. But whenever I go in, it's funny because it's normally the women that are the brave ones that come up to me first and then touch my arm or touch my, yeah, I've heard once before it was because, yeah, I'm the first Waikare there seen or is he real? Because we didn't give this village a heads up that we were coming or that I was coming. The abominable snowman is on the way. Yeah. And one time they were like, is that a lion man?

Another one was like, is that a spirit? Is that like a ghost kind of guy? I'm telling you, man. You're like an alien. Yeah. Well, and then look at me, dude. I'm this crazy wild looking guy here. Right. With all this hair. Yeah. And, and then look at me, dude. I'm this crazy wild looking guy here. Right.

With all this hair. Yeah. And then there, I just let it go wild. And so. That's so strange, man. So, and with the pygmies and the Machpala that's there, most of them, even our well drilling team, everyone is fascinated with my body hair, the arm hair, because they don't have arm hair or leg hair.

And then I'm just covered in it. So, they think you're like some kind of a white gorilla or something. My buddies would call me the great white Sasquatch. Or the vanilla gorilla. That's so strange. I just can't imagine how odd it must be to them. And they don't even really know how odd it is. For them to not have the preference of television, not understand

like if you could take them I mean if Spike TV wants to really make an impact, what they need to do is go to the Congo, take some of those little fellas and fly them out to your fight. That would be fucking nuts, man. What would they think?

I mean at a grocery store, I wonder what they would think us using I always thought using a credit card because for that transaction transaction it looks like they give it right back to you yeah so it's like you get all this food you give the cashier uh the the card they smile at you give it back and then you take all the food out it's like food's free you think it's free right um try to get them to understand what the internet is. Yeah. Or the moving, moving sidewalks at the airport. Um, how about fucking time square? How about fly them into New York city or Vegas? Yeah.

Sometimes I think about it and I think it would be awesome. Other times I think about it and I think it would be torture. I don't know. I may, maybe that sounds crazy, but also like giving them, uh, a place where all of a sudden they have everything at their fingertips and take them into a grocery store. And then they miss their family right away. Taking them out to go to Benjamin or Loringa's wedding, they started missing the forest, like deeply missing their friends and family. Deeply missing.

I've never seen it before, getting so homesick for something in two or three days. I can only imagine the bond because their struggle is so difficult. It's so difficult to stay alive. And then when they were with us, they had, they had the food everywhere. Like we're cooking the meals for them and everything when they came to the town. And I took, uh, his name's Kaptula and, uh, he's on the video that's on, on Kickstarter, uh, launched today, but, um, uh, he passed away recently and, uh, messed me up, but, um, he's one of my favorite dudes. And, um, anyways, I took him to the hospital like seven times and, um, what is this Jamie? What are you putting up? This is the Kickstarter. Yeah. And how does someone get to this? Uh, it's kickstarter.com and then it's fighting for freedom.

It's a new, it's going to be a documentary. We want to tell the story. I don't know if we got five minutes. Yeah, yeah, sure. Play it. Play it. Maybe we could do it with the volume. Yeah.

In my American bubble. Can we restart? Yeah. Okay. There are two people groups in the rainforest. The Makpala, meaning non-pygmies and pygmies. The pygmies are the Makpala slaves. God, look at that forest.

Slavery exists now. That was a joke. Today, it's not just a thing of the past. I mean, that's what I thought, you know, living in my American bubble. You know, there's no slaves today. They got rid of that in the 1800s. Slavery in today's age? Why?

Communities torn apart for generations. They would call us monkeys or jungle people. Like Paul would tell us we were nothing. After that, they'd call us nothing. And we would think, did God create us or are we human? Their slave masters would come up to me and say, what are you here doing with my animals? Or what are you here doing with my property? I own these people.

We would work hard from morning until night. And we would get paid in two bananas to share. Two bananas for a whole family. They just need to be given a few fish, a few bananas, something small, so that they can come back and work the next day, so that they're hungry enough that they have to come back and work the next day. If we made even a small mistake, we would be beaten. God create us.

