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#085 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman with - Daniel Everett · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
• 0:08
  by night, all day. Good to see you, sir.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Good to be here.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Thank you very much for doing this. I'm really excited
• 0:17
  to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this
• 0:18
  a lot.
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  Speaker 2: Thanks very much for having me.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: You have a very, very unique life story. So I
• 0:27
  want to start with how did you become, let's lay
• 0:31
  it out for people. What got me interested in you
• 0:33
  is you became a Christian missionary and then went to
• 0:39
  the jungle and met these people. Let me say this right.
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  And stopped being a missionary and lived with them for
• 0:50
  how long?
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  Speaker 2: Well, the total time that I lived with them is
• 0:53
  about eight years in the jungle with them over a period.
• 0:56
  But I've been working with them for 40 years. I
• 0:59
  go back a lot. Wow.
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  Speaker 1: But you lived with them for eight years, and during
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  that eight-year time period, you kind of— is it safe to
• 1:09
  say you're an atheist?
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  Speaker 2: Yes, it's safe to say that.
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  Speaker 1: And so let's take it back to the beginning. How
• 1:14
  did you become a missionary? Did you come from a
• 1:16
  religious family?
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  Speaker 2: No, I came from a very unreligious family. I was— in fact,
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  I was standing out in front of a Jimi Hendrix
• 1:24
  concert in 1968 trying to sell LSD to get in.
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  And— And this guy that I knew from high school
• 1:31
  that was really straight-laced came up with his sister. She
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  was very cute. And so I went up to try
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  to sell them some LSD. They didn't use drugs. And
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  so I said, well, you got any change? I need
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  to get some money to get into the concert. And
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  I saw that she went to the same high school
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  that I did. So after the concert, which she didn't
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  like but I loved, I went to see her in
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  high school. I sat by her during lunchtime and found
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  out that she was a missionary and had been raised
• 1:57
  in Brazil.
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  Speaker 1: Wow.
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  Speaker 2: That really intrigued me because it was the sixties and
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  I was, you know, didn't want to have just the
• 2:06
  typical us life and living in the Amazon sounded really cool.
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  But then I became, you know, a genuine, strong, believing Christian, uh,
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  went to Bible school. I did my undergraduate degree in
• 2:19
  Bible and theology and I was an ordained minister in
• 2:22
  the Wesleyan church and very active in church. And, um,
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  was preached on street corners and did all that kind
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  of thing.
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  Speaker 1: How did you make this transition from being a guy
• 2:34
  with a bag of acid in front of a Jimi
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  Hendrix concert to?
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  Speaker 2: Well, her father, who had been a missionary now for
• 2:41
  20 years, was the most influential person outside my family
• 2:46
  in my life. And he and I would sit up
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  late at night talking. And, you know, I was 17
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  and I found everything he said to be very convincing
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  and very interesting. But mainly I loved his stories of
• 2:58
  the jungle and what it was like to live in
• 3:00
  the jungle. And I wanted to do that. And I
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  became a believer. It was a gradual process. Well, actually, no,
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  it wasn't that gradual. My father was just astounded. He said,
• 3:11
  you know, from one minute I'm worrying about you getting arrested.
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  And now you're going to church every Sunday with these
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  people I don't even know. He wasn't that happy about it.
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  Speaker 1: He'd rather you just get loaded in front of the
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  Hendrix concert?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, he would have, actually, because he was a heavy
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  drinker and a construction worker, and he considered that to
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  be part of the masculine experience.
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  Speaker 1: But acid? Was acid okay with him?
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  Speaker 2: I don't think he knew I was doing acid. But
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  he knew I was doing weed and things like that.
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  Speaker 1: And he didn't mind that? No.
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  Speaker 2: He didn't want me doing it in the house, which
• 3:43
  I did.
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  Speaker 1: So your rebellion was to become an outstanding citizen and
• 3:48
  a Christian missionary?
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  Speaker 2: Right. That was my greatest form of rebellion against the
• 3:52
  life I had been leading.
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  Speaker 1: Interesting. Yeah, that's what happens when parents push their kids
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  into a certain direction.
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  Speaker 2: Right, right.
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  Speaker 1: Little people don't like being told what to do.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: So you immediately, it seems like, go become a Christian.
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  And then how long before you are actually doing missionary
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  work in the jungle?
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  Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of training you have to do.
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  So first I had to do four years of college,
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  Bible and theology, and then I had to do some
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  linguistics training. And then not a graduate degree or anything
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  like that, just some linguistics training from the missionary organization
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  because I wanted to be a Bible translator. And then
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  we did jungle training in southern Mexico. So we went
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  to the jungles of Chiapas and had to do survival
• 4:37
  training and.
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  Speaker 1: All of this. Whoa. What did you have to do there?
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  Speaker 2: Well, there are several phases to it. The family goes
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  and the family is part of it. But the hardest
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  thing is to really see how much you've learned. They
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  take you on what's called survival hike and they leave
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  you alone for about a week in the jungle. You're
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  not allowed to take any food or any supplies of
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  any kind.
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  Speaker 1: For a week?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, for a week or more. You don't know. It's
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  going to be at least a week. In my case,
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  it was about 10 days. And you've got to set up.
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  Your camp, how best you can figure out how to
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  get a fire going.
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  Speaker 1: Do they teach you how to do all this stuff?
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  They don't just like figure it out.
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  Speaker 2: This is like the final exam. So you've had almost
• 5:18
  four months of training before they finally take you out
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  on this survival.
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  Speaker 1: Do you have water?
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  Speaker 2: You have maybe a quart of water when you leave,
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  but you're going to be out there for 10 days.
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  So you've got to find water. So we learned which
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  vines have water and how to cut the vines. We
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  did have a machete. So I was able to jump
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  up and cut a vine out. At the top first
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  and then at the bottom.
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  Speaker 1: And no one's monitoring you? They're just leaving you out
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  there and they're not making sure you're okay?
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  Speaker 2: No, they just come along when the time's up. And
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  if you're there, you're there.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, boy. And if you're not, you're dead?
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  Speaker 2: You could be.
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  Speaker 1: So that's insane.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this is what happens when you live by faith.
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  You know, you're out there. And God's supposed to be
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  supervising your training, but it's really rigorous training. So by
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  the time I actually got to the Amazon, which was
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  eight years after I converted, it took that long, it
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  felt like I was coming home. I wasn't surprised by things.
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  Speaker 1: Well, the training was good then. I mean I would
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  imagine if you really want someone to be able to
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  survive alone in the jungle, the best way to do
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  it is to test them by making them survive alone
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  in the jungle so that you get an actual– Version
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  of the experience. It's not simulated. You actually are getting
• 6:32
  water from vines. What were you eating?
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  Speaker 2: Well, I learned different kinds of plants that you could eat.
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  And then I learned how to make with a stick,
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  you know, make a stick the size of a toothpick
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  sharpened on both ends. And I did have some fishing line.
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  I would attach that to that. And I was so
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  proud of myself because I brought up two fish that
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  were about three inches long. And I ate those. Most
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  of the time I ate plants and went hungry. So
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  when I see programs like Alone, that wouldn't bother me.
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  That's the kind of stuff we had to do.
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  Speaker 1: They didn't even give you fish hooks? No.
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  Speaker 2: You can't have that kind of stuff. You have to
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  learn to cope on your own. You've got to make
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  your own. You've got to be able to recognize the plants,
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  which ones are poisonous, which ones are not poisonous.
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  Speaker 1: Did you try to make like a bow and arrow
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  or anything?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: You did?
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  Speaker 2: I did. I made a bow and arrow.
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  Speaker 1: How did you do that?
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  Speaker 2: Well, I had a machete, and that's what I had.
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  Speaker 1: It's crazy they give you a machete. They won't give
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  you fish hooks.
