Steven Rinella

00:00vacation though with your family yeah we're going to Lai oh that'll be fun yeah boom and we're live speaking of vacations tell me about Guyana yeah that's a good segue dud you've been there a bunch you know I've I thought it was three no well I was in no I I've been to Guyana twice but between there I went to Bolivia oh and did like very similar very similar kind of trip like a like a doing a river trip with Amor Indians are those people weirded out by Americans because of the Jonestown Massacre thing is there dude it's so funny you bring up Jonestown because there's a couple things I've been SP like uh the the so the the the main group I was with in Guyana um is the m the makushi and I was surprised one day when I was they make a dish they make a dish with uh cassava which is a root like manc um they make a dish with that they make a flower from it and make a

00:58dish and I was one day saying that hey that's a that looks like pizza right no like right no comprehension like no thought of what pizza is and I remember thinking like wow man like something you take like such a you know you considered such a part of everyday life is pizza they didn't know what it was yeah and they don't know about Georgetown whoa even though it's in their own country they don't know about it at all no it's just not but you got like we'll get into this you got to like realize sort of how insular you know the Amar Indian communities are who live in the in the jungle in Guyana do they have communication all any they do yeah more and more now and there's a lot a lot changed the two times I went there with through five or six years apart they discovered sunglasses and I remember the first time I was down there trying to turn them on cuz uh you know they they

01:53they bow hunt for fish right which one of the main ways they get fish is bow hunting for fish and when you're looking into the water polarized lenses are invaluable I feel lost without them trying to spot fish underwater and I kept saying man you got to get on board with polarized sunglasses not hand him to him he he didn't like this guy roving he didn't like anything about having him on his face he just like couldn't do it but then I go down there five years later and um every one of those boys is rocking polarized glasses so you see changes but yeah that's the thing with like I've brought up Jonestown a number of times because in the US if you say hey I'm going to guy on that all anybody says is don't drink the Kool-Aid right you know wasn't really Kool-Aid it was some like Kool-Aid no it was a Kool-Aid type drink no no so when people look at when we had this conversation because

02:43there's a couple things that are important here what the poison was right so we had a conversation all right let me back up the root I mentioned they make a root yeah so there's a root Cav and it's like is that the poisonous stuff yeah so it's the root that gives all life they eat that's what they call it no but I mean they eat fish and game okay riverfish and Wild game and then that's like a staple that they eat every day and the other thing they eat every day is a half dozen things all produced from cassava which is kind of like a yam and it's cultivated with slash and burn agriculture and and they cultivate these yams and from it they make a flower um they make a a type of grain that's like couscous they make a syrup that's used as a coloring agent and a flavoring agent they make a nonalcoholic drink they make a somewhat alcoholic drink that would be like an equivalent to beer

03:42and then they make a much more alcoholic drink which would be an equivalent to like fortified wine wow they make all the stuff from this this root that they grow um in its raw form when you shred the root and squeeze the shredding so it' be like imagine you took yam and shredded a yam and then squeeze the yam between your hands and dripped out of liquid that liquid is deadly poisonous okay dogs chickens people anything that drinks that liquid dies Jesus and it's cyanide so wow the Jonestown Massacre uh was a cocktail of the best people think that it was cool-aid flavorade valume and potassium cyanide my question coming home from Ghana was did they was the cyanide from the root were they like doing homemade cyanide but and so when I got home I looked into this and it and it seems as that that that commune Jonestown commune had been ordering actual potassium cyanide which

04:52is used in a number of mining practices and other stuff so it's it's an available it's an available compound lace the Kool-Aid with I'd heard about this cassava stuff and what do they know what the process is like do they know like how people figured out how to make it non-poisonous and help wow it's just been done so long yeah and the same stuff with like different poisons they use to poison that that people use to poison fish um what strikes me about it is how in the village like the V the The makushi Village I was in um is mostly makushi but there's also like WAP pasana which is another tribe carab is another tribe but it's predominantly a makushi village and there's about 300 people to live in this Village um and how careless they are with the liquid like if you nowadays like picture like your like the type of person that like you and me are married to and

05:51raised kids with right if if you had that type of mom and you had a big bowl of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a a bit how that bowl would be monitored in your household Jesus Christ they'd be like barb wire around it Electrical Fence and how do they do this just lays out they just lay it out and I said I was ask this guy Ro I'm like hey man uh I kept returning to this there's certain things I kept would always ask him just like things that he struggled to understand my fixation on it but I kept saying to this makushi guy Roven who I should back up to communication so Guyana is it's the only English-speaking country in South America everyone no no the the the government functions are English so if you if you picture South America it's northeast corner opening out onto the Southern Caribbean that's guy on it's bordered on the east by Surinam on the west by Venezuela to the

06:53South by Brazil it's 90% virgin rainforest and within that 90% of Virg rainforest is only 10% of the population so the coastal peoples are like Creole cultures people mostly descended from slave trade Europeans in the interior are the Amar Indian groups and um the government functions sort of the power in in Guyana is that is the coastal peoples and there's not a ton of inter and there used to be barely any interplay between the Amar Indian communities and the government the government's English speaking so in you'll find that there's a lot of English mixed in in the Amar Indian communities in some people like this guy Roven because he's sort of a uping he's like a he has a leadership role in his community and he's learned just Standard English very well um he's had a fascinating life just how much stuff has changed for him uh so I you can just like Converse okay in in a way that

07:59you can converse in like in a type of the type of English we're talking right now almost which creates this weird tension between the things that you're discussing and how you're discussing them like for instance to have a guy just in conversational English talking about problems they're having with neighboring Shaman and their own Shaman putting curses on each other and it like creates like there's like this strange tension between like how it's being conveyed to you you know like how so like okay if you're talking conversational English I guess like a a life it's almost like you'd want it to be when he's telling you this you'd almost want to be reading it in like Clos caption and he'd be saying it in the Indigenous language because it sounds weird to have to to have an idea that's so foreign to us which would be like a battle of shamans battling over access

08:54to wild animals okay um to have that delivered in conversational English just struck me as unusual and cuz like usually when you're traveling you're getting all your information like traveling in Bolivia a guy would tell a story and he'd tell a story in um Simian no what am I say not Simian chimane okay he tell a story in chimane to a person who spoke Spanish the person who speaks Spanish would tell it to a person no no no a chiman guy telling someone who speaks in Spanish then that person telling it to a person who speaks Spanish in English and then that person giving you the information whoa when you get it it through that it takes on a mystical quality like you're Crossing some SpaceTime thing right you're seeing like these ideas discussed in their ancestral tongue okay yeah do you remember I sent you a video of a guy talking about killing a Jaguar yes right the language

09:58you've never like when he's speaking you're like I've never in all my travels I've never heard a language that sounds anything like that is the video online can we play yeah it's online what was do you know the title of it it's uh I think if you type in like um chiman TSI chimane um Jaguar ATT see if Jamie pull up it's very cool the language is really amazing it seems so ancient yes it's not like has nothing to do with like the Latin languages it just sounds so it s it's very unique so I guess what I'm getting at is to hear someone talking about something in conversational English that seems so far removed from just our understanding of things it takes on a weird quality but what's nice about it is you can go to a place where life is so vastly different than anything we understand and and just get like the Straight Dope right from the source is why I love it's kind of like what's so

10:52cool about Guyana because you can go and Converse with with people who are are very much a hunter gatherer culture today but just shoot the with them without ever feeling like you're missing something wow it's it's like everything's not Lost in Translation and all weird and garbled and and like painstaking to Wade through but you can just ask like hey what's up with the local Shaman I'll give you the dope on the local Shaman and so they trade spells Yeah well yeah we'll talk about that but I I I feel like I was laying to groundwork for uh the Jim Jones poison did you find the video no I lost the word that you were spelling the TS i m a n e okay TS i m a n e what does that mean chiman that's how they spell it I could I could be screwed up you know how you spell a lot worse when you're not actually writing it out yeah I'm terrible I don't know how anybody wins a

11:50spelling be ever this is chumani is TSI yeah so if you type in chimane Jaguar TS i m a a n e Jaguar wow the whole thing is an Amar Indian Hunter remembers his best dog lost to a jaguar in the jungles of Bolivia all right here we go let's play this because it's awesome here we go following is an interview with a member of the chumani tribe of bivia due their inherent difficulties of translating indigenous languages subtitles are at times approximate you you so he's explaining where he's from he's saying he hunts for food I always share the meat I get with my family I'm a good provider of meat cutting up the meat in this video I also enjoy the adventure I love trekking Through the Jungle once I was hunting with my favorite dog and a couple other dogs they ran ahead barking they were going after something all of a sudden my favorite dog just went completely

13:09silent they were about 50 me ahead of me when I got there the other dogs had gone ahead after something saying my favorite dog is Ling there dead there was a big hole on his right side almost looked like it had been arrowed first thing I did is pick up my dog and set him where the ants wouldn't get to his body that dog was the bravest one I had I'm not going to translate anymore guys just watch the video if you're interested but you get a sense of how cool it is so did we cover did we fully cover the poison thing no not really so I got home yeah so it wasn't the same poison but Jim Jones uh he grew up in like a he he was involved in a Pentecostal Church he's involved in the Methodist Church then he kind of became a Healer and started his own cult it was funny I was reading about him when I was trying to figure out the poison I was reading about how he was kind of ahead

14:11of his time because the Jim Jones massacre was 1979 and uh 78 or 79 and one thing that got him sideways with with his church was that he wanted to have an interracial service wow and that caused friction in his church at the time earlier in his career and he moved out to the Bay Area and started this church and then he got like kind of paranoid and thought that his congregant shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities but he had he was siring illegitimate children left and right they go down to Guyana go out to the Jungle you know a thousand of them down there people in the US from the Bay Area kind of like wondering what happened to their loved ones they send a congressman down there to try to figure out what's going on he shows up with a bunch of cameras the Congress says you know he's like I'm going to help anyone who wants to go back to the Bay Area go

15:03back to the Bay Area he goes to the air strip there's a shootout the Congress the US Congressman gets killed in the shootout and then they just all start killing themselves with the poison and firearms and other 270 some kids over 900 people yeah I remember it's like the defining thing but then yeah when you talk to these boys I'm like you know Georgetown like the Jones toown or you know the like Jim Jones Jonestown Massacre never drink the Kool-Aid they're like no see I'd heard it was it was budget Kool-Aid no that's a de and I and that's a debate and trying to find like trying to like dig around and find the source of the cyanide which became very important to me to learn for some reason um no I think Kool-Aid even tried to distance himself from it probably was Kool-Aid but they there's like some archival stuff and I guess in this archival stuff images like footage Tak

15:59around and photographs around people have found out that they had both flavor Aid and Kool-Aid on hand that's hilarious I what it was Kool-Aid propaganda that's trying to pass the buck on the flavor Aid so yeah no no thing there and if you so so if you go up the main river that drains uh the main river that drains Guyana is the esao and if you go way up the squeo and um you you'll get to in a stream that comes in from there called the ranun and you go up through the rupi and then you get to the riwa and at the mouth of the riwa in rupeni is riwa Village and in riwa Village you're uh isolated enough where you don't know about 900 Americans and and some other people from other areas not you know dying in a mass suicide wow that's that's around the time you were born that's fascinating that it's well it makes sense though they're just so removed from it yeah do they um it do

16:59they use agriculture like how are they getting this cassaba they grow peppers and then they grow the cassava and the cassava like it's kind of amazing um you know we always hear about slash and burn agriculture so they'll they'll go and do a slash and burn in a spot out in the jungle um but it's like it's like a recycled sort of slash and burn agriculture and and I'll break down what that means so they'll go into an area and slash everything and burn it just to clear the just so sunlight can make it through to the ground so they chop the jungle down and burn everything then the cassava like I said looks like big yams when you grow it you just take a stock of an existing plant and just bury that stock in the ground and it'll Sprout up a new crop and so you know you're close to the equator so you don't have seasons as much there's some seasonal variation they do have times they do

17:56have like their wet season and dry season but it's like you always get about the same amount of Darkness as daylight and they don't have the wild fluctuations that we have in the temperate zone so they can grow year round and they stage it so you know you have a crop that's coming in you have a crop that'll be coming in in three months you have a crop that'll be coming in in six months you have a crop that be coming in nine months and once you get a certain number of Cycles I can't remember how many cycles you get off piece of ground you let the ground go feral give it a few years and then come in and burn it again also intermittently every time you cassava you before you replant you make a little fire and burn some debris in that same spot no irrigation you're not watering it at all um and that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the

18:43surrounding just detrius scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it and it is a staple of life that in river fish in game it's just such a wild thing that it's such a poisonous plant I don't get it I don't get it there's other stuff that there's other poisons that are extracted um like people that people people in South America in the jungles people that use blow darts so people that hunt with blow guns it's generally understood like even talking to even talking to the makushi who hunt with bows and arrows I asked him like why don't you guys hunt with blow darts blow guns and he explained me we don't need to because we have Arrow plant which gives arrows now if you were in this other area you know more up in the mountains and there's no Arrow plant then you'd hunt with a blow dart so is Arrow plant just a plant that makes like a shaft like makes the arrow what what

19:41is it do what is the it's a type it's like a cane you know what it looks it looks it like a it looks like a palm and the palm leaf puts out these long pieces and when one of those is ready you you cut it green and then they can make an arrow no time so you go out the jungle find this piece and you know like like like you know like one of the theories on how we domesticated plant species would be that it was a very gradual unintentional domestication where you would go out let me's just take something simple like let's say eat a lot of raspberries okay you go out and you gather raspberries and you bring them home and you eat them near home and then people are eating these seeds and these seeds out and pretty soon there's a lot more raspberries growing around your home Village just for the simple fact that you're always bringing the seeds home and discarding them around and and creating it

20:37so they have except for Maniac which people don't even really I don't think it's really well understood what it came from it's been domesticated for a long time all the plants they use are widely available in the jungle but tend to also have some around home too that they've brought home and planted nearby or they just grow up there now because they've been bringing the stuff into their Village for so long so Arrow plant is readily available um they cut the arrow shaft green and it looks like just a green dowel but it's has some curvature to it then they'll come home and they start a fire and they heat the green thing just by twirling it over the over the Embers or over the flame twirling it and getting it hot and it'll let off a little steam and then you bend it and then you twirl it and get it hot and bend it and you'll eventually make it well Arrow straight then the they make four

21:37different kinds of arrows depending on what they're hunting for so let's say you were making a arrow to uh it gets you more let's say you're making a big game Arrow all right um and the big game they hunt would be red Brocket deer white lip pecker which is a favorite um um collared pecky which we call Havalina and sometimes tape here the the the arrow they use for that so they would take that so let's say they're going to build one of those so they take that green shaft and straighten it the next step is they find a wood called bullet wood and they cut what would be like uh what's going to form the base of your tip the base of your Spear and that bullet wood they fit into the end of of the green shaft which is almost like a it's a picture having the consistency of bamboo and they shove that bullet wood in there and it causes it forms like a base and to that they take an old machete

