The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 091: Surviving

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Seattle, WA- Steven Rinella talks with Eduardo Garcia, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: the pumpkin thief; electrified bear hides; cooking on yachts; getting back to a western way of life; Charged: The Eduardo Garcia Story; the La Brea Tarpits, sabertooth cats, and dire wolves; what recovery looks like; huntin' with a hook; and more. You can watch Charged: The Eduardo Garcia Story on iTunes and Amazon.Be sure to check out the MeatEater Store November 22-26 for our Black Friday/Thanksgiving sale for 25% off all orders. Use offer code: meat, offer good while supplies last. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. um you know i've been wanting to talk about and you guys will appreciate this because you you both garden we had

okay i was growing pumpkins okay and i the pumpkins i grew i was growing them like in my garden closest to the road and started getting getting some good head-sized pumpkins. Nice. And one day I come out and one of them has been twisted off, clearly twisted off the vine and is gone. Okay. And I'm looking at it, I'm trying to figure out. And I used to have, we raised pet raccoons when I was a kid.

And I know what a raccoon is capable of. And I was like, could they really get, because and i was like could they really get because we got them you know like could they really get like a pumpkin off and then also get it away where i can't find it i come out the next day my other pumpkin has been cut with a freaking knife so at this point i know like this is not you know like i've seen raccoons do crazy stuff but like wielding knives is not right. And I'm guilty. Like, you know, you hear about police profiling. I profile in my head who that is that's doing it. And I'm like, that is an adolescent male

pumpkin snatcher. And I even tell my neighbors, I'm going to catch him and I will cut his hands off. So I'm out and I'm trying to rig up a trail cam to get some to get a picture if he's ever molested the pumpkin patch. And I'm talking to bring up a trail cam to get a picture if he's ever molested the pumpkin patch. And I'm talking to the neighbors about it.

And I'm being so sly that I don't want to put my trail cam out in the daylight, thinking that he's such a sly burglar that he'd notice. So it's getting dusk. I'm kind of thinking about it's time to have the trail cam ready. And my phone rings is the neighbor. He's like, there's a little old lady out in your garden. And by the time I get out there, she's gone. But I go down the road and they tell me where she's headed.

And I catch her down the road. And I'm like, ma'am, ma'am. And it's dark out. You know, like you just in my garden stealing pumpkins. Not me, honey. I'm like, really? You're like, you're telling me you weren't just over at my house getting pumpkins. Just walks off.

But nothing to say to me about it. Well, not long after that, the green beans start coming in and I opened my garage door and I just see some legs squirting across in front of the doors, the doors rising up. And I follow her down the road and she's walking down the road with a big handful of green beans. And then I don't even say it because now I'm like, I'm not even saying anything to her. The other day I'm on the phone, not the other day, a little while ago, I'm on the phone. I look out the window and now it's perfectly daylight and she's out harvesting carrots. So I yell down and the kids are like,

they call it like the pumpkin thief lady. And I yell down like, she's out there right now taking carrots. Someone yells out the door like, ma'am, we'd appreciate if you would just ask if you need some vegetables. She looks up at the door, takes those carrots, throws them on the ground and walks off down the road.

No way. She has blatant, Wow. Blatant, like, like, vegetable thievery. I wonder if she has like some,

some type of Alzheimer's and she thinks it's the pea patch. Yes. She thinks it's the pea patch. And I, yeah, I think she may wake up in the morning and be like,

why is there a green pumpkin in the kitchen? But, yeah, so, so that's what I've been trying to teach. I've been trying to instruct my kids. I was telling them, it's like, you get in the hard stuff to explain.

I'm like, you know, sometimes old people, and I'm like really struggling for a way to put it, and this is not the best way to put it, but I was like, sometimes old people become more like, they'll become like kids kind of. Just in some like bad stab stab sort of trying to explain this to a four-year-old and the seven-year-old was like yeah but kids don't get to walk around the middle of the night i'm like okay it's like a different kind of kid yeah um so eduardo garcia Eduardo Garcia, can you explain the electrical charge that you were struck by? Like in whatever way is best to explain it?

Yeah. So what I know about it, and you'll have to forgive me that to many people's amazement, my enthusiasm was really curbed to dig into too many of the details. I think 2011, I suffered an electrical injury that nearly took my life, October 9th. October 9th. October 9th, 2011. And to get to your question, though, is that I was so immersed in survival for so long post that day that by the time I finally found my feet months down the road and 21 surgeries later, I just didn't, you know, maybe it's like a cocktail mix of denial and then just uh you know lack of interest to go revisit that moment that i i i just i wanted didn't need that many details about what it was but what i can say is that just yeah let's back up and tell the story what happened so i'm just trying to start out with

like a titillating detail yeah so so um you can cut off if I get too long-winded because I like to spin a story. Please. You're out elk hunting. I know that. Yeah, well, the short of it is that I'd been working in the yachting industry as a chef for 10 years. And starting 2010, I had basically decided I was going to leave yachting and try to get back to Southwest Montana near the Bozeman area where I'm from, where I was raised.

And I was going to start a food brand, start a food company called Montana Mex. Which you did. Which I did. And I was going to start filming a cooking show for television and I was going to call it Active Ingredient. And, you know, so I had a, I had a, like a pilot for the show. I had, uh, you know, I was, um, repped by William Morris Endeavor, uh, as talent. I had a production team at a Denver

citizen pictures, um, that was going to pitch this show in the food network wanted, uh, first right of refusal, you know, to basically sign the show. And life was good. Life was good. I was no longer working on the yacht. I was home in Montana, just finished it. But you liked working on the yacht, so. For 10 years, but you can only sleep in a bed half the size of this table for so long, you know. Just traveling your ass off. Yeah, you know, and I was 30. I wanted to have a family. I wanted to move home and just get back to a mountain, a western Rocky Mountain way of life. You were thinking about having a family?

Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, at 30. Didn't have a girl yet, but, you know. And so I find myself home for 2011. I just left the yacht, and I'm working hard on the Montana Mex with, you know, my business partners and co-founders and your father's from Mexico dad's from Mexico from the Yucatan Cancun area you ever been down

there many times yeah so he's going down there in February so he's from Islam Harris which is that little island right on I know that island mm-hmm we're going out to a different island but yeah well yeah I spent a shitload of time down there yeah so dad is a shitload of time down there. Yeah, so dad is a fifth generation lobster and shark fisherman and chiclero. So like from his dad's side. What's a chiclero? Chiclay farmers.

So they're like basically. A little gum? That was a bad joke. No, it is a little gum. But it's how it happens. Yeah, machete, chiclay trees. So like sap in upper New England. They're bleeding trees for their gum.

Is that right? Uh-huh. Yeah. The stuff I don't know sometimes kind of surprises me a little bit. I'm glad I could bring that to the table. You know, real quick, when I got out of school, when I got out of regular college, we went down there a number of times. Sometimes we'd fly into Cancun and then go south and just sleep on the beaches and fish. Yeah.

Fish, bonefish, and all kinds of other stuff. I kind of fell in love with that place, man. This was a long time ago. Now we're talking about back in the late 90s. Yeah, no, that's a super pretty area. You know that, side note, and you honestly have to re-listen if we digress too far, but that area, the Yucatan Peninsula,

and what's now called sort of like the Riviera of the Yucatan. Yeah, the Maya Riviera. Yeah, it's back in like the late 60s. The Mexican government was basically, you know, throwing darts at a board and looking for their next Acapulco. You know, that was kind of in its heyday, and they knew, or just coming into it, and they knew, you know, like we need to be 10 years out. What's the next destination place in Mexico? And so they chose Cancun. And Cancun at the time was oil wells, oil wells, and palm plantations for palm oil, right?

And fishing villages. That was it. You know, I mean, it was so remote that, you know, my dad, and I may have shared this story when we cooked on that meat eater show like two years ago with you. But my dad, they had this life where they would live in the estuaries, the mangrove estuaries of that peninsula. And there was no noise. There was no air traffic. There was no airport. You could hear a fish jump in the lagoon and know what fish it was.

