 they had to say it wasn't us coming in and saying we have the answer get out of the way we're gonna do this for you it was hey let's come up with a solution together we say tamika pimoja in swahili which basically means uh let's work together on this welcome to the art of charm i'm your host jordan harbinger today we're talking with my friend justin ren he's an mma athlete who fights for the forgotten that's literally the name of his charities made a family of pygmies enslaved in the congo i didn't even know that those were a real thing until he told me and showed me on youtube he's buying them land with his fight purse winnings and drilling wells in the jungle so they can have clean water and his own story of coming back from addiction induced retirement and finding purpose in helping others is not only inspiring but super interesting i'm really glad to have you here with us for this episode of the show and by the way if you're new to the art of charm we'd love to send you some top episodes and the aoc toolbox that's where we study the science of people and discuss things like reading body language and having charismatic non-verbal communication the science of attraction negotiation techniques social engineering networking and influence strategies mentorship persuasion tactics and everything else that we teach here at the art of charm check that out at the art of charm dot com slash toolbox or in our iphone app at the art of charm dot com slash iphone also at the art of charm dot com you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show we're glad to have you with us here today at aoc and enjoy this episode with justin ren well thanks for coming out by the way hey thank you for having me yeah it's awesome yeah i mean you really do fight for the forgotten we can talk about that in a bit but i watched the fight this morning which is it's weird watching mma in the morning i don't know what it's kind of like having a beer in the morning yeah you're like i don't know it feels too early for this somehow it's like i'm eating oatmeal and watching you just nail this guy with pink hair in the back of the head over and over and over now the commentator said this is a far more aggressive justin ren than we've seen so were you not as aggressive before because i feel like the line between not aggressive and aggressive in mma has to be pretty fine yeah so i had taken five years in two months off from the sport so i started fighting professionally at 19 years old did really well and i was always that guy that you saw this last fight that you just watched so i was always more aggressive but then coming back after the layoff it was a learning process because i had had five years off the muscle memory was gone there was ring rust and i was just trying to win what's ring rust that sound i mean it's probably what it sounds like but yeah it's playing that ring rust is probably where just there's the loss of muscle memory and just everything's a little slower and you're trying to work out the kinks and get back in it you know these competitive fighters are fighting two three times a year sometimes four and then they're training five six days a week two to three times a day and so that muscle memory is just firing and then when you come back after a long layoff even a year is a long layoff and i have five years off so this is don't come come back yeah it sounds like you retired and then just didn't and you unretired versus taking a break in your training yeah absolutely and so coming back and then those five years off i wasn't training at all i was going back in forticongo living there for a year and so yeah getting back into it and i rushed back i mean i had basically six weeks of a fight camp to get ready for a professional fight again on a big stage and so i just fought two boring decisions i mean not not necessarily boring but i tried to out box the boxers and i'm a ground guy i'm a wrestler and a jujitsu guy next and so i was striking with these guys that grew up striking and had to beat them at their own game and so the aggressive part tried to beat a guy at his own game if i made a mistake you're gonna pay for it especially at the heavyweight division so anyways i got back to my roots and it just started to flow again so you kind of slip back from unconscious competence where your things are firing automatic because you've trained so much versus ring rust situation where you go all right make sure that i'm doing that you're sort of thinking about a plan at some point instead of just going on i don't know animal instinct that's been beaten into you literally in the in the dojo or the training arena yeah absolutely and uh it was really great this last time was i was really able to focus we have a team around us now and so i'm able to do what i need to do in the gym and the first two fights back i was writing a book the second one we were doing a documentary and so there was i was spreading myself too thin and not being able to focus in the fight game like i should and uh that that that can be very dangerous for a fighter yeah it seems like you can only do one job when your job is to not get hit or hit somebody else more than more slash harder than they hit you you should probably try to specialize in one one thing set the iphone aside for a minute yeah she is absolutely the commentators also were saying things like this is the fastest he started and uh think about the pressure involved in that every dollar goes towards a cause you've devoted your life to and i i i kind of was hoping you weren't actually thinking about that in the moment because it seems like during the fight you might get a little bit of motivation thinking wow i better win because if i win i can drill five wells or something like that but at the same time you kind of wouldn't want to be thinking i better win because i can drill five wells when you should be thinking not maybe not thinking about anything yeah absolutely and to be honest uh the first fight back um having a short fight camp and then having that pressure and that weight knowing this time on fighting for a real reason for a cause for people for for yeah to drill wells to knock out the water crisis that's what i want to do and so i had that weight on my shoulders and this this last time this third fight back man i just felt like that weight was lifted off of me i just need to go in there do what i love perform at a high level um and if i can't do that if i can't prove that to myself on the third time that i i'm still i can still hang with these guys and not just that i can outpace them i can outwork them i can put them away i can finish um instead of going to the score cards the decisions letting the judges decide i need to put this guy away and so it's just great to have that feeling back uh you know hey i'm back so yeah it's it's got to be a lot of pressure to put on yourself and it seems like that would be useful during training when it's like i really want to mail it in for the last couple sprints because i'm tired it's like okay push yourself because of the think of the pygmies or whatever right but in in the fight itself it's like just that stuff probably needs to be packed away and you've got to rely on your training otherwise there's just too much going on upstairs yeah uh you're right about that but i also like pressure um i thrive normally under pressure the first two they just weren't uh weren't ideal circumstances for a professional fight and fighter the training uh that i was getting in so having it all being knowing i was able to go in with so much more confidence knowing that hey i do have the reason and the purpose and the passion but i also have the training to back it the skill set to back it and i put in the time and effort and hard work and so almost as a fighter you need to have uh stack up the chips and stack the deck in your favor so that way you know going in there like when the going gets tough and you have to dig deep because you're pushing this guy he's pushing you you're each trying to break each other yeah so i i've got to have more things that i can pull out of my hat and or pull out of my heart my fighter's heart and say like i deserve this win i put in the work you're like not just the cause because that's not going to win you a fight like i put in the work too to back it up do your emotions ever get in the way and or help during a fight because it seems like you could you hear a lot of and you see in movies stupid stuff like think about the reason for this and it's like well is that just hollywood or are you really thinking about the cause at some point when you feel like if i get punched one more time i'm going down or is that just all something that gets in the way and is extraneous by that point during the fight i'm not actually thinking about it but before the fight it helps yeah helps me get more motivated and so i even my walkout song is some of the pygmy music from the forest in the congo yeah which uh nobody else probably gets and probably wonders what what neck is that it sounds like this kind of yodeling and tribal music and uh you know i know the sounds and i know who they are so that pumps me up it gets me excited but once i'm in there i'm there to do a job i got to win and when i get to win i get to talk about uh the cause then so before i'll do it but during the fight put that all on the shelf yeah and then after the fight get right back what is that instrument i saw that in one of the videos that you have in the pygmy camp where there's a guy it looks like a guitar but there's like a curved branch coming out of it with little knots and he's playing it's almost like a weird guitar slash harp yeah what's that thing so he i if i can remember back to that specific instrument they just they're so ingenious and innovative and they can make things from nothing uh the kids are carving you know uh while we're out there with our truck they're carving out of wood uh trucks with our symbols and our logo and everything on it so they they can do so much great stuff uh this instrument was half of a bow and arrow that broke um and then they used one of our spare tires uh our sorry not spare tires one of the tires that blew out and then they ripped uh the rubber apart and got the metal like strings that line inside the tires so they can make guitar strings wow and then i think it was a uh a coffee can also yeah because there's resonance from the