We're human. We have to fight this. People are worth fighting for. My name is Justin Wren. 13 years old, I want to be a UFC fighter. I started fighting professionally at 19 years old. I was on a reality TV show called The Ultimate Fighter when I was 21. It was the main event at the Hard Rock in Ultimate Fighter when I was 21. It was the main event at the

Hard Rock in Las Vegas when I was 23. And that was what I always thought was going to be my significance. My purpose was to be a champion fighter if I could be that. Since then, I've come here to Congo. Why should these sweet, loving, amazing people be literally thought of and believed to be animals whenever there are these sweet, loving, amazing people? And so if there's something we can do, if there's something I can do, I'm going to do it. I was fighting against people, but really I was just supposed to be fighting for people. And even whenever we feel like the last ounce of strength is leaving,

we still got to choose to fight. And we'll see something amazing happen. I've seen people set free, bro. I've seen people set free. My name is Derek Watson, and I'm a filmmaker. And this story has dramatically changed my life. What inspires me about Justin is here's a guy who's at the top of his game and he leaves everything behind to go and serve and love someone else. So we really want to tell the story through film because it's a story that really can inspire

an entire audience to fight for something other than themselves in a fight for freedom. So what I love about Derek and I choosing the crowdfunding route and being on Kickstarter is that we get to involve passionate people to be part of the story, be part of the solution. And that's why we're inviting you along. We could have gone different routes for funding, but we wanted to involve people in this process. This is an awesome opportunity to really give my Pygmy family a voice. And that was my first promise that I gave them, that I could try, at least try to give them a voice.

And now I'm asking you, help me, help me give them a voice. So this Kickstarter campaign really is trying to help us get just the hard cost for this film to finish it out. Things that you have to do to get a film out on the biggest stage possible, that's what we're asking you to do. So this money is not going to me as the filmmaker. I am literally giving up all of my time and the time of my production team for free to do this because we really believe in the story and we hope you do too. And we're gonna have some amazing kickbacks. We're gonna to be talking to you guys. We want to make sure that you guys feel as involved as we do as the filmmakers and as Justin does as

the subject in going down this journey with us. So you may be asking, why don't we just give money to Fight for the Forgotten, which is Justin Wren's organization that he works with? The answer to that is, yeah, that would be awesome. In fact, if you feel like that's what you want to do, and you want to give directly to help free pygmy slaves through water, I would say go for it. Absolutely. Go to fightfortheforgotten.com and give there.

Think of this, though, as an opportunity to see just a dramatic impact in the lives of the pygmies, and honestly, in the lives of our audience as well. So that's this project, and we hope you get behind us. That's awesome. I just tweeted that out. Oh, wow. So if anybody wants to check that out, go to my Twitter page, and it'll be up there right now.

Today is, what is today's date the 24th monday the 24th so it'll be uh if you're hearing this in the future just go back to monday the 24th and look for my uh twitter page or go to fighting for the forgotten just do a google start that's a google uh search rather for kickstarter fighting for the forgotten yeah or the kickstarter is actually uh what was it fighting for freedom fight oh did i say Fighting for the Forgotten. Yeah, or the Kickstarter is actually, what was it? Fighting for Freedom. Oh, did I say Fighting for the Forgotten? Fighting for Freedom.

Fighting for Freedom, but the book is Fight for the Forgotten. That comes out on September 15th. There's a book with Loretta that helped me write that. Loretta Hunt. Yep, New York Times bestselling author with Randy. Wrote Big John's book, and she helped me write this book. And it was cool. It turned into something like a passion project for her,

and that's going to be one of the kickbacks on the Kickstarter. If you go support the Kickstarter, you can get one of the books, and I'll sign it and stuff. And then if people just want to go on Amazon, they can get the book. And it's like half price right now till it till it actually releases. It's like 12 bucks when it releases will be like 24. And the cool thing about that is 33 percent of my portion of anything from the book. 33 percent goes to the to the pygmies, goes to water wells and stuff like that.