That was the lifestyle down there but um anyway that that's how cancun became kind of mtv senor frogs god man if i could go back in time and find whoever that guy had that idea oh my gosh and just not like doing anything real bad to him but just to interrupt him at the moment he would have had the idea oh yeah they i mean they my dad. My dad, they have deer down there. They have called chachalacas, which are pheasant, like a pheasant of the Yucatan. Turkeys, whole thing. All right, so back in Montana. Anyway, back in Montana, getting after a food brand,

pitching a TV show. Had big plans. Kicking ass. Big plans, yeah. Basically, I just left a crazy successful yachting career, a decade. And I should have, you know, I should not should have. I could have stuck with that. And that would have been career, retire, you know, another 10 years.

And... Look, you can make money private chefing. Well, you don't have any expenses because you're living on the boat. And you got someone buying your Q-tips and everything else, you know. Yeah. So you can put it all away. And friends do, you put it into whatever. Anyway, so a longtime friend,

this is how I got to this injury. There was a longtime friend asked if I would cater his wedding end of September in New Mexico. I said, great. He's from Montana and he wanted elk on the menu. I said, perfect. I'll hunt the elk.

I'll get a B tag and an A tag and I'll bring down all the good steak meat I can and make a menu. I said, perfect. I'll hunt the elk. I'll get a B tag and an A tag, and I'll bring down all the good steak meat I can and make a menu. Here we go. And I ended up, of course, not getting an elk. So I had to borrow it from all kinds of friends and family. And got enough elk, pulled off the wedding, got home the 29th of September, and now I was like committed I need to shoot I need to harvest two elk to pay all my buddies back their back straps and whatever else and um so there I was and so on the morning of October 9th I'd been hunting hard looking for elk and um is that opening day no it's archery season still oh you're still in archery yeah so archery you know goes to like the 14th usually that's right and so I'm in the tail end of archery. The rut's like high gear.

It's amazing. It's the time you want to be out in Montana, you know. And that morning, I had a herd bull, nice six by, with about 30 cows pass at, I don't even know, 40 yards. And the cows were boogying quick. And the bull, I kept cow chirping. So I got the, I at least got the bull to stop and I'm at full draw looking at this bull and I'm thinking, no, I borrowed a two-year-old cow off my buddy and I'm going to return a two-year-old

cow. Like I'm going to return the same type of meat, give or take, right? Not a stringy herd bull. Most people in their right minds would not pass up a 30 yard quartering away broadside shot at an elk, at a bull elk, right? So I let it go. And I, it's like 9am now. I'm thinking, you know what? I'm going to go to this other spot. I'm going to go down the road now. And then, so I parked my car at the trailhead and ended up three miles up kind of right where the sage foothills meets kind of high alpine dug for timber and um yeah i came across what looked to me like a 50 gallon oil drum cut in half you know and um inside it i saw um what i noticed was like some claws and black fur.

And this is in the middle of a tight drainage with tall grass and sage. And, you know, if you... Yeah, okay, I got to stop you. Yeah. Because I'm going to introduce a thing now. I realize I haven't made this clear. I've seen this place because... Yeah. there's a new documentary out called charge yes which is your life story framed around this freak injury and your recovery from this freak injury

that's right so i've seen this place yeah because you visited a couple times in the movie yeah yeah uh what what land ownership is this public land public land that's i never understood okay so now no pick it back up but i kept looking at being like so it's miles from the road from the trail yeah it's three miles in this is good because we're getting back to the original question which was it so um public land public land yeah it's right on the yellowstone national park border okay public land. Public land. Yeah, it's right on the Yellowstone National Park border. Okay. Public land. You know, it's a super hot spot for elk hunting, especially in the rut,

because, you know, the tactic is to bugle them out of the park, you know, get them across the line. Super bear-rich zone. So, you know, kind of your head's turned on. Both kind of bears. Yeah. You know, this is down in Beattie Gulch. And anyone that's ever heard the word Beattie Gulch

for Southwest Montana Region 3, you're like, oh, yeah. You know, every year there's someone, some calling for a bear situation. And so my head is turned on. So when I see this, this can, two things I think of. I'm thinking it's old mining. So the town of Aldrich is an old mining camp. So I grew up in that area.

I grew up in Corwin Springs, like a mile down the road. So all of the hills around there are littered with old mining debris. Sheep camps. So it is not uncommon to be in the Rack of Mountain West and see an old enamel bowl or an old cast iron stove. Oh, yeah, man. Yeah, crazy stuff. Or like heavy equipment that was obviously driven in,

but now the roads are gone. And you kind of wonder how they got it in there. But you realize it's just, it's been collecting debris for 150 years. And or a container for a salt block for a cow lease. Yeah. You know? And so that's what I think. So I immediately think that's what it is. And then I see the claws and I'm hunting, you know, I have my gear on me.

And I pull out a knife basically just to pop a claw or two off right cut home because there's a what looks to be an inverted barrel an open top barrel coming out of the ground yeah yeah and i know what you're talking about in the middle of nowhere like corrugated sort of metal appearance no that's what you see in the film because that's what they protected it with i got you so think of just a rusty old oil drum. With a dead bear in it. And to say dead bear, so I remember People Magazine did a write-up about this, and they were like, and Garcia stabbed a baby bear. And then I had all this hate mail. I was like, why would you stab a baby bear?

It made it sound like I killed this bear. So let's just make this really clear. Yeah, this is the kind of story with enough complexity that I wouldn't let People Magazine even come kind of close to this. No, believe me, I made many mistakes in the post-aftermath of my injury. Stay out of the baby. You're talking to some jackass who's never laid eyes on a bear or a barrel in their life. Yeah, and he's not even writing anything down.

You're like, all right, where's your imagination going with this man? Remember what a barrel is again? You know? So it was actually this. So when I say baby bear now, this is good to know. When I say it now, I'm six years later. So I have all the facts now. But at the moment, all I know is that there's, you know,

there's like basically four little two-inch claws. But in the damn barrel. Inside this barrel. And there's like a little mess of fur, like a toupee. There's a scrap of fur and a claw sitting in this barrel. It's not like there's a 100-pound animal in this barrel. So it had been there for a while. It was desiccated. It was mummified, man.

Totally mummified. See, I know the damn story, but I didn't know. Yeah. And you never told me otherwise. I guess you just jumped to the idea that it's a full-on fresh dead freaking bear in a barrel. From yesterday. Yeah. Well, and this is an opportunity that I relish because most interviews, like People Magazine

or whatever else, you've got a soundbite and you don't have time. No one wants to hear your description of what this bear is. They want to know how hard life's been since then and what are you doing and all these things. So yeah. So you- Now I want to know about the bear. Yeah, you're looking at like a handful of fur,

some dry, twisted, sinewed skin and like a few claws. Okay. So I pull a knife out of my right, off my right hip. I put it in my left hand. And you haven't touched it with your right, you haven't touched it yet. No, and I'm it in my left hand. And you haven't touched it with your right, you haven't touched it yet. No, and I'm going in with both hands. And just.

That's it. Major, major warmth on the back of my head. Super high frequency orchestration going on in my mind, you know, within my brain, sound. And then curtain call, just black. That's my memory of the injury. And should have been just dead as dead. Should have been just dead as dead, yeah.

And if we all took a nap underneath a tree, you'd wake up and you'd see the sky and you'd see treetops. And that's my next memory, followed then by the sound of gravel under my feet. So what happens, what we know, and no one else is with me. So this is just what I can remember is that I clearly woke up, my eyes opened, I got up, I left all my stuff there. I left my phone, I left my keys, I left everything. And I got up to my, and then I wake up on this road walking downhill.

And I remember hearing my boots on gravel. I remember hearing a Western Meadowlark chirp, and I start to see the valley floor in front of me heaving and kind of coming into focus. And it's at that point that I start putting back the, you know, I start like, where am I? What am I? What am I doing? And then I recall I'm hunting or I was hunting today. I recall I parked at Beattie Gulch. I recall I saw this thing and then it just happens quick. Like, oh yeah, I reached out. I was going to take a claw.

God, I heard like a noise and heat. And then I like look and I noticed that my left hand is just crouched up against my torso and my hand is super black, totally burnt. And I have, you know, you can see sinew and bone and it's really kind of gnarly. It looks like just a charred. The hand that was holding the knife. Yeah, it looks like a charred turkey foot. Except the other hand just has sort of a black, you know, blowout scar on top of it.