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  Speaker 2: Like, come on, guys. Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Fish hooks are so much easier to carry.
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  Speaker 2: Right. But the machete you need for firewood. You need
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  for lots of things. You know, when I got to
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  the Amazon.
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  Speaker 1: What? Do you have a lighter?
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  Speaker 2: No.
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  Speaker 1: No. How are you making fires?
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  Speaker 2: Well, I had just— they let me take just a few matches.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, Lord.
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  Speaker 2: And so no lighter, but a few matches, which you
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  kept in a 35-millimeter film cartridge.
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  Speaker 1: People don't know about those things, those little containers.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: How many matches did they give you for 10 days?
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  Speaker 2: Well, you had one of those little containers with about 10,
• 8:11
  15 matches in it at the most. Oh, boy.
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  Speaker 1: So you've got to match a day.
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  Speaker 2: You've got to keep your fire going all the time.
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  You always have to keep that fire going. So before
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  you start it, you spend half the day just cutting firewood.
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  Speaker 1: And I would imagine it's very wet.
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  Speaker 2: It's all wet. So you've got to find something dry
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  to get it going. And as they told us— You've
• 8:31
  got to keep it going.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: They said once it's hot enough, it'll burn anything. But
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  until it gets hot, you can't just throw that wet
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  wood on there. It'll put it out. So— You know,
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  you have to spend a lot of time exploring, trying
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  to find dry, crackly wood and leaves and things and
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  get it going. And then slowly introduce the thinner pieces
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  of wet wood until finally you can throw on a
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  sopping log.
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  Speaker 1: So a big part of your day essentially is making
• 8:55
  sure that fire stays lit. Yeah. That's a big part
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  of your day. And you can't get too far from it.
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  Speaker 2: No. You have to stay fairly close to it. And
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  at night you definitely want to keep it going. So
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  I remember one night waking up and hearing heavy steps
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  around my camp. Oh, yeah. And– I was up immediately
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  blowing on that fire for everything I was worth to
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  get that thing up.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. Was it Jaguars?
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  Speaker 2: I suspect that it could have been, although I didn't
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  see it. I had my machete, which when I got
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  to the Amazon and actually saw Jaguars, I realized that
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  would have been a pretty pathetic thing to try, go
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  against a Jaguar with a machete. They would rip your
• 9:35
  head off before.
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  Speaker 1: You— Everybody likes to think they have a chance, though.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but— What I found out is jaguars, you know,
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  they get up to 400 pounds. And they're the third
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  biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger.
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  And they often hunt in pairs. And so you wouldn't
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  have a chance against a jaguar unless you were one
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  of the pitaha. I know that guys alone by themselves
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  have killed jaguars. Really? Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: What are they using to kill a jaguar?
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  Speaker 2: Well, they're always with their bows and arrows.
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  Speaker 1: A bow and arrow range for a jaguar. That's crazy.
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  Speaker 2: Well, you better have it ready because it sneaks up
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  on you. There's another group that I worked with for
• 10:13
  quite a while, several months, called the Banawa. And they
• 10:16
  use poison darts and poisoned arrows. So there's this story
• 10:20
  of this guy who went out hunting, and he reached
• 10:25
  a clearing in the jungle, and he saw a deer
• 10:27
  come out running straight for him. And at first he
• 10:30
  was happy, and he was going to kill the deer.
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  Then he realized deers don't just come running out of
• 10:34
  the jungle towards people. And then right behind the deer
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  came a jaguar. And the jaguar saw him, the guy,
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  and he was bigger than the deer, so the jaguar
• 10:43
  just took off straight for him and jumped up. And
• 10:46
  the guy got his blowgun out. Out in front of him,
• 10:50
  they're about seven or eight feet long, these big blowguns,
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  and they're very sturdy. And the jaguar, he holds it away.
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  The jaguar's back legs are tearing the meat off of
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  his legs, and the jaguar's head just keeps snapping at
• 11:03
  his face, trying to get his face. And what saved
• 11:06
  his life was the jaguar jumped off to go around
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  the back and try to get him from the back.
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  But he had a poisoned arrow, and he stabbed the
• 11:13
  jaguar with it, and that hurts. And the jaguar started
• 11:16
  to run off, and then he shot it with a
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  poisoned arrow. But he passed out and his family found
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  him a couple of days later with his legs just
• 11:28
  infected and torn to pieces. But he survived.
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  Speaker 1: And so these Pidahad, would they go hunt the jaguars?
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  Speaker 2: If they saw that it was a danger, if a
• 11:40
  woman went out and a jaguar or a mountain lion
• 11:45
  scared her, the men would go out to kill it.
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  So I've eaten jaguar.
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  Speaker 1: What does it taste like?
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  Speaker 2: Well, this one was sort of– this was a sick jaguar.
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  But it's stringy meat. I mean it's very muscly meat.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Is it a sick one? Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: That's how they wound up killing it. I found out later.
• 12:04
  I was really impressed. They killed a jaguar. And they
• 12:07
  have killed many jaguars. But this one turned out to
• 12:09
  be a sick jaguar, which is why he attacked the woman.
• 12:12
  Like he was starving to death or something? Yeah. He
• 12:14
  was starving. So the men killed it.
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  Speaker 1: And ate it.
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  Speaker 2: But I did, my children were with me this whole time.
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  So I told my children, I said, just remember who's
• 12:22
  eating whom out here.
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  Speaker 1: So do you remember what it tastes like?
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  Speaker 2: Well, it's a stringy meat. It's really hard to describe
• 12:30
  all the taste.
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  Speaker 1: Like very sinewy?
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  Speaker 2: It's tough. Yeah, sinewy and very tough. And my general
• 12:38
  rule of thumb, I eat anything that they kill. But
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  my general rule of thumb is I usually have a
• 12:43
  bottle of Tabasco sauce and If you put Tabasco sauce
• 12:46
  on it.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: It's okay. And so these pitahas, am I saying it right? Yeah,
• 12:52
  that's right. They don't preserve anything, right? No. They just
• 12:56
  kill things and cook them.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't, you know, many, many different groups smoke
• 13:01
  the meat or salt the meat if they have salt
• 13:05
  or dry it. And the pitahas know how to do that.
• 13:08
  I don't know where they learn how to do it
• 13:09
  because they never do it except if they want to
• 13:11
  trade the meat with Brazilian boats who come up. But
• 13:14
  among themselves, they don't preserve any meat. You know, I
• 13:17
  was talking to a guy one time and, you know,
• 13:20
  why don't you preserve your meat? And he says, oh,
• 13:22
  I preserve it in the belly of my brother. So
• 13:25
  they share it. And if I get meat, I give
• 13:28
  you some. And if you get meat, you give me some.
• 13:30
  So why would I?
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: Right. So there's no need to store. And also, I
• 13:33
  guess it's very abundant. There's a lot of life where
• 13:36
  they live, like in terms of fish and game.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: There have been.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, they live on this river, the Micey River.
• 13:43
  And they're the only humans that live along the river
• 13:47
  for almost 300 miles of the curvy river. And it's
• 13:51
  a relatively large river by U.S. standards. In Brazil, it
• 13:54
  doesn't even make many of the maps. But it's a
• 13:56
  couple of hundred yards across. And in the rainy season,
• 14:00
  it can be as much as 75 feet deep, 100
• 14:04
  feet deep. So there's plenty of fish for them. In
• 14:08
  recent years, that's changed because the Brazilian … Government has
• 14:12
  allowed the construction of dams across various rivers. Not their river,
• 14:16
  but they affect the water level so much that it's
• 14:19
  taken all the fish, most of the fish out of
• 14:21
  their river. So now they're starving. And this has led
• 14:24
  to conflict with Brazilians who live not too far away.