When you decided to get back to MMA to try to bring awareness and try to bring more attention to these people how long had it been since you were trained uh the entire time five years yeah nothing yeah nothing I mean I was hiking through the forest and I was I was no martial arts absolutely none what did it feel like to get back to the gym the first day back? Oh, dude, like I should have been training. No, my body had hurt for a while. And I only really started training two or three months before I went this last time, which was 10 weeks ago. And then I've been training this entire camp, too. Well, the last 10 weeks or so.

But it kind of was crazy. They bumped me up on a card quicker. And so from going to the Congo to celebrate the 20th water well plus like visa issues, they wanted to try to take it because they're corrupt, my five-year visa. They were trying to take it? Like how so? Yeah. So when my wife and I left Congo the time, or basically they marked it down, they wrote it down that we left six months earlier than we had.

No, nine months earlier than we had. And I have to go back at least every 11 months to check in, to show them like, hey, I'm actively coming into Congo and doing stuff. coming into Congo and doing stuff. So all of a sudden my time was, they said, literally they, I got a call and it was from the university and from our team, uh, the drillers. And they said, uh, FA, we, we heard that, um, that you're going to lose your visa in three weeks. I was like, what, why? And they're like, go look at your, your passport. Did they write down the wrong, wrong date? And so they literally wrote down the wrong date of me, my exit visa, just so that they could try to get another $1,200 or $1,400 out of me for a new visa. And, um, and I would have lost it. And when I went in, they would have a way to say, Oh,

you came in illegally and you lost your passport and your visa, and we're going to arrest you and try to get even more money out of me. And when I got my visa the first time, literally I didn't have a passport for over three months in the Congo. I had to send my visa or my passport to the capital. And people I didn't even know, I still have never met, were handling my passport while I'm in the forest. And you could have been stuck there. Yeah, I could have been stuck 100%.

Fuck. I would have had to do that again whenever i got back i get scared getting stuck in canada oh dude getting stuck in congo i got a friend that was arrested in congo for nine days and was thrown in basically like a dark dungeon oh my god people for what he had a gopro and they arrested him for a gopro he said he was a spy. Um, said he was a spy, threw him in the embassy. How'd he get involved? Um, he's a great dude. He probably wouldn't want me to, uh, I wish I could say what, what he does. Jesus fucking Christ. A GoPro gets you thrown in jail for nine days and nine days if you have help to get out. Yeah. And the thing that's crazy about Congo prisons is, uh, you don't get fed.

They, you have to be fed by people on the outside. So if you get arrested, it's up to your family and friends to feed you. Um, and so this dude is, he was all alone and he got thrown in prison. And then, uh, you don't have clean water at all. They do bring you water, but it's dirty. Um, and I think he was, I think technically he was in prison in Goma, which is a crazy city, like one of the most insane places on planet earth. How so? Well, a rebel group called the M23 took it over not too long ago or like over,

over a year, maybe, maybe closer to two years now. But rebel group came in the military and police that were supposed to protect Goma. Goma is a million person city, a million people at least. It's like the capital of the eastern Congo. It's where Ben Affleck is. Or Ben Affleck, or however you say his name.

He's there in Congo, has a real heart for Congo. That's where... Batman Ben Affleck? Yeah. Yeah, he's got an organization there and real heart for Congo. That's where, uh, Batman Ben Affleck. Yeah. Yeah. He's got an organization there and, um, just trying to do some stuff.

And Angelina Jolie goes there and like helps rape victims. Um, but when the rebel group came in, the military and police that are supposed to protect it, just ditched their guns, ditched everything and ran away. And like, uh,

I don't know, a small portion just turned over to the rebels. They were already rebels anyways. The Congo military is basically comprised of former rebel groups that disbanded and came on with the government. And so there's like 38 different warring rebel groups in just the eastern Congo. I think it was BBC and New York times. I'm not sure which one said which, but, uh, they call it the rape capital of the world and hell on earth for a woman because a stat had come out in like 2012 or 2011 that said one woman, every one minute

is raped in the Congo. It's a, it's a weapon of war it's 1200 women a day and so um yeah it's nuts it's crazy there and um and so this guy's in jail there yeah he was in jail there for at least six days and then i think they took him to the capital from there the u.s embassy had to get him no food released no so how's he getting what is he doing for just starving i think so i mean i would have to talk to the guy about what is he doing? Is he just starving? I think so. I mean, I would have to talk to the guy about it. Him and I haven't really talked about how all of it went down. All I know is he works in surrounding countries.