And otherwise it's not messed with. And I realized. Because you don't know what you're, you had no idea that you had just scorched no your chest down and burnt your no all i can see is my two hands you know and and then i so then i then i get it i'm like all right i mean i'm 30 years old i've heard enough stories out there in the world i'm like i got electrocuted i am walking to save my life right now and um and and And as I, so then I take note of that and then I shift. So I'm like, then I'm like fully present, lucid,

as lucid I can be. I'm like, I am walking to save my life. I am mortally wounded right now. Like I am headed for help. And I realized that in my right hand, I have bear spray out of its holster in my hand. That's like a phenomenal thing to just like understand that I, in leaving the scene, I had already like started going downhill to help and I'd pulled bear spray out because somehow in my

state of unconsciousness remembered I'm in a bear rich environment. So I have bear spray in my hand ready to go. And that's how I find myself. I make a sling for my left hand out of the two elk calls. I had dangling around my neck, and I start walking. And I remember I hit the valley floor. Two miles later, I see a buck antelope, which I remember seeing on the way up. And so it's coming back to me like, oh, I know where I'm at. And I ended up finding the cabin

in the valley floor. There's a guy working on his cabin and he called the local. What did he think when he saw you? Because you were a mess. I didn't realize how bad you were until I saw the footage that you guys had from

that your girl, you know, like all this amazing footage of like just very disturbing footage of a severely injured person. But what did the guy think when you showed up? I got to show you something. You got a hole blown out of your head. I got to show you the footage the EMTs took.

It looked like a Halloween story. He called 911, sat me down. Paramedics showed up, three of them at a gardener. They knew they were moving to save this guy's life. I got to back you up now because I'm still so curious about this source. I know in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter, but I just have to know. Okay. You had to later learn.

What was it? Right, right, right. Oh, yeah. So here we go. I want to cover that before we keep moving along because I think I just, I don't want people to,

because it's just so strange, right? So Malcolm Forbes, you know, you know, Forbes 500, right? Had a cabin up at the top of Beaty Gulch

and they brought power to that cabin via the road. When they dug the road in, they buried a line. At one point, the road takes a big dog leg out, and

instead of rolling cable on that dog leg, they just shot straight up this little gully to the next switchback. And had some kind of easement to do

this on public land. They must have. And it was back in the 60s. And on the rollout, when they're going up this drainage, they ran out of

cable. They brought in a new spool, and they spliced it. Instead of burying the splice, they just put a can on it. And at some point, they just put a can on the two tails. And maybe it was a junction box. Basically, it was a junction box. And the can is still there.

Yeah, yeah. Has power. Yeah. So this was actually feeding a… Yeah, this was like 2,400 volts going into a home. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So this was feeding, actually feeding of... Yeah, this is like, you know, 2,400 volts going into a home.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the lid was secure. That's important everyone needs to know. The lid was secure. It had three locks on all three sides.

And, you know, the welds for the tabs that had the holes through it to keep the lid attached to the container

had started to become compromised over time and you know and then now we get to sort of like a place where via an NDA I think I'm allowed to continue to say that um you know the locks the the tabs became compromised and then one broke and then another broke and then maybe a bison rubbed its ass on it one day or sloughing snow down the hill started to move it over time and then of course the lid fell off and it just remained exposed and it gathered dirt and grass and maybe a sage bush grew next to it and i mean it just became engulfed in the drainage gotcha you know hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear

from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right.

We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light shnaze vortex federal and more as a special offer you can get a free three months to try on x out if you visit on x maps.com

slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yeah. One last question about this. Is it your belief that the bear, I mean, a bear got electrocuted in there? Man, you know, like did the bear die because of that power? Who knows? I mean, it could have been dropped in there by something. Yeah.

Yeah, probably did. It probably died, probably bit into it or something. I mean, I've heard, so since then, you know, we've researched into similar bizarre instances. And, you know, a note to all you outdoorsmen out there that are going to listen to this is that if you come across a pile of dead animals in the middle of the woods, don't touch them. Like, don't poke it with the knife, you know.

You know, it could be one animal that dug into a power source because there's vibration and frequency coming out of it and they pick up on that or whatever and that animal dies and another animal comes to feed on that animal and it dies and you know that's definitely happened are you familiar with la brea tar pits yeah yeah uh look listeners, if you're just, the cascading series of events, it kind of almost reminds me. It's a freakish weird way.

It reminds me of the La Brea Tar Pits because La Brea Tar Pits are these like Pleistocene tar pits that would trap animals. Yeah. And over the tens and tens of thousands of years, they trapped, you know, dozens of mammoths, hundreds of dire wolves wolves short-faced bears saber-toothed cats yeah and when you look at all the stuff that's come out of there uh you're like how could these like be that like how could they have caught that much stuff

but some i remember reading that one what they call one interaction per decade would account for it. What they described was a baby mammoth walks out, gets stuck in the tar. A saber-toothed cat comes out to scavenge the carcass, gets stuck in the tar. A bird lands to scavenge the saber-tooth, gets stuck in the tar. Stretched out over tens and tens and tens of thousands of years, you have this bizarre collection. So there was an interaction going on at this power source. The buck stops here for this scenario because I didn't die.

I was not added to the evolutionary tar pit of electrical injuries in the woods. And that actually is, there's a kind of anecdotal side note here is that part of the film charged, not even part of, the sole purpose of this documentary, and we'll probably get to this later, is to serve as some type of beacon or educational or moving factor

so that others do not befall the same type of scenario that I did. Yeah, but the movie does way, sure, sure. In a small way. The movie does way more than that. But it does make you aware of the idea, sort of my dismay and surprise about the accident I think helps explain this. It does make you aware that you have

the stuff in your head that you think can go wrong and then there's the things that you never imagined. Oh. That you would never ever imagine. When I reached out to take that cloth I was already a mile up the hill in my mind stocking an elk. I was, I was, you know, by the time when I reached out to take that cloth, I was already a mile up the hill in my mind, stocking an elk. I was like, oh, cloth, you know, it was supposed

to be that quick. And had I not had a knife in my left hand, most likely, you know, I may have not been zapped that day. That knife, so that, that, the, that the the electrical jolt came through my left hand which is what was the hand holding the knife and then entered into my body and exited in nine different places on my legs on my torso through my scalp and then and then here on my other hand so this was an exit wound through my right hand not an entrance wound yeah can you walk us through your injuries yeah and then i want to get to the really trippy part that like kind of blows my mind is the cancer element yeah is is otherworldly yes but the injuries from the injury injuries so the electricity entered through the knife

that became the conduit that created the arc or you know that and that knife hit metal or just hit the bear no i i don't even think i'd made it I don't even think I'd made it down to the bear right so the can maybe is 24 inches tall and I go leaning in and I am again I don't know for certain you don't remember the details but my belief is that I never even made it to the claw and at some point that metal in my hand everything else is charged in this barrel right and at some point that metal in my hand everything else is charged in this barrel right and at some point that new metal caught you know became a conduit for an electrical jump that went into that knife and then came out through so basically goes in my left hand comes

out my left elbow comes out my left torso comes out my left thigh comes out my left torso, comes out my left thigh, comes out my right groin, comes out my right elbow, comes out my right hand, and comes out twice on my scalp. Like nine, give or take nine major exit wounds. And what happened at your ribs? Exit wound. Yeah, exit wound. The size of a head. The exit wound, like, you know.

Well, the size of like. Two heads. Yeah, no. So the thing is, when you look at the initial wound site, it's fairly small. It's like the size of a large honeydew melon. But once the doctors started debriding, which is removing the dead tissue from my body. Yeah, and you see it in the movie. You see all this, where it's just like black.

It grows twofold. You know, they have to dig back to live, you know, live, live tissue, live bone. So I had, so on my, I mean, that was probably, that was one of my most extensive injuries was my left torso is basically I lost half of my pectoral, all of my obliques on the left side, and four, like, two-inch sections of rib. Like, right now, you know, there's no ribs there. I remember one of the – oh, my God.