22:39blade that they cut out and file down to be about a 4-in steel knife and that goes into the bullet wood to to that forms the junction between the arrow shaft and the steel piece that's the only man-made material they use in their arrows then they take take a plant that looks like yucka and they make their own string and they got little bits of rubber from rubber trees that they wax the string with and they put a bullet wood knock in the part that that your that your bow string actually pushes on and that gets tied into to the arrow shaft and then they Fletch the arrow with feathers from Guan or black cile or crestless cile and that's what they Fletch their arrows with because they have they're very water resistant so their broadheads are made out of Machete blades yeah and this is this a recent Innovation they used to use wood and how long have they been

23:36doing it with machete blades in his lifetime it's always been they don't call him machete they call him cutlasses in Ren's lifetime Ren's 32 he's kind of my main friend down there that hung out with both times down there in his lifetime he remembers people using he remembers people using wood blades which is made from like a bamboo like material so it be like a convex spear point cut out of bamboo and sharpened he remembers people using those but he had always used cutless blades H wow now in bivia you'd see people who have who are just using the the old form their other arrows when they make arrows for hunting birds and they make arrows for hunting fish the only man-made material on those arrows is hog wire fencing so basically wire fencing they snip out the hunks of wire SM mash it down till it's flat and then they can cut barbs in there to hunt birds and hunt fish wow the bow is it's

24:36not a laminate bow so they make a bow by just cutting a tree single piece a single stem tree shaving it down to what they're after and then take that same yucka plant pull out the fibers out of the yucka strands and make bow strings that goes very quickly as well like we made a bow string one day wow yeah you just they they they you take the strands and twist them like imagine like you're rubbing your hands to warm them up you got all those strands in your hands and you roll them and it makes singles and it makes strands that are comprised of you know a dozen fibers then you start braiding up from there until you braid up a big long bow string and that's how you string your bow so when they're shooting their bow like what's a long shot for them like 15 20 yards is long shot long shot and the length of shot you're going to take sort of depends on um um kind of depends on well they don't

25:30really think like the idea that like that you're going to wound it and it's going to get away doesn't weigh on them very heavily right like in our culture in our hunting culture here we've come to like really uh the wound loss is something we do a lot to avoid okay there's a lot of talk we're I talking about don't you know you shouldn't be surprised to get a good hit you should know what's going to happen don't take shots that are too too far away right we really put a strong value on um when you let the arrow go or when you let the bullet go you damn sure know that you're going to have a quick clean kill at least we we put a lot of value on that in practice sometimes that stuff goes out the window but anyone would say that that's your goal um not on their mind you see him take some Hail Marys right and they can shoot like if you're just if you're trying to shoot a bird

26:25all they're trying to do is get a warrior point so one of those arrows I described fitted with a long wire on the end cut out of a piece of steel fence with a Barb with a couple barbs filed into it and that head is joined by string to the arrow shaft so that once the head makes contact the arrow shaft can fall away but there's a string connecting the Arrow Head the wire Barb to the arrow shaft and that allows it to tangle up up in the trees so when they shoot all they really need to do is prick that thing with that wire Barb knowing that the bird or they hunt for a large aquatic rodents knowing that the bird is going to get tangled up in the trees overhead and that they can then climb up to go get it even then I think even shooting like that kind of thing where you're just trying to prick the thing 30 yards would be very long shooting fish you're not shooting

27:23that I mean shooting fish you're not really like bow fishing which I've done a lot of in my life a 10 yard bow fishing shot is very far yeah you're right above them right yeah because you're shooting down in the water now do they have you have to judge when you're shooting into the water you have to judge differently right there's a refraction unless that thing unless that fish is sunning um unless that fish is sunning and its back is at the surface or breaking the surface uh you need to account for refraction so you're aiming way low now if you got a fish that's a fish two feet below the water surface is extremely hard to hit because it's so deep you're aiming like you're aiming at your boot like well I mean it feels like that you know you're aiming so low there's a there's an equation for below you're aiming way below the fish because of refraction like anyone's ever taken a

28:10fishing pole and stuck in the water right right you see the yeah it hooks so that's like that's like the trick of bow fishing but where they bow fish for some of the stuff my favorite thing that bow fish down there um is also you're also dealing with current and they're again they're shooting a hollow Arrow that doesn't weigh it doesn't cut through the water at all so they're holding way low for refraction and holding way Upstream because their arrow is so buoyant oh wow now an American bow fishing rig which I shoot has a fiberglass Arrow so the current isn't as much of an issue because that arrow is so heavy that it can cut through the water but refraction is the same so that's why uh a point blank shot bow fishing is still very difficult and then you got a factor that you still need to hit the thing pretty good in a place where the arrow is not going to pop

29:05out there's a fish they bow hunt for that they used to bow hunt for for salted fish called the arima and Ary is the biggest freshwater fish in the world um they used to bigger than a sturgeon yeah the largest freshwater F the largest okay the largest scal yeah and arim is the largest scaled freshwater fish how big is it oh I mean they'll get them up into the hundreds of pounds I've never even heard of it looks like it it's it's scale a r a p a i m oh my God yeah that's an aopo Jesus Christ that looks completely prehistoric they have a bizarre relationship with these fish in the makushi do in Guyana so that's amazing they used to hun am looking Critter they used to hunt them to export The Salted meat they used to hunt them to sell salted meat to markets okay now uh one of those is worth $7,000 to them alive holy because that's how much that's how much a white guy will

30:09pay to catch one and let it go oh my God yeah oh so it's a guy will pay more a guy will pay more the makushi will make more to take a guy out to catch an arim and Let It Go than what you'd pay to hunt for elk in the US on a guided trip holy they get Seven Grand to catch an aropa and when Roven was a kid they would go on two week hunting trips where they're gone for two weeks with their father they would go for two weeks to hunt saltfish so they were they were operating out of Dugout canoes that they would have to paddle and they would paddle a dug they would make a Dugout canoe themselves paddle The Dugout canoe up River for a week to get to the good hunting and fishing grounds then they would hunt and fish for for one week until they would get 100 lb of salted fish then you'd go back down river which would take a day or two days and then get to the mouth of the Rupa River and

31:12paddle up the rupeni river for two days to another town and then they would haul the saltfish including arima flesh and sell that 100 lb of salted fish for $75 so two weeks plus work for a family for $75 and now they will not touch those fish because they make a handful of people every year go down and give them Seven Grand to catch one and let it go so Seven Grand to them must be just an enormous for it's changed everything when I was talking about like that they discovered sunglasses and there's been a lot like they were already on to this arima thing the first thing I went down and it's it's changed everything about it it's changed that Village The arima Fishery the way they used to hunt ARA is they would hunt them out of trees they would so you're familiar like when when a river you know a river flows in a s pattern like repeating s's now and then um during high water a river

32:12will jump one of the s's you pictured I'm saying yes so the river jumps an S and it abandons and the main Channel abandons the curves of the S okay those curves become what's called Oxbow Lakes where during high water during a flood those oxbow lakes are connected to the main river system when the water goes low the Oxbow Lakes become isolated arimas live in those oxbow lakes and they feed on peacock bass and other stuff so when the water got low and the arimas were all kind of restricted to very small little spots in the river they would climb up in trees overlooking these places and wait for the ARA to come up near the surface and shoot it with an arrow that was a detachable basically Harpoon head arrow and shoot with the arrow the Harpoon head would detach from the arrow and the arrow would float on the surface connected by string to the arrow shaft

33:14you would then go take a handline with a hook and follow that fish in your Dugout canoe until you could cast your hook out and catch your arrow and then you're connected by your fishing line to your arrow and your arrow is connected by the tether to the Harpoon head and you would handline in and Slaughter the arima Jesus and then dry the arima with salt and they and they still salt fish today like when we're out fishing they're salting fish all the time they would salt that fish and then sell it and then that became an IND like that became like a very threatened species under that thing and the other thing that they would hunt for is they would hunt for giant River Turtles and sell the meat and um greatly depleted because their whole lives occur on this one River and once those Market influences came in and they had moved Beyond subsistence hunting and fishing

34:12and they moved into Market hunting and fishing they did what the same thing that we did to our own country in the late 1800s and early 1900s is they were on course to entirely deplete the resource through Market demands because their Village gets more and more people all the time it grew considerably in the five or six years between my two visits and um their environment just couldn't support that level of Market hunting so this arima thing kind is giving gives them a way to make money to to buy staples and run a school and stuff like that it gives them kind of out and it's funny because like uh I'm a lot more interested like personally I'm a lot more interested in a guy shooting fish out of a tree and salting the meat than I am a dude like me going down to catch an arima and let it go so in some ways it's sad yeah it's sad just because like it's not s it's great that they're

35:15saving the fishery but you see like just it's just sad to see change man and why do they let it go why don't they give it to the people that live there so they could use it for the meat do they let it go so they can catch it again because they want to make sure that the population St so Roven what here's the thing that recently happened one of those Oxbow Lakes uh got lower and lower and lower and someone re one of their guy one of these makushi guys realized there's 26 aaima stranded in an oxbow lake and the arimas running out of water and when the water goes down the a Pima will excavate he'll keep Excavating in the bottom to even just save a little spot for himself okay and a guy found them and they're all in there but there's not enough water to to cover them up they can sip air is the thing that makes them so you can always find Aima because they come up to gulp

36:03air Jesus they can bre air and they can also they have very loud noise they make when they come up to gulp air so they can live in low oxygen environments like if you took most fish and threw them in a stagnant Ox Bowl that's got six inches of water in it I mean they're dead as right these arimas they can just keep Excavating a little spot in the bottom and just wait praying or their equivalent of praying that the water level comes back up and liberates them from the Oxbow they stuck and these are huge fish yeah Giants so they found 26 that were out of the water and their backs were all messed up from birds and other Predators grabbing the a trying to grab the arop pimas wow and then they went and spent four days these are 26 arimas between 50 in and upper 80s in length they spent four days moving these 26 arimas into the river in a canoe full of water

37:01Jesus Christ that's how valuable those fish are to him now wow in the old days they' have been dead as right you being like you just sold them yeah so they realiz just like a fin night they have like on their River the river that they call home the river they kind of control there's like a finite resource but the thing is other groups so they're mostly makushi and my friend Ren's makushi um his wife is Wana and and there are other wanas in other places who will come down to hunt their area and they have very different like these other groups that come in have different hunting practices like Roven was telling me one time that he was going up so like the largest snake in the world's green anaconda their River has the largest thing in the alligator family which is the black cayman some people say oh it's not a true alligator but the largest member of that how big are they Familia

37:55black cayman yeah they get big you know they they get bigger like American alligator big like 15t yeah yeah they get Giants some black cayman do there used to be a market for those they used to Market hunt those for the hides for bags boots and so they have the giant River outter which is a river outter like way that you know up you know River ouers get up to 100 pounds they have the biggest snake the green anaconda they have the largest aquatic Road in the world the largest freshwater scaled fish by some definitions the largest eagle which is the harpy eagle the Philippine eagle has a bigger wingspan but some like when you measure them by weight the harpy from there and then there's another Harpy that's a giant like the papoin the papa Guinea Harpy the harpy is that one that eats sloths and monkeys monkeys and yeah czy sloth monkey some bad we saw one really so I'd been down in Harpy

38:50country three times and finally saw my first hary wow yeah just like it's like Majestic just piercing kind of Unforgettable um just the face on it the male the male face you're looking at it it just is like a it's it reminded me the first time I saw lyns where you just looking at it and it just so freakishly different than anything you looked at like that Harpy's face so they had that um oh so he's going up the river he's telling me this story how the Wana will come down and hunting a hunt different than the mun like the makushi aren't that big on killing tapers but the WAP aana will come down in their area and he says they come down with arrows that got 12in steel tips on them he's like you know those boys are hunting tapers but he said one time he was going up River and he sees a green anaconda and he goes to look and it's got a arrow head stuck into

39:48it and he said and I told my companion the wapa are here and they go up the river a little bit of course they come to Wana Camp cuz the W he said they he's like talking about this particular there wanas all over but he's like this particular group of wanas that travel ahead of Christmas because these they're they're like they have animist you know mystical systems but they also it's also infused with a certain level of Christianity so ahead of Christmas the WAP pasana will go on a couple monthlong hunting trip to get food for Christmas celebrations who and they'll travel Overland and by river to come down and hunt the makushi river and when they come down they're there They're Playing for Keeps so they come down they're hunting arapa which these which the rwa makushi Do Not uh they're hunting anacondas they hunt everything they eat the anacondas yeah they dry all that

40:50and the fat they like to render the fat down because they feel that it is helpful for um they feel that it's helpful for arth us we pulled up on a on a we pulled up on an anaconda one time that was 13 or 14 ft long just sitting on the bank you can walk up you can walk right up to it Roven was telling me um again a type like mysticism I mean we have our own beliefs that would seem absurd right to an outside perspective but he was telling me if I were to touch that Anaconda with my bow it would die a a a very painful death if I just laid my bow Lim on it and I'm how long he he he thought about tell in about 45 minutes just a belief they have if you touch it with a hunting bow it will die in 45 minutes but it's painful how bizarre no exp I I asked about that a thousand times and never got any more clarity on it than that I said can you touch it with a stick oh that doesn't matter go

41:56ahead touch it with a bowl will die so but yeah they don't eat them but he was telling me if you're really hard up and have really bad arthritis you can take the fat from an anaconda and help cure the arthritis how much fat does an anaconda I I never cut I never cut into one I've seen a rattlesnake skinned they seem like they don't have any fat you got to understand how big these things are though they're so big I mean way bigger than your leg Yeah what 14t long 14 feet long was probably weighs hundreds of pounds right oh yeah no hundreds of pounds have you eaten rattlesnake yeah it's it's not bad right chewy look at the size of that sucker yeah there's there's a good one Jesus that's a heavy yeah look at those guys struggling four Dudes struggling oh that's out of Guyana did you ever see that movie with Jenifer Lopez nope Anaconda it's a giant one like yeah so that's the biggest

42:48snake and uh they'll eat Cayman anacondas well yeah yeah and then Cay leite them when they're younger yeah you know it's a vicious amount of everything eating everything um so these these gentlemen the makushi come down no the Wana the Wana come down and have different hunting practices and different things that are acceptable to eat and they have and this is like a group of wapa Shana so come from an area where the hunting and fishing sucks are going after each other no that was a different story okay now it's a different piss match of someone else so um so their hunting sucks what's that their hunting area sucks th this group of w aana that come down to rape and pillage on the Rea uh yeah Ren explained to me their hunting area is a pport hunting area so why do they stay there I don't know I don't know why they stay there um and I asked him like does it