And the dude's awesome. He's got a business that works in Whole Foods and other stuff that goes to do social good. It's a really great—I wish I could say it. I don't think you'd want me to tell the story. So I won't say his name. But he won't come back to Congo, I don't think. Or at least I've heard that from people that surround him and his family and stuff.

I can only imagine. Yeah, absolutely. It was for a GoPro. All he had was a GoPro. And they did that crazy thing to him. I have the right people in place that they don't mess with me as bad, although they do mess with me a lot, just like that visa.

They just try to get money out of you. Absolutely. What a fun place Africa is. Yeah. Sounds like a terrific spot. Well, Jesus Christ. Yeah, Congo's nuts. Man.

So from the time you have five five years off you start training again how long between that and your fight how long have I trained yes I think if I put it all together maybe four or five months solid no no it's been split up uh uh now i'm ready i can tell you that i'm ready for the fight um i think how long did it take before you like felt fit again i mean how long did you before you went back to sparring and yeah i was for the last four or five months i've been i've been going in and sparring i helped jared rochelle get ready for, um, a couple of fights and to help Josh get ready for a couple of fights. Um, and yeah, so I was in there sparring with the guys and stuff, but I would say at first, man, it was brutal. It was tough. Like my body took a beating and, uh,

I was thinking I needed, um, well, I was told I needed knee surgery. I needed my meniscus cleaned up and stuff like that. Not a big one, but to get it scoped and so i was like i don't know what i should do should i fight or should i not and um and then i found some some great doctors that that decided to help me uh they're actually called ipi they're in denver it's called uh integrative performance institute it's a new place one of the doctors is an ironman competitor she's awesome helps all the nfl ml, NBA guys, but it's with, uh, we were talking about it before, but Regenikine. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big fan of that treatment. So great, man. They started you, uh, you, you start training and then like,

did you immediately book a fight or like, how did you, uh, how did you decide when you were going to come back? I came and I, so I flew out here three times, I think for two weeks and, uh, was staying with Loretta Hunt, um, working on the book. And she said, what if, what if I could get you a meeting with Scott Coker? Um, would you want to fight again? Are you going to fight again? I'd already been thinking about it and talked to my wife, which my wife's never known me as a fighter. She thought I did Taibo at first. She didn't know? She didn't know what MMA was when we first started dating. When she found out, she was like, oh, okay. I told her mixed martial arts. She's like, Taibo or Kung Fu?

Do you do cardio kickboxing with your friends? she's so sweet she's so awesome and this will be your first fight to ever uh well for me to ever be at she's been at josh's two ufc fights in austin and um so this will be your third live mma fight and uh you keep saying josh josh copeland Josh Copeland's here, the cuddly bear, everybody. So when you are planning on doing this, you start thinking, maybe I should do it. Loretta prods you. You meet with Scott Coker. What made you decide to go with Bellator and not go back to the UFC? I talked, my management and everything talked with the UFC. I would say that, man, that's a great opportunity, obviously.

I love the UFC. It's great, great, great. Even you helping support the Waterwells and Nate Marquardt. I don't know if I said that last time. Did I? But from one of his performance bonuses, he gave us two Waterwells worth of donation. That's awesome. The dude, Nate the Great.

He's seriously a great dude. And he might not have, I don't't know he probably didn't want public props but uh i'm giving it to him uh and then whenever i came out and met with scott though i just felt like you know the ufc you could get you could get lost in there i don't mean that in a bad way but um there's 560 something dudes under contract right how think. Right. How many does Bell tore out? Less, and then their main card guys, I think it's significantly less. And then also, whenever I talked with Scott, it was more of an idea of, we want to get behind this. Before we even talked fighting, he had sent out that video you just watched.