strings right that's incredible because it sounds pretty good or something that is made out of old tire and some sticks essentially absolutely yeah it's it's uh it was interesting to watch these guys and the whole village and you showed these nail knives oh i guess they're taking a metal nail and hammer it down and it looks like a pocket knife yeah absolutely it's so impressive yeah it's awesome man that's chief leo man i love that dude um and yeah he he goes out there and there's a lot of illegal deforestation out there you'll see like a ladder and it'll find some nails pull them out of the ladder after they're done logging and then he makes some nails for the village did they just figure this nice for the village did they just figure this stuff out i wondered where they got metal in the middle of the jungle that explains it right right but how do you know oh i can hammer this down and make a knife out yeah i think they just learn from what they need and uh they what they see and so originally they're their best arrows that they have and now they use scrap metal to make some metal tip arrows but they'll sit there and ask you you know which one would you use on a bird and which one would you use on an antelope or a wild hog and they have this one that's just sharpened wood and that one with the wicked looking uh uh i don't know scrap metal ones that they made and it looks sharp it's bigger heavy duty and that's what we know here so i'm like oh you use that one for the bigger one use the little one for the bird like uh because on the uh the one that we sharpen we put poison on that and so they mash up these roots and these berries and these leaves that are all poisonous and it's like black tar kind of looking stuff and that's what's at the tip of their arrow and so over the years they just found out the perfect mixture from the different things that's wild right there that's crazy i saw when they're walking through the jungle and they have i guess it's like a a root net that they used to hunt or net right up made out of roots right and they're carrying on their head and then he's got that spear with that flail flayed metal tip and i thought if i ran into that guy in the jungle i would be i mean if i'm already in the jungle alone there's a problem but i would be freaking tripping out and it's the stuff of nightmares except then you see them laughing and having fun so it kind of cures the cures that whole thing but it they look really scary i mean it looks just like you would imagine some travel folks who don't have a lot of other western contact and we'll like we'll embed some of these videos on the show so people can see what's going on there but it is are you using just your iphone or a gopro or something in the jungle there to film everything yeah normally it was my iphone and then once uh once there was like a little short film made of what we're doing people called for it to be a documentary and we threw it up on Kickstarter and got it funded wow and uh yeah so now we've been filming over the last three years having a documentarian named Derek Watson he's any award winning filmmaker to the documentary with force Whitaker and so it's just really cool to see what it's turned into from a couple of iphone videos to then a gopro to now like this professional being able to come in and really he's developed a deep relationship with the people learning their story like with my book i it was my attempt to give them a voice that was my first promise to the chief he asked you know we don't have a voice communities have one so i said yeah and so then when the book happened that was my attempt but now the video or the documentary that's going to be them having their own voice telling their own story um so i'm just so stoked about that what's the dance that you do after the fight that's related to the pygmy stand i mean there's i saw that and i thought okay if you don't know he's doing a pygmy thing and they call you the big pygmy actually if you don't know that he's doing a pygmy dance you might think what the hell is this guy doing it's like dancing in the end zone right except it looks like it looks like a little person dance because of how close the foot movements are but you're how big you're how tall you i'm six foot three yeah so six three so you're about twice the size of probably a pygmy average men's height is only four foot seven wow yeah so there there are a bunch of little dudes with great big hearts and yeah those little footsteps and over thought of that how maybe it's because they're smaller guys maybe they have kind of this little conga line or conga line i guess but uh the the men and the women are in their separate lines and the men are over there and that's just the dance that they do with uh around the fire and we'll embed the fight video from Bellator in the show notes because i thought that i thought that was interesting and then i think even during your victory speech he said i hope that doesn't look cocky it's a pygmy dance yeah absolutely because i was like what is going on the first two i didn't have anything to dance uh first two comeback fights i didn't have anything to dance about you know it was a decision i had to wait for the judge's decision but uh once you finish the guy yeah it was called for a little celebration or dance well let's go back to the beginning why did you start fighting in the first place oh i started fighting because i grew up actually getting really heavily bullied about i take it you were not six foot three with the viking appearance no and that was my former fight name was the viking i can see that yeah absolutely it does match better than big pygmy but you know you got a role with the current branding yeah and so it was uh it was something that i wanted to do since i was 13 years old um it was something that actually kind of gave me hope when i was going through a lot of the bullying i um i know a lot of people get bullied and um and i really feel for me i think it's made me even more compassionate person growing up sure i would imagine or it would make you a bully yeah absolutely yeah i think you have you know that crossroads that you come to well now you've got the best of both worlds because you can help the pygmies and you can also beat people up when you want to you can just sort of flood between those two things as therapy calls for yeah well i just remember i just remember sitting at the lunch table sometimes all by myself and getting pelted in the back of the head with like chocolate milk spit wads and names names being thrown at me and uh and we're going to the high school homecoming homecoming thinking that uh or actually middle school thinking that uh uh you know this date said yes to me and i get there and it was actually she was going with another guy named justin and so she came up a guy came up there and took her away or uh i think yeah i have this one time in eighth grade uh where this girl named jennifer she asked me to come to her birthday party and i knew that she loved transformers and that her dad worked at dr pepper in their house was even doc decorated with dr pepper stuff oh wow and so i made myself head to toe uh into a dr pepper transformer so romantic boxes right just a young dumb kid that wanted to impress this girl it was my crush and so uh i got their duct tape i was from the country town like i don't know kids in the country so we seemed to use duct tape a lot yeah and uh so yeah i made that went there uh went to the backyard and whenever i got there the whole uh all the cool kids were there waiting and i got met with a couple of flashes of light and um people laughing and uh and it was it was a big set up it wasn't a costume party at all it was just for me seeing if i would come oh no that's so awful yeah so one guy said uh uh or actually jumpers said i can't believe you thought you were cool enough to come to my party uh yeah jennifer yeah and then one of the guys said you know what you're you're worthless i felt worthless and i like i said you should just kill yourself no that's terrible yeah so at 13 years old you believe the things people say about you right i felt worthless i um i i actually went into this like spiraling depression that i was even clinically diagnosed with depression from the you know doctor and so um that was tough for me but when i found the ufc i was 13 i was walking around this like flea market and i there was like some used vhs tapes yeah i was gonna say your 13 how old are you 29 yeah so i'm 37 but even then ufc was maybe available on vhs somehow maybe whenever i found it it was actually illegal on pay per view um they had banned it because it had been advertised as a blood sport and as a human cock fighting right the modern day gladiators and no rules you know anything goes right that was one shots for legal yeah but they had i remember when i first started watching it it was also vhs this is probably 2000 2001 or maybe even 2003 and they were like oh yeah no fish hooking because yeah you just don't come back from that it's quite the same no no eye gouging no eye gouging right yeah no i no biting no eye gouging and no fish hooking that was the three rules compete against the three rules groin strikes were all right yeah it's just and i remember thinking there's kind of no way to get around that because if you just can rail someone the balls over and over and over it's going to be a short fight even if you have a cut yeah there was actually a fight uh i think if they someone in youtube that just it said joeson and uh he he fought in there and he took like 20 groin shots in a row just absolutely brutal from i think he hacked me and uh that was on one of those vhs tapes that i bought and you're like i gotta do this well it hurts less than being dressed up as a transformer and getting laughed at right absolutely i was like i want to give someone some of those um no but i i i i saw that though and and what i actually fell in love with from the sport was how it was taking these olympic sports the olympic sport of wrestling boxing judo brazilian jiu-jitsu as well and uh and and putting it into one sport and so i looked at it and i that was actually what i well first thing that drew me to it was i bet these guys don't get bullied and they can defend themselves yeah i bet they don't yeah i bet they don't get bullied they can defend themselves they're probably not the laughing stock of the party maybe they're