Joe Rogan & Steve Rinella on Guyana and Jonestown

Hello freak bitches boom and we're live speaking of vacations tell me about Guyana Yeah, that's a good segue. You've been there a bunch. No I thought was three no I was in no 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 Amerindians Are those people weirded out by Americans? Because the Jonestown Massacre thing is really so funny you bring up Jonestown because there's a couple things I've been surprised like The the the the the main group I was with in Guyana is the makushi and I was surprised one day when I was a cook they make a dish they make a dish with Kasava, which is a root like maniac They make a dish with that they make a flower from it and make a dish and I was one day saying that hey That's a that looks like pizza, right? No, all right, 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 just consider such a part of everyday life. He didn't know what it was. Yeah, and they don't know about Georgetown. Whoa Even those in their own country They don't know about it at all. No, it's just not but yeah Like we'll get into this we got to like realize sort of how insular You know and the Amerindian communities are Who live in the in the jungle in Guyana? Yeah, they have communication on any More and more now and there's a lot a lot changed the two times I went there with her five or six years apart they discovered sunglasses and I remember the first time I was down there trying to turn them on because uh, You know, they they they 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 Polarize the lenses are invaluable. I feel lost without him. Yeah, they're amazing fish underwater And I kept saying man You got to get on board of polarized sunglasses not hand into him He didn't like it this guy roving he 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 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 Guyana. All anybody says is don't drink the Kool-Aid, right? You know, it was 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 there's a couple things that are important here what the poison was Right. So we had a conversation I Let me back up the root. I mentioned they make a salva. Yeah, so there's a root cassava and it's like the poisonous stuff Yeah, so it's the root that gives all life They that's what they call it. No, but I mean they eat fish in game okay River fish and wild game and then that's like a staple that they eat every day and the other thing they 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 they cultivate these yams and from it They make a flower They make a type of grain. It's like couscous They make a syrup That's used as a coloring agent and a flavoring agent. They make a non-alcoholic drink They make a somewhat alcoholic drink It would be like an equivalent to beer and then they make a much more alcoholic drink Which would be an equivalent like fortified wine Wow, they make all this stuff from this this root that they grow In its raw form when you shred the root and Squeeze the shredding so it'd be like imagine you took a yam and shredded a yam and then squeeze the yam between your hands And tripped out a liquid that liquid is deadly poisonous Okay dogs chickens people anything that drinks that liquid dies Jesus and it's cyanide so the Joes town massacre It was a cocktail of The best people think that it was Kool-Aid flavor aid Valium and potassium cyanide My question coming home from Ghana was like did they was the cyanide From the root were they like doing homemade cyanide, but it's when I got home I looked into this and it's in its scenes is that that commune Joes town commune Had been ordering Actual potassium cyanide which is used in a number of mining Practices and other stuff so it's an available. It's an available compound They laced the Kool-Aid with I'd heard about this cassava stuff And what do they know what the process is like did they know like how people figured out how to make it non-poisonous? No help wow. It's just been done so long Yeah, and the same stuff with like different poisons. They used to poison that people use to poison fish What strikes me about it is how in the village like the village the makushi village I was in Is mostly makushi, but there's also like Wapashana, which is another tribe Carib is another tribe, but it's predominantly a makushi village, and there's about 300 people with a living this village And how careless they are with the liquid like if you nowadays like picture like you're like the type of person that like You and me are married to and raised kids with right if you had that type of mom and you had a big bowl Of a liquid that would kill you if you drank a bit How that bowl would be monitored in your household Jesus Christ, they'd be right barbed wire around it electrical fence Just lays they just lay it out, and I said I was asked this guy wrote him like him in uh I Kept returning to this there's certain things I can't would always ask him just like things that he struggled to understand my fixation on it, but I kept saying to This makushi guy rovin who I should back up to I got communication so guy I was eating it's the only English-speaking country in South America Everyone's ago. No no 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 its bordered on the east by Suriname on the west by Venezuela To the south by Brazil It's 90% virgin rainforest and within that 90% of virgin rainforest is only 10% of the population so the coastal peoples are Creole cultures people mostly descended from slave trade Europeans in the interior are the Amerindian 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 inner and it used to be barely any interplay between the Amerindian 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 Amerindian communities and some people like this guy rovin because he's sort of a upping he's like a He has a leadership role in his community, and he's learned just standard English very well He's had a fascinating life. Just how much stuff has changed for him So I you can just like converse okay in a way that You 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 shamans and their own shaman Putting curses on each other and it like creates like there's like a 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 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 closed caption And he'd be saying it in the indigenous language Because it sounds weird to have to have an idea that's so foreign to us Which would be like a battle of