43:49goty does it make you guys mad that they come down because now the like the people in R Village the M the predominantly makushi riwa Village um is onto a a a they're on like a pretty Progressive conservation program like they can just they through their Market hunting practices they got a glimpse into the future and didn't like what they saw and they're on a pretty aggressive program about sustainability um their eyes toward the future the Wana are this group of Wana are not and when I asked them does it piss you off that the Wana come down here oh they also the Wana fish with poison the makushi don't fish with po poison do they use the poison from the cassava no they use a poison they use a uh there's a root and a leaf that are both poisonous the root it's a thing used here in the United States when they have to do a fish kill like if you get a big population of

44:44invasive fish in a Waterway and you just need to like wipe the whole thing clean heads stuff like that yeah like that when you're trying to do a fish kill we in the US use a thing called roton it's derived from a South American Plant and then there's another plant called barbas well some people some you know it's like different people in different areas in the Amazon drainage is a thing they call barbasco and that is a leaf that you just pulp and it would look like you're just like taking if you just imagine if you took a bunch of thyme or Rosemary and put it in a mortar and pestle and pulped it and then you take and spread that in the water that'll kill fish both of I think they kind of they act in two separate ways there's two types of fish poison one inhibits the fish's ability to oxygen from the water so I watched them apply this poison and you need to

45:32get area where there's not much current because it'll just wash the poison away so you get into one of these Oxbow Lakes apply the poison kick back 20 minutes and pretty soon all the fish are up gulping at the surface and then you shoot them with bows and arrows wow and what's the other way of doing it and roton and I can't remember which category roton Falls in but there's another one that has some kind of like some kind of neuro effect it has some kind of brain somehow impairs some other aspect of their body but these fish poisons are classed in two categories I'm sorry I'm not more clear on what the two are but I know that the the ones that just that prevent it from being able to get air and the other ones poison them the ones that don't suffocate them does that come up when they eat it no but they were telling me that that um if that you need to watch your if you're poisoning a pond

46:23you need to watch it and make sure dogs or any livestock don't come down it doesn't last long and they were telling me usually the fish you don't shoot will recover if there's some amount of water flowing through it so they might go in and build a temporary Dam to block whatever Inlet let's just say it's a it's a isolated Channel off to the side of a river they'll go in and pretty carefully with rocks and logs block the flow coming into it poison it and then once they've gotten whatever they want they unblock it and let the clean water come in and it'll resuscitate the fish whoa but yeah if if they said of livestock dogs people drink that water can kill that it can kill that thing how many do they lose people every year to that cassava water man in talking to me you realize they lose there's like a handful of things that people get lost to um they had mentioned people dying

47:16from anacondas they' mentioned people dying from black cayman um I know that injuries from piranhas are common snake bite snakes are everywhere like in one of these I remember we sitting in Ren's friend's house his outdoor like a Palapa kind of house you know with hammock strung in it and they're just being a giant tarantula like a 2 and a half inch diameter tarantula and um not even doing anything to it well tarantulas they just hurt yeah they hurt they don't really you up like a black widow or something along those lines before we found a kid who' been hit by a scorpion young kid and some scorpions can be fatal he was V vomiting he was very sick but just a fact of life so when they get bit by snakes uh are they getting bit by poisonous snakes yeah there's one I think the most dead the deadliest snake in the Western Hemisphere the coral they have yeah um they have other ones he

48:11mentioned their Chief getting hit by a by a venomous snake and them having to call a Medevac which is not in the air for I think the Air Force came in with a helicopter oh wow and got him out of there and he was fine wow just a fact that shit's everywhere man but they got a eye for it and you don't like like you're like you always you know the the non-local is always the one getting stung and bit and yeah I can only imagine like the first time I was down there I got hit by an electric eel a couple times right that scared the out of me but it's like you don't even know what's happening you're in the water and all a sudden you're kind of getting like electrocuted there's more in tune with all that stuff that's a strong blast to it hurts we had those on Fear Factor people grab them it's like grabbing a bar it's like grabbing a hot it's amazing that an animal or a living

48:59thing can generate that kind of elect Char you just did it voluntarily for a joke just to say what it's like yeah it's not fun no I was shocked I was like this probably just annoying but I I reached it and grabbed it it's like whoa yeah like that's legit yeah yeah it's like it's like grabbing a a hot wire fence yeah with cattle in it yeah I watched um there was some sort of a nature documentary where something tried to eat it and uh the electrical eel Zapped it and you see the this animal just lock up and fall over sideways oh really yeah repelled it yeah just just completely electrocuted it yeah you know got it to the point where it just couldn't stand up have you I I know you like uh you'll pull off some stuff have you seen the video of the Jaguar killing the Cayman yes I've seen a bunch of them that's solid right there amazing cuz you can sense he's done that a

49:49thousand man there's a there's quite a few of them online uh and here's what's what's fascinating what is this a Cayman with electric eel an alligator ate electric e oh wow it starts just frying yeah it's just cooking really yeah wow no that's not oh you asked about eating snakes electric eel meat is not good that's one of the many things that the that's one of the many things the makushi like do not eat look at his body just twitching God that's amazing obviously that's a little alligator but still boy what a crazy animal yeah it's brutal I I never saw anything about jaguars killing Cayman until about 3 or four years ago and then there's like a whole slew of these videos coming out just makes you wonder I guess maybe the Advent of GoPros and all these different video cameras that people take down there and finally started catching in on film yep we missed a sighting by we

50:40missed a sighting you know narrowly missed the sighting when we're down there tracks are everywhere so particularly because the time I was just down there now um the giant River Turtles are nesting so they just like how we have you know just how you picture sea turtles crawl up onto a Sandy Beach and dig a hole that night and lay their eggs and then Retreat back into the ocean um giant River turtles lay like that but so the sandbars are covered in busted turtle shells and there are vultures so like black vultures and King vultures and carac caras are on the sandbars feeding on turtle eggs and jaguar tracks all over because the Jaguars come down just wait for the turtles to come up wow so you're' seen a lot of that and one of the more surreal that's a perspective shot but I bet they're pretty big right big but that's that's an oceanic that's not a GI who look at that

51:38sucker so how old is that I have no idea God those they they live hundreds of years right yeah they're they're ancient that thing might have been around when Columbus was around they you know the the are you fam with the SES treaty so uh things that ban International Wildlife traffic they have there's a couple turtles that the makushi eat um they traditionally ate giant River Turtles and many people still do but they call that one the sides Turtle oh wow because they now know they can't traffic in this Turtle anymore so they got like the eating turtle and the sides Turtle but the image will be forever burned in my uh mind there's two things that that there's two like SES that'll ever forever be stuck in my mind and one of them is a a Wana woman in a a DK a DKNY t-shirt up to her armpit in a river bank digging out 150 turtle eggs giant River turtle turtle eggs putting them in a

52:39handmade woven basket wow cuz you know like clo like donated clothes like cast off clothes wind up you know getting bundled so you see people with like crazy American t-shirts and stuff on where like I have like a Bob's Pizza Santa Cruz California or whatever you know and it's just like something sent down there through Goodwill donation centers whatever so they'll have like um like Brands you know like like famous brands that you see like people you know in our in our culture wearing but they'll be all like hunting monkeys in them and like the language thing it creates that kind of tension you know so do they recognize the Sid's like regulations do they they not eat those turtles yeah so you gathered is kind of loose um they don't traffic in them but they will eat them but they will eat them yeah so they will collect the eggs but they won't kill the turtles

53:38to sell so as they become more aware of conservation like with this giant fish what's the fish called again the aopa as they they become more aware of conservation do do you see them like recognizing like hey there's some stuff that we have to leave alone we got to let it recover I mean they they obviously they're aware of the cycle of life when it comes to their slash and burn agriculture and leaving spots alone like are they becoming more aware of like what animals they've kind of pushed to the brink of Extinction yeah and it's like I don't even know how much is coming from the younger generation cuz talking to guys talking new guy who's I'm 43 there's a guy just a couple years older than I am and talking to him um and he was a market Hunter he's glad to see what's happened because he in his own lifetime saw how much they had depleted everything so he

54:30in his lifetime saw like from Market hunting not just from subsist and stuff but as that Village grew because the village was a handful of families right then now it's 305 people as that Village grew he watched um the giant River adders they were hunting giant River ERS to sell the hides into Brazil and um they would smoke them out of their dens so he watched their numbers go down this is a 100 PB Auto yeah wow freaking Giants just as the name would let you know and very vocal a large vocabulary of crazy sounds the giant River ERS make they get when they see you they're pissed and they start making crazy noises you see them oh yeah you see them all the time and they're squawking at you like what does it sound like it's like a like wow but a lot better than that look at that socker oh there he is eating some kind of snake or eel wow yeah they make they have an alarm noise and a

55:22number of barks and crazy sounds uh so he watched those get depleted from hide hunting giant River Turtles from hunting eggs he said he could see that the Arab pyas were disappearing and so he was really glad um this guy was really glad that they had gotten on to some other way to bring some cash into the village wow and the arima fishing how do they find out about this like people from the United States or like where are they coming from you know I'm not sure you know I I know that there's been a number of companies um Costa you know the sunglasses company Costa invested pretty heavily through a conservation program they have Costa sunglasses invested pretty heavily in helping them establish a guiding system down there to take people out to fish arapa so these people that come down trained some of the makushi and how to just deal with westerners like for instance um in the

56:22time and we were out just we were out when I'm with them on the river we're out I'm with them participating in the hunting and fishing activities that they do year round on the things that they identify to be sustainable resources because they still like they still hunt several days a week right Roven like they live off fishing game everyone in that Village all their protein is hunting and fishing protein and some chickens that they raise but that's all their protein so they're engaged in in a daily sense like Ren says he spends about 2 days a week farming he spend two or three days a week hunting and fishing and then he has other obligations he is take care of but he hunts and Fishes constantly year round and it just if he kills a wh lip Packer he says that's good for a week did you bring your bow yeah I brought my bow fishing bow and I brought a regular

57:19bow now when they saw your bow were they like Jesus can you get us some of these you know surprisingly not that excited about because they I think that they know they would run up against sourcing problems with the arrow roen got a at one point in time Roven had a recurve um but he lost it his house burnt down and he lost his recurve anyways so just for the simple fact you can make him and make arrows very quickly they don't need to worry about how you ever Source parts right but they have all this other stuff like machete blades and all these different things it seems like they would I mean if you could get a good compound bow Jesus Christ yeah I think if you brought one down and left it there um I think if you brought one down and left there it would get a lot of use yeah well absolutely would it be too effective like would they run into problems with you know

58:06like they have kind of a sustainability issue right I I'll say yeah I think that if you went down um this is speculation I would think if you went down and gave if you went down with a dozen of these things and left them there um I think that along that River corridor you would see a diminishment of a handful of bird species for sure yeah I would think that because the the birds but here's the thing here's why it's a little bit tricky because I think that you would also be reducing demand because one of the things about the birds the guans and kurasa is that they want them to Fletch arrows but they're hard to get so they really want them because they like they they classify them under this broad category that you hear in other places called Poes and basically it's like edible like a a term some people say Poes refers to a specific cile but some people use po like like a like turkey

59:06like bird like a turkey meaning a good edible bird so the birds that they Fletch Arrows with are also coveted food items all right I would I feel that yeah if you were to bring conventional archery tackle in you would see that diminish now other people will have shotguns but the limiting factor there is how expensive the ammunition is so they'll have like the shotgun shell or they might have a handful of shotgun shells that would last him a long time because they would only use when absolutely necessary like the village they they've been having a Jaguar problem when we were there they had over the previous two months lost 24 dogs including a dog while we were there to a Jaguar who comes in at night and kills dogs and chickens he was speculating that at some point point in time they will probably have to get rid of that jaguar and that it would be a firearm issue they would have to like

60:04figure out a solution for with a firearm so even people that might have a firearm um have limited ammunition and it's sort of a a Le a tricky spot in a legal situation for them to have a firearm but bows I think that they would knock the out of ciles and guans if they had good bows but then might not hunt them as heavily cuz they didn't need the Fletching for fishing I think their tackle Superior close to Superior for bow fishing why is that um because the shots are so close it just isn't really necessary like it's like it's not it's just not necessary to have that kind of investment and you just tend to lose arrows bow fishing so it wouldn't make sense to have very expensive fiberglass arrows when you can make an arrow in 15 minutes 20 minutes yeah that makes sense and then you're still limited to very close range shots um the like when I was in Bolivia where

60:58they hunt for a bigger variety of stuff including monkeys uh bows would be a game like like compound bows be a real game changer on monkey hunting so they're not monkey hunting and uh they won't touch them really that that here's there's a couple there's a couple things that are really hard to talk ear I was saying like you have this luxury being able to have like good conversations in English and get your an your questions answered right some things you really uh uh you hit a wall okay now one of the things you hit a wall on is if you say to someone like how many days out of the year would you guess you do X it's just like you never get there you never get there do they not understand years no they do but it's just like because we speak in that way it's hard for me to understand why that's such a hard question but you it would be very hard to get satisfactory answers

61:54about how often do you do something another thing is if like how much do you like like do you like hunting or fishing more isn't something that's thought about because it be like I like do you like to hunt more or Farm more you have to do both so it's not like the luxury that we have like but I don't you have to do both you can't just do one but but he was telling you he hunts two days a week he Farms two days a week so was after me like asking the same question a thousand times and finally kind of getting finally kind of getting to a spot because they contradict because one time I pushed him and pushed him and pushed him how many days a year do you hunting fish and we talked about this for forever and he came up with the figure maybe 200 or 250 then later I'm like how many days a week do you hunting fish and I asked him that a thousand times and got two now if you do the math

62:49one of those numbers is wrong it's just not and also like what you like most do you like this most like that most another thing is why don't you eat X right but if I think about it if imagine if someone came from another country to hear and you're driving them around and every single thing they see that's alive if they said to you why don't you eat that right why don't you eat that spider right I don't know bro we just don't eat those spiders why don't you eat that cat that's a really complicated question like uh we don't eat house cats let me count the reasons why we don't eat house cats you know so when I'm like why don't you eat monkeys he's not like oh silly we don't eat monkeys because it's just like we just don't eat monkeys but they don't have any weird relationship with monkeys right the more I press him on it it wound up being he would say because we have so many fish

63:45and they're so easy to get uh but you hunt white LP pecker now white lip Peery with for folks who don't know and does that look like a Havalina as well yeah so a little bit bigger than the main difference from from a human a human perspective looking on the two what you would what what you would jump at is the gregarious nature of the white lip Peery so there's three peckies there's like the choen I think choan pecker which I've never laid eyes on white lips and and and collard and the Collard pecky a dozen is a giant group of Collard Peck that's like like a big ass group of Collard pecker and that's what we have look at that sucker yeah and that's what we have in West Texas Arizona Parts New Mexico right so it's essentially the same thing as a Havalina the collared pecker is the Havalina same exact thing the white lip Packer now remember I said like a dozen is a bunch