actually invited um and then yeah and then i just fell in love with the sport it's like a human chess match and i loved how strategic it was um and i think i saw through the bad marketing that they were doing at the time and because whenever you see some of those fighters how disciplined they are this guy's an olympic gold medalist or he's an olympian like he's not some knucklehead street fighter bar room brawler drinking a beer yeah it seems like the original marketing back then they were like we need the wrestling crowd except we want the wrestling crowd that's more adult and already knows that wrestling is scripted in some ways and i don't want to say fake because it's real athleticism but it's not real it's an entertainment striking uh but they need the adult version of that which is always when you're a kid and you find out wrestling is fake you're like well where's the real version right so they marketed towards that and the the initial branding was drunk rednecks are gonna love this right it wasn't like the whole world is gonna be watching this stuff yeah yeah absolutely so uh but yeah then after that uh got into wrestling uh 15 years old uh and i mean i was just really fortunate my two high school coaches were both olympic gold medalist um they were instantly champs for oakland state wrestling which is just like uh the the best wrestling club ever um and so yeah it was kinny monday kindle cross learning from the best right from the start uh and they just started um you know i was i was young i was uh i would say almost fragile with going through the depression going through the bullying i had to transition out of the school i was at my parents sent me from the the public school to private school um to get me away from that and then yeah these guys just invested in me they saw a desire to to want to learn and they say we can we can work with that while you were still in high school they were doing this yeah absolutely how did they find you through the wrestling team the wrestling program yeah uh kinny monday kindle cross with the high school coaches at the school gotcha and so it just very fortunate there wasn't one other olympic gold medalist at any high school uh coaching yeah what are the odds yeah we had two at the same school geez and so uh it was just a powerhouse it was a texas wrestling school which isn't known for texas or texas isn't known for wrestling and so uh but theirs came to or ours bishop lynch high school um we were the best in the state but then we were the second best in the country um and yeah because we had great coaches and a lot of us were coachable and we'd listen go figure yeah and then you ended up on ultimate fight of the reality show yeah so out of high school i went to the olympic training center and then from there uh started battling drug addiction because i had this elbow surgery right here oh yeah that's a nice little scar you got it how did that happen i was wrestling an olympic bronze medalist world champion and i was 18 he was like 30 something oh that's safe what could go wrong right yeah and he was just uh he was just great but i was a two-time national champion in wrestling and so uh i went out there wanted to compete wanted to test myself and just in a freak accident uh snapped my arm and uh it was just it was a one-point move it wasn't anything crazy it was just the way that i fell yeah and uh broke it dislocated it tore the whole neary collateral ligament and then living at the olympic training center i want to be able to compete again and the doctors were telling me i only had a 30 35 chance of competing again so what's going through your mind at that point like crap the only thing i like is now yeah this is this is the one thing that has given me a sense of purpose and identity like that was where i mean growing up from a completely uh i don't know feeling worthless bullied to then going to wrestling having success finding friends on the wrestling team and then becoming successful at it the best in the country um and then yeah wanting to pursue the olympics living at the olympic training center then also they say you might not ever be able to do this again you only have a 30 to 35 percent chance of ever competing again um man that that rocked me because it sent me right back into that depression i think wrestling helped pull me out of it um and then once once the only thing i liked and was the only thing i was good at was maybe ripped away from me uh yeah i spot it right back into that depression and i got hooked on uh narcotics really bad the painkillers from the surgery yeah so they wanted me to go to a mainly an ankle doctor who did knee surgeries um for my elbow talking about your elbow yeah okay yeah and he had to petition with our insurance company and uh even write letters and we had to go to an appeal process so that i could get an actual elbow doctor to do my elbow i was gonna say where's the elbow doctor and all this yeah exactly so luckily going through that process i got the best guy in the country one of them at least and uh but at that time i had to wait four months so during that four months all like you give me was like yeah yeah yeah just pills to my ulnar collateral ligament was completely uh severed what is that is that the one that goes that's the inside so it's basically the surgery i had was the tomny john surgery that a lot of the professional baseball pitchers get um and they took a uh tendon out of my hamstring there's three like hamstring tendons they took one of those out the center one and they replaced my ligament and my elbow with it so are you one tendon short on that side that doesn't sound safe either though yeah no actually they said it's the it's the one that the other two will will strengthen up and basically the doctor was telling me he was a good salesman i guess because uh it was it was great because he was like we could give you a cadaver um but you know you're a big strong guy who wants to compete we don't know how we're gonna find that so a tendon is stronger than a ligament so we'll put that uh a leg tendon into your arm so it'll be like you're kicking people in the face when you punch them oh yeah so you got upgraded yeah okay nice good well at least there's an upside to that okay so how did that trend then translate to you getting on the show i think i jumped over that with the elbow injury oh no yeah so i started fighting uh 19 years old professionally once i was able to to see i'm gonna be able to compete again um i wanted to get paid had do this professionally uh because wrestling there wasn't really an opportunity except for MMA was was growing really growing and so that's where a lot of the wrestlers go so yeah i took my first pro fight um at 19 years old i was actually coaching and uh i was it wasn't even supposed to be in there and uh my guy got hurt and couldn't compete and so the day before they threw me in there ended up winning in about a minute and a half the next fight that sounds horrifically kind of ad-libbed and or hodgepodge or we talk about winging it like hey your guy's injured i don't know the fight's tomorrow do you want to do it right this was in podunk oklahoma and it was they don't they now they have a boxing commission their state athletic commission but they didn't at that time yeah unregulated um second fight was kind of similar the third fight was in iowa at the i don't know the aims or uh aims iowa or ios t university is it was their county fairgrounds seems legit yeah and i was uh three beers in um and i was in the stands just watching at a button down shirt and jeans on and dress shoes and a guy gets in there and says my opponent didn't show up he weighed in yesterday but he didn't come today if there's anyone that everyone wants to fight today uh you know raise your hand and so we're looking for a big guy who's still not too drunk that they can't walk and can fit into this pair of shorts right absolutely this was back in the old school days not as old school where there weren't rules but this was when it was still developing and taking off now it's more mainstream it's regulated everything else but yeah so it started getting much better and i got on the ultimate fighter tv show which uh was my ultimate goal was to be in the ufc um it's not the ultimate goal but one of the big goals in fighting you want to get there so you beat the guy who challenged you while you were in the stands yeah just thinking that was my quickest fight ever i got like corn dogs in your belly and they're like i can do it right let's look how hard can it be i actually had to go backstage borrow another fighter shorts for the father yeah i had to get an unboiled uh unfitted mouthguard from back there and then uh you have one of the rules is you do have to work up and so that's probably a good idea so you took a sweaty cup from the other guy yeah that's when my uh i won't ever do that again yeah your wife loves this story as a juicer she like take a shower before you get back in the car so yeah but it was uh maybe it was motivation to get in and out because it was only about 16 seconds uh the fight and um no i so but after that i decided man i i think i can be good at this i need to dedicate myself yeah um and yeah from there i just started setting my my my goals and what i wanted to do accomplish in the sport and as a person and um and yeah i started trying to rally around that how did you kick the oxy habit after taking it for months and months um i didn't uh it was a six-year battle so wow it was a six-year addiction and it started before my fight career did um and so that was one of the main reasons for my five-year layoff from fighting was i needed to i got kicked off my fight team i was uh i think i was 12 and two or 13 and two um and i was fresh off the ultimate fighter i was the youngest heavyweight in the UFC um everyone else was normally in their 30s uh mid 30s and i got on there 21 22 you're like uh what's is that guy now kevin um he's the youngest he's like i'm the youngest ultimate fighter he's 25 oh kevin gaston yeah i always forget his his last name he lives here in san july yeah so ours from here i should say right yeah so i was i was kind of like kind of like a little bit of a kevin and so um i yeah i had had that opportunity and even on the ultimate fighter i was sneaking in pills and yeah i just um i was battling that addiction the whole time whenever i finally came through it i