Yeah, he's showing us the lack of – he's demonstrating the lack of ribness. I'm lifting my shirt up, showing the wounds. We haven't even got to your arm yet. Right. Which is, I have to imagine the, the, the main part of this to you, um,

losing an arm. Yeah. In, in the movie, when the doctor says to you, he's talking about what the surgery they're going to do just on the one wound on your rib cage. Yep. And your girlfriend's filming this interaction with,

you know, doctor, and he's kind of giving you like a basic what to expect right yeah for instance you'll never do a pull-up again like struck you yeah in some way you because you'd always been like a fit no i wouldn't say like a fitness freak but like you're a fitness guy uh yeah i was athletic you can tell that that it is in the movie you kind of see this moment where you're obviously like, your whole life's changed anyways, but I see this moment where you're kind of like,

just that little detail makes you see. I was like, wait, like a week? In like two weeks? Yeah, it's so funny. And he's like, no, man, like for good. You'll never do a pull-up again. And that's because they were taking my, it's called a muscle flap. So basically, with all that muscle being

removed from my left torso, you're left with a very, muscle is part of your armor. It's part of your body's armor for the vitals, you know, as well. It doesn't just serve as this mobility tool, it's armor. And so with bones being removed, with all this tissue being gone, the doctors have to find a way to cover that up and protect the side of the body again. So, you know, the latissimus is not a vital muscle to overall life. Like it's there for locomotion. So they basically remove the latissimus. That's that big muscle that runs from your shoulders down to your hip. It's kind of shaped like a V, you know, and they removed it from my hip. They brought it out of my, they brought it out

and then they flipped it and attached it over to my left torso, right? And so that's why basically if anyone does a pull-up, you're using your shoulders and your arms and your core, which is mostly these huge latissimus dorsi muscles. And so when the doctor's like, you won't ever, you know, you won't do a pull-up again. He was just speaking from learned experience that you're losing the majority of your pull power.

Yeah. And. Was he right? Well, it was, no, he wasn't. You know, two years later, I was at my prosthetician's. Yeah, because I see that. It looked like, it looked damn near like a pull-up. Yeah, he throws a pull-up bar up on the, up on the door and, and, you know, probably a cheater pull-up.

Got my chin barely there. And, you know, and I don't do. And I don't do pull-ups anymore because usually it's my prosthetic. It's the material that makes up my prosthetic that breaks because it's 170 pounds hanging on it. But what's interesting to note is that for anyone that goes through a major transformation of their physical body in any which way is that the body is made, it is redundant. It's like redundancy in place. So if you lose one muscle, the body's going to find a way to have all the other mini muscles or underlying muscles that really are there to support, those will start to grow and pull weight. So right now, when I'm hiking, so I'm missing a major chunk of my left quadricep, a huge

majority of the muscles on my left side, and I don't feel weaker on my left side now, six years later, when I'm hiking an elk out. I feel fatigued like anyone else does, 100%. But I think it's because um all the little muscles they fill in they come back in you know they start working out more so walk us through how things went with your arm um like kind of how that decision making process you say in the movie how you've decided to yeah yeah was it actually a decision? Yeah, it was. It was a decision. So I think I had been in the hospital for six days at that point.

And if anyone's ever been in like a high school locker room, it stinks. And it kind of started to smell like that. It started to smell like foot and just odor. Yeah, there was basically decay. They had debrided most of my body like i was basically begging with the world and i was like praying to people i'd never prayed to before i was basically throwing every hail mary i could out at the universe like don't take my left hand because could any could you guys imagine losing your left hand like how could you you know you you can't you know you don't no and it's funny because

it's like uh because of the nature um because of sort of like how the last couple wars that we've been involved in have played out with improvised explosive devices we see more of it my god yo yeah well i imagine people i imagine people see you and assume you're a soldier a hundred percent they're like oh you you were you lost your arm in uh fallujah yeah it's probably like well it's it's usually you get like you get like the nod and maybe like the two-fingered like like veteran i'm like yeah so i'm like outdoorsman so in that way yeah so in that way no i can't imagine losing my limb but there's so many guys in our that are roughly in our generation that are dealing with that because

of like that becoming such a yeah we see more of a common injury but just like we've had 13 years of i mean where i can expose expose these kind of explosions that seem to have a propensity to pull people's limbs off i could speak all day too as to how i've benefited by technology by by the the mass influx of amputees coming back from the work is the government obviously is going to pour a ton of money into taking care of people when they come back and so the government's been huge behind new technologies But in regards to losing my hand, basically the doctor said, look, we've removed the majority of the dead tissue on your hand. And what you've got left is basically

you're going to have to lose your pinky and basically like three out of the four top fingers. And you'll be left with your pointer finger and your thumb and a hand that kind of runs down the middle of the back of your hand to your wrist. So you'll be left with your pointer finger and your thumb and a hand that kind of runs down the middle of the back of your hand to your wrist. So you'll be left with kind of like a pistol-looking hand. And he's saying guaranteed the pistol's a good working pistol. Well, he's saying you'll be able to have some movement in your pointer finger

and your thumb, but you're losing all the rest of your fingers. And he says, so you'll have a semi-functional left hand. But he said, what concerns me is that we believe that what you smell in the room is an infection in your hand and in your forearm. Oh. And that is at the moment from like the middle part of my left forearm to my heart is less than 18 inches. And that is not going to take long for a bacteria to run up to your heart. And our concern is great that you've survived the electrical injury miraculously somehow. And yet, there is a very high risk that the bacterial infection in your forearm

could kill you if it gets to your heart gotcha and it was like that was on a sunday afternoon and i'll never forget i just said like bring me to the table yeah take it off right now and they're like whoa whoa whoa the doctor the surgeons at earliest we can do this is tomorrow you know so i was ready to take the second they said the bacterial infection in your left hand could kill you i was like then take it off because you know i i you know somehow survived the electrical injury itself i'm not screwing around with infections and other things you know it's a weird thing you just mentioned that i remember striking me is um you talk about that 18 inch distance up your arm i remember i had a pick line yeah one time and i went to have it removed and i was expecting i was just kind of i don't know why

i was expecting this like giant hose yeah and when they pull it out i'm like you know that saying like when you get hurt people like oh it's a long way from your heart yeah like no it's not a long way from your heart no they pull a little out a little line. Just like, yeah. Right there. You somehow think of it as being like sort of more isolated and protected as they pull out this like little seven-inch holes. I'm like, that's all it takes to get from my arm to my heart? I can feel where I'm missing ribs. I can put my fingers under those ribs when I'm working hard, and I'm basically like an inch from my heart.

Yeah, so when I do high-intensity sport, whether it's horseback riding or triathlon biking or snowmobiling or snowboarding I wear a it's basically my triathlon jersey like a tight spandex jersey with velcro

and then a kind of like a Kevlar plate that goes against that velcro to protect against that hole in my chest right now so if you see against impact

against impact so it's big enough your ribs aren't doing the job anymore well most of them are but there's a hole in my rib cage the size of a grapefruit. And so the plate is like just over the size of a grapefruit so that if it gets hit, it's going to spread weight to where the ribs are. Gotcha. Like a bridge, yeah. Yeah.

And I've called off recreational events where I forget it. You know, I forget to bring my vest. And, you know, and my girlfriend now, you know, she knows, remind me like, are you going horseback riding with Ben Masters? Bring your vest, you know? And if I forget it,

I just won't go in. Yeah. So when you woke up from the surgery and, right, what, like,

how, what'd that feel like? You know, six years later, it's kind of a letdown, but I can only speak generally to what coming out of anesthesia feels like because I had 21 surgeries. Coming out of the surgery that removed my hand, it was not significantly different than the surgery that I had my ribs removed on or my scalp surgery.

Yeah, but all of a sudden your arm's gone. Right, but it's interesting. So going into the surgery to remove my arm, I didn't really have an arm anyway. I just had a bandage club. Couldn't feel it. Yeah. I was loaded on medicine. I was totally maxed out on pain meds.

And I was like really in this point of stasis. I was like the first week, I was still in this super tentative place where I could live or die basically. And so coming out of surgery, to me, I didn't even get to look at it for the first day or two. So it was still just this bandaged left side.

And then being just the twisted individual that I am and a chef, the first time I saw it, I was like, oh, man, it looks like shank bone. I can see the marrow in there. Really? Yeah. And it was like, huh. And that, honestly, a lot of folks would assume, rightfully so, that it was super traumatic for me to see my missing forearm with the out-of-hand attachment for the first time. But for me, I was fascinated by being able to see all of my muscle groups open and see bone.