• 14:28
  And they've killed a few people stealing food from their
• 14:31
  farms and things. Oh, man.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine? You just have this. kind of harmonious
• 14:38
  existence with nature and someone just decides to make a dam.
• 14:41
  Like you've got it so dialed in that you don't
• 14:44
  need to preserve your food. Right. Because everyone's just like
• 14:47
  happy and eating fish right out of the river. Right.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: And, you know, that's, they don't know where the dam is.
• 14:55
  They've never seen the dam. I told them that they
• 14:57
  built something that crosses the river like a wall. And
• 15:01
  they say, why do they do that? And I said, well,
• 15:03
  they want electricity, which they barely understand. They've seen I
• 15:07
  have a generator. I never had one for the first
• 15:09
  20 years I was working with them, but I eventually
• 15:13
  got a generator and they could see what electricity was.
• 15:15
  And I said, so that's where they get the lights.
• 15:19
  But they don't understand it. And it's for the first
• 15:22
  time in their history, and they've been living there as
• 15:24
  far as I can tell for almost 300 years on
• 15:28
  this one river. For the first time in their history,
• 15:31
  they can't be self-sufficient in proteins.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: That's crazy. And how long ago did they build this dam?
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: I think it was about 10 years ago. But they
• 15:45
  didn't– when it first went into operation, then it flooded
• 15:50
  the entire– lots of farmland, lots of settlements and things
• 15:54
  up on the Madeira. But what was shocking was that
• 15:56
  way downriver from the dam, it affected the water level
• 16:01
  so much that when their river, the Maisee, goes to
• 16:06
  its lowest point– in the dry season, there's still only
• 16:12
  a few places where you can see the bottom of
• 16:14
  the river. Most of the places, even when it's at
• 16:16
  its lowest, you can't see the bottom of the river.
• 16:19
  But in the last couple of years, it's gotten so
• 16:21
  low you can walk across.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: And the fish don't stay there.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: So what are these people eating?
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Well, they go hunting, which they don't like to do. But,
• 16:33
  of course, when the fish are gone and when the
• 16:36
  river is gone, You lose a lot of the game
• 16:38
  from the jungle. So they have to go– instead of
• 16:40
  going a mile into the jungle, they have to go
• 16:43
  many miles into the jungle and they're still not successful.
• 16:46
  So it's busting up communities. Some people are moving out
• 16:50
  of their normal area to other areas to try to–
• 16:54
  back on bigger rivers. But then that means they're surrounded
• 16:57
  by Brazilians and they're no longer leading the life that
• 17:01
  they used to lead.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: So– When they move into these civilization areas, are they
• 17:08
  integrating or are they trying to like stay as a
• 17:11
  tribe removed from urban society? Like how are they doing it?
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: Well, up until about five years ago, they would never
• 17:20
  have thought about integrating. They would live in like ghettos.
• 17:24
  If they were out near some town, they would live
• 17:27
  in the jungle away from the town because that whole
• 17:29
  part of Brazil is covered in jungle. Even the cities
• 17:32
  are bordered by jungle. Right. But nowadays, because there's no
• 17:36
  food anywhere, they're trying to integrate more. They're trying to
• 17:39
  learn Portuguese. And it's a very unfortunate situation for them
• 17:47
  right now.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: That's such a bummer. That sucks so hard. So when
• 17:52
  you first got there, your aim was to try to
• 17:58
  convert them to Christianity.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: That's right. I went there to translate the Bible and
• 18:02
  to plant a church and get everybody believing.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: And why Pitaha? Why did you go to those people?
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: Well, we were in our training, and the missionary organization,
• 18:10
  the Wycliffe Bible Translators, offered us three areas. They said,
• 18:14
  you can go to New Guinea. We need people in
• 18:16
  New Guinea. You can go to Mexico, or you can
• 18:19
  go to Brazil. And in Brazil, there's this tribe called
• 18:22
  the Pitaha. that we've had two teams assigned to, and
• 18:26
  nobody's been able to figure out the language because it's
• 18:28
  not related to any other known living language. And so
• 18:31
  they said, if you're up for that challenge, and we
• 18:33
  know you did well in linguistics, we'd be happy to
• 18:36
  have you take that group. So I thought, well, sure,
• 18:39
  I'm up for a challenge. So we took that.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: And so this was 1977? 1977. We were assigned there
• 18:43
  in 76, and I made my first trip in in
• 18:45
  December of 1977. And so how much of the language
• 18:54
  did you know before you got there? Nothing. Nothing?
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: No.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: What do we know in terms of like before you
• 19:02
  got there? Was it recorded? Was it something that people understood?
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• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in 1784... Portuguese explorers made contact, and they didn't
• 20:12
  take lists of words. They wrote a few descriptive things
• 20:15
  about the language and about the people, and those things
• 20:19
  still fit them today. And then in 1821, a German
• 20:24
  explorer went there, and he took a long list of words,
• 20:27
  which was amazing because he didn't have linguistics or anything
• 20:30
  like that, and his list of words is pretty good.
• 20:36
  And then in 1920— Another German who naturalized Brazilian, the
• 20:42
  founder of Brazilian anthropology, went there and took a much
• 20:46
  larger word list, and that one is very good. And
• 20:50
  so I had those little word lists. They're not much,
• 20:52
  and there's no how does the grammar work or anything
• 20:54
  like that. It's just lists of words. So I had
• 20:57
  looked at those, but it's a tone language, and so
• 21:01
  they hadn't written the tone, so I had no idea
• 21:03
  how to pronounce the words. To give you an example
• 21:06
  of what a tone language is, so if I want
• 21:10
  to say friend, I say magiai. And if I want
• 21:14
  to say enemy, it's magiai.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: What's the difference?
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: So if I whistle it, friend is whoop, whoop, whoop.
• 21:22
  And if I whistle enemy, it's whoop.
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: Whoop, whoop.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: If you can't hear the tones, you don't know what's
• 21:28
  going on. So the word for me is chie. And
• 21:35
  the word for shit is je. So, you know, you
• 21:38
  can be talking about yourself and everybody starts laughing because
• 21:41
  you've called yourself shit.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: Because you have the wrong tone.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: Because you have the wrong tone. So, you know, there
• 21:48
  are a lot of tone languages in the world. Mandarin
• 21:50
  is tonal. Korean is somewhat tonal. And many languages of
• 21:53
  Africa are tonal. But for those of us who speak
• 21:56
  European languages, this is just really weird and it's hard
• 22:00
  to hear.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: A complete mind shift. Yeah.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: So you've got to be able to pay attention to
• 22:07
  those tones. But the first thing you have to do
• 22:12
  is start just collecting words. So I would point at
• 22:14
  things my first day, my first hour. I was pointing
• 22:17
  at things and writing down what they said, and that
• 22:19
  was the basic linguistics I had had, phonetics, how to
• 22:22
  write down sounds of the world's languages.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: And when you got there, so on day one, how
• 22:29
  do you make a connection? Do you just show up? Hey,
• 22:32
  brought you the Bible. Everyone have a seat. How do
• 22:34
  you do this?
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: Well, I got off and I started handing candy to
• 22:39
  the kids.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Good move.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: That works. And the people were very curious because I'm
• 22:45
  this white guy with red hair. At that time, I
• 22:49
  had bright red hair and they found me curious to
• 22:51
  look at. And so they came around. They could tell,
• 22:55
  you know, at least I think they thought they could
• 22:57
  tell that I was no danger to them. They know
• 23:00
  how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger.
• 23:04
  So then I would just start pointing at things. I
• 23:07
  had my pen and paper, and I would get a stick,
• 23:11
  and I would say in English, you know, stick. And
• 23:14
  they know that I'm trying to communicate something, so they
• 23:16
  would say back, eh. And I thought, it probably means stick.
• 23:20
  And I would write that down. And then I would
• 23:22
  take the stick and drop it. And they would say, eh.