was like okay i need to to really set a firm foundation of like sobriety and uh and this life has always been about me it's always been about what i want and uh and which is which can be good if it's a positive outlet but whenever it was just all about me and my significance and identity and self-worth came from my success as a fighter or as a wrestler and it's a roller coaster ride of like if you win things are good if you lose things are terrible and awful right um and then yeah even if you win though and you're battling an addiction like now you have an excuse either way to use you know you want to celebrate party have fun um and then if you lose you just want to numb yourself and forget that it ever happened so you're fighting against the addiction you're fighting against the ghosts of these bullies from your past essentially you're fighting against yourself you're on mind at this point and then you kick the addiction did you kick it cold turkey by just going to congo i mean i'm trying to put the timeline together in my head yeah so for me um man i tried different stuff and um tried a little quietly you know tried to keep it under wraps and it's hard to do that with addictions that make you look sloppy or make your speech slower make you pass out and you're absolutely my teammates i i would be there for my fights uh training but then after they helped me get ready for a fight uh they have a fight coming up i would just disappear i would go off on a six week eight week long binge now man one of those times uh my best friend left me a voicemail and on the other line he said i can't believe you missed my wedding i can't believe my best oh man yeah i can't believe my best man didn't show up and so i was just a hurt dude that was hurting people i was jacked up and uh i i basically broke every relationship that i ever had um a lot of them to where it was almost beyond repair but it's i've been fortunate you know now uh now things have really changed around yeah yeah and so it's it's it's been a learning process for sure and i'm still not i'm still a work in progress that's that's for sure but um but yeah it's been six years and 10 months and 15 days uh that that the life has just kind of completely changed around did he ever forgive you for missing his wedding yeah absolutely he's we're actually texting uh i think maybe two days ago okay that's yeah because you hate to see something like that especially because weddings are important i'm having one really soon as well but i think if my if my best man was hooked on a substance i would be more worried about him than pissed off i mean i'd be pissed don't even be wrong but i'd be much more worried because your wedding is one day but an addiction is hopefully not for the rest of your life right yeah and he was a great guy supportive the whole time um but yeah you know at that time in my life all i saw was the dark cloud that i was that i left over that special day of his and so right after i heard that voicemail i turned right back to the drugs of course yeah right and had the opposite effect probably been intended right absolutely so oh man so you're you're headlining in vegas at 23 you're fighting against people uh who are i mean this is big time stuff it's not just like the local just what was the county fair challenging the guys probably couldn't make it the main event at the hard rock casino in vegas or you know the ultimate fighter getting 6.8 million viewers on average during that season it was the biggest season of the ultimate fighter ever um and yeah being able to fight guys that were the ifl champions or a really big country nelson who now has the um won the ultimate fighter that was the very controversial decision um and then yeah he's got the knockout of the night uh record in the ufc right now so i was fighting some big name guys yeah it's good to lose to somebody who goes on and just crushes it sucks when you lose to somebody they're like whatever happened to that guy that beat you and you're like yeah i never never made it anywhere then you just look like you're one rung below that schmuck right you might as well lose to a really good fighter he's killing other people too right yeah so tell me about the pygmy connection how did you go from our item to fight i'm gonna be a pro athlete to the jungles of the kongo yeah so that was a crazy process but i just wanted to to get started um doing something something with my life worthwhile um and so i started locally i mean uh and and a lot of times he occurs and why do you go over there want to help here say man well if you if you have ever been there and seen the suffering that they have it's it's on another level um but i believe in helping here there and everywhere and so that's what i started doing uh at the local um you know juvenile detention center then i went through all the classes to become an official volunteer at the children's hospital and then so i just tried to look for places i could get involved the homeless shelter you know serving meals and going there and hanging out with guys and seeing what i could do what i would feel uh kind of called to that i could dedicate my life to and so that was fun it was great um getting involved here and i was trying to do something where i don't know just i not to put a system on it but hey i can do something every week what what can i do and what can i start with and i was like i can do something every week locally maybe uh i can do something once a month nationally like look for something to get involved in and then once a year maybe i can go uh maybe i can go internationally make a difference and so that's how it kind of all started and developed um and then man this it goes back to what really helped me with my sobriety and just changed my life but just kind of my faith personal life um it uh yeah so it's a wild story but i sat down and i said a prayer god will you want me to do with my life this is to push anything on anybody but uh i always have believed in visualization um just seeing the match in your mind before you ever go wrestle see the fight in your mind before you ever go fight uh the first two fights back come back fights i wasn't doing that and i suffered because of it this third fight that you watched i visualized that fight happening basically exactly the way it did um and so but this happened effortlessly i just said what do i do with my life and i had this vision that just lit me up and i basically had a movie in my mind and uh i saw myself in the forest i was walking down a footpath i didn't know where i was but i get close and i hear this drumming and then i hear meet these people and i hear the singing and i i get my heart just crushed once i met them where it was like me and the wait what were you this is in your mind still this is a moment okay because i'm thinking what the hell are you doing in the jungle back up yeah i know i i should back up and just reiterate like i thought that i was tripping out or had some sort of mental break it does sound a little bit like lsd at work absolutely and man dude i i've i've experimented with with plenty of psychedelics and uh it was similar to that but this was more real and more vivid and uh and more it was just natural or kind of effortless where man i uh yeah i saw these people that had their ribs poking out i knew that they were hungry i knew that they were thirsty they didn't have clean water that they were poor and sick and and i knew that they were slaves like that they'd been enslaved by people and i didn't know what was going on but like the thing that struck me was that they felt forgotten and you know i cried a pot of tears this big and i've never done that before but i was like hyper ventilating crying when i came out of the vision felt nuts for three days didn't know what to do with it but i wrote it down yeah you're like i don't know who i should tell about this because i'm just starting to get my shit together yeah well it's even weird to talk about now to be honest like um but but because of what's happened since it's given me a little more more confidence to share it yeah i mean there's there's crazy stuff that happens you know and and this was the craziest thing because i could have never dreamed this i could have never thought up i didn't know where the pygmies were right and so um or where the conga was and so uh yeah three days later i told a friend of mine uh actually i just met him his name was calip or is calip and he i knew his friends were like bear grills and man versus wild oh yeah that was crazy yeah so i'm like there's a guy i could tell i mean uh maybe it's him and he won't think i'm too crazy and if he does oh well um and i won't tell anyone anymore yeah lesson there right lesson learned and so he um man he said uh those are the pygmies and i said what who because they're in the congo and i'm like where i didn't know they were still a real group of people i thought it was something from like an old movie or a fairy tale yeah well i mean they were supposed to be the in the original book uh what is it i think it's willy wonka or charlie in the chocolate factory yeah uh the original text the book um instead of oompa loompas it was the pygmies um and and he was kind of willy wonka was kind of a dark guy uh that was a dark character where was very kind and nice and um and yeah the pygmies were slaves and so um anyways yeah so i i didn't know who they were uh that was a random thing of product but uh yeah i really read them but yeah so he i don't know he told me that and he goes man i went last year i met him those are the people that you say forgotten that's them how did he meet them he was just doing a he went on like a scouting trip so this guy goes all over the world and does good good and humanitarian effort and missions work and so he just he's like man you want to go meet him come with me and uh then i found out he was taking a team of three other guys uh who all backed out because the rebels had taken over taken over the airport um and it was just uh it's chaos in kongo um it's not a they did a failed state study and they said that kongo is the only country that should be considered a non-state that is just the wild wild west and this was i think backed by oxford is a south african university that did the study and there's 38 different warring rebel groups in the east kongo well you got like minerals elements like coltan yeah diamonds coal uh i think