64:45of collards have Leena I've hunted those in the US and I've hunted those in in Mexico white lri will run in a group of 100 to 200 whoa and white lip pees I was mentioning cassava white lip packies are hell on cassava patches they eat them they come in and eat the stalks not the root they'll destroy the cassava patch and they'll dig but they particularly like to eat the they'll come in and they like to eat the young shotes Growing Up Now can they eat the cassava the root or is it poisonous to them as well don't know I don't know huh um that's a good question though I wish I would have asked that that would if I had a week I would get a satisfactory answer out of that so the white L peckies will come into the village and raise holy hell everyone running grabs their bows and then they start shooting and then they'll chase them into the jungle and maybe even

65:39track them for a day trying to whittle away at them because it's it's a great meat it's like the favorite game meat is whelp pecker they like it better than collared pecker because they're bigger but is it like a pork like something like that but they have scent gland so they're very yeah looks like pork has a very strong off-putting the animal has a very strong off-putting smell but the meat doesn't no if you handle it properly and keep it clean it's never it would never be regarded like as as good as pork to the American pallet but to the makushi pallet it's the best so their whole thing like we don't hunt all these animals various animals because we have so many fish flies out the window with white lip pecky but a lot of the white lip pecker hunt is also related to the protecting of crops now as long as Roven can remember Rea Village has had a group of

66:36whelp PES that would come through the area trying to raid the gardens and when it came through the area raid in the gardens they would kill some number of them and then they would track them into the jungle and stick with them and kill a handful and it was when that happened was a very good thing they like the pack there's been a number of years where no pecker or something happened to this group of 1 or 200 pees they haven't for years they have not been through the village it's not attrition because he was saying at the most when we get when they come through and get us he would say on average we would get actually kill between one and four when they come in and hit the crops if we we stick with them and a group of guys goes after me we might kill between one and four and there's 200 of them so it's like it's not like they like slowly Whittle away at them right it just would never

67:34account for that but they vanished roben never wanted to explain to me why they vanished but I kept pestering about it and eventually he told me here's the deal since RI Village is now so wealthy and we have so much food all groups and other Villages have grown very jealous of us and he told me that a shaman in another Village got so insanely jealous of ri's prosperity through fishing for arapa and through all the good hunting and fishing that they have there that that he got so jealous that he um locked up that this Shaman locked up their peckies he doesn't know where perhaps in the mountains they're locked up now getting them out is getting them unlocked is difficult because at the time that this Shaman locked up their pees they happen to be without a good Shaman in their Village did they have a bad Shaman yeah they have a shaman in training his his he's a young Shaman in

68:52training and his powers are slow to develop so what happened to the old guy don't know this guy's Powers have been slow to develop he's getting there and soon he will hopefully be in a position to unlock the peckies now what's a young Shaman is it like a young president I don't I didn't meet him I didn't meet him he doesn't really like we brought up wanting to go talk to him um got the sense that that wasn't the best idea to go visit with him really yeah got there's only 300 people in the village 305 wow got got and and I brought up a number of times just got the sense that it wasn't the greatest idea to go talk to him so is there theatrics involved this guy like living on the outskirts of town and I know he lives in town but he just claims mystery he like so here's a handful of things that was said like roin was telling me and and and I want to say man

69:50uh I do not like if I'm here okay if you tell me something that I thought was outlandish I would jump on you right and I'd be like that's ridiculous right now that desire to like be right and to dispel uh wrongness like I don't have a lick of that when I'm talking to these guys right right I'm never like well I don't buy that right it's just like it's so inappropriate right feeling right and it's so interesting to me and also gives such an interesting glimpse into how most cultures and societies were structured long time ago in pre-christian times right that it's just like it's just educational so I'm not in any way I'm never saying like well I don't buy that I'm just saying like oh okay right that's great thanks for sharing so magic yeah so I'm not in any way I'm never like but here's some things that were explaining to me if you're having a problem where your your

70:51archery skills go downhill like you have a few misses the way to correct that would be to go up and take the hand that holds the bow string and punch a beehive and then hold your hand up to that Hive because they don't miss and you will find you will they will demonstrate their accuracy when they bombard you and Roven was saying that most of them even know to hit you between your fingers where it really hurts you will then absorb that accuracy in your hand and you will do a lot better shooting huh and the more you can do this throughout your life the stronger it will make you it's also helpful just even with kids and other things it's also helpful to be hit by like a bullet ant for instance um I had that hat in me before and it's awful but to get hit by a bullet ant to absorb some of that ant strength but this Shaman that up their peckies could also just be jealous of you and

72:01and strip your ability to shoot accurately and what these I want to point out that Roven has an email address right wow yeah you can email I email with him wow and he's firm in his beliefs yeah also also yeah but he's also rational it's he seems fairly rational outside of this listen it's like I'm torn even talking about it because like I don't want to like I'm torn talking about because because I have such a um a love for him as a person uh that I wouldn't want to say that would make that would like dispel that idea of like that that that he that he's not like that he's not perfectly rational like I would go anywhere with this guy extremely capable but you're talking about just like some some long held belief systems so their cultural belief systems are just deeply ingrained and there's probably some sort of a placebo effect attached to all this where they've seen it in effect where

73:04someone is cast what is a there's a some point in time those those peckies are going to come back into town yeah and and then what where will credit fall they'll probably say the shaman is relaxed as grip awesome or maybe the new Shaman yeah or someone take credit it's just a way of explaining the volatility here's the other thing here's the other thing like like you know you could go well let me give you ex I'm going to make a point about the way um to sort of see a culture in transition right because it's always so relative but uh the right there's a WR there's a staff writer at the New York one my one of my favorite journalists of all time John Lee Anderson you might be familiar with his book Chay like he wrote sort of the definitive Chay gavara book Chay um he he's a war correspondent writes in troubled spots around the country or around the world

73:55John Lee Anderson he wrote a piece not long ago in the New Yorker about a group of people that had just made that were were making first contact with the outside world just recently 2015 uh they had been they were regard they were initially regarded as an uncontacted group that lived in the border between Peru and Brazil in the jungle and for whatever reason they started coming out to a main River where they were having some contact with other groups and they killed a couple people with bows so the government was in the situation of when dealing with a first Contact group you can't go in and just start putting people on trial and like it only leads to more problems so they were trying to it's an article about the difficulties of leading of of introducing a first Contact peoples into sort of a constructive engagement with the outside world um a trick there is some people

74:57look and and they have a some countries have a policy of isolation for uncontacted people and try to enforce isolation other theorists on this or other anthropologists think that that's completely unfair that it's the most human of Tendencies is to find other humans and swap ideas with them right it's like it's you it would be laughable that I would come to you and say Joe I'd like to prevent you from meeting the French less some aspect of frenchness rub off on you right now they're worried about other things too but they're worried about like disease and stuff but also a tendency to to the AL alcohol can be destructive being lured into prostitution all all forms of exploitation trying to protect people from this wasn't there also the romance of running into these UNC conted tribes wanted to cherish that some people yeah so some people seen those photos that

75:53they took from the helicopter where they see people they're covered in war paint they're pointing arrows at the helicopters it's amazing and that's the that I'm guilty of right because even though that that's why I was going to lead up this thing where this battle I have in my own mind right that even though I mean they are far far away they're you know far far removed from a first Contact people they're not even like I said the guy's got an email address I'm not trying to paint this as something it's not right but at the same time they make their bows from raw material out in the jungle and hunting fish for all their protein I love that so much and I like laying in bed even if you tell me you can never go back I want to lay in bed thinking about that occurring right I want to lay in bed thinking about a guy having a problem with his Shaman because it's just

76:41so refreshing and like like like mentally exhilarating to just know that that's going on so you get caught in this kind of uh you get caught in this kind of it's almost like the it's like the opposite of colonialism or something where you get caught in the sing of wine to be like oh these precious cute people if I could just keep them like how I like them where they stir my imagination yeah you know I just want them to stay like how they are because that's how I like them like when I come down to visit I like to know that they're all doing the that's interesting to me but they in no way are they perceiving their experience in that way but you go down and see like in the handful of years as much as theyve changed all the time right in the handful of years to see that just like practices are different dress is different clothing very different so you're just seeing it happen you're

77:44seeing in real time it happened in a fast way now you might come up and be like oh you I was in the US in the pre- internet days and I came to the US in the post internet days and um and man is that place different but you're watching it like wherever you live you're also seeing that happen too so you're living that transition but to go to there and then come back five years later uh and see things different it really um yeah man it like as much as I hate to admit it and as wrong as it is but just be like absolutely FR it like it kind of bummed me out so when you talk about when you talk from a hunting perspective I tend to view of the world through a hunting and fishing perspective when you talk about bringing bows down my first thought is that's no fun they shouldn't do that because I like watching them hunt with the homemade bows right no it's it's totally

78:39rational and it completely makes sense yeah it's just it's longing for Nostalgia and then you find it you find it as it's changing you know as much as you know about the American West as much as you told me uh about the the history of American West and the Native Americans to see these people that are essentially like in some ways like the Native Americans before the Colonial people arrived yeah or like uh I guess it would be this is a bold statement if there's an anthropologist or historian listening they're going to pull their hair out but it would maybe would be like I'm so hesitant to even throw this out just it's is extremely approximate and full of holes and full of contradictions but some kind of post Conta scenario and I don't know like let's say it was the 1890s or something right here the firearm was very much a part of stuff you know but yeah so it's

79:33like um but you know it's it's makes it's complicated in the internet age but at that time you definitely we had definitely established a form of tourism in the American West right yeah by they you know I mean well before they Francis Parkman um so Francis part was this figure he wrote The Definitive history of the French and Indian War but in 1842 he was a historian he had health problems in 1842 he did a tourism trip out on to the Great Plains he met some fur Trappers some mountain men he traveled with the agala Su uh Crazy Horse who probably wasn't Crazy Horse yet he he was he was named Curley as a kid crazy he was in crazy like The Three Stooges yeah I think that I think that was like a name from I don't even know it and have no idea what it meant huh before he adopted the name Crazy Horse um he would have been 13 years old and Francis Parkman traveled with

80:36them as a tourist and they went into the Black Hills of South Dakota they went in there to get Lodge poles because it was the time of year they would go and fit out their Lodge poles for their tepes to re replace broken Lodge poles they went up in the Black Hills killed some big horn sheep by throwing rocks down on them off a cliff went shot a bunch of Buffalo and he was out there like as a tourist okay so tourism in the American West now you gota remember the last the last free roaming the last like non-confined PLS Indians didn't get rounded up till depending on your definition 1876 1877 so he was out there way before that there were still like what they described at the time as hostile wild Indians were running around and he was traveling with them as a tourist so I I just bring that up to bring this idea that here's this group of people who are very much engaged in tourism like I was

81:34down there I was down there because I wanted to go on a river trip I want and it's something I've done a handful of times I wanted to go on a river trip and and and participate in their hunting and fishing and food Gathering activities as they engage in them if I the same way they might engage in if I wasn't there that's why we weren't fish that's why we weren't catching a p and letting them go so there's that in the internet era but it's like there's that thing I always return to it's like you're still you're still hunting and fishing all your own food or growing it in your yard now when you guys went down there did you participate in the hunting and fishing or did you just observe no participate in it you participated with their traditional tackle or did you you use your own stuff I've done both I've hunted fish with my own bow and I've hunted fish with their bow and in the

82:23end I wound up the first time I went down I hunted fish the second time too I I hunted four fish so bow fished with um their gear but then it always felt like somehow funny too because like there's a thing that happens when you're watching like goofy uh you know you watch like goofy survival shows and there's always the part where the host you know grapples with how difficult it is to master and ient Technologies but you're trying to just pick it up and do it from scratch okay Roven has been shooting that bow at fish for he's 32 years old he's been shooting that bow at fish for let's say 27 years it is not an unusual thing to him all right so when you go pick it up and you're like man you got to give props to these guys for being able to kill fish with this boow it's like well kind of and kind of not because if you spent 27 years doing something you're damn sure

83:26going to be good at it the same way is if you took someone like one of these first Contact peoples from between Peru and Brazil and handed them my laptop and said hey pull up my Gmail contacts from scratch he might be like man I gotta give props to you guys I had wo no idea right it's just like absurd yeah so that I was having this conversation with someone the other day where you know the first time Daniel Boone in 1760 Daniel Boone went through the Cumberland Gap for the first time and dropped down into what's now Tennessee and Kentucky and he stayed there hunting hides he was a hidde hunter stayed there hunting hides for two years ran out of gunpowder and made his own gunpowder and made it out of bat guano your own piss pot ash right you can cook this up right and make your own gunpowder wow and I always look at that as being the epitome of woodsmanship and the fact that he could

84:23do it makes him seem otherworldly how do they what kind of formula do they have for how much piss how much bat guano just something they knew do you know that bat guano used to be something that was so cherished people would go to war for it yeah for explosive incredible not just for explosive but also for fertilizer oh no yeah that's the the term batshit crazy like the people would fight for bat yeah they would go nuts like it was so valuable that's where all the buffalo bones went after the near extermination of the Buffalo really yeah the really good was Bone China China table wear and everything else is fertilizer wow yeah but you you could make the same some of the same characters that were involved in the slaughter were involved in picking up the bones they were called bone Pickers picked up for fertilizer but no I didn't know that about BW I had

85:11no idea that bone china yeah there's still bone china no kidding yeah I thought China was always like some sort of ceramic there's a place in Detroit on the on the Rogue River in Detroit that the rou River Rogue River depending on what dude in Michigan you're talking to um there's a place there called the Detroit carbon works that used to so you know you when you're watching movies including the Revenant you know that giant pyramid pile of Buffalo skulls that turns up in everywhere every book every movie that photo was taken at the Detroit carbon works and what they were producing was bone fertilizer wow is there more than one of those photos whoa Jes Ian it's everywhere wow you can't escape that picture that's an incredible picture that's that's taken to Detroit Michigan where I'll point out was one of a handful of states that that never had buffalo in the history in in

86:09the history there's no buffalo in Michigan so they they were not extrait out of Michigan they just never those picked up those bones were picked up in the American West shipped by rail to Minneapolis Chicago Detroit turned into bone fertilizer and then ship back out for people tilling up the great PLS that F go back to that photo again that photo is so disturbing how many skulls is that in my book about Buffalo I'm describing that picture and I say that the Man Standing On Top is like an exclamation point at the end of a long sentence about death and destruction cuz like look at him it's like he somehow realizes the weirdness of what he's involved in but that was post extermination there's a crazy um podcast from from Dan Carlin on the The Wrath of the KH on gas Khan and they describe how the kisian shaw sends a uh a group to check out Jin China and they