He had sent that out um to friends and family saying look what this guy from fighting has done and do they even have a champ who's the heavyweight champ uh i'm gonna mess it up um it's a russian guy uh volkov was and now it's uh vitaly or something like that nobody knows knows, though. I mean, it's not... It's going to be me soon. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, you could be the Bellator heavyweight champion. That's like a legit possibility.

Right. And this is what I like to look at it as, and me from my wrestling background, and fighting, sometimes you don't get this perspective, but from a wrestling background, you think of a podium and the champ's at the top, and then there's, you know, normally there's a top eight or all Americans or whatever. It's a podium of eight guys. And I look at it as, man, I want to, I want to get on that podium. And eventually I want to get to the top. I want to get to the top

of that podium, be the guy at the top, the champ, because if I'm there, I have a bigger voice, a bigger voice for my family. Um, and so, I mean, people will look, people will watch if I'm there, I have a bigger voice, a bigger voice for my family. And so, I mean, people will look, people will watch if I'm on the podium. And I guess they already are because of, you know, you and great people that are getting behind the story that see that it's important. But I know that the better I do in fighting, the more people will listen. And I know that's cheap and shallow at times. There's nothing cheap or shallow about that at all dude you're living like a movie you're living your life is like this crazy inspirational movie this is amazing oh bro you know it's amazing i mean it's uh

it's just it's it's hard to imagine that someone could be that selfless that's doing as much as you're doing. It's really, really inspiring. Thank you. Man, whenever I look at it because of the team that we've lined up, man, the 17 full-timers we got now, about to have 20, each and every one of those people on that team, like, they are such fighters. And they're so giving. And they're so selflessless and they'll go live in the forest year round and drill wells and teach farming and teach all this other stuff so we've got a team of such great people and we've had to let uh guys go that just weren't weren't with it or we went through 20 people before we finally got to our team that we have now Legitimately 20 people I can only imagine

How many people the amount of dedication that you have to have? To live that life and to be that selfless to go over there and dedicate all of your time and your you mean You don't get to go home. Yeah, that's your home now. Yep, and so it's we try to give them That's your home now. Yep. And so we try to give them anywhere from a month minimum to eight weeks maximum in the forest. And then you get to come home for two weeks, rest up a little bit, and then go back out. Wow. Get yourself probed for parasites.

Yeah. Get healed up. Get other stuff. We're looking at ways how we can. There's no, like, health care system or insurance there. So we're trying to figure out how we can really set up our team that they're giving so much of their bodies, you know, like their health, their time. We try to feed them really well out there, but still it's not as good as being in a city or town. I can only imagine.

And I can only imagine what kind of medical care they even have out there that's why i almost died the four four labs told me i didn't have malaria until i was almost dead and then i got out into uganda and they're like they either said 60 to 70 or 65 to 70 percent of my bloodstream was parasites and in congo they didn't they couldn't see it at all so sometimes like well like our head guy um we you know his wife was actually poisoned like people can be just wicked there and mean somebody tried to poison his wife and kill her did did poison didn't didn't kill her but uh almost did she was she was in a coma because they were jealous um literally literally it was just jealousy uh they first tried to get get uh i'm not gonna say their names but first try to get her our guy and then went after his wife because they knew that if they could get her then it would affect

and hurt him oh my god and so we've we've sent her to uganda for treatment and kenya for treatment and i think they've come maybe gone through tanzania but um but it's been months and months like she's she's partially has been partially paralyzed on one side of her body from it and uh is learning going through rehab everything else so there's lots of stuff with health and so we want to we want to try to see how we can um love on our team that's given so much you know like, like, Hey, whenever you guys got a health thing, let us know. And, uh, we want to take care of it. So that's, what's awesome. The backing of water for they're all in. And, uh, honestly, whenever I first got back, I was like,

how am I going to do this thing? How am I going to do it by myself? And, uh, because that's how it's kind of been. Um, I mean mean i got a lot of support after being on the show and lots of people were are behind it but when it comes to like the business side of it and filing with u.s government and all that other stuff it was like man i got a cpa i got other people got my board everything else but i'm like man all i want to do is go there be there with them fan the flames teach them stuff, love on them. And then when I come back here, I need to come on things like this, speak about it. I need to train.