coal yeah coal and gold gold i think i might have said yeah diamonds and gold and then you've got just lumber which is also valuable which is hard hard woods like mahogany and uh the what is it ebony and uh just different stuff out there that is is really dense heavy hardwoods that are really rare and expensive and so yeah the deforestation there's crazy i think they said in the last 20 25 years um since they started getting all the mechanical chainsaws and everything out there that the size of texas has been deforested in the kongo so just brutal i mean uh the the town that our team or well drillers are based in that used to be the rainforest now it takes six hours to get to the rainforest that's so tragic and sad but that that whole country is kind of one long sad story story with no happy ending so far yeah absolutely ever since uh even king leopold the second there's a great book called uh king leopold's ghost and it talks about that was the african holocaust where kongo at the time had about 20 million uh in population and any at least eight but up to 10 million people were killed during the time the belgians came colonized and that was because the rubber boom and ivory and so they came there and just yeah completely destroyed the country and since then it's just been a constant it's the most rich country on the planet they should be the most developed probably because of all their riches right and they're the most underdeveloped that's kind of the whole story of much of africa though is look at all these natural resources and ancient technology and now they have they're still they still have nothing i mean they don't even have water unless unless you have the villages where you've been they don't have water right so i think it's around one percent of people have access to clean water there's 74 million people in kongo that's a cute think about how huge that is because it looks on them when you look at africa on a map it just looks like this hodgepodge of random places that you can't are indistinguishable right and to have 74 million people there what is that like almost a third of the united states right it's it's huge man um and even if you look up uh just google the real size of africa you'll see how huge africa is you can fit the whole united states in there plus india plus china um and japan and like i think it's eastern or western europe you can fit that all in the continent of africa it's massive it's huge and it's just small on maps because we don't really need to look at the detail right right and so it's crazy how how big it actually is and kongo is massive and it should be so rich um but yeah it's just uh it's brutal to see people living in those circumstances the first time i went that's just it rocked me um because i wasn't prepared for it i never planned to go to africa for any reason right you just showed up because somebody a couple guys bailed on the trip and he said hey do you want to go and it's an ash here why what could how hard can it be to travel in the kongo yeah and man we went and all of a sudden we're walking down a footpath and we get close and we're drumming we're seeing i get in there and i meet these people and there's these sick people that their ribs are poking out they're hungry they're they have tuberculosis and meet the chief and and just like something hit me to where the first day i met him i was crying i had to walk away so that they didn't yeah look at this freaking out the vikings crying what's happening right now right and they actually even uh in that village they were they were actually kind of ran and hid um because they had never seen anyone with white skin before light skin there well yeah who hasn't tried to shoot them or something and take something from them maybe yeah and and this was just it was really really remote where he would go so you could see the Caleb's goal was to see do a scout trip to see the actual worst and in that way we can work from there up and so kind of backwards but um but no i i got there and man it was uh it was there's even a viral video that was on like Jimmy Kimmel the today show and all this of some of the kids from a nearby town seeing me for the first time them all rubbing my beard and my hair and my arms because i have crazy hair hair yeah and they don't have that there and so uh yeah but they ran hid behind trees whenever i came in there i think me being a big guy bearded i got the hair that might look like a lion's mane or maybe i look like a vanilla gorilla but walking through the forest vanilla gorilla is not a bad fight name it doesn't need a fall back okay there we go uh vanilla gorilla yeah and then man it just uh it wrecked me in a way hearing that they don't have a voice hearing that they are the first citizens of Congo and that they have no land of their own they've never owned land legally it's all been taken from them um and then developing relationships where it wasn't like a show up blow up and blow out of there or here we're going to give you a bunch of handouts like hey we're actually here to listen and learn and actually live with you for a little bit um and then the next trip was like i need to go live with them more to understand like it's one thing to to to read about it it's not a thing to see it um and it'll last with you when you see it but um it can go in and out of one ear when you read it but whenever you live it whenever you develop the relationships whenever you suffer from some of the sickness or some of the hunger or you know not having clean water having to boil your water having to to use filters that then break that are supposed to last for thousands of gallons but they only last for a few days out there and so uh and then the second trip man living with them uh it was like my third to last day there's a one and a half year old named andy bow that actually passed away and um yeah i i uh i was holding them and uh buried them and um it it just absolutely tore me open and ripped my heart apart and like it would i think anyone um but not knowing that kiddos are dying of dirty water every day um that 800 a day died just because of diarrhea from the dirty water and then another 2,350 children every day are dying just because of malnutrition from the dirty water so they're they're they can't absorb they can't absorb the nutrients and so it just it wracked me man and i came back and i'm like you know what if it was something that i wanted to do but in a way that was different than the model that i'd seen over there at that time at least i saw a lot of handouts but it was like isn't there a way to give them a hand up and there a way to empower them to where if if we have all the equipment to to drill wells and if i can um you know if i can go to my kitchen sink and my shower and my toilet has clean water i keep my dog clean water my can my grass has clean water um can't i uh or can't someone give them the tools to where they can do it themselves like that's what they need is the tools in their hands the job that they can have be proud of go out there and do it for themselves to where they don't have to sit back and wait for the west to come in where the government to come in or an NGO or church or anything like they can do it for themselves it's that whole difference you know either give a man a fish or teach him how to fish right right you know you can feed him for a day or feed him for a lifetime and then uh if you empower people truly with that that was something that i i realized like man charity can be great but opportunity is always better um and i saw charity hurting people crippling them a lot of the communities that got these handouts um they didn't want it they didn't want it like they're take it because it was available right there and the ones that that learned to take it and learn to just over and over like it's almost like they would develop a dependence mentality of hey when these people come we're dependent on their markets are crashed from our foreign right because we just completely subsidize all the stuff so they can't grow their own stuff because we're giving away free corn or rice absolutely they can't compete how can they compete with american grown rice or or from china or india that is free or even if on a talking about just the market it's cheaper than what they can produce themselves and so it puts all these farmers out of business depletes the the crops that are out there i mean they just they it's it's so jacked up the way that that aid has been done the charity has been done and there's a better way and there's a more sustainable way even some of the the you know the social entrepreneurship is really big right now and i love it i love the heart behind it even charity the heart is good the intent is good yeah i don't think they're like let's crash these mobile markets right now let's give them a bunch of free stuff and ruin their lives right it's like oprah you get a car you get a car and they should they say like we couldn't afford the taxes on the car and it's like oh that was totally not the idea behind giving away cars yeah yeah and so it's just where it's like how do we do it in an even social entrepreneurship to where the whole buy one give one um that's that that can be really good if it's when you give one you're actually giving one by creating jobs in their country to where then they get to make it themselves and sell it themselves and then they get to put money in their pockets or put their kids into to school or buy some food or or invest in themselves um but if you just buy one here and then you go over there and you just give it away now you're hurting the guy if you do that with shoes you know you're hurting the cobbler the true salesman but yeah so it's just how do you do it in a way that is more appropriate for the people there their country their context their culture um to where it makes a long lasting impact instead of uh i heard this thing where someone was saying that that the short term disasters around the world oftentimes because of the foreign aid turns it turns into a worse long term disaster sure i can see that because of the things we just mentioned markets crashing and getting rid of the if the farmers go out of business instead of being temporarily bolstered by the aid then as soon as the aid dries up they're like oh crap now we can't even grow food we don't even have people doing this yeah how did you end up there for a year you went