Name: Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren
Uploaded: 2015-01-27T10:14:32.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-01-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2015-01-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #603 - Justin Wren

The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
And we're live, back from the motherfucking jungle, Justin Rand, saving pygmies,
hanging out, having a good time.
What's up, brother? How are you?
Man, I'm excited to be here.
Excited to have you.
Hey, thanks.
I've been paying attention to your crazy travels and your journeys, and you
brought some pictures and videos for us today, too.
And how long have you been back for?
I've been back since late October.
And you were here for a little while, and the last time you were supposed to be
here, you were real sick.
And I've got to be honest with you, we weren't too excited about a dude, fresh
back from Africa, coming in with some sort of funky jungle virus.
Yeah.
Well, I'm glad I didn't come in.
What did you have?
Did you have anything crazy?
Well, I had bronchitis, but before that I had Shigella, which is an intestinal
bacteria.
I don't like that.
How do you get that?
It's a water-borne disease.
Water-borne, so you drank the water out there?
Water-borne or food, yeah.
There were just times that I couldn't help it.
But, yeah, or it could be from food or a fly landing on your food while it's
being cooked.
Or there's many different ways that you can get it.
Whoa.
So you either live your life like the boy in the plastic bubble.
Remember that John Travolta movie?
Yeah.
I think that's the only way you can't get sick.
Yeah.
How many times have you gotten sick over there?
All throughout.
All throughout.
You're always sick.
Yeah, I had this guy on the sci-fi show that I did who told me that everyone
who lives in South American or jungle climates, everyone has parasites.
Oh, yeah.
They just live with them.
Yeah, I had them, too.
I had amoebas.
I had some kind of parasite in my stomach also.
I'm actually still a bruise from here because I got seven vials of blood drawn
to see what kind of parasites are still in me.
Still recently?
Yeah, yeah, that's just a few days old.
Wow.
Yeah, so it's been a battle since coming back, but I think I'm on the track to
get my health back together.
It's a crazy place to live, to spend your time in.
It's a very strange thing, the environment where you have all these crazy
tropical diseases.
Is it the heat and the moisture and all the above?
Yeah, I think it's just the entire environment.
It's just brutal because right when I got there, I got malaria, and so that was
pretty bad.
So the mosquitoes, the bugs, the parasites, everything can mess with you.
Yeah, so the water, the climate, the bad living conditions, so not having a
nice bed and not having a good home to sleep in, all those can contribute to
sickness.
Malaria is no joke, huh?
What was that like?
Oh, man, that was brutal.
That was one of the toughest times of my life, but I counted it as, I don't
know, it was actually a good experience for me in the end because I got to
share in the suffering that they're going through.
Because they don't even have all the antibiotics and all the medicine to pump
your body with to get healed from it.
So I had to be evac'd out of the Congo and into Uganda.
Wow.
I was misdiagnosed four times.
So they drew my blood.
They did two quick tests for malaria, and they said it was negative.
Then they drew my blood, said it was negative, but I got real sick, real sick.
Like, six days, I couldn't eat.
Six days, I couldn't urinate.
I think I lost 34 pounds.
And then whenever I finally did urinate in Uganda, it was after I got the right
medicine.
They took my blood out, saw that I had over 70% of my bloodstream was parasites.
What?
Yeah, 70% of my blood was full of parasites.
They would hide in the liver, and then they would distribute through your blood.
Whoa.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Like, you're invaded.
Yeah, absolutely.
70% of your blood was parasites.
Am I getting that wrong, or 70% was infected with parasites?
They said 70% of my bloodstream.
So they said between 60% and 70%.
So I was on the third tier.
Like, there's level one, two, and three, and four.
And four, I was right at four, which was a coma.
So when you get to four, you're in a coma, and it's pretty bad.
A lot of people die.
Well, lucky you're a strapping, healthy, young buck of a man that you got
through that,
huh?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, man.
It was really good.
Like, I mean, the pilot that flew me out, it was actually on Thanksgiving of
2013.
And he flew me out, just me and him on the plane.
And he found out that they're misdiagnosing me, that my buddy there was like,
the doctors
don't know what's going on with him.
He's going to die if we don't get him out of here to a good hospital.
So they took me out of the jungle, flew me to Uganda.
And when I landed, an ambulance came and picked me up because my vomit had
turned to blood
and bile.
So it was literally, I could smell, you know, like in the fight game, you can
smell the blood.
Right.
So I could smell the iron, I think, in my blood.
And it was literally Christmas colors, red and green.
And it was brutal.
For two weeks after, my esophagus was raw.
And so I could barely, barely eat much.
I mean, I'd really have to chew it down a lot, or I'd have to just drink a lot.
And so, yeah, replenishing my body after that was a whole, I mean, I think it's
still happening.
But it was at least a month-long process to start putting weight back on.
You think it's still happening from over a year ago?
Your body's still replenishing?
Well, from that and from some of the parasites and everything else.
So, yeah, but the malaria, I guess there's mixed reviews.
But a lot of times they say that the malaria never literally leaves your body
100%.
So it's dormant in your liver.
And then it can come back up whenever stress and other things happen.
So we're getting that tested.
That's one of the things they're testing for me.
So it can come back up.
Like, say, if you get run down, like maybe you get the flu or something like
that.
Malaria might go, come here, bitch, I got your back, motherfucker.