• 23:26
  And that means stick fell to the ground. And that's
• 23:28
  what I thought it meant. So that's how I started.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: That's what you thought it meant. What is the reaction
• 23:35
  to this person coming in and demanding that they teach
• 23:39
  the language?
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: Well, I didn't demand.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, you have a requirement. You can't communicate,
• 23:45
  but you're there. So they're kind enough to welcome you.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: Are you in the actual camp with all these people?
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm in the middle of their village. The plane
• 23:53
  let me off on, you know, landed on the river.
• 23:56
  I got out.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: You don't even ask. You just like. wander into their camp?
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: There's no way to contact them ahead of time.
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: This is crazy.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: And you're just assuming they're not going to kill you.
• 24:05
  Is this you?
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: This is the Pitaha. This is a Pitaha village.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: Yep. And so this is what it looked like when
• 24:10
  you showed up. You're like, hi, what's a stick? Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: You land, you land on the river and, and you
• 24:15
  get there and that is, uh, that's the Pitaha. Wow. And, um, wow.
• 24:20
  So they're very friendly and they start talking. Um, But,
• 24:25
  of course, I don't know what they say. They just
• 24:27
  see me as a very.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Guy's got a Ferrari t-shirt on. What's up?
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they— riverboats go in and give clothes. If a riverboat
• 24:35
  hasn't been there in a long time, they'll all be naked.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow. So— And so, like, day one, they just
• 24:45
  accept the fact that this redheaded dude just showed up
• 24:49
  and is hanging out with us now?
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there were a couple of things that counted in
• 24:52
  my favor. I was all by myself, and so— Giving
• 24:55
  out candy was a big factor. They like to chew tobacco.
• 25:00
  And I had been told this by somebody who had
• 25:03
  been there. So I took in a big, long horn
• 25:06
  of tobacco. I don't know if it was a really
• 25:07
  old-fashioned way to– A horn?
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: Yes. Like an animal horn? No.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: It looks like an animal horn. But it's probably eight feet,
• 25:15
  nine feet long, just rolled up tight tobacco wrapped in latex. Really?
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: And you just cut it off for them and they
• 25:23
  chew it and they like it. So– I would, you know,
• 25:27
  the ones who would help me, I would give them
• 25:30
  a little bit of tobacco or candy. And I also
• 25:33
  brought canned food for me. And I would trade that
• 25:38
  to them for fish and other things that they got.
• 25:42
  And they liked that.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: How long did you stay initially?
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: The first time was just to see what it was
• 25:47
  like before I brought my family. So I stayed 10 days.
• 25:51
  And then I came back with my family and we
• 25:53
  stayed a year at that time. We just stayed there
• 25:55
  the whole year.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: When you say family, so your wife and how many kids?
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Three kids. There they are.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: How old were the kids when you got there?
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: Well, my oldest daughter, who there was about 12, was nine,
• 26:06
  and the middle daughter was six, and then my son
• 26:09
  was three years old. So this is around that time.
• 26:16
  And so my kids grew up among the Pitahon. Both
• 26:19
  my older daughters learned to speak the language fairly quickly.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: Wow, that's a risky move. You brought your little kids
• 26:27
  to the jungle. What is that decision like? Was that
• 26:31
  a difficult decision?
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: Well, today it would be, but I was a Christian
• 26:35
  and I believed in miracles and I believed God would
• 26:37
  take care of us. And so I went there and
• 26:40
  figured he was in charge. He would take care of us.
• 26:42
  So my son got meningitis. My two daughters got malaria.
• 26:49
  I got malaria. In fact, after a few years, I
• 26:52
  went to San Diego and I I came down with
• 26:54
  malaria in University Hospital San Diego. They were thrilled because
• 26:59
  I was the only person they'd ever seen with all
• 27:01
  three strains of South American malaria at the same time.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: Did you have a relapse of malaria? Because I have
• 27:09
  a friend who got malaria in the Congo, and it
• 27:13
  came back.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: It can come back, and I've had relapses, but it's
• 27:17
  been a long time now that I haven't had relapses.
• 27:19
  I've taken so much medicine that supposedly— It won't come
• 27:23
  back anymore. But I can never give blood because it's
• 27:26
  always in my blood.
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: What do they give you? Like what medicine they give you?
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: Well, Daraprim, Primaquin, straight quinine. When my wife almost died,
• 27:37
  she weighed 115 pounds. And then she got malaria and
• 27:42
  almost died. She got down to 76 pounds. And the
• 27:47
  doctor told me she's going to die tonight. We don't
• 27:48
  have any way to keep her alive.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. They put her on blood transfusions because you lose
• 27:54
  a lot of blood. It kills the blood cells. And
• 27:57
  they put her on blood transfusions and also straight quinine,
• 28:01
  which caused her to be in agony for several days
• 28:04
  of just constant retching. And quinine is a really bad experience.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: But at the end of it, she pulled through.
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: She pulled through.
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God. Yeah.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: We all pulled through.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: You had to be like questioning your decisions. I mean
• 28:18
  this has to be a trialing process. you know, very
• 28:21
  difficult time because you chose to be there.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so we were leaving the village to find
• 28:29
  help because my wife and daughter were dying of malaria
• 28:32
  at this time where she got down to 76 pounds.
• 28:34
  And my daughter lost a lot of weight too. She
• 28:37
  was just skin and bones. And I'm getting my boat
• 28:42
  out of there. And I had never been out by boat.
• 28:43
  In fact, I didn't have a boat. We were, I
• 28:45
  had no idea how to get out of there. So
• 28:47
  this Catholic priest came up to see what the Protestant
• 28:50
  missionaries were doing. And I said, can I borrow your boat?
• 28:53
  I've got to get my family out of here. He
• 28:54
  had this very narrow aluminum canoe with a six-horsepower Johnson.
• 28:59
  And I got my whole family in there, and he
• 29:01
  just stayed there in the jungle and let my family
• 29:04
  take off in his boat. And I didn't know where
• 29:08
  we were, but I was thinking, you know, I've read
• 29:09
  all these books about missionaries, and now I'm having a
• 29:12
  missionary experience. But it wasn't fun. It was really— That
• 29:17
  sounds horrific. It was a horrific experience, and I just
• 29:20
  didn't know what was going to happen.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: So your goal was to convert these people, and how
• 29:26
  long were you there for?
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: Well, I was there— in 1980, I spent the whole year there.
• 29:32
  In all the other years, from 1977 to 2013, I
• 29:34
  was there for three to six months. months every year
• 29:41
  so i was there a lot and um got sick
• 29:46
  every time i went i had typhoid fever and all
• 29:48
  this stuff but um uh attacked by snakes and stuff
• 29:53
  like that but um It was just a mind-altering experience.
• 29:59
  Things didn't go the way I thought. And the people
• 30:04
  started questioning me. They started asking me about, why do
• 30:08
  you believe in this Jesus you keep telling us about?
• 30:10
  What's he like?
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: And you're doing this also, you're translating these concepts from
• 30:17
  English to Pidaha.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: From Greek to Pidaha. Going from the Greek New Testament,
• 30:22
  because I was translating the New Testament, so going from
• 30:24
  Greek to Pitaha, but I'm referencing English and Portuguese at
• 30:29
  the same time.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: I'm staying in there.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: And you expect these people to understand what you're saying.
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So, you know, if you're in the middle of
• 30:36
  the jungle and Jesus does something out in a desert,
• 30:41
  how do you describe desert?
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Isn't their language a completely different language than ours? Like
• 30:46
  in terms of like they have no words for color. Right.
• 30:50
  They have no words for direction. They don't have a
• 30:52
  left or a right.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Right. So— And this all takes time to find out
• 30:56
  because when I went there, I thought everybody had words
• 30:58
  for colors. Everybody had words for numbers. Everybody had a
• 31:01
  concept of God.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Right. They don't have words for numbers. That's so crazy.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't have.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: Do they have numbers?