87:04got there like about a year after uh gask Khan had killed everyone in the entire city over a million people and they thought what what they saw in the distance they thought was a a snowcapped mountain as they got closer they realized it was a pile of human bones really yeah man those guys were hardcore back that hards yeah Jonestown wouldn't even been a blip been nothing like oh minor it's like it' be like a car crash he changed the carbon footprint of the human race him during his time they don't know how many people they have through depopulation through depopulation cooking fires they they believe they killed more than 10% of the population like gingas Khan and his people through his orders killed more than 10% of the population of the world and wasn't he the number one land conqueror but just never held on to anything well conquered more than like

88:00conquered more than Napoleon conquered more than Hitler but just didn't hold it I'm not sure about that I don't know about that but I know that they always lived in tents and they despised people that lived in homes they thought they were they probably thought that after their life they probably thought they were vulnerable too yeah probably right yeah I mean just anybody listening Wrath of the cons it's a five-part series and I think Dan Carlin he charges for them you can buy it on iTunes but I think it's only a dollar per and is the best dollar you ever spend World War I yes yeah and not sure what else he's done he's done a lot of I mean his podcast is just absolutely amazing he's incredible and super humble guy won't call himself an historian but meanwhile has the best history educational series you can get yeah it's a buck a buck a piece and they're like an hour and a

88:50half long they're incredible yeah he's uh he's a real treasure that guy doesn't call himself in his story because he doesn't use like primary source material or something just reads popular works I don't know why I mean I know he cuz who who owns the name yeah who owns the definition he's just really humble you know I mean but his main focus of study his entire life has been history you know and when he does these things well it's like if he calls what he does a podcast I need to change what I do cuz I what I call a podcast is just so it pales in comparison cuz we're just sitting here talking right what he does is he prepares for these things for months and cites different sources and references and then essentially does an educational entertainment piece yeah yeah maybe that's why he doesn't like the term historian is because he's not um he's not contributing he's not contributing to

89:46the body of knowledge he's interpreting the body of knowledge right maybe yeah that's a good point yeah maybe I think he's just super humble too he just wouldn't wouldn't say that no matter what but I somehow it's I don't know why more disturbing to see a pile of human bodies than is to see a pile of the buffalo bones yeah I think I told you um and I talked about this a thousand times what after the Custer Massacre the guys that that were following the other soldiers who were coming in after the Custer M they didn't know what had happened you know they hadn't got word yet that kuster and his entire command had been wiped out by the Sue in Northern Cheyenne and they're riding up the valley and they're looking off in the distance and they and they see all these sort of white bloodish things and all these dark brown things and one of the guys wrote that their initial impression

90:42looking at it was that kuster must have caught the Indians in the middle of a buffalo hunt and what they were seeing was it was summertime and they were seeing fatty Buffalo carcasses that had been skinned and that the brown things were the Buffalo hides laid out next to the carcass but when on closer inspection it was the brown things were horses Cavalry horses and the white things were stripped and mutilated soldiers it's a good image wasn't one of the guys one of the Native Americans that was in the Little Big Horn W you know whatever event wasn't he one of the guys who toured with Wild Bill many of them so they were they had killed American soldiers then they went on this entertainment tour yeah it would be as though it would be like this is a risky comparison no I'm not even going to do it it's too na no no no I definitely was going to say that cuz it's way different it would

91:46be like uh I'm not going to say I don't want to make the comparison it'll come back to haunt me um I'm trying to think of something that would work it would be like a a people that we now fought against later became a media celebrity yeah oh I guess they're kind of dealing with it right now in Colombia where the farc right now that Colombia has struck a peace Accord with the farc and the farc are entering into politics entering into media fart commanders who spent their entire life fighting against the Columbia government many atrocities were traded back and forth they now come on the the Columbia um equivalent of 60 Minutes to do interviews wow okay so it's like where you have an adversary that that hostilities end and the reconciliation is so complete and so quick that you can come you can become a media personality and this guy was a touring media personality right so G

92:51quite a number guy yeah Gaul who um the spell name the the historian Evan Connell he's a g and there's some photos of this guy right yeah there are photos of him see if you can find that evanes Connell he was he was huge and um the the novelist who wrote sort of my favorite Custer history uh he says that Gaul went through kuster's men like a wolf through sheep and um yeah so that's a hardl looking man he someone asked him how long it took how long that fight lasted he said it lasted about as long as it takes a Hungry Man to eat his dinner wow that is a hard looking gentleman right there yeah that face man so he toured all over the country people would pay to see him pay to get their photos taken with him wow he did selfies selfies with people wow what a crazy thing that must have been so they had some mock war that they would do yeah they come out and reenact the battle

93:56wow yeah so you could go down and this would have been in your own lifetime the the people who the families of the men killed at the Battle of Little Big Horn could have gone down and got their photo taken with and and paid to watch and interacted with the gentleman who likely cloved their father's head in with a tomahawk Jesus Christ we're not as like we always want think think about how much worse we are now right is that Buffalo Bill up there I don't know that's I don't think that's him but that's from his show wowor what we gonna say we're not that far removed oh no I was just saying like we now think we've gotten to such a weird spot but yeah you want to point out that see people must have been a a tad more forgiving at the time well there must have been much more used to death and murder yeah cuz it was so common and it's just it was so personal

94:54because you know you're doing it with hatchets and axes and guns that don't fire very well so you're doing it at close range you're shooting people with muskets from and there was so much more violence then yeah so much more death the fact that you can grow up and be so old now and never see a dead person is like just a new idea it is pretty crazy you know I got people my age that never seen a dead guy yeah well it's a real eye opener when you see one there's a lot of people that haven't even seen a dead animal dude I could sit and rattle off the dead people I've seen burn in my mind how many dead people have I seen yeah not 10 what have you seen dead people from I saw two people that were not just dead but in bits after a plane crash I saw whoa where was that not even a mile from my house when I was a little kid yeah and then um and then uh uh commercial plane

95:54or like one of those little private so 57y old man and a 13-year-old kid I I try I tried recently briefly to find to to go back and find the article but the way I here's how the story went down is uh the way I remember a detail that I remember very clearly is that this guy it was his neighbor kid and they he had told this kid's parents they were going down to wash the airplane and look at the airplane and he decided to take the kid up for a flight I don't know if that's true or not I was trying to find that article to confirm that aspect of it but I lived on a lake called Middle lake and everybody remembers for whatever reason this guy buzzed Our Lake a couple times really low there was a guy down on the East End of the lake named Mr rbert and I remember what was unusual about Mr Rupert was he would eat freshwater clams which we were forbidden from doing by

96:44our dad but um why is that you know it's just not it's people don't regard it as a good practice at all to eat freshwat clams because of toxins I you know that's another thing I haven't really looked into why that doesn't happen people just generally don't eat freshwater clams we would go get them and clean them and I remember we cleaned the whole shitload once my dad's like no but Mr rert would eat these freshwater clams and um would he go raw or would he cook them I'm sure he would cook them he said man I saw that plane when it Dove down over the lake it went up but then Dove down again and never came back up uh and he even told some neighbors this the next day when we wake up uh the sheriff's posi the mounted like our area had a mounted like a bunch of volunteers who had horses and they were like the mounted Sheriff's posy right like deputized individuals during emergencies

97:38such as this they were all loading up their horses to head out into the woods to look for some plane and another detail that was told to me that I wanted to verify that I would I need I just need to go back and and go through the micro fish where I grew up and find the article because it was something like it had a signal on it and the signal was picked up by some other country even but they knew that a plane had gone down and that was a matter of fact everyone at this point knew that this plane had gone down um and we were riding around on our bikes out in the woods just kind of following these Sheriff's posy guys as they were sort of combing through the woods and eventually a news helicopter was hovering over a spot like right at where uh right where the end of White Lake Drive um and there was a news helicopter hovering over there my two brothers went directly there on their

98:29bikes and I was younger and for some reason I went got my mom and then we drove over and we got to the end of White Lake Road we had to walk into the woods and there was a guy there that tried to block my mom and me from going in there and I always remember he said um uh if you're going to go in there you better have a strong stomach and she's like well my kids are in there and so we go in there and Matt and Danny are just stand at the edge of the hole there and they're trying to sort out they're trying to sort out who was who inside this plane wow into bags I'm not you man like and yeah I have like some visual details I remember from that just like uh yeah and then it's kind of maob but yeah like like and then that was you know that and then I remember we were at our neighbor Mrs muscleman um I remember we were at her birthday party and the cater just fell over dead in front of

99:30everybody so like stuff like that very non-war related things right that's what's what's interesting is most I'm just saying like but you can you can see that EI these are just like happen chance things but yeah you can go through life we just have it sort of set up now where you can be hidden from it but when you talk to previous generations just a like just it was just a part of stuff yeah you know my old man talked about walking he grew up in Chicago he talked about walking out of a party one time there's a dead guy at the bottom of the stairs that have been beaten to death just like day just like then went off to World War II and saw who knows what so yeah when people talk about how now we're so violent and there's nothing to support that nothing no it's the safe time safest time to live ever youed to be able to hang people from trees and not get in trouble for it if

100:22they were the right color yeah not that long ago no that's what's crazy about this Wild Bill hickcock we're talking about what 1870 1880 when was it and what's funny is he was one of the combatants so some of those guys like Wild Bill Cody and Wild Bill hick Hickock actually had like a dispute over who got to have the name you know Bill Buffalo Bill Cody Wild Bill Hickock there's some other Wild Bills I guess and it was like it was like a popular name right but they were combatants too so they engaged in these wars and the fact that you would later get both sides of the war it'd be like if you went and got a bunch of Germans who were defending the Normandy Beach Omaha Beach and you got a bunch of the um Americans who were storming Omaha Beach and you had a traveling Road Show in which they would pretend to inflict Mass casualties on one another for paying adoring

101:27crowds how bizarre who came up with the idea for that I don't know had that been done ever in history before I don't know my guess would be you know there's a guy there's a thing that I've told people a bunch of times no one ever believes me it's true but it's true it's true there was a guy one time you know Niagara Falls right you been to Niagara Falls no big damn waterfall uh you know the St la like right St Lawrence drains the great lakes and on its way out to the Atlantic there's a big ass waterfall and Egger Falls um a guy one time bought there was like a zoo was liquidating its Holdings and a man bought the zoo and bought a barge and put all of the zoo animals on the barge and charged a dollar to watch him send his barge full of animals over the falls yeah wow so right yeah not that long ago now what happens if now nowadays nowadays nowadays they'll put you in a

102:35cage yeah so it's just yeah we've traveled what is this Jamie this is uh like from when the when the show started in the World's Fair he got denied from uh doing the the show outside of the World Fair like 189 way F Cody I don't know which one is which but uh he found a 14 acre swath of land where he set up stands for 18,000 people to watch each show and over 2 million people saw it during like that whatever during the world's fair that year God that's how the first one and there weren't even uh there were there were two million s but there were less well under probably way less than 75 million people in the country wow well what year was it in World War II there were 150 million that's incredible 18,000 Spectators 74 Indians from the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota wow 18,000 Spectators must have been amazing back then yeah now but here but think about the numbers

103:37at that battle that they historians feel that at that battle that was the largest gathering of ples Indians to have ever occurred an encampment of maybe 10,000 individuals and how many people were there from what's his face kuster kuster he rode in at one end of the camp that's why it's not well understood like there were other engagements going on at the same time when when you say like kuster his command was annihilated there were other prongs to the attack that that were repelled and beaten but it was only like one prong of the attack that had Custer in it that was annihilated and how many people did Custer have he rode in with about 200 people and ran an encampment of 10,000 individuals and later some of these individuals like GA and others in interviews said that even at the time our understanding is that these people were all hopelessly drunk oh my God because it did not make sense

104:38what they were doing wow they just didn't know it's no one that's that's why kuster that's why there's still all these kuster people who just debate and argue and is like uh some of his Crow Scouts okay he had some cre or re Scouts and Crow Scouts who came and told him do not you cannot go down there in the morning plan was to attack at Daybreak and they said you cannot do that that makes no sense he said we're going um they did their death songs some of the some of his Scouts sang their death songs because they knew they would be dying in the morning and um it's debated still today to what extent did he like did he believe what his Scouts were telling him okay so was it suicidal or was it huous no one thinks it was suicidal it was either that he just didn't really comprehend what they were telling him or he was so you know he was a decorated Civil War

105:39figure and probably was a very Ardent believer in the superiority like of his army and that they were train Soldiers with discipline that it was just one prong of a three or you know three prong attack or two-prong attack he was riding into one end of the village but he just rode into the village and they were just killed right and in dep in popular depictions they always show cluster like his the last guy standing like there's a mountain of his dead guys around him you know and he's still firing his revolver uh with long hair when in fact he had short hair at the time but uh some people think that when in looking at it he probably yeah the great one is here fell kuster the great image yeah like Jamie just pulled up a a crazy picture so here Fel C is that a contemporary picture did say what no no that's the old classic there's one that was on the an contemporary to the

106:36time yeah here fell Coster a little bit later but then um the one that was the anheiser bush one was by a German guy I think that was the one you had pulled up that waser bush had a Custer it was like their poster oh my God that's herfel kuster wow which is is considered to be a very accurate which appeared to be a pretty accurate depiction of what was going on now the Custer kuster died early they think he died earlier in the Skirmish he wasn't like the in movies he's got the flowing blonde hair everyone's dead and he's still firing away he he was he was probably killed earlier rather than later in the Skirmish it's so funny because see right there like he's like you know in a different position it's so funny that that we've done that you know that people have taken what they know most likely were historically inaccurate accounts and they pass them down generation to

107:29generation it makes you wonder like this is what we know now because this is only a hundred and so years ago yeah like what you know what are we getting when we're getting some version of something that happened a thousand years ago or 2,000 years ago you know yeah how distorted insanely yeah but the problem we have as a culture I think is when someone goes to fix when someone goes to challenge our popular perceptions um it's it's branded as revisionist and somehow like loses right it becomes almost like uh its credentials are tarnished do you remember the guy I can't remember what politician Jamie you be a pull up there was a politician who said um he famous he said you know after we realized that Paul Riv the the the ride of Paul Riv was didn't really happen yeah like fabricated whole cloth right right there's a politician said I love Paul Riv whether he wrote or

108:29not well I mean when we were kids we were taught Columbus discover the United States I mean we didn't figure that out until it's it's still amazing that it wasn't like the West Indies yeah and to this day it's still amazing that they celebrate that guy when you find out that he was a monster I mean the what was it uh I believe it was a um a minister or someone who some religious person who came with them at the time uh left a journal about the atrocities committed directly by Columbus and his men uh when they you know hacked off arms for people couldn't bring them back gold and I mean just horrific smashed babies on rocks did it right in front of them and this guy was a firsthand account of what and we're supposed to believe I mean who knows how much of what he's saying is accurate but if any of it is accurate Columbus was a monster yeah I think that what it stems from is that from the