Yeah, and that would be brutal because my fever got to, like, almost 105.
It was, like, 104.5 or 104.4.
What's fatal?
It's, like, 1.6 or 1.7 or something like that?
Like, 1.10?
Yeah, they were saying it was getting high enough to where, like, they really
had to watch me
because it can do stuff to your brain.
Yeah, if your brain gets too hot, right?
Parasites are terrifying, man.
Don't ever watch that show.
You ever seen that show, The Enemy Within?
What's it called?
The Enemy Within You or Enemy Inside You?
It's all about people who do what you do.
Go to some place and get some crazy parasite, and then they have, like, some
softball-sized ball of worms living in your brain.
You know, and they're like, oh, I have headaches.
I started seeing Jesus, and there's angels floating around me.
I couldn't figure out what it was.
And then I went to the doctor, and they found this mass inside my brain, and,
yeah.
I probably won't watch that.
Don't.
Well, you live it.
I mean, you don't have to watch it.
You live it.
We got plenty of coconut water for you, my friend, if you want some.
We got C2O.
You ever have that shit?
No.
C2O is the bomb diggity.
Get the man a can of C2O.
All right.
Thank you.
It's from Thailand.
Really?
Yeah.
Their coconut water is, like, it's really sweet.
It's weird.
It's a short tree.
It's only, like, five feet tall.
And, you know, you think of, like, the big, tall, like, palm trees as being
coconut trees.
But the Thai trees are short, and it's, like, a much sweeter.
You drink it, you would swear that they have some sort of sugar in it, but it's
not.
It's totally natural.
Dude, thank you.
It's delicious stuff.
But those parasites, the thing about parasites is that it's really hard to root
them out of your system.
And some of them, like trichinosis, I found out recently.
My friend got trichinosis, and they said he's got it essentially for life.
Like, they give him pills.
It flushed, like, the active parasites out of his system.
But, like, say, trichinosis comes from an animal eating an animal with trichinosis.
So if somebody cannibalized him, they would get trichinosis.
Wow.
Yeah.
To this day.
And he's walking around like a normal person.
But he's got trichinosis in his system essentially forever.
So that's, like, kind of how malaria is?
I guess so.
Something like that?
That's what we're looking at.
So if I ate you, I'd get malaria?
I hope not.
If you ate my liver.
I think if you ate my liver.
I'll tell you right now, I'm pretty confident.
Unless we're in some Donner Party-type situation, and you die first.
Yeah.
Man, it's nuts, the suffering that they're going through, though, with malaria.
Because they don't have mosquito nets and all that other stuff.
So I was kind of not cautious enough.
And one thing I didn't want to do was take a malaria pill that would prevent
malaria.
What's that called?
A prophylaxis or something like that?
Something like that.
And so I didn't want to take that because a doctor here stateside said that if
I took some of them, they're really intense.
They can really hurt your body.
They also said that even mentally, taking them for a full year, they could give
you night terrors and terrible dreams.
But then also, like, people have moments of psychosis from taking them and
stuff.
So I was like, well, I don't want to be dealing with that.
And if the guys in Congo said, oh, yeah, once you get malaria once, normally it
doesn't come back very bad.
And so all we have to do is, all we have to do is, yeah, the next time is much
lower and much lower and much lower.
And it's much more, I don't know, you can control it easier.
And so the thing that was the struggle with me was that they misdiagnosed it
four different times.
And we took it to two different labs, and they just didn't have the, I guess,
the right tools and technology to really see that.
Because whenever I got there, we're flying, and I'm hugging a bucket.
And whenever they were putting me into the ambulance, I remember my vision was
tunneling.
And all in front of me was completely, I mean, it was just a blur.
And when you say tunneling, could you actually see, like, the walls closing in?
Well, not at first.
It was like, I woke up one day, and it was like, all of a sudden, my peripheral
vision was kind of blurry.
And that messed with me.
I was like, what's going on?
And then all of a sudden, it started getting darker.
And so it didn't, like, start closing, like if you're getting choked or
something.
Right, yeah.
It didn't do that, but it kind of stopped.
And I think it just prevented my peripheral vision from really functioning or
working.
And then the thing that sucks is you get these crazy back and forth between shivering
uncontrollably
and your teeth chattering to then you all of a sudden just, like, on a dime, it
switches.
And all of a sudden, you're incredibly hot, sweating, and you're throwing
everything off,
and you're grabbing a fan.
And it just goes back and forth.
Wow.
It goes back and forth for maybe 30 minutes or something.
You're terribly cold.
Then for 30 minutes, you're terribly hot and incredibly thirsty.
But then you drink something, you vomit it up.
And so they were trying to force me to eat because they're like, you don't have
malaria, you've got to eat.
And everything I'd eat, I'd just vomit.
You don't have malaria, you've got to eat.
Yeah.
I had one doctor there that they couldn't agree with each other because they
didn't know what was going on with me.
So the up-and-coming doctor and one of the young nurses said, this guy's got
malaria 100%.
But the older ones were just going off of the results.
And they're like, no, look, you want to see the first test, second test, third
test, or fourth test that says he doesn't have malaria.
And so there was some humanitarian organization there, and they had gotten this
crazy, I don't know, virus or flu kind of thing.
And they would be sick for three or four days, and then they'd get better.
But it went through all of them.
And so they thought that I had gotten that.
So they s