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: No, no numbers.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: So how many fish did you catch today, Mike?
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: A lot.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: That's it.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: A lot or a little.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: A lot or a little.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: Or a good amount.
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So in fact, that claim was really controversial.
• 31:23
  I've had psycholinguists and cognitive scientists come down with me
• 31:27
  to do experiments.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: Didn't you get into it with Chomsky about that?
• 31:31
  Speaker 2: Well, I got into it with Chomsky about their grammar.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: Yes. Oh, that's right.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Chomsky made this claim. I've gotten other people. There have
• 31:39
  been people who find every claim controversial. So there's some
• 31:42
  people can't believe they don't have numbers. Some people who
• 31:44
  don't believe they don't have a concept of God. Other
• 31:47
  people who believe they don't, who don't believe they don't
• 31:49
  have colors. Um, but, um, Chomsky claimed that all languages
• 31:55
  are built on a common property called recursion. And recursion
• 32:00
  is this, English has it all over the place. So
• 32:03
  it's the ability to put one unit inside another unit
• 32:08
  of the same type. So take a noun. If I
• 32:10
  take the noun truck and the noun driver and I
• 32:14
  put them together, I can form a third word, truck driver.
• 32:18
  And so that's recursion. I put one noun inside another
• 32:20
  and I get a third noun. Or with a sentence,
• 32:22
  I can say John spoke. There's no recursion there. I
• 32:26
  can say John said that Bill spoke. And now that's
• 32:29
  got recursion because Bill spoke is a sentence inside John
• 32:34
  said that. And so Chomsky claimed, and in my opinion,
• 32:39
  without doing a lot of homework on this, I mean,
• 32:42
  he just was basing it on languages that he happened
• 32:45
  to know, which aren't many, that all languages were built
• 32:49
  on this. It made sense. And he had a principles
• 32:52
  built into his theory that required this. So when I
• 32:54
  came along and said they don't have it, and now
• 32:57
  I know there are other languages that don't have it,
• 33:02
  this was like saying you're wrong. And for me, a
• 33:06
  relative nobody, to tell the most famous linguist in history,
• 33:11
  somebody that Chomsky was called by the New York Times
• 33:13
  the most important intellectual alive, to tell him that he's wrong,
• 33:19
  a lot of people found that very Weird, you know, unbelievable. Yeah, problematic.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: But facts are facts. Yeah. I mean, it should be
• 33:28
  exciting for a linguist to look at something that violates
• 33:32
  all the laws of other known languages.
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: It was exciting for some linguists and really off pissing
• 33:37
  for a lot of other linguists.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: Isn't that gross? That's so gross. Yeah. That is one
• 33:42
  of the grossest things about intellectuals, this gatekeeping of information
• 33:46
  and this appeal to authority that they're the only person
• 33:49
  who could possibly know. Especially when you're talking about languages.
• 33:53
  Like how many languages are there?
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: There are about 8,000 separate languages in the world.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: Okay. How the fuck could you know all the rules
• 34:02
  to 8,000 languages?
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: We don't have data on more than about 1,200 or so.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: Well, isn't there also an issue with the Aboriginal tribes
• 34:10
  of Australia? My good friend Adam Greentree, he's from Australia
• 34:15
  and he was running a mine there for a while
• 34:18
  and worked with a lot of Aboriginal people and really
• 34:21
  learned a lot about their cultures. And they're called mobs,
• 34:25
  like their tribe. They call it a mob. And there
• 34:29
  could be a mob that's just like 30 kilometers over
• 34:32
  that way. They have no idea what they're saying. They
• 34:34
  don't know the language and it's not written anywhere. And
• 34:36
  there's hundreds of these. They're all over the place. Right.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: And the bit of fieldwork that has been done, there
• 34:42
  are some really good Australian linguists trying to figure out
• 34:44
  these things. But the fieldwork that has been done has
• 34:47
  found properties in that aren't like anything else we know about.
• 34:52
  So languages can vary so much that it's really premature,
• 34:56
  in my opinion, to be writing laws that languages are
• 35:00
  supposed to follow, all 8,000 of these languages.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: Well, all you'd have to do is say, as far
• 35:06
  as we've observed, and then you're okay. But as soon
• 35:09
  as you say it has to have this, and if
• 35:12
  someone says actually a language that doesn't have this, And
• 35:15
  then there's a controversy. You're a bad guy for pointing
• 35:18
  this out.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: You're a heretic. I had one of Chomsky's followers who
• 35:24
  was Brazilian write to the Brazilian Indian Agency, which is
• 35:27
  where I get my authorization to visit these tribes, and say,
• 35:31
  this Dan Everett guy, he's a racist. That's what they
• 35:35
  always say.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Isn't that the fun one?
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: The moment they want to get rid of you, you're
• 35:40
  a racist.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, she was silly because she said he's trying
• 35:43
  to reduce the pitahas to primates. And I said, well,
• 35:46
  in fact, I am because we're all primates. I'm a primate.
• 35:48
  You're a primate. But it's the thing. If Chomsky says
• 35:52
  that all languages have X and I say here's a
• 35:55
  language that doesn't have X, then either A, Chomsky's wrong
• 35:59
  or B, these aren't humans. And so the only person
• 36:01
  who would claim they're not humans is a racist.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: That's such a crazy way to put it.
• 36:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: It's so stupid. Yeah. God.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: But this is typical in science. As I got more
• 36:11
  and more into science, it's very unfortunate.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: It's men. It's men and their egos. That's what it is.
• 36:18
  And I'm sure women as well, but primarily men.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: Well, you know, you don't get a lot of money
• 36:24
  when you're a scientist. It's not a money-making profession. You
• 36:27
  go into what is the biggest rate of exchange among scientists?
• 36:32
  It's ego.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: But it's just so crazy to think that if it
• 36:35
  doesn't have this one characteristic of language that you're calling
• 36:39
  them primates, there's not a value judgment. You're saying it's
• 36:41
  a different kind of language and this is fascinating.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: Exactly. That's my take and many anthropologists took that. This–
• 36:50
  so for example, they originally said that Homo erectus had
• 36:56
  no capability for human speech and I thought that was
• 36:58
  kind of a questionable statement since– You know, I've read
• 37:01
  a lot on Homo erectus, read a book about it.
• 37:04
  And they don't– all their accomplishments, they had to have
• 37:11
  pretty advanced language to account for the fact that the
• 37:14
  ocean was never a barrier for them. And so I
• 37:17
  said that Homo erectus had language, and I think the
• 37:20
  evidence supports that. But they don't have the kind of
• 37:22
  language Chomsky says necessarily. And– So an archaeologist at the
• 37:28
  University of Liverpool wrote me, and he says, my specialty
• 37:31
  is Homo erectus, and I think you're right. So we
• 37:33
  wrote a paper together. And then after we wrote the paper,
• 37:37
  he discovered last year the oldest wooden structure known in
• 37:42
  all of human history, 500,000-year-old structure built by Homo erectus
• 37:47
  in Zambia. And he showed that it has interlocking pieces
• 37:52
  and parts that, Nobody ever expected Homo erectus to be
• 37:56
  able to do, and their brains weren't that much smaller
• 37:58
  than ours. The average size of a modern human's brain
• 38:02
  is about 1,200 cc's for men and about 950 to 1,100
• 38:09
  cc's for women. And since we know that men aren't
• 38:11
  more intelligent than women, the size of the brain can't
• 38:14
  be what's determining that. Homo erectus had brains of 950
• 38:18
  to 1,000 cc's, cubic centimeters. You measure that by taking
• 38:23
  the skull and filling it full of sand and seeing
• 38:26
  how much sand fits in there. And so they were
• 38:31
  able to make these complex structures and they were able
• 38:33
  to make boats and they were able to do all
• 38:35
  these things. Yeah, that's what Larry Barham from the University
• 38:39
  of Liverpool discovered. This structure, you see the cross piece.