And I met it out, so I'm semi-comfortable. And so for me, it was actually, it took my mind off of things to follow the movements of the nurses and the team cleaning after you and to have a chance to have the inside view of my body. It was kind of cool, honestly. Looking back on it now, how lucid were you for all this?

I mean, considering the medications, right? There's an accumulative effect of all that stuff, I'm sure. Yeah, I think I was mostly present. There's a lot I don't recall because of the cumulative effect of the fog, as you want to call it. But- Yeah, I mean, just sort of like probably a persistent sort of shock. Yeah. And then being doped up. And being doped up. But I you know, I remember we took, you know, and I'm grateful too. This is another thing is too,

is I had a support team like no other. You know, my ex-girlfriend, Jenny Jane, who's my business partner, she flew back from the UK and took photos and video the whole time we were in hospital. I want to get to that because I don't understand that.

Yeah. And so, you know, so for me, I was kind of felt like it was a busy time period. the whole time we were in hospital. And- I want to get to that, because I don't understand that. Yeah, so for me, I kind of felt like it was a busy time period. It was like, you're going from one bandage dressing to PT to surgery to, there wasn't a ton of downtime that I was awake for that we weren't doing something. And part of, I've always loved photography,

so I have a lot of photos that are pretty intense, you know, that kind of helped take my mind off of things. It was like, you know, yeah, it made it kind of interesting in a sense. Well, I imagine, too, that it doesn't take many minutes or maybe, you know, I don't know, maybe it's a couple hours until the thought repeats itself of, well, thank God. At least I'm here and I'm thinking. Oh, yeah. No, that is a good point.

And I actually don't think I got back to Steve's point to that either, which was how was it to wake up and not have your hand? And I think it was three weeks in where we were watching a movie. And Jen's probably in my hospital bed. And I'm on her right side. She's on my left. And we're watching a movie on the laptop. And this is the moment where I first remember having an emotional breakdown.

And with my left hand, I was kind of, you're sitting next to your honey at home. Where are your hands? Well, don't answer that question. But one of your hands is probably you know, probably on her knee or on her shoulder or on her hand. You know, you're hanging out. And so my left hand was on Jen's knee. I remember watching a movie.

And at one point I go to give it a squeeze and then I kind of look over and I realize that my left hand is on her knee and I'm hanging out with her and yet there's no left hand. You're kidding me. Yeah, and y'all, I'm moving my muscles and I'm kind out with her and yet there's no left hand. You're kidding me. Yeah, and y'all, I'm moving my muscles and I'm kind of like doing this, you know. And I just broke down because, you know, of course my body still remembered a left hand had been there for 30 years.

And it took a year, you know, six months to a year for me to really come to terms psychologically with the fact that I don't have a left hand. Like right now I'm wearing a prosthetic hook and if I take this hook off, 100% in the second I just took that off, I now am unilateral. I'm like one-handed in my mind. Whereas the second I put this hook back in,

I'm bilateral again because I got two hands to do stuff with because the mind uh you know the so for me it was it was really like a few weeks in where i actually had a moment of loss for my limb but not after the not right after the fact yeah this is a pretty impactful part of the movie not the most impactful part to me but a pretty impactful part of the movie is leaving the hospital. Because it seems that then, all of a sudden then, once you're outside, it seems like you kind of are...

That's like one of the moments when it sort of seems to hit you. But all of a sudden now, you've been to this little sanctuary and all of a sudden now they're like, oh, you can go home now. And you're walking outside without your nursing staff, without the pharmacy next door, without your surgeons.

Basically, you've been incubated. You've been knocked down to this place where you are vulnerable and being built up from the ground up again. And then you walk outside and you're discharged. And all of a sudden, you got to park your own car again. And you got to drive again. And of course, I still had my family and everyone there but um you know i mean jenny you know bless her heart you know take her hours to unbandage me get me in a shower take me out of shower and bandage me

back up again you know we i mean wound care was still intensive it would take four hours to kind of just get me ready for the day so So here's something I forgot to check in on. How in the world, so you coincidentally at the same time happen to have testicular cancer that has spread up your spine and don't know about it. Right. Yeah. And they find it through all this other stuff.

So on top of that, you're in there doing like chemo. So I hadn't done chemo yet. But so, right. So what you don't see in the film and what's interesting to me is that in 2007, I'm working on the yacht and I'm in Saint-Tropez in the south of France and I feel this pain in my groin, kind of like pulled muscle. And I remember just mentioning to the captain, I got to go see a doctor, you know, and I don't bitch much about really anything, a high threshold for pain. And there's a doctor on board who's a guest at the time. And he's like,

oh, we'll just have Dr. So-and-so give you a checkup, you know? Like, okay. Doctor gives me a quick eval, kind of checks the boys out down there. And he's like, you know, how many hours a day are you working? I'm like 20, 18 for like months in a row. And he says, tell the boss to give you a day off and take a anti-inflammatory. You're probably just working too hard standing on your feet. And that's what every young mid-20 male wants to hear. You know, that we don't want to go to the hospital or go get checked out. We're invincible. Looking for a reason to not take it seriously. A hundred percent we are. And so that was 2007.

So fast forward to my injury in 2011, and I come out of a surgery where because of one of my exit wounds basically being in my sack, okay, they removed my left testy. And so I'm told this when I come out of surgery. This is kind of like, this is like just a twisted fact of coming out of a surgery is you don't really know what happened in surgery until you wake up again. And you're getting told, oh, well, we took this off, but we were able to keep this. And, you know, so you're kind of getting the shakedown of how it went. Because they're doing play by play. Yeah. I mean, they don't know what they're getting into. You sign a waiver every time you go into surgery that basically says, I recognize that I may not live through this.

And the hospital is not, you know, legally bound by what may happen. And then you obviously give someone power of attorney so that if they need to make a game day call, someone can do that for you while you're on the table. And so, Jen. You handed it over to your ex-girlfriend. Yeah, because she was the one that was there every day. She was like, boom, on my side. You know, so it's like, you make a call. Meanwhile, you got siblings, parents.

Who were there. But as my mom says, you know, and my brother, you know, like there can only be one captain of the ship. And if Jen's going to be, if she's already been by this guy's side for five years, she's sleeping next to that bed every day. And we were all in the peripheral every day here. So everyone else was in Salt Lake too. But it was like Jen next to the bed. So, and she's able to make like end of life decisions for you.

And she, but, and to be fair, yes, she was. But she's also, you know, she's living with my family. My family's in the room too and then going home. But, you know, she's with them. Yeah, I'm not suggesting that I would think that I shouldn't do this because she might pull a dirty trick and say pull the plug, which just strikes me as it's unusual.

Well, because Steve's referring to that she's my ex-girlfriend. Right. She's not my girlfriend. But you guys are becoming kind of like when the accident happened, she was an ex-girlfriend, correct? Yeah, she had just flown home to the UK a week before.

Okay, so fresh ex. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, and so I come out of surgery, and they're like, and the doctors say, this went well, that went well, this went well. Couldn't save your left testicle. You know, adios. Rest in peace, buddy.

And in that moment, I recall that many years before, I had had a pain in my, you know, in my sack and, you know, and some swelling. And I was kind of told to take an ibuprofen and never did anything about it. So I just casually mentioned this to the nurse who then mentions it to the surgeon. And so like the first of a little red flag goes up

and the surgeon puts in an order that a tissue sample from the testy that had been taken out a few hours before gets sent to the lab. And that comes back positive for testicular cancer. Oh man, really? So that's how that was found. Yeah, you don't have room.

In the movie, there's not room for that. There's not room for that. But that's how it was found. So they did like a biopsy on an electrocuted test. Yeah. And so then we biopsy the heck out of, you know, like we, so then there's a full-blown attack on all of the CT scans that had already happened over the prior week or two. And they're looking now, like, what did we miss?

Is there something in here that we're missing? And they see this mass that's on my left spine and my lower abdomen, just above my groin. And it's immediately flagged as a second-stage tumor coming up from the testicle. Cancerous. Dude, this is making me physically uncomfortable. We biopsy the heck out of that. But in every biopsy test comes back negative. Okay, but the thing with the biopsy is imagine you have an apple and then you have a hollow

core biopsy needle. How many times do you have to stick that apple to get full coverage? About a million. It's just not going to happen. So we biopsy it like six times, let's say. And they all come back negative. And all my tumor, my blood work comes back negative.