shamans battling over access to wild animals, okay? To have that delivered in conversational English just struck me as unusual and because like usually when you're traveling you're getting all of your information Like traveling in Bolivia a guy would tell a story and he'd tell a story in Simshian no one must say not simshian chamone, okay He tells story in chamone to a person who spoke Spanish the person who speaks Spanish would tell it to a person No, no, no Chamone guy telling someone who speaks chamone 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 Through that it takes on a mystical quality like you're crossing some space-time thing Right, we're seeing like these ideas Disgusting 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 you've never like when he's speaking it like I've never in all my travels I've never heard a language that sounds anything like that. Is the video online? Yeah, it's online What it was do you know the title of it? It's I think if you type in like chamone TSI Chamone jaguar See attack see if Jamie you'll pull it up. It's very cool. The language is really amazing. So seems so ancient Yes, it's not like has nothing to do with like the Latin languages just sound so it sounds 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 right is why I love it's kind of like what's so cool about Guyana because you can go and converse with with people who Are very much a hunter-gatherer culture today, but just shoot the shit with them without ever feeling like you're missing something This is like the everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and in 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 And so they trade spells. Yeah. Well, yeah, we'll talk about that. But I feel like I was laying the groundwork for The Jim Jones poison. Did you find the video? I lost the word that you were spelling the TSI M-a-n-e TSI M-a-n-e. What does that mean? Chemani. That's how they spell it. I could be screwed up You know, you see you spell a lot worse when you're not actually writing it out. Yeah, I'm terrible Oh, I don't know how anybody wins a spelling bee ever Chemani is TSI Yeah, so if you type in Chemani Jaguar TSI M-a-n-e Jaguar Wow The whole thing is an Amerindian hunter remembers his best dog lost to a jaguar in the jungles of Bolivia All right. Here we go. Let's play this cuz it's fucking awesome Here we go Following is an interview with a member of the Chemani tribe of Bolivia do their inherent difficulties of translating indigenous languages subtitles are at times approximate 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 enjoyed the adventure I love trekking through the jungle Say everything once I was hunting with my favorite dog and a couple of dogs They ran ahead barking. They were going after something All of a sudden my favorite dog just went completely silent see good You see good. They're about 50 meters ahead of me when I got there the other dogs had gone ahead after something I Say my favorite dogs lying there dead there's a big hole in his right side almost looking 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 Do we cover the do 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 was involved in a pentecostal church. He's involved in the methodist church then he kind of became a healer and Started his own colt 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 of his time because the jim jones massacre was 1979 and uh 78 or 79 And one thing that got him sideways with his church was that he wanted to have an interracial service 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 gaiana go out to the jungle You know a thousand of them down there People in the u.s. From the bay area are 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 congressman says, you know, he's like i'm gonna help anyone who wants to go back to the bay area go back to the bay area He goes to the airstrip. There's a shootout the congress the u.s congressman gets killed in the shootout And then they just all start killing themselves with the poison And firearms and other shit 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 town or the you know The jim jones jones town massacre never drink the kool-aid. They're like no Oh See i'd heard it was it was budget kool-aid No, that's a some of it was and I and that's a debate and in 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, and I think kool-aid even tried to distance himself from it. It was cool But they oh there's like some archival stuff and I guess in this archival stuff Images like footage taken around and photographs around people have found out that they had both flavor aid And kool-aid on hand. That's hilarious. What was kool-aid propaganda that's trying to pass the buck on the flavor aid So yeah, no no thing there. And if you go so so if you go up The main river that drains uh, the main river that drains guy on is the essequibo and if you go way up the essequibo and um, You'll get to a in a stream that comes in from there called the rupa nuni and you go up the rupa nuni And then you get to the riva and at the mouth of the riva in rupa nuni is riva village and in riva village you're uh Isolated enough where you don't know about 900 americans and some other people from other areas not, you know dying in a mass suicide. Wow That's around the time you were born that's fascinating that it's why it makes sense though, but they're just so removed from it Yeah, do they um, do they use agriculture? Like how are they getting this cassava? 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 the spot out in the jungle. Um But it's like it's like a recycled sort of slash and burn agriculture 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, it looks like big yams When you grow it You just take a stalk of an existing plant And just bury that stalk 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 have like they are 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 six months you have a crop that'll be coming in nine months and Once you get a certain number of cycles, I can't remember how many cycles you get off a 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 plant 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 And that's the only fertilizer you're giving it is you're burning some of the surrounding Just detritus scraped up from the jungle floor that you burn there and grow it and it is a staple Of life that in a river fish and 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