• 38:43
  And he recently gave a talk to a world association
• 38:48
  of archaeologists. to get their judgment on what this could be.
• 38:52
  Not archaeologists, but architects, to get their professional judgment. And
• 38:56
  they were really impressed by this. They said that's actually
• 38:59
  a pretty advanced structure for building a walkway or a house.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: We actually discussed this yesterday. I had a guy on
• 39:07
  named Michael Button. He's got a fantastic YouTube channel. It's
• 39:10
  all about sort of the mysteries of human history. And
• 39:14
  we talked about the seafaring aspect and how much evidence
• 39:17
  there is that these people were seafaring as much as
• 39:20
  a million years ago.
• 39:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And in my book, How Language Began, I have.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: They had to be communicated.
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't... There's an archaeologist in... Australia, Bednarik is
• 39:31
  his name, and he showed by... He did experiments and
• 39:38
  they're not exact because you can't find humans today that
• 39:41
  don't have any language, normal humans. But he got humans
• 39:45
  from different languages who couldn't communicate with each other that
• 39:48
  well to see if they could build a boat. And
• 39:50
  And then another linguist wrote a paper based on some
• 39:53
  of this called How Much Language Does It Take to
• 39:55
  Build a Boat? And it turns out you've got to
• 39:58
  have language to build a boat. And so if they
• 40:00
  were building these boats that could carry water and could
• 40:03
  carry as many as 20 people because you've got to
• 40:05
  have enough to– if you find a colony of Homo
• 40:08
  erectus on an island that was always an island, it
• 40:11
  was never connected by land, there had to be more
• 40:15
  than one person that washed up there on some vegetation.
• 40:18
  There has to have been a community.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Michael brought up that the– what was it? What
• 40:25
  organization did it? Was it NASA? NASA did a study
• 40:28
  because they were trying to figure out how many people
• 40:30
  you need to colonize another planet. And they came up
• 40:35
  with the number 500. You need a minimum of 500
• 40:38
  to begin a colony.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: In order to have genetic diversity, make sure you're not
• 40:42
  having sex with your cousin, that kind of jazz.
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So you can't. just sent a couple over there,
• 40:48
  Adam and Eve.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: And expect this to happen.
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. How did you feel about that story when you
• 40:53
  first heard it?
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: Adam and Eve?
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah. When you, when you were converting, you're 17, you're
• 40:57
  doing acid.
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: I mean, I was one of these guys who I
• 41:00
  believe the Bible cover to cover and even the covers.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: Uh, so we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah. So,
• 41:04
  but go back to how this is all going down.
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: With, uh, the, the controversy.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: So I started getting hate mail and then, um, uh,
• 41:15
  The article came out when I first proposed this in
• 41:19
  the major journal of anthropology, Current Anthropology. I was in
• 41:23
  Germany at the time at the Max Planck Institute for
• 41:26
  Evolutionary Anthropology. And right down the hall from me was
• 41:30
  Svante Pebo, who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding
• 41:33
  the genome of Neanderthals. And there was a reporter, a
• 41:38
  German reporter from Der Spiegel, to talk to him. And
• 41:42
  she found out about my article. So she walked down
• 41:44
  the hall after she interviewed him and interviewed me. And
• 41:46
  this came out and it started to get picked up
• 41:48
  in the press in a lot of places. And so
• 41:51
  the New Yorker did a big profile. But then the
• 41:55
  reaction came and it wasn't what I expected. I expected
• 41:58
  that if you make a proposal that other scientists, if
• 42:01
  they're skeptical, which they have every right to be, are
• 42:04
  going to propose experiments to test what you're saying. And
• 42:07
  they're going to say, well, if they don't have recursion,
• 42:09
  you should find this and you should not find that.
• 42:11
  You should get this and this and this. And I
• 42:14
  tried to anticipate that. But that's the kind of objection
• 42:17
  I expected. But instead they said, I'm a liar. I'm
• 42:20
  trying to get publicity. I had a New York Times reporter.
• 42:23
  She called me and she said, do you try to
• 42:26
  get publicity? I said, did I ask you to call me?
• 42:29
  I said, you know, you called me. I said, you know,
• 42:32
  it's an interesting story. If people want to talk to me,
• 42:34
  I'm here to talk to them. But I'm not. I
• 42:37
  said if I wrote you at the New York Times
• 42:38
  and said I'm an interesting person, interview me, would that
• 42:41
  make any difference?
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: They're not mutually exclusive. Like you could be trying to
• 42:45
  get attention and publicity because you've discovered something that's very important.
• 42:49
  The idea that you're just trying to get attention. Are
• 42:52
  you trying to get attention? What are you talking about?
• 42:56
  That's such– it's so weird that the– intellectuals, the people
• 43:02
  who are literally professional thinkers, would fall into these like
• 43:06
  common human traps of ego.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it was a mind-blowing, mind-expanding experience for me
• 43:17
  to see that intellectuals that I otherwise admired as deep
• 43:21
  thinkers about their subject would not think otherwise. And, you know,
• 43:25
  I mean, Did they.
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: Ever gauge you on the actual information?
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I had people from MIT, Department of Brain and
• 43:36
  Cognitive Sciences, from Stanford, Department of Psychology, from Columbia University
• 43:42
  came down at separate times to run experiments, and they
• 43:44
  were well-designed experiments to test what I said. And they
• 43:49
  all came away saying, you know, it looks like Dan's right. Right.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: So where's the reaction then? And what do they say
• 43:59
  about that? Like the people that are negative about this
• 44:01
  and the people that are calling you a racist and
• 44:03
  all this saying you're trying to get attention. What are
• 44:06
  they saying about these results?
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: They don't refer to them directly. But if asked, they
• 44:12
  often say that these people don't like Chomsky. So– All
• 44:17
  of them?
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. All of those individual scientists that are running these
• 44:20
  studies for you don't like Chomsky, and that's why they
• 44:22
  have these skewed results?
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: That is one of the many objections that people raise.
• 44:27
  But by and large, they ignore it.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: They ignore it? Yeah. So they ignore the studies?
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I had Chomsky write me some really nasty emails.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Do you have them? Do you have them still?
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: I have them. Yeah, I do have them. And I
• 44:41
  asked him, I said, why don't we debate at the
• 44:43
  Linguistic Society of America? I said, you think I'm an idiot,
• 44:46
  so here's your chance. You can show that I'm an idiot.
• 44:49
  Just we'll debate, and you'll make a fool of me
• 44:51
  in five minutes.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: He's saying he thinks you're an idiot when you're explaining
• 44:55
  a language that he doesn't know.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: I'm an idiot or I'm a liar.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: He gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper, and he said,
• 45:03
  Dan used to be a fairly good linguist, but he
• 45:07
  is a charlatan. He's just a 100% charlatan. And he
• 45:10
  was interviewed on a Spanish station and they said, what
• 45:13
  do you think of the contributions of Dan Everett? And
• 45:15
  he said, they're nothing, nothing, nothing. And he's really popular.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: I used to really admire him. I used to really
• 45:24
  admire him. Then I found out I was close homies
• 45:26
  with Jeffrey Epstein. That kind of threw a lot of
• 45:28
  water on that. Like what? Yeah. But then it was
• 45:31
  the stance during the vaccines when it was like people
• 45:34
  that weren't vaccinated should be round up and put into camps.
• 45:36
  They had some crazy positions on the unvaccinated people and
• 45:40
  very just misinformed, just completely misinformed about whether it was
• 45:47
  natural immunity or there was other medications that were treat
• 45:51
  that you could use to treat COVID-19 or even the.