But the doctors feel, via what they can see in imagery, that there is an, and so the University of Utah, the University of Utah has a Huntsman Cancer Clinic there. So they have a major oncology team. So they have an oncologist on this now. And they basically decide that there is a reason enough for

concern that this is a second stage tumor. And that even though all of my readings are coming back negative, they highly recommend that I go into a very aggressive round of chemotherapy to just make sure there's nothing in me anywhere. And I'm still in the middle of surgeries. So now all of my surgeries, you can't go into chemotherapy with open wounds. So now they basically put surgical band-aids on these wounds that are in recovery, like my scalp. So they basically take skin, and they put it on my skull to close that up, and they put everything on hold so that I can go home to Bozeman and do three months of intense chemotherapy. That's another part of the movie.

You always hear, doing chemotherapy, that your hair falls off. But in the movie, you're able to, one day, you realize it's loose, and someone's filming this, and you're able to just kind of go and pull all of the hair off your head. Yeah, I started chemo late January. Early January. No, early February. And I'm whitetail shed hunting and I started to notice, you know,

like my hand going through my head while sweating. And when I say to whitetail shed hunting, I'm like sick as a dog in chemotherapy. So my goal is to get outside once a day for 100 yards to maybe a flat river bottom walk with no weight on my pack just to be outside and i start noticing that my hands coming back with hair on it you know and and um yeah i remember one day just kind of like messing with my hair noting it and i was determined that i would be the one percent that whose hair doesn't fall out because it happens like a few small percentage of people do not lose their hair in chemotherapy. And yeah, and so when it did, yeah, I was at home.

And Jen and I just put a camera on a tripod and just, yeah, went after it. That's a very raw part in the film for a lot of people that are watching. I mean, I've sat in a lot of screenings in theaters, and that's a very raw part. Cancer is all over our society, and there's almost no one out there that's not touched by cancer somehow through their family or friends or personally. Yet, I don't think anyone's ever seen a cancer patient pull their hair out.

It is. It's really arresting. I got a question. Through all that, did they ever say, oh, yeah, we did have a test result that came back then positive? On his scroll. Yeah, no, on the testicle that was removed, that was positive. So none of the biopsies and none of the blood work until this date, knock on wood somewhere.

I go for a checkup every six months and I'm still negative. I still test, you know, like I'm clean, you know, at the moment. So I think, are you getting at, so what's up with the mass, right? What's up with the mass? So, man, we kept our eyeball on that for, and we still do, but we kept our eyeball on that heavy for two and a half years. And my oncologist now in Bozeman, Montana feels that, and I was pushed heavily to have it removed, which is a very dicey surgery because it's right near your spine with some significantly undesirable telling me that this mass is going to kill me, I don't want to have this removed.

You know, like I'm happy to just watch it, seriously watch it. But I don't want to go under the knife again and deal with these side effects and whatnot. And so we didn't have it removed. And my oncologist now believes it's an overactive lymphocytes. Basically, it's a lymph node filled with some lymphatic drainage. We watch it. Every six months, I get a CT scan, and we watch it. It hasn't really grown.

Sometimes, it'll shrink or change shapes. We're watching it. I feel like I got this little thing I get to keep tabs on now. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Here's a part of the movie I don't understand. I don't feel like it was adequately addressed. And it wouldn't be because it's almost like fourth wall. It's a fourth wall issue. I'll explain that. So when people say breaking the fourth wall,

it's kind of like a production term where you imagine that you're filming a room. I'm telling you, the listeners, this, not Eduardo, but you're filming a room, right? And you can always see three walls of the room because the fourth wall is where the camera's sitting so in production you'd say like to break the fourth wall is to sort of acknowledge the presence of of the fact that there's some level of artifice here and that this is being filmed right so watching the movie you're just sort of engrossed in all

the stuff that's going on. But let's say we break the fourth wall a minute. How in the world, why in the world, or how did it come up that within days of this injury, when you still don't even know if you're going to live or die, you guys, that your ex-girlfriend comes and you guys come to a decision to start filming it. Like, what was that conversation? Yeah. Great question. And that's the result of filming it.

Hold on. I'm getting sidetracked. The reason why we have so much footage from the hospital in the moment is that we had just finished wrapping up filming all through 2010-11 this pilot for this TV show, right? So I already had a DSLR camera and a light kit and lenses, and we knew how to use it and film in 4K or whatever else. And Jen is a creative. So Jen actually was the original mind behind, Hey, Ed, you should have this TV show. And she storyboarded it out and she taught herself, you know, how does a TV show happen? And she, you know, wrote, put it on paper. So she's a screenwriter also. And so when

she was flying over, she says that she had, she told her best friend in the UK when she was flying over, you know, we've already been documenting Ed's life for two years for this TV show. I'm going to keep documenting it in the hospital. So is she coming to help you or coming to film you?

Help. She's coming to help. She's coming out of love. A hundred percent. You think so? A hundred percent. Yeah. Because that was,

it just struck me as so, I actually couldn't, like, it was something to me, I had to work to break free from that question. Yeah. So, and so, so my friend Sam drove my truck down with our camera and the production team that I was working with, of course, I mean, I had people, business partners from everywhere and friends from everywhere flying in to see me.

I mean, this guy's like like I'm almost dying right so obviously the company I'm working with on this television show they fly in and they brought a tripod and they brought like a small handheld light and things um because we're filming a tv show and the tv show is not morphing all of a sudden into this hospital show but I think what we were thinking or what Jen was thinking was we need to document this like and you know we need to document this and had we really publicized that to the hospital we probably wouldn't have got permission so it was jen with the handheld dslr and just we're just filming this so we have it we're filming because even at one point i think

a nurse even asks right she's like yeah Why are you filming all this? Yeah. Because I was filming it on my phone. And part of Jen's reasoning, too, is that so when I wake up and I'm missing a testicle and whatever else, there's sort of, when I come out of this fog and this traumatic sort of place where I may not be fully present, I would have I can go through 386 hours of footage and see what the condition I was in yeah see how it could be like a coping mechanism that yeah that that that's it you know but you still had to eventually I don't want to get too like production talk here but you said to go get releases from all these people right right so

that's three years later okay three years later and then I mean that's its own fascinating story but um you know I uh it wasn't until 2014 that the conversation really started to come around via friends that are in production and via Jen and via family and you know like hey you should tell this story you know know, and I had no interest. I had zero interest in telling the story. And it was actually the surgeon on call that saved my life, Dr. Stephen Morris, who to me, he basically impressed upon me that in fewer words, and I kind of took his words and extracted what I found, what I thought he was trying to tell me was that I lose a lot of patience.

I lose a lot of people because they give up. And this is three years post, okay? So my hair has grown in and I'm standing and I'm walking and I'm back to work and looking healthy. And he's like, your recovery, Eduardo, is phenomenal, the way you've recovered. And the fact that you are not sharing this with others is selfish almost. You have a human obligation to society to help those around you. And you are sitting on a really kind of high, high, high opportunity.

There's this quality opportunity to help others by just saying this is what recovery can look like if all these parts come together, which is not just about Eduardo. It's about if your community comes together, if your family comes together, if all the pieces come together, if the patient, even if you're splinted, even if you can't move, because there's many times when I couldn't move my arms, I couldn't do anything but move my eyes.

But even as the patient, if a patient assumes responsibility to bring in as much fire and stoke that so the nurse and operating team knows that patient is fighting or fighting with that patient. And I think that's what he was trying to task me and challenge me with. It's like, you should be helping others with this. Well, that's what the movie ultimately is about. Recovery and family and the people that you keep around you and how you maintain yourself in life under hardship we focus a lot here on on details of the injury but that's just a a small fraction of the movie and it really becomes pretty heavily focused on sort of a reevaluation of the relationship between you and your father

and also trying to make sense out of a really complex relationship with a woman that you are in love with and she's in love with you and you go through some thing like this together but still there's this nagging sense that you're not together yeah it's it's touching the the thing that struck me most and the movie moved me to tears because at a point i'm sure it does a lot of people eduardo goes to a high school to talk to some kids about just how to cope and be together and how to treat other human beings, I think is maybe one way to put it. And you're saying that here I am now, and this has happened to me, and I have this kind of incredible story. And you go on TV, and you've been on all kinds of news shows and morning shows talking about it. And it's like all about you.

