Rogan & Callen Talk Africa, Mosquitoes, and Scary Animals

But that thing in the Congo meant it's apparently in a very difficult spot to reach. It's very dangerous to go through there. When Justin Ren goes through there, he has some hair-raising stories about being held up at gunpoint, where people thought they were going to kill somebody. A lot of the people, apparently, a lot of the soldiers and people that committed atrocities from the war in Rwanda, in their bands, moved into the Congo and lived in the jungle. Who knows? Justin is a fucking... A lot of crime. Justin Ren is a saint. That guy's a... He digs wells. He's a legitimate saint. Yeah. Really is. Great guy. He's got malaria three times. God. Visiting the Congo and building wells. Unbelievable. It's amazing. Yeah, he told us some amazing stories. Heartbreaking. It's amazing. The Cash App, which is one of my sponsors, also sponsors Fight for the Forgotten. They give people... They give five dollars every time someone signs up and uses the code JOROGAN. And they're building wells right now because of that. Really? Yeah. What was the latest number? I forget what the number was. They sent me an update. Very early on, they had built two wells and then they built a bunch more and provided water to a shit ton of people down there. I don't know the exact statistics. The guy who wrote Moonwalking with Einstein, what the hell is this? He had a book about memory and stuff. Really smart guy. He lived with the Pygmies in the Congo for a long time. Oh, well that's what Justin Renz is doing. It's all Pygmies. Yeah, and said that they smoke copious amounts of wheat, at least the tribes that he lived with. Is that the book? Yeah, Joshua 4. 4. Really interesting. What a name. The Foyar 4. Yeah. I've never seen that name. What is it? These are people that truly have been almost untouched by Western civilization. He's like, well no, they die of stupid things like you get an infection and you don't have antibiotics. Well, there's a lot of bacteria and parasites and stuff too that get stomach parasites from water. Skin diseases and weird things like that. The jungle's not, even if you've evolved to live in it, it's not a very... I spent enough time in the Indonesian rainforest. I've never seen bugs like that in my life. I've never seen anything like it. It's so loud. I was like, take the loudest street in Manhattan, and I'm not kidding. That's how loud the insects and birds and everything are. And then you have to carry a... Bug spray does not work. Did I ever tell you this? Bug spray, you got to carry a sulfur coil? Yeah. Good luck with the mosquitoes. Bug spray, they laugh at your bug spray. You have to burn a sulfur coil. And just carry it, hold it when you're walking? That's correct. Is there any time for the day when you wake up? They just, they're all over the place. What year was this that you were doing this? God, I was 21. Did they have thermos cells back then? I don't think so. Yeah, thermos cells are the shit. Have you ever used a thermos cell? No, what is that? Oh my God, they're a fucking game changer. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a device that has a heating coil in it and some fuel. And you ignite it, and the heating coil, it heats up, and you put this little pad across the screen. And this little pad has this stuff in it that mosquitoes hate. It's probably terrible for you. Yeah, I was gonna say. Some fucking chemical. Some chemical wafts up in the air, and I'm telling you, it creates a 10-foot bubble around you where no mosquitoes get in. That's great. Yeah, and look, even if it's a little bad for you, maybe it's like smoking a pack of cigarettes. Better than getting fed on. Yeah, I'm not using it every day. I wouldn't recommend using it every day, but if it's the difference between like in joint, like if you're in a place like Alaska. Exactly. Yeah. Where, weren't you, what about Edmonton up there? Yes, same thing. You came back with like, oh, the jack. It looks like the pox. They'll fuck you up, those mosquitoes, man. Yeah, they're so aggressive because they're only alive for like three months, you know? So cold up there. Yeah, nature could give a fuck about you. I love people who are into nature and they, like, listen, man. They don't even know what nature is. Yeah, go try to, exactly. Go try to raise crops in South Africa when animals, when elephants were all everywhere. And lions and leopards. Or now. Yeah. Even now, these poor villagers, they're poor, and they build these crops, and they have this farm and they have all this food for their village, and then elephants roam in. 20 elephants go, hey man. That's a wrap. Yeah. There's nothing you can do. You're not going to go, get the fuck out of here. They're like, I'll stomp on you. I mean, and then people get mad when people shoot the elephants. It's like, okay, I get it, but I don't know what you want here. Like, what? They have a lot of stories about, elephants have this mystique in South Africa. There was this guy who was a farmer and he had a donkey and it was tied up and the elephants came into his property and he shot guns and got