once and then you just went i'm going to pack a backpack and live in a hut i mean how does where's the where's the story there i went i went there twice um beforehand for about a month and stayed and lived with them and that's the second time was when andy bow happened and uh i was just like you know i came back and i was in uh my parents had some land like two or three acres and i was at home depot and i was on a website uh that don't go try to drill well this way but it's uh how to drill your own well that way yeah we'll we'll link to that just so you know what not to do yeah and so i was getting parts from home depot and trying to see if i could just go drill it myself and go over there and teach them how to do it um because the thing that the place we were going to you're not going to be able to drill first off i wasn't i didn't think i was going to be able to fundraise for a half a million dollar or a million dollar drilling rig and then the roads that you go on i mean it's dangerous there's rebel groups the bridges collapse and then the villages are in the trees i mean in the forest and so how do you drive a truck out there you gotta be yeah you don't it's just not possible and so where the most need was it wasn't possible to do it in the standard way so we got to be able to have these tools that we can hike into the forest and so luckily i came across an organization called water four we partnered with uh my our nonprofit initiative fight for the forgotten we told them what we wanted to do that our vision was to empower the locals that i already had over those two trips found some great guys we had four guys that were just outstanding they're just sitting there waiting for the opportunity they're all college educated with community development degrees but some of them were working at the market selling meat and another guy was selling sim cards these are guys that were just had great hearts that loved the people we wanted to serve um but they needed an opportunity to have a job to do it and so it was just really cool how water four trained me up to go over there to train them up and then yeah it's been really awesome to see it take off where in that year that i was there i mean i helped drill the first 13 water wells um but now the next year when i came back you know people people think like when you leave a lot of the charity mindset is if i leave it's going to all fall apart yeah well it will if it's dependent on you right if you you could because you gotta teach them how to fish right exactly right and so the next year i was actually i did have some fears and insecurities or just are we sure that they're going to be able to uh to do it not not really because they're so rock solid but but still you want to be part of it and you want to be a big part of it and so i went from almost a leader to i guess i could say cheerleader you know like i went from from showing them how to do it to then being in the background and cheering them on saying you can do this um and yeah they're able to crank out 20 water wells next year this last year they did 29 and so we're up to 62 um which has just been incredible 3000 acres of land for the Mobuti Pygmies they have land of their own are you buying the land with them for them from the state or from those other tribes or something right absolutely from both uh from either like land that doesn't have titles on it that that we could relocate them to or from the locals there that benefits them for selling the land and so it actually helps both sides of the community to where we buy land back that is legally in the name of the pygmies so that they have land for the first time um and yeah they get to live on it they get to have clean water both sides um and then we get to come in with a farming initiative to where they're able to learn to to grow their own food for the first for the pygmies for the first time and now uh in Mobuti they're able to go to the market they weren't able to make it there the first couple of times but they have their own banana trees and their own cornfields and they had surplus so that they they couldn't eat it all and didn't have a place to store it really so they go to the market and on the roadside people are all buying it from them on their way there and uh so it's really cool to see what they've been able to do from that make money and invest in themselves you know be able to buy clothes for their kids and be able to send them to school it's the first time the pygmies in that area or maybe ever in conga have been in school paying their own school fees wow and everything else so it's just been kind of transformative what water can do water changes everything so you're drilling me as well how deep is the water how deep do you have to drill uh it's different but in the rainforest it's not as deep as some of the parts of the world but 60 to 90 feet deep is our sweet spot okay that's that's much more shallow because it looks like in some of the videos it's a glorified coffee can picking up this light colored clay out of a hole that's I don't know maybe a little bit thinner than a telephone pole yeah and they're just going in and up and in and up and in and up and let's just get down 10 10 to 12 inches at a time it must just take how long does it take weeks in some of the countries that water fours and they can do three five seven days and drill a new well last in the congo because of the circumstances and and it'd be the rainforest and getting out there and going really deep and hiking everything in sometimes where just to get from the truck out to the forest it can be an hour hike two hour hike three hour hike to unload our equipment so to take it in and come back and pick it back up and so that's a can be a six hour round trip to the truck oh man so it takes 10 to 16 days in the congo yeah yeah well it's obviously well worth it so you're drilling these these water wells in each village and how many people live in a village and how close are these villages to one another man at all it all really varies but the average from a booty pigmy village is anywhere from 85 to 150 people but all of ours are more around 300 because there's just more opportunity more opportunity to help more people with a single well right and they have land ownership for the first time and so a lot of them you know some the chiefs are saying you know my grandchildren are going to be able to say this was my grandfather's land to their you know children and grandchildren and so it's it's a the pickings have been semi-nomadic you know they they are hunter gatherers so they travel around but whenever they have the opportunity to land for their first time they just settled and it's been great to see but water is not the only problem I mean they're enslaved by another tribe or other tribes in general yeah so not just one tribe but we just say the makapala which means the non-pigmies in the pigmy language oh I thought these these bastards yeah this tribe is all enslaved but that just means like outsider yeah okay basically because we don't want to villainize one one tribe there's over 200 tribes in the Congo and there's several that are doing it but then some of those tribes are outside of the Congo where the pigmies don't even live and so if we say these are the people doing it you know the people in Uganda or Kenya or some guy in New York's like bro yeah I've never had a slave I swear never even met me they're not even in our country exactly um so we just go with what the pigmy say which is non-pigmies and yeah so that that was a process and and we've been able to help 10 villages in that way so we've drilled 62 wells the only 10 of them we've been able to see like a peaceful pretty awesome transition that's even being sponsored now by the local governor of that state that's like man we need the pigmies to have their own land for the first time so we're coming in on the local state and national level and sponsoring this and so we have all the legal documents where we come in and and yet buy back the land for the pigmies but it's in their name they get to pass it down from generation to generation and so we've seen about over 1500 people transition out of a life of slavery and then do life of freedom but then they're able to go back and still work for them but now it's for pay instead of just for scraps speaking of pay you're throwing your fight purse if they still call it that to to what land and wells land water and food initiatives in the Congo so when you talk about finding purpose yeah that's a big task yeah so instead of spending it on oxy you're spending it on a well yeah much much better more rewarding yeah absolutely much better outlet and uh yeah so it's basically a fighter gets a show amount and one amount and so the show amount we live off of in the one amount we give so it's about 50 50 um I just love that and the sponsors that I have uh we we've transitioned everything to where it's like hey you want to sponsor me let's sponsor wells and so which is better for them right because they can maybe write some of that off and then maybe get a little bit more instead of paying for some shorts yeah and so I'm learning on the business side of things that's what we do in the Congo start up social enterprise where you know they get to have their own business and they're their own boss and to have employees and it can run you know by itself it doesn't need us if something happens to me in the ring right they're going to be able to keep doing this work and so but yeah it's it's something that yeah it's just truly rewarding I was amazed when I heard there were 27 million slaves in the world yeah that was shocking because I thought first of all when you said oh you know these in the video that I watched these people are enslaved I thought wow that must be like the only slavery left anywhere in the middle of the jungle but then you said there's 27 million slaves and I thought where the hell are these people yeah what's going on how's that even possible yeah so all around the world that that takes um from that that stat takes from you know even sex trafficking but India and China and all over the place where they're you know working in the uh you know the mines and I'm forgetting what that's called but the quarries quarries yeah quarries and uh yeah but I've seen that with my eyes in Congo and the gold mines the diamond mines with coal tan which is in their smartphones and