109:21perspective in Europe at the time he had he had solidified and put some together that people had been kind of pecking around the edges of right whether this continent existed yeah and and and and yeah just had it was like a Leap Forward at the time yeah how crazy is that but the fact that it becomes that right that he like you know that in some people's minds he like somehow established America yeah and that we take a day off of school because of it that's really crazy it's bizarre Columbus Day I mean we still to this day in 2017 kids get Columbus Day Off don't they but now it's like here's the thing now that no one now that now that sort of the consensus right the popular consensus is that um he was a one of many players involved in sort of putting together what was here and sort of outlining where it was and how to get here um he he's one of a bunch of

110:30players you know almost certainly not the first uh no one cares about that meaning what they mean is you're like saying like I uphold the idea of Western civilizations annexation of the new world as being a good thing H so when someone says is like when someone gets pissed at the revisionists for questioning the legitimacy of Columbus they're not actually talking about what he specifically did it's become it's become a proxy for the cultural annexation of the new world and to say oh I hate Columbus he's an they take it to mean you're saying that um that uh you're questioning our claim on the Western Hemisphere and that it was a bad thing I think that's why people are annoyed by it I don't think people are too much annoyed by it anymore cuz I think it's pretty much been established that Columbus is a really bad guy but no one's gone in and undid the day I they

111:31have have they is there any is there they kind of change them around don't they well they should probably come up with another name for it you know uh Happy uh no sure it's still a day right I think so pretty sure yeah it is kind of crazy though I'm not I'm not like here to defend the day but I I do understand like kind of how that came to be yeah I understand it it's just seems pretty incredible that just 500 years ago here it goes the war against Columbus Day in the Washington Post yes it's waged by the same people who are waging a war against Christmas is it really that's that's crazy indigenous people's day in favor of indigenous people's day H yeah makes sense yeah just give us a day off we'll take it I'm generally like like little movements like little cultural movements like that I'm generally not uh receptive I don't try no I don't try to read too

112:24much into them if I woke up tomorrow and told me that we had decide you know that uh people got together and decided against Columbus Day I wouldn't like do a lot of soul searching on that day no no I wouldn't either well you know you don't work a traditional job anyway or go to school where you take that day off oh yeah I think people that lost the day they're like dude that's my day man yeah it's just hard to imagine that's I hit Walley my buddy dug every year yeah he'd be bummed it's just hard to imagine that you know 500 plus years ago they really didn't know in Europe about the continental United States like that's that's amazing it it yeah that's another we're talking about you know earli we talking about violence right violent more violent then I think that we're so tripped up by the upheaval caused by the digital age right and everything like you know I

113:15just changed our sleep practices and just everything you know it's it's major upheaval yeah but picture that that picture that in your lifetime they all like you become aware that the the the Earth that that there are you know three times as many or whatever as many civilizations on Earth as that you thought there were yeah I mean that's a huge thing to Grapple with a huge thing to Grapple with people that had history people that had boats they were seafaring had more history than you yeah they're crazy or to think that one day and this is not too long ago you know some of our grandparents remember this to think that one day we had devised a contraption that was capable of ending life on Earth and that these Contraptions could be initiated by the distant actions of a handful of people that that's a change right yeah the nuclear era here's the craziest change in the nuclear era from

114:28the invention of an airplane to someone dropping a nuclear bomb from an airplane is less than 50 years yeah I think right Brothers 1903 right 1906 1903 early 1900 first sustained flight with a heavier than air vehicle and then in 1945 they dropped an atomic bomb that's crazy that's inside my life someone's like I knew this airplane was going to take off but that is probably one of the biggest changes ever in terms of like the amount of in 50 years in the world to go from no air travel at all to dropping a nuclear bomb out of an airplane in less than 50 years yeah and to then have it be that it's a staple of uh of of American life not just where other people like space travel you're like okay it's this flood of information but it's not affecting me but with that like that's now how how you get around yeah you know that you like at a time when you wanted to cross the country you

115:30would lose a large percentage of your party to death right you had to plan ahead it would take many many months to being just a thing you just do on a whim now I do believe like I accept that we are in a state of upheaval right now and I think that we're probably impacting ourselves in ways we don't fully understand how so digital devices oh for sure yeah just you run your day yeah no doubt how you spend your time how you run your day well ever go to a restaurant and you see a whole group of people just staring at their phone yeah yeah we laughing day if you're staying at the baggage claim not looking at your phone people are going to think you're nuts that's true my friend just looking around trying to make conversation with people my friend Ro was talking about a conversation his wife was having with someone where someone I was in Starbucks drinking a coffee just sitting there

116:15staring at the wall like a lunatic yeah you're like what's wrong with that person what what are they up to are they going to start killing people they're not doing anything with their phone um it it's a big thing but one of the helpful thing I guess one of the helpful just to bring a full circle one of the helpful things um you know about traveling or about like just reading about history is you stop you lose some of that sense of specialness about thinking that the life you're living in the moment you're living it is this great test of humanity or some like super peculiar thing going on he realize that people have always been involved with and struggled with cataclysmic upheaval you know and then to go and to and to go witness some other people in some version of that transition um is pretty healthy man maybe in a long term like just traveling going to see how other people do stuff

117:14it's unsettling but probably ultimately pretty good for you yeah I think it's very good for you just anything that enhances perspective it gives you like another layer that you could consider when you think about life on Earth we're so used to our own environment our own ways it's like you were talking about talking to these people and asking them like why don't you eat monkeys and they're just don't eat monkeys has he ever been to a supermarket that's a good question a couple years ago when I was mentioning that uh i' mentioned to you that that the the that a couple American companies who have a that have like some conservation spending they do they were training some guys from R Village they were training some of them to uh just how to interface with westerners and as part of that he went up to he might even gone up to the Bahamas to go for a couple days to a fly fishing

118:13lodge so I'm get so yeah he flew on Commercial aircraft oh wow yeah um just what we but he's peculiar in that way now I've brought up to him I'm trying to talk him into coming up and going I want to take him on a ice fishing trip so I want to take him to Alaska to fish of the ice because what I want him to understand is um I'm so uncomfortable with him physically uncomfortable with the heat with everything biting me all the time just everything it's just extremely uncomfortable and to him it's standard yeah it's comfortable but he's never like if he hadn't done that trip or you know just all of his siblings and most other people in those vill they never experence you know they've never experienced 50 Dees Fahrenheit now what is it like to them when it comes to bugs do they have any sort of resistance to mosquitoes or anything along those lines they don't care about it nearly as much

119:06as we care about it do they get the same amount of bites though do they get chewed up like we do yeah they complain about tick bites and stuff but doesn't generally doesn't seem to bother you're like we do because it's just a part of everyday life like you got to get used to you know in like hanging out bivia you get bit by bees and wasps at about the same rate that you'd get bit by mosquitoes if you were at like some Fourth of July thing out at your uncle's Pond you know shooting fireworks off at night on the edge of a cattail Marsh really it's like you're just getting bit you like wake up and you start getting bit by bees and WS so they just get just kind of used to it and then you'd say like I remember when I got stung by a bullet asking like hey how many times have you been stung my bull dance and a lot of them would be like I couldn't even begin to guess how

119:50many times I've been stung my bull Dan but it's like but they just suffer different so what I want to do is I want him to experience suffering while watching me not suffer so like I want him to look at me with awe okay and so to do this I want him to come up and ice fish well I'm going to take him up and I got a I got a friend who likes to go on he likes to get on snow machines in February or March out of Fairbanks and they go overnight camping on snow machines fishing through the ice for burbet some's BB oh they call them freshwater Lings or law you know why they call them lawyers is when you gut a burbet his uh his heart's way back next to his so they call them lawyers or vent you know fish have a like a like a CLA they have a uni hole you know we have like like a bird yeah we have a couple outlets and they have a single outlet for waste and sexual exchange um

120:55so yeah lawyer BB it freshwater Ling Poor Man's Lobster is another word for it it's a northern fish uh looks like if you combined a snake and a bullfrog kind of uh yeah I want to take them out to camp in a tent in 40° below weather that's it right there wow what a cool looking fish very good to eat yeah very good wow now are they commonly caught through the ice or did people catch them on the street that that's a northern pike that's a northy yeah oh oh yeah no it's kind bouret are not they they're in the Great Lakes they're they're all in Alaska yeah there's bouret everywhere so does it taste like lobster is that why um they call it a poor man no the reason they call it poor man's Lobster it doesn't really taste like lobster but it's suitable for boiling it and dipping it in butter and cocktail sauce and eating really yeah but you also make fish sandwiches with it huh they even

121:42sell that commercially B guys that have like guys that like uh Native Amer like so in the Northern Great Lakes you have a jiboa the jiboa Indians still carry on White Lake they fish for Great Lakes white fish they trap net Great Lakes white fish they're able to sell uh byy catch of bourb it and they have restaurants and like in the up I got some friends that do it and and they have restaurants in the up that they sell their bouret into and they make bouret sandwiches huh freshwater link so I want to take them on ice fishing trip and um but for him to leave like he doesn't go into Georgia gwn which is the capital of his country he'd have to go into Georgetown and start like trying to figure out some kind of uh Visa situation and a passport W does he have a birth certificate I don't know what he has I told him that I would try to help him with all that but

122:38he said it's like a very daunting idea that you would like go and leave the country wow or you'd go in and stay in Georgetown but he has been on a commercial flight he did that trip yeah yeah so he has done it yep he has done it so he had get a passport in order to do it his passport didn't last long and now he has no passport anymore is what he's telling me when I was asking him about the feasibility of this huh and then you don't need a visa for there but he need a visa to come here H but I'm going to figure it out I want to have him up so bad wow him and his brother Dennis one of the things that surpris like one of the things you get is um you know you're from What state were you born in New Jersey yeah see it's like you've been all over the place right yeah uh imagine that imagine you hunted and fished and farmed and that's all you did so you're always on the land yeah and

123:27you've done it all within a 25 mile a 20 mile radius of your home so you're outside hunting and fishing or farming or gathering in the jungle every day and you're in your 30s or 40s and you've done it in a radius of 20 miles wow to what level you understand your spot and without the distractions of the digital and without the distractions of an occupation oh you doesn't work at all not I mean now he he guides a little bit every year for the fish he guides a little bit but typically not like most days he's not engaged in that activity so the spatial awareness is the thing that's most striking to me in in spending time with with these individuals is um everything I'm interested in what they notice and and uh what they never miss it it's like you realize that all of the bits of information that you're able to contain in your head to log you to function and carry on right

124:40you're like a comedian and you do with MMA and you have a very successful podcast and you have a family and you're digitally very astute and you have opinions about coffee right all this your wife red right that's like all you sort of fill up your brain with as much as it can hold but for them it's like it seems to be from my perspective it's like all of that breadth of knowledge but crammed into the natural world to where every plant every tree what are its uses what are the other things and it's like they know as much like they know as much as we know but it's just focus in a way that our breath of knowledge which which would probably be astounding to them if they realized all the we knew about but they're all that all those bits of information are just applied in a different way down to like a granular understanding of the Jungle it would probably be very bizarre for

125:39them to see us like walk like out to this parking lot these these little patches of like plants we don't have a clue as to what they are we pass through them like they they they're just peripheral there is no like I don't know what that is yeah wow no they know everything and there's toxicity how many thousands and thousands of different varieties of plants and animals you know at various times there's 1500 species of birds listen I like there was never a moment when I heard a bird call there was uh I never said hey what's that bird that everyone there didn't say what the bird was bird sounds just from sounds it's like you can't like and the that like it def it's almost just something you have to go see is um the ability to just like move through the jungle and notice everything now are they like the people in Bolivia where they're Barefoot most of the time yeah but you know it's

126:38another bummer is getting more into shoes man uh ran still likes to take his shoes off when he goes into the jungle like we went into the jungle after some Cel and uh and he he pulled his shoes off to be extra quiet but yeah so he'll now and then put flipflops on now and before there's no way wow do they still have the weird feet that are all just callous and toes are spread sped out it's very strange the way their feet look real strange I was in you know the in I was in the Philippines one time in the highlands where people are just hiking Mountain Trails like in you know severe topography on Rocky ground and the feet there I've never seen anything like it Barefoot yeah but it's just it's almost unrecognizable as a human foot really perspective of a human foot what does it look like have uh have have your your man here photos their feet type On LAN Island uh Lan Island Highlands uh

127:37Kinga k a l i n g a feet I don't know try that there probably some high resolution National Geographic if if this if he's any good at his job you will be seeing some crazy feet in a moment you know another thing I wanted to uh share with you I mentioned a sort of a surreal image is uh he'll watching them woman in a DKNY shirt like digging turtle eggs for food um there there's there's flowers you know everything's In Bloom right um it was just the beginning of the rainy season so was some rain like everything is in bloom and these flowers just all flowers of all variety hang out over the river and sometimes you'll pass through and it just has this like warm floral smell that just it's astounding um it remind me of you know in in the end of Apocalypse Now when kurts when when Captain Willard finally catches up with kurts and kurts asks him where he's from and he mentions Ohio and kurts

128:45tells him about a river trip he took with his father on the Ohio River when the gardinas were in bloom you know and he talks about the smell in the end of Apocalypse Now but these flowers would smell like that but when the rain would come what's going on I can't even see what I got something but you got some feet oh you'll find some feet boy got one I was trying to find something better here's a um so it would rain it would knock the all the flowers into the river oh wow and you know like the way yeah yeah that's what I'm talking about so from grasping wow they're like almost like a gorilla's feet yeah from gra like from wrapping your like wrapping your feet around things rocks and stuff while you climb that one in the middle yeah no I saw I saw I saw like a like not yeah quite a few people that had feet that resembled that from just from from from

129:41cuz like you know down in the Amazon and other areas you're just walking on soft ground you know but imagine if you're just like walking on slippery rocks and you're using your feet in a way that's that's not even uncommon so what we're looking at for people that are just listening to this it's like at the middle of their foot especially that one foot in the middle to the right it's like he's T it's taking a turn like a hard turn like a 15 degree plus turn why do those seem like disembodied feet cuz it's just photographing the feet I guess the real old this is like a big article about some people from the Philippines I think from the same area oh huh um so what what go back to it for a second Jamie cuz what we're seeing in this is um this massive spacing between the big toe and then the first toe to the point where it look imposable it's an imposable toe yeah it's crazy seems

130:36like almost like an imposable toe yeah almost like a thumb no I'm sure what's at play there to really like it makes you wonder like at one point in time was it like that that that's that's the thing you wonder is and and I don't know the answer to this but my guess would be that over time you know that they're they're they're not starting out with your foot like over time that that's just been something that's been selected for right in a population of people like height or like you know this guy's feet holy holy we're wa we're looking at what looks like frog feet but that's not even that's not even Asia that's isn't that uh that's North America indigenous people feet and got some h a o r a n i how do you pronounce that harani I'd have to check where that is God it's bizarre but it really does show you from wearing shoes your whole life yeah and given the different