them the hell away from there. And then the next day, the elephants came back and stomped his fucking donkey into mush. Whoa. Just stomped. The donkey was on a rope and they were like, really? Gang, gang, gang. And then of course, the other, the neighboring farm when the elephants came, she laid out a bunch of food for them and they spared her her crops. All these elephants have this mystique, which is all, by the way, maybe the biggest day holes in the world. They hate everybody, but they were so nice. I was in Thailand. I was, yeah, there's a Thai elephant, sir. They're different. African elephants. You're not, you're not taming an African elephant. Good luck. Most of the elephants you see, what is this Jamie? Okay. Jamie's watching like this little buffer. It gets up. Oh my God. Yeah. Elephant came over and rolled it over. Yeah. They don't give a fuck about you. He's trying to stab him. He is. Oh, he does. He's killing. So he's killing a baby. I don't know. That's probably a full grown Buffalo. That's just a giant elephant. Wow. So he's fucking up this Buffalo. They're so dangerous. You're going to look it up. Yeah. Elephant stabs and kills Buffalo. Look at that. Jesus Christ. Well, that's why they have tusks. Yeah. I mean that there it is. You know, it's really crazy when lions take a chance. Wow. That was the other video. I didn't pull. There's three elephants killing a lion. That elephant just killed. That is the craziest shit. They just killed. That's crazy. What's crazy is lions will take a chance on elephants. I know. Which is just so nuts. They will take a chance to try to kill an elephant. They'll jump on their back. They'll try to jack them. Well, when you go to a game reserve in South Africa, you can't. It has to be big enough to sustain lions because it's super expensive because they're just a pride of lions will eat everything. So you got to keep replenishing the animals. Because they just, they're just too effective. Well, you know, after that dentist shot Cecil the lion. That became this international outrage. They banned the lion hunting. And because of that, people didn't want to go back and they weren't getting the money from it. So they wound up euthanizing like 200 lions. I know. Because their undulate population was getting devastated. But what made me think when I heard that, I was like, how many lions are they killing? Like how many people are going over there to hunt lions? It brings them good money. How weird is that? A huge part of South Africa is, you know, like part of the conservation efforts are that, you know, big game. You can you can hunt the big five or what do they call it? Yes, that's exactly what they call it. But it's a lot of money. It is a lot of money and it brings them a lot of money and it brings them a lot of money for conservation and all that stuff. But what a weird activity. Is there an activity that's more human in that like we are so conflicted and so weird that the only way we have animals that stay alive in this part of the world, like where they're in record populations, is to set it up so you can kill them. So like we figured out some weird loophole like we don't want the rhino to die. Hey, we don't want the rhino to die either. So let's go get a bunch of them and we kill like one a week. Come on. Yeah. And if they could get enough rhinos where they could make a case for that, they would be doing that. I mean, they're doing it with lions or doing it with everything. Right. I mean, all the different animals that you think of, plains animals in Africa, they're record numbers there. Right. Neil Guy, they bring them back to Texas. They're all over Texas. Yeah. There's so many animals there and a lot of those animals were on the verge of extinction. But they're there because people kill them. Like what a fucking, it's weird. It's weird. Really? The bigger issue is unbroken migratory range. Yeah. And the habitat. Tomorrow is one of the few places where they can roam for thousands of miles. But most of Africa now is broken up into, I think there's an area in Cameroon or whatever, but most of Africa is broken up into, I mean, in South Africa, it's all basically, with the exception of Kruger Park, it's all abandoned cattle lots. And then they just, there's money in it. So you buy that lot and you just stock it with animals and then you drive around. It's a sustainable ecosystem, but it's... Yeah, it's weird. You gotta, yeah. You still, you do have to cull the elephant population and lion population. Well, when we think about Africa, right? When we say, oh, elephants are going extinct in Africa. Like, Africa is so big. It's crazy. It's so big. You've seen the map where they stuff all the countries inside of Africa. I never, that was so shocking to me. I know. I couldn't believe that. So there could be an abundance of them in one area and none in another area. It's like saying they have a black bear problem in New Jersey, which they do. Do they? Yeah, they do. But that doesn't affect us here in California. People just started shooting black bears. You're like, hey man, there's not that many of those. Why are you shooting them?