But you're saying it's really not about you. It's about other people. And at the end of this talk, a kid comes up to you and the kid's just suffering, suffering bad. And his brother's been injured by a firework. And you, like the way that you each knew was impactful like what he's going through yeah when one survivor looks at another survivor you almost don't have to say a word it was amazing it's an amazing moment like an amazing moment that to have captured to be captured on film you know that school had been going through a major rash of suicides,

like many in our country right now, and in our high school youth, which is something that I don't understand fully. And so the high school asked if I would share my story. And I stressed about that talk. How do you fill 45 minutes of conversation with 2,000 high school students that, you know, I have my niece and nephew were in that school.

And I'm thinking like, I mean, I love them to pieces and they love Uncle Ed, but, you know, oftentimes they don't want to give me more than a second of attention. Dude, it's the most cynical age. No, and, you know, and high school was not my glamour years, you know. I was getting kicked out of every school I ever went to so you got kicked i knew that's what i wanted to

add out of nine schools i was equally impressed with the connection with the i can't remember if that was the next kid or the kid prior to the one that had the brother with the injury yeah but the other kid that just really related with you having like a rough upbringing and not rough upbringing, but just rough earlier years where you got into trouble and whatnot. And you could tell that he was probably sort of like, probably not getting straight A's having a rough go at it and just being able to relate. It was good.

Was, so we, we did a, we had a Q and a after there's a funniest thing is I released the assembly 2000 kids. Like talk was over. That, that, the funniest thing, is I released the assembly, 2,000 kids, like talk was over, good night, you know, I'm out, and I forgot that we had a Q&A, you know, like we had already just held hands and everything, and I forgot that we had a Q&A, one of the student bodies that was

running the assembly, it's like, Mr. Garcia, Mr. Garcia, the Q&A. And I grabbed the mic and I was like, yo! And just yelled and arrested everyone on their track. I was like, sit down! We're not done yet. And I just told them, like, we're done. And so we do a Q&A. And think about this.

High school is a really, really, really challenging time in any young adult's life. And think about getting up on a mic and sharing anything with your entire student body. And so it was like an auction. When as soon as there's a mic here, we're going to do a Q&A. I know there's some questions out in the room. Who's going to go first?

And it was like an auction. I was just looking for anyone to scratch their nose or flinch. I was going to call on them. And so some kid flinched and I called on him. And he was brave enough to get all the way up, walk all the way across the auditorium and get to the mic. And his question was, where can I eat your food? You know, but it broke the ice.

It broke the ice. And all of a sudden we have a line of kids. And we did a 30-minute Q&A and we had to end the session that's all it took we ended the session with 20 kids still standing behind the mic but you know that talk and that's what I'm doing

that's my focus for 2018 and you know onward for many years is to bring my life experience via I'm so grateful man I'm so grateful, man. I'm so grateful that there's a film like this out there that takes my story and objectively puts it out there in a way that almost anybody from any walk of life at any age can reflect upon their own lives with. Yes, it's told through my story and it's told through my shitty day, but it raises emotions and it raises challenges

that every single one of us experiences and no one's immune to grief and loss and wrongdoings and forgiveness and love. We all experience that. So I have great hopes. i have super high hopes for this part of my life coming forward you know is to um let this film be its own its own thing you know and i didn't make the film we gotta that's important to understand for you know everyone listening is that i signed this sweet little piece of paper

that's actually quite short and it's called Life Story Writes Release. And you have the opportunity to list. It was made by the director and producer, Philip Baraboo. Yeah, so the director is Philip Baraboo, who also recently finished an award-winning feature-length documentary

called Unbranded, which everyone should check out. But when you sign your life story rights away, you can list, I don't want to talk about the fact that I had testicular cancer. I don't want to talk about that I'm from immigrant Montana. And I left it blank. I didn't put anything down. Because for me, I could have put,

I don't want to talk about the fact that I was a lying, cheating asshole to my ex-girlfriend. But for me, look, I'm looking for healing in this too. Like I need to get something out of this process, out of this film. And beyond my interest in helping others by sharing what recovery looks like via my story, I'm also still to this day right here with you guys. Like I am still going through like the aftermath of a super traumatic event that I'm still trying to make like right in my mind. But that's touched on well. Toward the end of the movie, like you're out of it. Not out of it mentally, but you kind of, your future is sort of clear.

I'm starting to find like where my new purpose is gonna be and and you're with your father right you know but then and it comes up it comes up that like yeah that that all this that all this optimism that you have and the sort of uplifting nature of this and the way you're spinning this to other people not spinning the way the portion of it that you're choosing to share with other people and the parts of it that you're picking out to have it be that this is what you want your legacy and story to be like that underneath it is there's a sadness that's there yeah and you your father sees it and you admit to it and you guys talk about it. And it's something

that like, I think it's an important part to bring up because you could look at someone and someone who's doing their best to put all this in a good light, just like the transparency, the acknowledgement of your faults, how you want this to be, how you want people to discuss you and perceive you, that when you see someone who's just kicking ass in dire circumstances, it's not that they're different than you are and that they're just immune to feelings of self-doubt and immune to feelings of depression. It's because probably what's happening is that person is making a day-to-day conscious

decision to be like, there's the parts of this that I'm going to focus on and talk about, and there's the parts of this that I'm going to deal with internally. And that probably becomes a tremendous burden for someone. And in all fairness, you kind of allow it to come out in the movie that, yes, there is a sadness down in here that I'm not going to deny, but it's not going to be the part that I hold out to other people. Well, it's a part that I didn't even know. I'm moving a mile a minute, just my way of life. My natural way of being is just to move forward quickly through things. And it wasn't until halfway through this last six years of recovery that I started to hear from a gal I was dating or from a friend, like, hey, you're kind of a dick, man.

Or, hey, you talk about being happy and positive all the time, but I don't think I see that. So I started to actually go to my closest friends and say, hey, you know, I would love to hear from you. What do you see in me that's challenging to you? What in me is something I could get rid of and be better off without? You know, and I started to assess, you know, this gal I was dating was like, you talk about being happy, but you don't look so happy, man. You don't sound so happy.

And I started to think like, really? Am I not happy? You know, and, but you don't look so happy, man. You don't sound so happy. And I started to think like, really, am I not happy? You know? And, and, but was it an anger? No, you know, I, I think, I think what, I don't know if I agree. Was it something that was already there or was it something that was laid over everything else because of the injury? I think, uh, I, I think I hadn't done the emotional work. Like I was, it was easy to figure out how to hike again. It was easy to figure out how to get on a bike or fly fish. I'll do respect to anyone out there who's trying to get back on the pony, right? For me, the physical was the easiest part to get back into. But the emotional part, honestly, this injury probably started pulling up emotional baggage from somewhere earlier in life also. It started pulling out everything baggage from, you know, somewhere earlier in life also.

It started pulling out everything, you know, not having a dad from the age of two weeks old through 13, like all kinds of things. So, you know, I think what the film teaches us through my story is that, you know, every experience, positive, hold on, just move positive or negative aside. Let's not associate those words with an experience. Every experience is a circumstance by which we can really make it what we want, right? Like we have veterans, we have veterans and everyday peoples coming through trauma and being wrapped in bubble wrap when they come out of trauma. Like, here's your meds, here's your help, here's your this, almost being encouraged not to get strong again. Whereas I kind of feel, and please, this is all due respect

to anyone going through tough stuff. I'm just speaking about what I know, is that I think we're forged by fire. I think that if we survive something intense, by my mind, we should be stronger after that via the experience, via the learned sensorial, physical, chemical experience of all of it. We should be just this stronger human being that now has experience with trauma. So the next time we experience it, because we are going to, it's a bittersweet life we live. So the next time it

happens, we will, if we've embraced it, if we've learned from it, if we've used it to make, to really add on to our experience in life, I think that we will be able to address the next event in our life with just, you know, as a more adaptable human being. If we're not crutched by meds, if we're not clouded by meds, if we're not kind of brought back into society as a, oh, you're an amputee, let me give you a parking sticker for your rearview mirror. Of course, someone may really need that and they should use it.