• 45:55
  the efficacy of the vaccine. It was crazy. That was
• 45:58
  just one thing about him. There's just like his earlier debates,
• 46:02
  like he's got these fantastic debates. I think it's him
• 46:05
  and William F. Buckley. Have you ever seen those? He's
• 46:09
  so good in those. He's so brilliant in those. It
• 46:12
  was a young Chomsky and like his intellect and his reason,
• 46:18
  it was like a breath of fresh air. It was
• 46:19
  like Super well-informed. Every time Buckley tried to catch him
• 46:24
  on something, he judoed him. It was amazing. Yeah.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: Well, the first two books of Chomsky I read when
• 46:30
  I started doing graduate work in linguistics.
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: I read the media one. What is it?
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: Oh, A Manufacturer of Consent.
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But he had– the first book of his I read,
• 46:44
  it was in linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
• 46:47
  And if you're a linguist and you're studying linguistics, that's
• 46:50
  just genius. It is just brilliant. And then the next
• 46:53
  book that he published the same year was American Power
• 46:57
  and the New Mandarins, which was about Vietnam. And that
• 47:00
  was also brilliant. And, you know, for one person to
• 47:03
  publish two books like that in one year, I mean,
• 47:07
  that's just first-order genius. So I admired him.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: What goes wrong with a guy like that, though? If
• 47:12
  a guy can be that smart, how can he not
• 47:15
  be curious about it? How could he not– like when
• 47:17
  you say something that flies in the face of everything
• 47:20
  that he's taught, how could he not be curious and
• 47:24
  want to talk to you? And if you're right, why
• 47:27
  would he not want to like do something with you?
• 47:29
  Like if I found someone like you and I was–
• 47:31
  I mean I would have hoped that I would be
• 47:33
  the same way as I am now. And I had
• 47:35
  an opportunity. I said we should do a podcast together.
• 47:38
  We could explain this. This is crazy.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: Right. I invited him to the Pidahá. He was coming
• 47:42
  to Brazil and I said, hey, why don't you come
• 47:45
  with me to the Pidahá? And I'll ask them any
• 47:47
  question you want me to ask them. We can talk
• 47:48
  about it there. And he said, I don't do that
• 47:50
  kind of thing. I don't do field work. So he
• 47:53
  didn't come.
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: Good move. You don't want typhoid fever and fucking malaria
• 47:57
  bit by snakes, stalked by jaguars.
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: That's all true.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: See? He's smart. It's just very disappointing when people are
• 48:04
  really brilliant. He's a brilliant guy and essentially– I mean
• 48:09
  especially rather was really brilliant when he was young. It's
• 48:12
  just– I'm so sad when you see someone like that
• 48:15
  just behaving with ego because he was the expert. He
• 48:19
  was the foremost linguist on planet Earth.
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: When the New York Times is saying things like you're
• 48:23
  the most important intellectual alive and you have people hanging
• 48:27
  off every word as though it comes from the Oracle
• 48:31
  of Apollo, I assume that it affects your ego to
• 48:36
  some degree.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: 100 percent. Most people, especially back then when there's no
• 48:40
  internet to check you. You can get a really distorted
• 48:43
  perception of how you stand. Also, everyone is kissing your ass.
• 48:47
  You're surrounded by other people that are trying to climb
• 48:50
  the same ladder you're on. You're in a very lofty
• 48:53
  position of authority and power.
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: He wrote letters of recommendation for me for my first
• 48:58
  job in the US.
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: And he wrote a letter of recommendation when I came
• 49:02
  up for promotion to tenure at the University of Pittsburgh.
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: Why would he do that if you're an idiot?
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: But I hadn't been– I wasn't yet an idiot.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: I became an idiot.
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: You became an idiot when you disagreed with him. Meanwhile, ha-ha,
• 49:15
  you're right. That's what's funny. In the end, you're right.
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well. he– I've had so many exchanges in journals
• 49:24
  and magazines and things with his followers over the years
• 49:28
  and with him that I go give a talk somewhere
• 49:32
  and people say, I hope you're ready because there's a
• 49:35
  lot of skeptics in this audience and I say, I
• 49:39
  don't think they're going to ask me any new questions.
• 49:40
  I've done this so much now that they're going to
• 49:42
  ask me– I said I'll be surprised if anybody asks
• 49:46
  me a question that I haven't heard from Chomsky.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: And when you have these conversations with Chomsky and you
• 49:53
  lay out how the Piraha use their language and what
• 49:57
  they– and how it works, what was his reaction to that?
• 50:01
  You're just incorrect?
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: Well, the first time I talked to him about it,
• 50:04
  he had not made this claim about recursion. This was
• 50:06
  in 1984. I was a visitor at MIT Linguistics, and
• 50:11
  my office was next to his. And so I talked
• 50:14
  to him several times that year. And I said, I
• 50:19
  don't think their language has this property. And he said,
• 50:23
  you know, he was drinking coffee and looking at the board.
• 50:25
  He had a blackboard right by his desk. And he said, hmm,
• 50:28
  wonder what the consequences of that are. And then one
• 50:31
  of his PhD students told me, oh, you really got
• 50:33
  gnome thinking. What is this? He found that very intriguing.
• 50:36
  But then when he came out with the proclamation that
• 50:39
  all languages had the habit, then I became an idiot.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, God. That's so disappointing. Fucking people. Yeah. Fucking people.
• 50:50
  Even the brightest minds. They're just– ego is such a motherfucker. Yeah.
• 50:56
  Speaker 2: Well, it's really disappointing because he was like my idol
• 50:59
  for the first part of my linguistic career. And I wasn't.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: Did you try to have a conversation with him after
• 51:05
  he denounced you? Did you try to like one-on-one get
• 51:08
  together with him?
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: Well, we exchanged emails.
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but in his face, like right in front of him.
• 51:13
  Did you try to do that?
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: He never had– I had always told him when I
• 51:18
  was going through Cambridge that I was coming and maybe
• 51:21
  he and I could talk. And he always made time.
• 51:24
  And we talked– I would be living somewhere else and
• 51:26
  I would come to MIT and he would talk to me.
• 51:28
  And my first PhD student is a full professor at
• 51:31
  MIT and he started off in linguistics. He's in brain
• 51:35
  and cognitive sciences now. So I had a good relationship
• 51:38
  with Chomsky. But then suddenly he never had time to
• 51:41
  meet with me.
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: So after his proclamation? Right. OK.
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: He had no time to meet with me. His wife
• 51:47
  died and I wrote him a letter. saying, I'm so
• 51:49
  sorry that Carol died. This is really terrible. I know
• 51:52
  you guys have been together for so long. And he
• 51:54
  wrote back and said, thank you so much. That means
• 51:57
  a great deal to me. And then I saw this
• 51:59
  article in a Sao Paulo paper where he called me
• 52:01
  a charlatan. So I wrote him right back and I said,
• 52:03
  did you call me a charlatan? And he said, yeah,
• 52:06
  you are a charlatan. I said, you should be ashamed
• 52:09
  of yourself. He said, no, you should be ashamed of
• 52:10
  yourself for saying things you know that can't be right.
• 52:14
  So that was the last exchange we had. Silly, silly.
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: No, of course you should have had that in front
• 52:19
  of them. I mean, just, I think people say things
• 52:22
  in emails that I think is a terrible way to communicate.
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: I agree completely. You know, that's.
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: Especially with insults. It's just, it's such a way. And
• 52:31
  then you're waiting on the other person's insult in return. Like, God,
• 52:35
  stop it. Are you fucking 12 years old?
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Stop. So the author, Tom Wolfe, um, The last
• 52:42
  book he wrote was called Kingdom of Speech. And he
• 52:46
  talked about two controversies, Darwin versus Alfred Russell Wallace and
• 52:51
  me versus Chomsky.