everything else but yeah isn't that nuts that there's more slaves today than ever in human history on earth which is shocking yeah because you think gee when there were slaves in Europe or slaves in the United States imagine how many slaves there were in America when we had slavery it's a huge country now there are actually more even though it's been abolished everywhere that you can think of anywhere with cell phones pretty much right anywhere with electricity you're thinking now they don't have slaves there right it's not true Africa's loaded and and Asia Africa's loaded Asia's loaded India's loaded um and even the countries that condemn it uh it's still going on silently and they just make sure that they don't highlight that it's going on in their country so does that count just really crappy business arrangements like I know there's a lot of Filipino guest workers in Saudi Arabia that are basically slaves only they're allowed some pittance I think yeah I think I think it does include uh kind of like the economic slavery or what yeah that should certainly it's whenever you're not getting paid it's whenever you have no control no power all everything uh all the power is taken out of your hands and your only way to survive is to be a slave for this person how does the clean water intersect with the slavery issue yeah so that's been really great we didn't even really see it coming but uh whenever we you know sit with the community listen to their needs brainstorm together include them in on that process to where they really feel a part of the initiative of the change in their own community like they had to say it wasn't us coming in and saying we have the answer get out of the way we're going to do this for you it was hey let's come up with a solution together we say to Mika Bimoja in Swahili which basically means uh let's work together on this and so um both sides the Makapala in the pygmies the non-pygmies in the pygmies the slave masters and the slaves were both suffering so much from not having clean water um the pygmies uh I mean I've been to three funerals uh of the little guys that actually seen and held and everything else well Andy Bobo and Siku but um but yeah I've been to about five or seven funerals total which were of the slave master kids uh two or sorry yeah there are the people with the power that actually were making money but the thing is that they only make about a dollar dollar 25 per day and so there's these people that do have all the power because they're the slave master but they are suffering immensely they're incredibly impoverished and so how do we come alongside them and say if this is the actually sitting down with one of the slave masters who was also the chief in this one village that worked with us he said maybe for my grandfather this arrangement was very beneficial to him so my father too but it started to take a real shift and turn events to where now it's become uh you know how do I feed my own family on a dollar dollar 25 a day and then how do I take care of these other people right so it started seems like they they had slaves so that they could essentially get by on the pitons that they had but if you solve the water issue it sort of demilitarizes the arrangement where it's like look you know you can support yourself you'll have clean water you'll survive the condition is you stop picking on these folks yeah absolutely and so and it's all agreed upon to where the they know how much they're suffering without clean water whenever their wives or their daughters who they can't send to school even if they have the money to pay they can't send their little girl to school because she needs to go collect water out of that horrible walking 3.75 miles is the average walk for a woman in Africa to go collect water most times it's dirty and so almost all times it's dirty so you're walking you know round trip 3.75 miles with a can of water minimum of one time a day but normally two to three times a day and this is a 20 liter jerrycan or two 20 liter jerrycans which whenever that five gallons is filled is 44 pounds so these women and children are walking who are four foot five or whatever absolutely are walking this long walk and even the the muckpawler you know average sized people um they're they're walking this walk with them and so being able to come in there and say hey we can end this walk there's over there's over a billion work days every year that are lost because of the water walks that women have to do and so the time that they spend doing that when you come into a community and you're able to solve that problem they are freed up in so many ways to focus their time and energy on things that are important and so because they recognize that that their suffering is going to end in so many ways and they're going to be freed up to to focus on what's important instead of just going and making sure you can survive that day by drinking this dirty water and hope that it doesn't give you typhoid or E. coli or cholera or some kind of intestinal parasite that can slowly kill you you know it's a game changer so when you buy the land you've bought over 25 000 acres for the pygmies to live on okay so I love the video was older so I wonder yeah that was 2470 acres okay yeah wow now it's 3000 and what so what's the real estate market like in the jungle in the Congo yeah so it's it's varying but if we wanted to buy it in our name this is another reason we we wanted to do it in the best way for the people but then also the most logical way on the government kind of level it was going to be hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions for us as a nonprofit to go buy land and hold those papers we were working with the local university and we wanted them to almost be the caretakers but that was still going to be really expensive but whenever we bought it in the name of a people in the name of a tribe that is the most respected way to do in Congress the thing that stands up in court the most that's the most powerful thing to do because they get to pass it down from generation to generation that way so man it brought down our acre cost to hundreds of dollars per acre so really you can buy whole farms for the less less than the price of a freaking jacket yeah for a laptop computer yeah absolutely that's right but if you do it for the people it's not for you to come in there and do it for yourself right they're not gonna put McDonald's there right exactly and so uh and with the the long-standing relationships with the people if they trust you because it takes a while to build up to trust with the locals in the community for them to see that there truly isn't um you know that it's truly for their best interests is what our heart is and that we're not coming in there you know even having well drilling equipment I mean these you saw the equipment it looks like you could be going for gold or diamond or gold in yeah um and so to prove to them that hey we're not the you know people watching are they are they really looking for for minerals or are they really helping us with water it's like once they see that they're really getting the water uh trust starts to build I would imagine word starts to travel though like no they dug well for this guy they would dug a well over there they dug a well over there yeah and it's helped it's helped spread and our biggest advocates are chief leo man chief elando who were the first two picnic chiefs to buy in and now we get to take them to the other villages or other villages come to them and ask whenever we're not around you know hey did this really work and they're like hey we were a part of the process from from the beginning to the end of all the development the community development we were included in on that process did they have their own language or you speak swahili swahili so they have their own languages so the local language and then they have they speak swahili but the national language is french um and they have uh well they have five national languages and so there's a funny quote that is uh that tanzania or sorry swahili was born in tanzania it got sick in Kenya it died in Uganda it was buried in the Congo and so they can't even communicate with each other from Congo to tanzania really uh that's just everything's lost in translation what's the thing that you say in all you you show up in these videos and i you actually are a really good natured guy because i've seen you with like big black eyes in your videos and i wouldn't be in such good humor if i got punched in the face 48 hours prior to my youtube video i'm not i'm not even in that grade of a mood when i don't have tea in the morning so i can imagine when you show up just beat up you know you have that higher sense of purpose what is the the pygmy language that you're speaking in the beginning where you say hi to your peeps over there yeah so that that's just a really broken swahili okay but yeah i'm basically in chiniango efeosa mabutimang bo nafika hapa kuapinda uh i'm a goo i'm a goo basically what i'm saying is hey my name is everyone there calls me efeosa my family in the tribe which means the man who loves us um but then mabutimang bo means uh the big pygmy and so that's what everyone else calls me um and then i say hey i'm in here uh because i love you whenever i'm you know after the fight i say that and then i'm a goo i'm a goo basically means we are one we're not different um i love that saying you know we're one we're not different i'm a goo i'm a goo and uh yeah there's just so much beautiful stuff even their swahili proverbs you know they say if you want to go fast go alone but if you want to go far go together or they say if you think you're too small to make a difference try to sleep in a closed room with a mosquito and there's just so many things that are that are so uh encouraging about their culture i've learned so much i've grown so much i've become a better person um i've discovered a life that i can live that that's bigger than me that's uh like i get to add value to my life but to the lives of others and whenever you do good for them it actually comes back and makes you feel really good and it's helped me stay straight you know from my sobriety and so yeah it's kind of it's kind of weird because you're doing it all hopefully with the heart and intention to truly help them but at the same time you're helping yourself um and so it's it's it's a beautiful