I need to fight. I need to win. But I don't necessarily need to do all the business side of things. So anyways, Water 4 has been awesome on getting behind us in that route. That's beautiful that you formed this incredible group of people and this organization becoming becoming a part of you are you becoming a part of them right now your bellator fight when is it and uh it's it's live on spike right when is it taking place it starts at uh 8 p.m uh well it starts 9 p.m central what day uh aug 28th on Friday. Oh, so it's next week? It's this week.

This week? This week, man. It's Friday night. Yeah, today's the 24th. So it's four days from now. Yeah. Where are you fighting? It's in Temecula.

Oh, okay. It's at Pechanga. Okay. So I'm fighting at Pechanga. It's 8 p.m. Central, 9 p.m. Eastern. Wow. Yeah. Who are you fighting?

It's the Lard and Gertz. I'm fighting Josh Burns. Josh Burns has fighting? The Lard and Gertz. Um, I'm fighting a Josh Burns. Josh Burns has fought for Bellator five times, I think maybe, maybe six, but I think this is a six fight in Bellator. Um, he's a, he's a tough guy. He, he hits hard. He's a finish or get finished guy. Um, his records only, I think like eight and eight.8. So the kind of, I mean, he goes out there and either crushes guys or he gets crushed. So that's my plan, go in there and crush him, even though I hear he's a stand-up guy. I've had so many people, even his friends, messaging me saying how great of a guy he is as a person and that it's kind of hard for them to root against him or things.

So it's cool. It's kind of hard for them to root against them or things. So it's cool. I'm going to fight a good dude, but he's got to go down because there's a lot more riding on it for me. There's so much more at stake now than ever before. Wow. Well, listen, man, I'll be watching. Thank you, man. Best of luck and give out all the information so people can contribute.

I gave out the Kickstarter on Twitter. What else can they do? How can they contribute to Waterfor? What else can they do? Yeah, if they want to follow me on social media, there's on Twitter, I'm TheBigPygmy. And on Instagram, I'm TheBigPygmy. That's the Mabuti Mangbo.

It just means TheBigPygmy. So that's what a lot of the people call me. That's where the nickname comes from. By the way, it's random, but there's three kiddos now. And those three, one of them's in Tundu, that village. He's named as Mabuti Mangbo Justin. And so that's his full name is the big pygmy Justin. Wow.

And so that's kind of one of the reasons why I'm like, you know what? That should be my nickname, not the Viking. Yeah. So that's kind of one of the reasons why I'm like, you know what, that should be my nickname, not the Viking. Anyways, but how they can contribute is, man, fightfortheforgotten.org. Fightfortheforgotten.org. I think later today or tomorrow, also.com will be there. Right now it's the old site on.com, but the new improved site is fightfortheforgotten.org. The book, I mean, I think people can really, I mean, from our talks, this is the deepest people can see into what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and my heart behind it so far.

But on September 15th, it's 28 chapters of this stuff. And I go into it real deep. That's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Well, I'll tweet that out whenever it comes out. I'll do it. Thank you. And I'll tweet whatever you need, man. You are, you know, you're an incredible person.

Thank you. Thank you, bro. You're incredible. And I'm so thankful for this platform. This platform is easy. I'm just sitting in this room in the valley. I literally can't tell you how many people from airplanes that I sit next to someone from San Diego that's watched it and someone at the hotel and just all over the place,

man. I walk around and people are like, oh, it's Justin from the Joe Rogan show. And I'm just like, what? And they're like, oh, what are you doing? So I'm honored that I could have you on and give you this platform, but what you're doing is just amazing, man. There's not a whole lot of people like you, man. It's incredible. I mean, what you've done is just beyond words. So anytime you need any help, I'm here. Dude, I love you, man.

Thank you. Love you too, brother. All right. Before I start crying. That's it, folks. That's the end of this. We'll be back tomorrow with Abby Martin, the Big Pygmy. Follow him, Twitter, Instagram, all that good shit.

And root for him, Spike TV, Friday night. All right. Facebook, fight for the forgotten. Woo. All right.