131:43environment like that that's insane like what we're looking at here L they literally look like thumbs like they're sticking out of the side but it's the same structure as a human foot meaning that it's the same length of toes and and just you see that from using it that way they've just developed this incredible you know what's really crazy what is one of the Hallmarks of civilization that shows like really uh poor choice and Footwear when your feet go the other way when they go in an ineffective Direction they they get they get that hammer toe and they climb over each other this is these people have functional feet to the point where you know they could probably hold something with their feet yeah when I look at uh when I look at my wife's feet I feel like it's like she's got a foot this seems very much like shaped by a lifetime of office Footwear oh it's

132:34awful especially with women they get that hammer toe that bunion thing where their their toes are kind of crossed over to the side I know that thing well it's so weird it's a weird choice that someone has decided that women should shove their toes into these pointy things but but uh just like with that that I saw the a group of individuals lock on to polarized sunglasses as being the um I if you went back in five years I'm telling you instead of everybody being bare every's going to be wearing shoes what if you got those women high heel shoes and said this is what all the women in America stretch of course I think it take a while but oh that that's disgusting now that's foot binding that's just up right there that's just insane I can't tell what I'm looking at yeah well that's her toes curled under that's from binding your feet that's foot binding in China

133:29yeah it's well you know soft tissue it's very flexible oh man go uh go to Cirus solle look what those people could do to their bodies the human body is pretty bizarre in its ability to adapt but it yeah you know those groups that used to bind their children's head to that backboard to flatten their head out well how about those people in um what what part of the world was it uh where they have that Incas the where they have those uh lines the naasa lines you know and they they found all these skulls from people back then where they had stretched their heads out and almost made their heads look like aliens yeah there you go but uh see if you find the Ina uh Ina skulls it's so much so that a lot of the really Looney people said look they're trying to be like the aliens that have come down and given them knowledge and oh yeah yeah have you ever been down to um

134:24do you remember those they're they're they're held in salta Argentina I went to see him one time but those children that they found that were inomed at the top of a mountain and they were basically freeze-dried no it's perfectly preserved children what what happened to them well they were taken up and given as a offering so first it seems based on the um stuff they had with them that they were paraded through the Incan Empire and people lavish them with gifts and when they look at the Isotopes and their bodies it's like their diet their whole lives they had just had potatoes but then you can see that toward the end of their lives they were very well fed with meat and fish and all kinds of stuff and they had just innumerable Treasures uh gold pieces carved pieces so they were taken it seems as though they were taken throughout the Empire and what what's really funny about this

135:16speaking of Columbus earlier is it was like yeah so wow it's like it's best that they haven't dated it exactly but it seems like I mean it seems like we're talking about you know Columbus 1492 it's like we're talking about 1491 wow so the the height of this Empire at at the the height of the Empire budding up up against its dramatic and sudden collapse with European contact but they took yeah I went to see and um she was on they only they made a deal with the indigenous people where they only put one on display at a time but she was on display when I there and what do they have their how do they have their encapsuled so they took them well I'll tell you how they came to be first so they were finely dressed had a lot of ornaments and things with them had been very well fed and the the older and they took them up to the high peak I can't remember how high they might have been

136:1014 or 15,000 feet above sea level and they built a little tomb for them and sat them in the Tomb they were drunk they they had a lot of rice wine in their bodies when they died uh the oldest one must have putting up some kind of struggle because she was hitting the head with a hammer or an Axe and they were just laid out sitting in this thing and then capped over with rocks and it's very stable environment so they froze and then you know we use now like backpacking food as freeze-dried food yeah they used to have they used to do a very similar thing with by just taking potatoes and storing them at high elevations where what freeze drying is is you liquid it's like you freeze something and then expel the liquid where the liquid goes from a gaseous goes from a solid to a gas without passing through its liquid state so when you freeze dry food you like

137:05freeze dry you put it in freezer and get super cold and then you start then you start putting it under a vacuum to a point where all the water goes immediately to a gaseous State doesn't pass to a liquid state so it holds its form but all the water's gone if it goes to a liquid state then it collapses but it just holds its form in the nonwater parts of the cells just stay Bound in their natural shape so they were in this position and eventually just like expelled tons of water without ever thawing out and when they found them you can even see the that they had been chewing cocoa leaves because the high elevation the kids still have dried cocoa leaves on their lips wow dude it's wild wow yeah me and my wife went there to look at them where is it now it's in salt Malta Argentina wow near the border with very near the border with Bolivia I wanted to ask you something totally

137:57unrelated but it came up because you talked about freeze-dried foods I know you cook a lot but have you ever I know you eat those mountainhouse things but have you ever tried to make your own have you ever try to dehydrate some of your wild game oh yeah I've dehydrated I mean anytime you make jerky you're dehydrate stuff right but if you ever made like chili and things like that where you could rehydrated in the field TR think you ever made dehydrated no I've assembled a lot of dehy hydrated things but I've never de like at what point how many ingredients need to be in something before it becomes like a recipe just a couple yeah pkin that's a recipe what is it pkin that's got two things in it what's pkin pulverized meat uh with liquid fat poured over the top of it did you know what that is no people that up all the time what pkin is I've never heard of it before I

138:45don't think forgot it it's like the original Road food you dry meat into J air dry meat in a jerky then you pulverize it into what looks like sawdust and then you take and stirred in liquefied fat I made some from a buffalo I kill when I wrote my Buffalo book I made pkin from that and I was and I had it in my fridge just as an experiment I kept it for seven years survival food that can last 50 years but that's not pkin it's not doesn't look like it like it looks like jerky sticks because it's not pulverized people just now start all of a sudden calling like different I'm not saying everybody mess hardly everybody messes up but it's like a thing that gets messed up so um what was I getting at what were you asking about I was asking about I never hydrate I never dehydrate a bunch of different things and combine it into a recipe that I then bring with me um

139:37the reason I like the reason I use dehydrated food and a lot of backpack Hunters use dehydrated food is because um if you have a a dish made up of DEH hydrated ingredients they have different hydration times okay so if you do beans like like a piece of meat is going to be digestible to you piece of dehydrated meat that's then hydrated is going to be digestible to you a dehydrated Bean might take 30 or 40 minutes before it's going to be in a condition that doesn't rip you apart like if you want to yourself up eat straight dried beans what happens just you're off yeah you don't know your stomach doesn't know what to do with it man well knows what to do with it starts producing voluminous amounts of uh gas right it's aw it's horrible but with with if you cook if you take food and cook it to a ready to eat State and then freeze dry it it it uh you can rehydrate it kind of like

140:45simultaneously if you do everything right now it wouldn't work with like a hamburger right if you dehydrated a Hamburg and then you add water to it you're going to wind up with a soggy ass bun so the trick is like finding things that are going to in a hot water bath are going to all come back to life kind of at the same time but places that make backpack food out of just dehydrated but not freeze-dried ingredients is a recipe for disaster really some people like that but for day in day out consumption um I'm a freeze dry man and is freeze-dried something you can do at home you'd have to buy a sublimation chamber so no what is a sublimation chamber what does that look like it's a chamber in which sublimation you know what it looks like it looks like the looks like a submarine really a small but it's very heavy duty because what you're doing is you're taking you're taking food you

141:35take ready eat foods and freeze it right and then you put it into a sublimation chamber and pull a very strong vacuum on it and the air pressure gets to a point where the liquid sublimates and was directly to a gash State and you condense it on another surface inside the chamber but it's out of the food then you take the food out and it's like glass wow you can shatter it that's freeze-dried food but it rehydrates in a real nice way I have heard we eat a lot of it because we do a lot of Back Country trips I've heard everyone's complaints about it but it's like it from my perspective which I will argue is a well- informed perspective it's like it's the lesser of two evils it's not that bad for day in day out consumption I think that the the companies that are doe freeze drri it's just better in my opinion now when I say that these children were freeze-dried I

142:31think some people you know people are going to challenge that because it's not technically freeze-dried but like a similar thing going on where they're keeping their form but shedding their water and be you know shedding water keeping their form and being frozen and preserved for a long time so yeah it's a trip because I was reading a podcast reading a podcast listening to a podcast rather where this guy was talking about how he's doing that with his own food for backpacking trips dehydrating it all sure man why not things like chili things along those lines is cooking chili and then dehydrating or just dehydrating the components I think dehydrating the components I think he was talking about dehydrating the meat and dehydrating the pasta like like something you know like uh taking some meat with sauce and then putting it together with a pasta now my brother one

143:17time he he's a very uh Frugal man he no that's not the right word he just hates uh to see food go to waste he one time had a bunch of roommates and they all moved out and left a ton of rice and he got sick of cooking rice because it take too long he cooked all the rice and then spread it out on sheets and dehydrated it in his dehydrator and and and and reverse engineered instant rice that's insane does it take that long what does rice take like 20 minutes it seems like it take more time you have to talk to him so this is the same guy is this the same guy that found the hobo underwear and stole it yep and the same guy that um one time our our dear late friend uh was getting married and uh his bride his bride the wedding was at his bride to be's house and a neighbor was away on vacation and the neighbor that was away on vacation said you know since we're out of town if you guys want to

144:19use our home for some of your wedding guests go ahead and so all the groomsmen were lodged up in this house of this man we didn't know who was the neighbor of his wife's parents and uh I don't know why but my brother got to snooping around in this guy's freezer and found that he had had he had a bull elk in there that had been in there for seven years and he had like this crisis this moral crisis where he's trying to figure out is it Mor Al worse to steal or morally worse to allow this man to waste this meat how long was a b will a bull stay good if you freeze it you're pushing it at seven years seven years like what is what is like commonly agreed upon it depends who you ask if you ask me the way I trim the way I cut trim and wrap I don't even blink at two years two years is fine yeah the way I cut trim and rrap but when you start seeing four years you get a little weird

145:20a thing that I don't let it go I I've never even done it I would have to think it's going to start to go because the texture the texture will change the texture will change um seven years there's two things going on one you're borderline and two you're starting to get the idea that this guy isn't going to eat that thing right yeah so he weighed it out in his head and when he left he had a bunch of that meat with him and took him home and ate it cuz he just hated to see a el go to waste how did it taste seven years don't remember we' have to ask him wow but his standard of good is different than your standard of good his standard of good is acceptable in cases like that so that is a weird crisis though it makes sense but he throughout his whole life he always is running into these situations like where he just like cannot um he cannot let food go to waste

146:06so he's if I talk to him right now there's probably 10 more things like that that have happened to him since I talked to him last where he's like when he found like he found in his Alleyway one time and he's living in Montana in he still lives in Montana living in bowan found in his alleyway like a discarded a discarded cash from a homeless man and ate all that guy's food and he was a PhD candidate at the University you grew up with him yeah so I remember the first time you understand him the first time he here's where he kind of like where not where it came from but he drew a bear tag when we were in Michigan and it was hard to get a bear tag at the time and he drew a bear tag and the only way to hunt bears in the up is like you know you're not you're not going to spot stock hunt them cuz it's flat ground and you can't see right the you're going to use dogs

146:58or you use bait you never you're not going to see a bear um so he started a bait pile and the way he was feeding his bait pile ahead of the season was just dumpster diving so as he's dumpster diving it's like he's living off not only is he baiting the bear with the dumpster food but he's like living off the dumpster diving food that he found too cuz he like discovered his great richness God he found I'm not he found this big box of boxes of expired bugles you know those little crackers yeah that people like put cheese whiz shoot cheese whiz into the open end of that bugle and I even got a picture of him he just walk in the walk through the woods with boxes of bugles under his arm and get out and he'd be like dumping them out for the bear and then just eating the bugles too and then he walk back with a hand full of bugles just hates to see wasted food his old girlfriend had a job cooking

147:49like the brown food in the Albertson's you know like the display case where they fry all those like burritos and and um they were she was bringing all that home and they were living off the the food that was going to the garbage and they came to her and said you can't steal this food and then she started stealing it quietly wow he can't stand to see food go to waste well that's probably Noble you know what's extra nice is he works for the USDA so it's good to know that a person like that is involved in um you know is at least in the room with people who are thinking about food systems is it good cuz it seems like he'll eat anything dude he will he's on a different level I mean on a different level of toughness and you know he's a guy whose arm is shrinking because remember I was trying to hook you up with yes he's got a muscle did he do anything about that

148:46nope oh Jesus that's not good no once you get that atrophy it's very tough to get it back the way his nerves regenerate takes a long time it's like a half an inch a year he Chronicles its Decay by taking a he's got a 30 lb uh kettle bell and he he was chronicling his Decay by watching how many it's his tricep so counting how many tricep curls he could do with that kettle bell with one arm and one with the other and I think the last time we were talking to him it was 30 or something like 30 on one side and 10 on the other side oh Jesus that's bad so uh that's a neck issue then he's that's like a C3 or C4 or something like that he's gone I shouldn't say he's gone he hasn't I shouldn't say he hasn't done anything about it he's probably if he listens to this he's probably cringing because he would feel that he has but um tell him if he's listening there's a couple things you

149:41need to do if it's it seems to me like it's a neck issue cuz uh when when you start getting a elbows and things where your arm starts uh atrophying usually it's a cervical disc which is somewhere up in here um what what he should do is get a neck decompression device they're very they're inexpensive they hook over a door you put it on with velcro you strap it and I have one uh it it hangs on the thing it's like you're hanging Yourself by your chin making some room in there for all those nerves exactly and well same Principle as these toes spreading out and then other also toes smashing up you can kind of soft tissue stretch out your neck and decompress all those areas a lot of people have it from Bad posture a lot of people have it from Athletics I got it from Jiu-Jitsu um from all this you know getting your neck yanked on see that thing right there that lady has yeah man that's a shitty

150:33one cuz that one's working on a bag of water that doesn't work with a neck like mine you need you need to be able to hang you hang a rhino on the other end I had a I have a thing where I go like this click click click click click click click and then I let myself hang from my neck and um the more it's just like that just like that see how that guy's just sitting there reading the book yeah and you can adjust that so there's a little uh cord it's tough to see in this photo but there's a cord you pull sort of like a plunge on one of those old school toilets you pull that click click click click click click click see how he's pulling it right there and then you just relax and you just got to learn how to go with it and sort of relax and it feels weird at first cuz there's a lot of pressure but it's pulling your neck literally pulling your neck you can feel

151:17sometimes when I'm really relaxed I feel like pop I feel like something pop little tissue separations in there does it have do you feel that it's gotten better long term oh yeah for sure and it feels like really relaxing like after it's over I feel like ah I feel like it just takes a weight off you oh I think there's a tremendous amount I think sitting is terrible these these seats that we're in right now are exceptional because they're ergonomic chairs if you use them right if you use them right yeah I'm pretty cautious about sitting up straight but uh from back injuries I've been very very cautious about uh working out all the muscles around my back which I didn't really I just worked out and I figured those things to take care of themselves now I treat them as like uh just like brushing my teeth like my spinal column and all all those supporting muscles in