You get where I'm going with this? I know exactly where you're going. So, you know, for me. I understand, but I mean, it's like, I just have to hear you say it because I don't have anything comparable. use it you get where i'm going with this i know exactly where you're going so you know for me i understand but i mean it's like i just have to hear you say it because i i can't i don't have anything comparable no it was like well it's like i was elk hunting three days ago and um you know i got a great bull buddy of mine and we're less than a quarter mile from the truck but of course the last quarter mile is you know down this steep nasty hill with chopstick deadfall everywhere and we're

dragging this caped head out so it's got the hide and everything weighs double what it should you know and we're dragging it out and um my buddy calls for a break so we break and he's like man he's like he's like man can we switch sides man my hand is killing me like my arm is killing me i like look over at this guy. And I lift up my hook and my right hand. I'm like, you're going to say that to a guy with one hand? Your hand's killing you. And so I think, look, for me, this film was not made by me.

This was made by an objective team of talented storytellers. Phil Baraboo and his whole team took 386 hours of footage, and they brought that down to an eight-hour assembly of selected imagery that they felt was strong. And then from that, they brought it down to the two-hour version, which was the first thing I got to see. So I didn't even touch any of this until it was at two hours. And now it's an 86 minute film that is out there in the public. We just released two weeks ago and I

didn't make a single edit on it. I didn't make one change to any of it because for me, part of my healing is to say to the outside world, which is the director and his team, he knows the message I wanted. He knows that I was really hell bent on being this root, like recovery tool for others. And, um, and he kept that in mind, but I was interested in seeing what does everyone else see in my story? I don't want this to be Eduardo on a mountaintop saying like, this is me, everybody. I wanted it to be those guys looking in yeah and then pulling out through their life so and i think it's it's a beautiful film for that reason that it's it's this more general human piece you know it's called charged eduardo garcia story The Eduardo Garcia story. Just released. That's insane, too.

You know, that's insane. I'm flying on Delta back from New York City last week, and I'm wearing this shirt, and it says, it says, Charged, the Eduardo Garcia story. And the guy checks me in. He's like, welcome. You know, like, have a good flight, Mr. Garcia. What's the Charged?

And then I get to say, oh, this is a documentary film. I don't even have to say it's about me. I can say, oh, it's a killer documentary. It's on Amazon, iTunes, and basically everywhere else that you download your films. Go watch it. That's all I get to say, you know, which is surreal. Yeah. I think everyone should check it out.

So that's where it's at, Amazon, iTunes. Amazon, iTunes, and all the other subscription-based platforms that are out there for digital download. And obviously, you can go to chargefilm.com, which is our website, which has a lot of the, you know, more of our bios and story, and obviously about the film team. You know, and yeah, you know, we'll see what's next. The next time we have you on, I want to do an episode called Hunting with a Hook.

Let's do it. And have you explain all that. You mean how I can pull hide off with this thing? You still skin elk, you bow hunt, you rifle hunt. Well, this has better purchase than your hands on a slippery hide is my guess. You just poke a hole in it. You know how you have like a meat gaff? You know, butch you just poke a hole in it you know how you have like a meat gaff you know butchers have like a meat gaff that's kind of like a meat gaff you just poke a little hole in the hide and you can self-arrest

well you know you get a knife on there and you know yeah you can probably self-arrest and then i point out too that you had a stainless steel anvil yeah installed on there for uh crushing walnuts and flattening garlic and whatnot. Yeah, well, that actually came around because I slammed a hole through the bottom of my carbon fiber socket, which is basically the prosthesis shell that goes over my forearm. I was pounding steaks with a ranching buddy, fiberglass steaks for an electric pen. I didn't touch the electric part.

Still messing off electricity. Yeah, you know. So, yeah. And, you know, but the thing is, it's great to have a left hand back, which is my hook. However, you know,

we cope, we figure it out, you know. I wrap those little hot hand warmer pads to it because there's so much metal on this that this just sucks the cold in. Oh, really? Oh gets cold oh man when i get when i you know if i if i've been out all day and i it'll take hours for that forearm to warm up for sure you just feel it traveling up your arm oh yeah yeah yeah before we i got one last question for you before we start we were talking about the rapidly evolving um language we use uh you know in in uh terms of political correctness and other things and just like how we describe people

what uh what sorts of things ring true and not true to you terms amputee handicap i mean yeah i mean i think if someone some you know if i if i if i overheard or directly was you know in a conversation and being addressed as being handicapped you know probably challenge whoever to push up contestup contest or something like that. If someone said, hey, look at that handicapped guy. Yeah. But then the same goes true. There's like, I think we need to curb our enthusiasm for wanting to find fault in everything.

I think there needs to be a little bit more leniency to just being organic, right? So if someone says, oh, can I help you with that? You're missing a hand. I'm not going to attack the person. I'm going to be like, sure, hold the bag. Thanks, for sure. That's something that comes up with me all the time because I think that if you spend your life hanging around younger people who are more involved in sort of the evolving cultural dialogue and cultural landscape, they have a sense of, you know, they can tiptoe through the minefield of terms and ways we talk about things.

And they're hip to like changes but then if i go back to where i grew up and i'm talking to someone you know one of my father's contemporaries who's in their 80s now and they just kind of you know spend their time fishing and live in a rural environment yeah and they'll and i know what's their heart what's in their heart and i know just from having a lifetime of exposure to them, what kind of person they are. And they'll use language that would, to many people, betray another kind of person. But their adoption of it was so long ago that they felt that they were moving in the right direction and never heard otherwise.

Right. Yeah, listen, I would encourage encourage for me i i'm honestly unless unless i kind of i think i kind of just decided i was not going to be moved by other people's interpretation of what they see yeah like i mean first of all and that didn't start with my injury but it was probably super crystallized with my injury. But growing up a Mexican kid in a country town in Southwest Montana, changed my name from Eduardo to Edward, Eddie, just so I wouldn't get made fun of. So that prejudice, I saw that early in life. For sure, I can imagine. And so for now, this for me is just a radical humility test.

It's just a radical introduction into just being a little bit more human, you know. Like Michael Franti always wears a hat, right? Stay human. And I think that just means there needs to be room for organic occurrence to happen. And of course, some people are malicious and malintended, but not everybody. I think we need to continue to give people the benefit of the doubt that they're just trying to react the way they naturally know. And let's just hope they're open to being told like, hey, that kind of hurt me this

way, but call a handicapped person, just Mr. So-and-so instead of like all that guy who's handicapped you need help you know um and i would encourage everybody get get involved you know get involved in something that challenges you so i do a lot of work right now with a group called the challenged athletes foundation out of san diego and that's the group that i'm sort of doing these triathlons and stuff with and so that what they stand for, they've been around for 20 years, nonprofit, and they basically believe that through active sport, anybody can lead a healthier life. And of course, their focus is on people with physical disabilities, whether it's congenital or trauma-based. And so through being one of their athletes now and one of their spokespersons, I also fundraise for them. So I'm an active part of that.

But what it does for me is it's fun and it makes me feel like I have a community of other amputees and non-amputees, just folks that are born with some type of spina bifida or whatever it may be, some type of physical challenge, right? And let me tell you what, you want to be inspired? Go to a Challenge Athletes Foundation event and you get your ass handed to you in a swim by a blind swimmer or a swimmer without legs. And sure, you know, like you get smoked in the water by a swimmer with no legs and you're like blown away.

And you go up to the guy and you're like, or the woman or whoever, and you shake their hand. You're like, wow, you just crushed that swim. And you have them look at you and they're like, thanks, but I had no drag through the water. You know, and so it's just like there's a humor, right? That they kind of, they invite you into just smiling and laughing at the many different lenses that is being human today. You don't have to have your legs, you know? I should have one last question for you. You've come out of this a transformed person

and a powerful person and you're in touch with the symbolism of what happened to you and how you came out of it, do you ever think to yourself if you go back to that day in October in 2011, if you once again had to grab your knife and reach out and touch the bear would you touch the bear or not i wouldn't change a thing well i don't imagine you would no all right man thanks for joining us check out the movie charged the eduardo garcia story the Eduardo Garcia story.

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