Name: Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella
Uploaded: 2017-06-06T23:16:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-06-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-06-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #971 - Steven Rinella

vacation now with your family yeah we're going to lanai oh that'll be fun yeah
boom and we're live
speaking of vacations tell me about guyana yeah that's a good segue you've been
there a bunch
you know how many times now i thought it 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 like doing a river trip with amerindians are
those people
weirded out by americans because the jonestown massacre thing is it so funny
you bring up
jonestown because there's a couple things i've been surprised like uh the the
so the the main
group i was with in guyana um is the the makushi and i was surprised one day
when i was they make
a dish they make a dish with uh cassava which is a root like maniac um 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 like right no comprehension but 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 is they didn't know what it was yeah and
they don't know
about georgetown whoa even though it's in their own country they don't know
about it at all no 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 did they
have communication on any yeah they do yeah more and more now and there's a lot
a lot changed the
two times i went there were through 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 polarized lenses are invaluable i feel lost without them
they're amazing fish
underwater and i kept saying man you got to get on board with polarized
sunglasses and i'd hand them to
you know he he didn't like it this guy rovin he didn't like anything about
having them on his face
he just like couldn't do it but then i go down there five years later and um
every one of those boys is
rocking polarized glasses so you see changes but yeah that's the thing with
like i've brought up
jonestown a number of times because in the u.s if you say hey i'm going to guyana
all anybody says is
don't drink the kool-aid right you know it wasn't really kool-aid it was some
like kool-aid no it was
a kool-aid type drink no no so when people look at when we had this
conversation because there's a
couple of things that are important here what the poison was right so we had a
conversation
all right let me back up the root i mentioned they make a cassava 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 and game okay river fish and wild game and then
that's like a staple
that they eat every day and the other thing they eat every day is a half dozen
things all produced
from cassava which is kind of like a yam and it's cultivated with slash and
burn agriculture
and and they cultivate these yams and from it they make a flour they make a
type of grain that's like
couscous they make a syrup that's used as a coloring agent and a flavoring
agent they make a non-alcoholic
drink they make a somewhat alcoholic drink that would be like an equivalent to
beer and then they make a
much more alcoholic drink which would be an equivalent to like fortified wine
wow they make all
stuff from this this root that they grow um 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 dripped out a liquid that liquid is deadly poisonous okay dogs
chickens people anything
that drinks that liquid dies jesus and it's cyanide so wow the jonestown
massacre uh 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 and so when i got home i looked into this and it's and it seems as
if that commune jonestown
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 and that's what
they laced the kool-aid
with i'd heard about this cassava stuff and now what do they know what the
process is like did they
know like how people figured out how to make it non-poisonous and help wow it's
just been done so long
yeah and the same stuff with like different poisons they use to poison that
people use to poison fish
um what strikes me about it is how in the village like the village the the mikushi
village i was in
um is mostly mikushi but there's also like wapashana which is another tribe carib
is another tribe but
it's predominantly a mikushi village and there's about 300 people that live in
this village um
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 raise 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 like
barbed wire around it
electrical fence and how do they do it just lays they just lay it out and i
said i was asking this
guy rovin i'm like hey man uh i kept returning to this there's certain things i
kept i would always
ask him just like things that he struggled to understand my fixation on it but
i kept saying
to this mikushi guy rovin who i should back up to i got on communication so guyana
is it's the only
english-speaking country in south america everyone's no no the the government
functions are english
so if you if you picture south america it's northeast corner opening out onto
the southern
caribbean that's guyana it's 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 like 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
there 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 um he's had a
fascinating life
just how much stuff has changed for him uh so i you can just like converse okay
in 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 um 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 um simshian no woman say not simshian chamane okay he'd
tell a story in chamane
to a person who spoke spanish the person who speaks spanish would tell it to a
person
no no no a chamane guy telling someone who speaks chamane in spanish
then that person telling it to a person who speaks spanish and english and then
that person giving you
the information whoa when you get it it through that it takes on a mystical
quality like you're crossing
some space time thing right you're seeing like these ideas discussed in their
ancestral tongue
okay yeah do you remember i sent you a video of a guy talking about killing a
jaguar yes right
the language you've never like when he's speaking you're like i've never in all
my travels i've
never heard a language that sounds anything like that is a video online can we
play yeah it's online
what do you know the title of it it's uh i think if you type in like um chamane
t-s-i
chamane um jaguar attack see if jamie you'll pull it up it's very cool the
language is
really amazing so it seems so ancient yes it's not like has nothing to do with
like the latin
languages it just sounds so it's not 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 it's 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 wow
it's it's like
everything's not lost in translation and all weird and garbled and and like
painstaking to wade through
but you can just ask like hey what's up with the local shaman i'll give you the
dope on the local
shaman and so they trade spells yeah well yeah we'll talk about that but i i
feel like i was laying
the groundwork for uh the jim jones poison did you find the video no i lost the
word that you were
spelling the t-s-i-m-a-n-e
t-s-i-m-a-n-e what does that mean chamani that's how they spell it i could be i
could be screwing up
you know how you spell a lot worse when you're not actually writing it out yeah
i'm terrible
i don't know how anybody wins a spelling bee ever
chumani is t-s-i yeah so if you type in chamani jaguar t-s-i-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 right here we go let's play this because it's fucking awesome here we
go
following is an interview with a member of the chumani tribe of bolivia due to
their inherent
difficulties of translating the 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 enjoy the adventure
i love trekking through the jungle once i was hunting with my favorite dog and
a couple other dogs
they ran ahead barking they were going after something
all of a sudden my favorite dog just went completely silent
they were about 50 meters ahead of me when i got there the other dogs had gone
ahead after something
saying my favorite dog was lying there dead there was a big hole in his right
side almost looked like
it had been arrowed first thing i did is pick up my dog and set him where the
ants wouldn't get to his body
that dog was the bravest one i had
i'm not going to translate you guys just watch the video if you're interested
but yo