152:05the spine those are huge they need they need to be exercised and especially if you do anything like you guys pack out a lot of weight yeah that's a big one and um I feel that's where he feels that different well he had sciatica right that's lower that's a lumbar yeah that was a different thing but he he he knows he like traces that uh to a specific animal that he's packing out yeah makes sense because sciatica is what stica is is a disc that's bulging meaning the disc the soft tissue in between the two hard bones is pushing out and it's pressing up against the nerve and uh it causes pain that shoots down your ass and your lower legs and a lot of people don't even recognize it as a lower back issue because maybe their back is not really that painful but the leg in the ass is painful like what the is going on here I had a similar issue with my neck where it was pushing on my erner

153:03nerve and I was getting this elbow pain and I was like this really hurts like down my arm and in the back of my tricep and then I started getting numbness in my fingers that's when I started figuring out what was going on then I went to a doctor I went to a chiropractor first which is a giant mistake I spent a year but do you not believe in chiropractors I don't believe in chiropractors at all I think it's 98% horseshit that's what I think and I'm I don't know but I think chiropractors that are smart they incorporate things that I think are beneficial cold laser massage a lot of different things but I think that manipulation that they do unless you have like some sort of significant scoliosis or something they're attempting to slowly put back into position I think most of the time it's just popping your neck and it just feels good but but I just like in an immediate

153:51sense I went to a guy that's a very nice guy and he was trying to tell me that I didn't have a bulging disc cuz he was pushing down on the top of my head and it didn't hurt I'm like okay so I was listening to him I listened to this guy for like a year I had treatment with him and I still have these neck problems and back problems then finally I got an MRI and they're like yeah you got a bulging disc and I remember being angry I remember being angry because I was angry that I was being treated by someone who was a professional that really didn't know what the they were talking about and they were treating something that was a significant issue that I was experiencing a real deterioration of my function uh pain I wasn't able to do Jiu-Jitsu correctly there was a lot of a lot of problems that I was dealing with that I was like well what the is this like how do and then I started

154:35talking to doctors about it and when you have a bulging disc man they want to cut you open like like you're a pinata and you got a gold inside well that's a thing that my bro is talking about is the pro he's very nervous about a procedure that he could or could not do well for some people it's on a bad move depending on whether or not your brother's willing to do all the different things that can but he's got a lot of atrophy already which is a real bad thing it's noticeable yeah that's not good because that doesn't grow back yeah boss routon has it real bad uh boss routon former UFC heavyweight champion he his neck up and uh went through a bunch of different treatments and then eventually W up getting it uh fused he's got a I believe two discs and maybe more in his neck fused together where he doesn't have any dish tissue they just screw the bones in

155:27together and remove the disc tissue and stabilize the area but his right arm is significantly smaller than his left arm to the point where he calls it baby arm and this is a former UFC heavyweight champion of the world and uh what's ironic is that some of it came from fighting but the last thing came from doing a stunt on Sons of Anarchy he was uh in some sort of a fight believe it Sons of Anarchy some sort of a fight fight scene where they were you know doing some and some guy was supposed to like throw him on the ground he landed on his head so all that actual fight and then you get up forend fighting is that hilarious yeah and it's bad man I mean he's it's slowly starting to come back but I've known boss to have this issue for uh we we worked together on a movie before my seven-year-old daughter was born and he had the issue then and so for seven years and still now does still

156:20does it's come back slowly but what I'm talking about is like I think there's some the like the way that your nerves regenerate is extremely slow they can deteriorate quickly like the atrophy can happen pretty quick but the way it regenerates is extremely slow so they say once you have atrophy you're like you got to act on it right away that's the thing they told me when I had lme disease is that um a thing that you up is the nerve damage yeah and then people a lot of people go on to think that they always have it but they're like you had a thing it's treated it's gone but it'll live with you for so long because of the damage to your nerves it's just not it's so slow to recuperate I talked to a doctor about Lyme disease and he said it's not just a lme disease that you're dealing with he said Lyme disease is this overall term he said you can get a tick that has a

157:11100 pathogens in it when you look at that list of it gets scary it's scary as and they connected it to more gellin you know what more gellin is no challeng is a disease that a lot of times they think is psychosomatic because there's some sort of a neurotoxicity involved in Lyme disease and all these people that have Mor galons uh almost without a doubt have Lyme disease as well and what Morgellons is is they have they start itching at themselves and they think they have fibers growing out of their body and they start hallucinating well most most of the time it's treated as a psychosomatic disorder like they'll get carpet fibers in their body and they'll claim these carpet fibers are coming out of their body and growing out of their SK but I talked to this Doctor Who was the only Lucid person that sort of explained it to me because he's a doctor and he

157:55has more gel and he was saying he also has lyme disease and he says like to a person they all have Lyme disease uh that he's encountered at least but he was saying that he was looking at himself in the mirror and he saw something moving across the surface of his eye and he knew it was a hallucination and he realized it was a hallucination as a doctor as an educated man of medicine and still was seeing it and was freaking out and then then then he realized like oh there's some sort of an extreme neurotoxic effect that this stuff has and then he started doing like some pretty deep investigation into what constitutes Lyme disease and he's like well it's not like you know you know you have herpes you know no it's not like that he's like you get bit by something you got a bunch of in that cocktail of whatever that disgusting tick is carrying around and it's variable you

158:42know you might get it from one part of the east coast and it has you know 50 things you might get it from another has 13 things yeah and but he's saying with the people that have more galons what he believes is they're suffering from hallucinations brought on by Lyme disease that's that's a thing about lime that I found was um about medicine and about people and about mysterious diseases is like I quit doing it now but I would getting arguments with people where like I was trying to deal with it and finding out about it and people were telling me like here's what's happening to me I'm like no I was told that's not how it works because there's so much uh the same thing you bringing up earlier about a doctor or a chiropractor telling you the wrong thing there's so much um sub subjectivity in the medical world yeah that it's like on one hand all these people are sort of going

159:34through this uh this regimen this educational regimen which is you know it's like there's like government oversight there's certain criteria you need to meet right things you need to pass and you think it would sort of like have this unifying effect but people come out on the other end who've gone through kind of the same educational system telling you wildly different yeah wildly different about the problems where one guy like you could walk in one guy is going to like do a surgery and the next guy's like oh no way yeah who was it that had in his balls who was it wasn't steo right who the was it oh that just said that uh Santino I think Andrew Santino he was telling me that he went to he had a cyst in his balls and he thought he had ball cancer went to a doctor and one doctor told him that he has excess stored up in his balls sperm that's stored up in his balls and that's what's causing

160:32this knot he went home to his wife and said listen he went to another doctor no he wasn't married at the time he was a young man but he went to another doctor and the second doctor said who the was that doctor that guy should lose his ability to practice like you don't get stored up in your balls and make some sort of a knot like he's like that's insane who told you this and a real practicing doctor told him that yeah I used to go into when I was younger I'd go into it and thinking it was like going to there was like going to get an oil change right like you could have 20 people and they're all going to change your oil like the same way yeah well what we do is we drain it and put new in I'm like great now I realize this a roll of the Dice Man roll of the dice and here's thing you mitigate that by doing some research but it really is like I don't know what the

161:21guy's going to tell me he's not going to tell me the same thing their guy's going to tell me the big thing when it comes to health and this is one of the things that I have a big problem with when it comes to anything dealing with the back is preventative maintenance is like one of the most important things for back Health we're sitting in desks all day and most people are not sitting up straight they're not sitting a good thing is like one of those balls those gym balls those big balance balls those are great to sit on because they force you to kind of stabilize yourself and use your core muscles or some sort of an ergonomic chair forcing you to stabilize but doctors not telling you hey man you got to take a yoga class A couple days a week you got to do something to straighten out your posture you got to do something to make sure that your spine is strong enough to be carrying

162:02your about you can't slump forward because you're putting undo pressure on these different portions of your back there's a significant amount of doctors are just not telling you that they like oh yeah your disc is bulging we're going to have to do a disectomy no worries it's outpatient it's outpatient procedure but I'm telling you is they're they're chopping off of a chunk of this finite material there's a small amount of material that separates your discs and when they talk about oh I have dis degenerative disorder it's a disease my disc no stop it's not a disease what's going on is you're compressing your body through weightlifting through extreme exercise your body is slowly getting smooshed down you're not allowing it to recover you're not stretching it out you're not strengthening all those core muscles you're not giving it some time off you're probably engaging in the same

162:48damaging activity over and over again and toughing it out if there's one thing you should never tough out it's a back issue anytime there's something going on with your back don't tough it out don't try to work through it just don't because you're going to it up worse and then it's going to get to a point where it just does not recover and then you're gonna have to get surgery yeah man this is all this is making me super self-conscious about how I sit I sit like Larry King man so bad a chair in Des I do I I used to much more I do try to sit up as much as I can now but these chairs every time been here I went away for a couple days trying to sit straighter after staring at you sitting all nice for 3 hours I try man I didn't know he's used to be good at it I used to slump quite a bit before I had back issues yeah I got to catch up these chairs are called uh capisco chairs

163:33they're from Ergo Depot um you can go to ergod depot.com and get these things they're the they're they're comfortable enough to sit in too I've been on some of them where you your knees slide in and there's a pad against your shin and there those are kind of gross these seem much more like an actual chair but they're super comfortable what's it called it's called a capisco sounds like a drink I know Ergo depo.com no they didn't pay me to say that but uh these things are the backs man backs are the one thing like when people have these heavy packouts and everybody likes to Pride themselves and I packed out 150 PBS 7 miles don't I'm I'm prone to saying those kind of things I tell everybody pack take 75 and do it twice please and even that's a lot man I have this new thing that's a good point why do people why do they like to talk about because they want to be badasses yeah

164:26but you'd never be like yeah man I jumped out in front a truck and just jumped away right in time people love to tell their friends too you know Mike he packed out two elk Quarters on his back dude's a Savage like oh my Mike's probably gonna have no legs like dude's a dumbass his legs are gonna stop working he's probably like got a massive bulge in his back no I I'm guilty cuz I I I traffic in those stories and when I hear those stories I'm like right on bro well you know how hard it is that's why when you've done a pack out a real pack out you know how hard it is I remember when we shot that mule deer right there in Montana and we only walked like what was it two miles maybe and we had the meat split up between like three of us so it was probably only like 50 PBS on everybody's back and I was like holy once he finally got to Camp two miles pretty pretty flat it

165:20wasn't that hilly yeah if you're not accustom to it it's exhausting yeah so if you're not accustom to getting bit by beads six times a day it's overwhelming so I should tell people that uh the Outdoorsman I know a company that you you like their products as well they make an atlas trainer now it's a I saw you were messing with that great you got a weight you put on there yeah it's like an Olympic late it's it slides in like an Olympic post and it clamps down I thought maybe you rigged that up yourself no no they're selling it now it's their thing I saw that you had that I thought it was like you I thought you like gone down to the hardware store I KN I knew the frame but I just didn't recognize the I know guys do it but usually they use sandbags they put sandbags in their backpack and get used to it makes a big difference and it's an incredible workout it doesn't shift

166:02doesn't shift at all and you really lock it down and like you know have the risk of like tweaking right like it's strength but it's not because when your shit's wiggling around then it like I don't know it doesn't like make you stronger just makes you more inclined to like something up yeah to twist funny yeah no I agree know but I just implore people just pleas just just exercise your back treat it like it's like brushing your teeth just take yoga you don't have to take it Ethan just get some YouTube videos they're free they're they're available everywhere just just do something to strengthen your back you will prevent most people don't want to listen to this and they're not going to do it CU people are lazy as but you will prevent a host of issues that people have just by exercising your back simple stuff there there's the atlas trainer right there yeah you could do

166:46chin-ups on if you're a Savage look at this guy it's an animal but um yeah you could carry up to 90 pounds that thing so it'll take two uh I bet it'll take 100 pound plates too I just don't know if the plates designed for it if the pack rather's designed for it that's a good idea to do pull ups that sun on yeah I use a weight belt put like a belt and I hang a kettle bell in between my legs I put a 50 lb kettle bell in a chain and I do chin-ups like that really yeah it's hanging where it's right between my legs like it's a big leather strap where do the straps fall across leg right in between the straps are on my back or on my hip like this and then there's like a chain in between my legs and the kettle bell hangs in between my legs but it's not getting your scroll at all no no no no it's swinging low swing you got to make sure your legs are separated so it's not cracking against

167:33your knees but you know when you're doing chin-ups it's just hanging there no yeah they say that that's the best way to get more reps in with your chinups is not to try like 1920 the actually best way is do less but with heavy weights do like uh you know put a weight vest on or hang a you know 70 lb kettle bell between your legs just grind out three or four yeah but again you're run the risk of injury because it's a you're maybe that's why I've never done it hey yeah you're putting a you got to build yourself up to it you know that's what also one of the big things that happens to people when they start exercising they just try to go too hard too quick they go too full balls it's yeah I remember uh at various times not running for a long time then be like yeah I'm going to start running and go on a five mile run dude I've been running now for just a little

168:21over a month I got a friend who's a runner and um like he he's re you know a hobbyist but runs marathons and he never did before but he was saying uh he was he wrote he's a writer so he's been writing about that a little bit and he was saying he just wrote a piece about um you don't run to get in shape you got to get in shape then start running yeah it's a good idea it's a smart Way's like there's some steps there's some if you're just like of slob right there's some things you need to get taken care of before you embark on that smart there's ground there's ground work that needs to be done to get ready for the run I talk to I don't like to ever discourage people from doing Jiu-Jitsu but I talked to a buddy of mine who just did Jiu-Jitsu from he's 43 years of slovenly Behavior no exercise whatsoever other than the occasional pickup basketball game for

169:16like seven years yeah and then started doing Jiu-Jitsu and immediately his body's falling apart I'm like okay I know this is going to be hard for you to do but if you really want to do it you got to get in shape first yeah just push started out with thum wrestling then gone into arm wrestling Steve Rell you got to get out of here 3:15 listen man you got one of the best podcasts in the world it's awesome I love listening to it I'm so happy you do it and I think you got the best hunting show ever so I I I owe the podcast All to You Joe Rogan well listen man hang out with you look it's so easy for you you you have so many great stories and you're such a good talker I was like how the does this guy not have a podcast I'm glad you steered me in that direction thanks for the plug I'm glad you're still doing it it's called The me eater podcast it's available everywhere and uh me eater is

170:03available on Netflix and uh right now it's only how many seasons do you guys have season five and six seasons five and six yeah five and six we we'll have more we got more we got uh you know a dozen episodes that are new that we're going to be releasing so just stay tuned and then I you know months ago back uh a couple months ago if you go to my Instagram Steven Rella you'll scroll back and find a bunch of pictures from you'll find a bunch of Guyana photos yeah amazing stuff from Guyana yeah like we never even talked about oh we did talk about that yeah you'll find some pictures Good Times thanks for doing this man all right