circle whenever you do in a way that's slow and steady and strategic uh to to not get too big for your britches to not uh to to not walk all over them and say okay we got this thing now i know how to do it here's the blueprint here's the cookie cutter solution and then think that that's gonna work from this village to that village you know you gotta go in there and spend the time take the time to listen till we learn when you showed up in the jungle and you're like i'm gonna stay here for a year how did you arrange that i i can't really imagine you and hey i'm gonna build one of these little huts over here and i'll see you guys every single day for the next 365 days yeah well it was it was similar to that we found the team and we were like hey if we come in with this well drilling equipment they already went to work on the land um it looked like we were going to be able to secure that deal if we're actually bringing be able to bring in some some development some water and some food initiatives maybe even housing down the line and yeah so yeah it it came about just saying hey let's i'll i'll go all in if this if this is working it started developing a way that that we went we went with like $15,000 of well drilling equipment there and uh $50,000 of funds to hopefully drill uh 12 water wells we made the 13 there yeah there are a lot of challenges uh along the way um a lot of sickness yeah did you get sick yeah i did with malaria three times yeah i was only once or none but uh yeah the first time i had malaria it was brutal because uh yeah i i got so sick i was vomiting red and green eventually which was blood and bile oh good yeah i've never seen those things so right doesn't smell good either um sorry for you those listen that's gross it's so gross disgusting but i got this little mosquito uh almost knocked me out for good i um i lost 33 pounds in five days i lost my peripheral vision completely it was like tunnel vision uh the rest was completely blurry sounded like i had a bees hive in my ears constantly my fever would spike up to over one of three and then it would plummet down to 96 something um yeah 65 to 70 percent of my bloodstream were parasites from the malaria oh that's disgusting yeah and so it was basically i was almost in a coma whenever i landed in Uganda how do they even fix that how do they get you so they got you out of there somehow yeah they got me out of there um once and they didn't even when i left the the doctors three or four different doctors were arguing one doctor was saying he does have malaria but all the others were saying but it's not showing up on the test turns out the quick tests they were using were expired and some different stuff oh man and uh so yeah i went off to Uganda found out there and there was just a great doctor actually named doctor happy okay yeah that took care ironically yeah ironically and uh and it did make me happy that she was a great doctor and was able to take care of me they seem malaria there's so much that they're specialists in treating it so as long as you aren't in that coma um they're able to to normally bring it back so what did they do they just give you a bunch of pills and an ivy uh an ivy uh constantly around the clock and they had doctors working on me for i think it was at least three days giving me an ivy's but i think it was five days um and it took me two or three weeks to be able to start eating kind of whole food again because uh i was basically drinking juice the whole time uh and eating smushed up bananas because my soft guess was raw from that while and everything else um so it was brutal man i mean i i've i've got a little scar here i don't know if you can see that oh yeah a little brown hatch on your skin yeah that was from a scorpion out there uh it stung me i was in the middle of the night got up got out of the hut because yeah we we want to live exactly the way they live right so that we have this heart connection like hey we're we're on the same level we're looking eye to eye with you uh we understand um we're at least we're trying we're truly trying to understand and yeah this uh i got up in the middle of the night it was just in the moonlight and uh and kicked up some leaves when i was taking the leak and uh the scorpion got me and but the chief got up and uh and rallied the troops they went and found the the kind of leaves and i think roots not the poison but the kind they mashed up right and were able to put on there and starting to suck out uh or draw out the venom or the poison out of me and then i had broke out in a fever my teeth were chattering oh man my joints were aching um but they were able to put that on there and it actually started to pull that back out of me it seems like it would be so uncomfortable to be in a situation like that for a year scorpions fevers how long does the malaria fever last man it's different the last two times i think because you know i i was lucky to survive the first one the last two times have been i wouldn't say mild but but a whole lot better than that first one um so the first one was brutal i didn't i actually forgot to say i i didn't urinate for a full five days and i had something called black water fever um and so it's basically where your kidneys are failing oh man and it looks like darker than black coffee uh what do you finally do get to urinate and get that release oh man so it was it was brutal but the last few times weren't so bad um if i had intestinal bacterias and parasites and all this stuff but but i just have to you know in that moment even the first time i got it i was almost uh in a weird way um thankful for the opportunity to understand what they go through all the time and so it just allowed me to have another set of compassion or empathy or understanding um and and be like man like this is this sucks yeah yeah no kid there's gotta be a solution there's gotta be an answer so now when you fight in vegas in the shower it takes too long to warm up you're like hey no big deal yeah it's all right if the power's off or whatever it's it's pretty good well thanks for doing what you're doing and thanks for coming on the show today man thank you for having me man love the podcast so if people want to get involved with the charity and check that stuff out check out your youtube videos we'll link to that in the show notes but what if they want to dig a well in congo yeah i mean we are absolutely open to that and that's that fight for the forgotten dot work there's all the information right there um being a well uh the transformation that bring in not just the water well but employ the people there and then also do the wash program that's around forty two hundred dollars but um but to make it a bite-size amount twenty five dollars a month that changes the lives of fifteen people throughout the course of a year but they'll have clean water for the rest of their lives because yeah we get to empower the locals not just to drill it but also be able to repair it if anything happens thank you so much man thank you that was a super interesting show the stories are incredible the fact that he just went to the jungle for a year and decided i'm gonna live in a little hut and make these people my family is really funny and if you want to look up justin's videos on youtube they're worth it the kids and the pygmy people are just really cute and endearing and he's so much bigger than them he's literally twice the size of a lot of these people great big thank you to justin for coming by today and doing that he's got a book we'll link that in the show notes and most importantly we'll link to a lot of these videos that we talked about during the show in the show notes as well including the fight that he had his comeback one of his comeback fights here with an awesome speech at the end and it's a short one he made short work of his opponent in that one if you enjoyed this one don't forget to thank justin on twitter we'll have that linked in the show notes as well i'd love it if you'd tweet at me your number one takeaway from justin ren i'm at the art of charm on twitter and remember if you want those show notes you can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the show notes for this episode we'll link to the show notes right on your phone if you're interested in our live programs our aoc boot camps that's at the art of charm dot com slash boot camp join thousands of other guys who've been through the program who'll become your network for life all around the world we've had people backpacking through europe working at art of charm meeting up when traveling couch surfing even gotten jobs informed lifelong friendships and frankly the growth that people experience during and mostly after the boot camp is astounding and amazing and it's just one of the best parts of running the show and the company here that's the art of charm dot com slash boot camp and also if you want to dip your toes in the water join the aoc challenge at the art of charm dot com slash challenge or you can text the word charmed char med to three three four four four the challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you and of course we'll send you the fundamentals toolbox that i mentioned earlier on the show which includes great practical stuff ready to apply right out of the box on reading body language having great nonverbal communication the science of attraction negotiation techniques networking and influence strategies persuasion and mentorship and everything else that we teach here at the art of charm it'll make you a better network or a better connector and of course a better thinker that's the art of charm dot com slash challenge or text charmed char med to three four four four here in the states for full show notes for this in all previous episodes head on over to the art of charm dot com slash podcast this episode of aoc was produced by jason defilipo jason sanderson is our audio engineer and editor and the show notes on the website are by robert fogerty theme music by little people transcriptions by transcription outsourcing net i'm your host jordan harbinger go ahead tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else either in person or shared on the web word of mouth really is everything so share the show with friends and enemies stay charming and as they say in swahili achakila kitu musuri goliko oyokuta in other words leave everything in every one better than you found them