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 52:53
  Speaker 2: And so he has a very– he has some bizarre,
• 52:56
  absolutely wrong ideas about where language came from. He's not
• 52:59
  a linguist. But he did cover that controversy extremely well.
• 53:04
  And Tom used to call me every week when he
• 53:07
  was writing the book. I didn't even know what it
• 53:09
  was about to get the details right. But he was
• 53:12
  just shocked how this happened. Yeah.
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: Again, it's disappointing. But even the most brilliant humans are
• 53:20
  just human.
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: And they're subject to all the flaws and all the
• 53:24
  traps that the human mind could fall into.
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I've often said after long experience that intelligence is
• 53:32
  no antidote for stupidity.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: You can be both.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, 100 percent. Absolutely. Especially when ego is involved.
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: So– How many people– how many of the Piraha did
• 53:44
  you convert?
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: Nobody. In decades, they weren't interested. They were so totally–
• 53:52
  because my claims did not meet their standard of evidence.
• 53:56
  They have a high standard of evidence and I didn't
• 53:58
  meet that standard.
• 54:00
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  and the products being advertised are intended for a United
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  States audience. But don't they have like mystical creatures and
• 55:10
  stuff that they believe live in the forest? They do.
• 55:14
  Speaker 2: And When I first got there as a Christian, I
• 55:18
  called these things spirits because that's all I knew how
• 55:21
  to characterize them.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: How do they describe them?
• 55:23
  Speaker 2: They describe them as distinct beings. They don't say they're
• 55:26
  spiritual or anything like that. But you see something. Like
• 55:30
  you see– maybe there's another Indian hunting from a different tribe,
• 55:34
  hunting in your jungle because there are some that are
• 55:37
  close enough to be hunting in the same area. You
• 55:39
  see them, but you don't see them well. They go
• 55:41
  behind a tree or something. So you say, oh, that's
• 55:45
  one of these things. I just saw one of these things.
• 55:50
  They don't put it to the test necessarily, but they
• 55:52
  did see it.
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: These things.
• 55:54
  Speaker 2: So they have three major types of entities besides humans.
• 55:59
  And they have different types of humans. I'm one type
• 56:01
  and they're another type. And so they have things.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: How do they make the distinction? Is it the appearance?
• 56:08
  Speaker 2: For humans, yes, it's appearance. Well, actually for the other entities,
• 56:12
  it's appearance too. So for me, I'm white, and white
• 56:17
  means you don't have blood. So they asked me. They said,
• 56:20
  so do you have blood? And they asked me one
• 56:24
  time after I'd been there for years. They said, do
• 56:25
  Americans die? And I said, yeah, we die. But you're
• 56:29
  really old, and you haven't died yet. And so I
• 56:31
  cut myself once.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: How old were you at the time?
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: Probably 45.
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: 45. And they thought you were a goner.
• 56:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because we age differently. I already had gray hair,
• 56:41
  you know, not all over.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: Right. They look a lot different when they're 45.
• 56:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. They're all still 100 percent black hair.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: Oh, they thought you were a goner with the white hair.
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: So they have an expression, almost about to fall to
• 56:54
  the ground. And that's the way they described me.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: But so Americans are one way. Brazilians are another way.
• 57:02
  But then there are these things. Some of them are
• 57:03
  called fast mouths. And so they They talk in a
• 57:06
  high-pitched voice. And at night, you hear somebody, you know,
• 57:11
  a creature talking in a high falsetto voice into the village.
• 57:15
  And I say, what's that? And they said, oh, that's
• 57:16
  a fast mouth. I said, but I'm seeing it, and
• 57:20
  it looks like a pita ha. Oh, yeah, they look
• 57:22
  just like us, but they're not. They're not us. And
• 57:25
  so this is where we come to the border of
• 57:28
  fact and fiction. And we try to draw a fairly
• 57:33
  rigid line between fact and fiction. in our society and
• 57:36
  in most European societies. But to them, they don't have
• 57:42
  to have the full range of experience with this to
• 57:47
  describe it. And so a fast mouth is just a
• 57:50
  fast mouth. And you know who they are because they
• 57:53
  talk in a high falsetto voice and they go naked.
• 57:56
  Whereas pitahas often go naked, but if they have clothes,
• 57:59
  they'll wear them. And the fast mouths will never wear clothes.
• 58:02
  And the fast mouths are also sexually promiscuous. So I
• 58:06
  had a reporter with me in the jungle from GEO
• 58:09
  magazine in Germany. And he said, can I see one
• 58:12
  of these fast mouths? And I told one guy, I said,
• 58:15
  he wants to see a fast mouth. And he said, well,
• 58:17
  I'll go get one. And he walks off into the jungle.
• 58:20
  And then the same guy comes back in naked, talking
• 58:24
  in this falsetto voice, and starts trying to hump the reporter. Yeah.
• 58:31
  And the reporter says, oh, I'm feeling very uncomfortable. I said,
• 58:34
  you asked for it. I mean, you know, I mean,
• 58:36
  that's the way they are. And so I finally told
• 58:38
  the guy. I said, you know, he doesn't want this.
• 58:40
  He doesn't want to see the fast mouth anymore. So
• 58:42
  he talks to me in a high falsetto and he
• 58:44
  walks off and he comes back on with his clothes on.
• 58:47
  And I said, did you see the fast mouth? He said,
• 58:51
  was there a fast mouth here? I was gone, you know.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: What?
• 58:54
  Speaker 2: But it's the same guy.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: What did you take of that? Like what– Did you
• 59:00
  think that they were playing a prank on you? Did
• 59:02
  you think this is like some sort of a psychotic
• 59:06
  state that they fall into?
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: It is a limit. area between being, say, theater and
• 59:13
  being reality. And I don't know if they feel possessed.
• 59:17
  I don't think they have a concept of possession. I've
• 59:20
  asked them and I've investigated this and I've never seen that.
• 59:23
  But they definitely believe that they're gone and this other
• 59:28
  creature is there in their place.
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: Do they have memory of when they become a fast mouth?
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: They deny it. I've tried to get them to talk
• 59:36
  about it. I don't know. I wasn't here.
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: Everyone denies it?
• 59:40
  Speaker 2: Everybody denies it.
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: Wow. Do you think that being a fast mouth is
• 59:44
  like almost like a license to go and do stuff
• 59:48
  you're not supposed to do? Go fuck everybody? Yeah. You
• 59:51
  think that's what it is? Yeah.
• 59:52
  Speaker 2: They also change names very frequently. So if I go
• 59:56
  back there now, all my old friends will have different names.
• 59:59
  And anything done under the old name is– you'll say,
• 1:00:02
  you remember when you did this? Well, I didn't do that.
• 1:00:05
  That was the guy with this name. So they don't
• 1:00:08
  even claim– so the concept of constancy of identity throughout time,
• 1:00:14
  they deny this.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: So when do they choose to make a new name
• 1:00:18
  or do they get a new name assigned to them?
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: They can. Why? Children often get new names for different
• 1:00:24
  phases of life. But adults, if you're out in the
• 1:00:28
  jungle and you think you saw something and you can't
• 1:00:30
  explain it, you might take a new name.
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: Not a bad idea, right?
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: This is a way of coping with things.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean it kind of makes sense. If something
• 1:00:41
  really traumatic happens to you and you want to like
• 1:00:44
  reclaim your life, you change your name, start over from scratch. Right.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 2: And some of us do it in American culture, but
• 1:00:50
  it's a lot harder legal process to change your name.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: How often do they get killed by jaguars?
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: Nobody's ever been killed in my almost 50 years coming
• 1:01:00
  and going, but many of them have been attacked.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: Really? Yeah.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: Like one guy was coming back from getting Brazil nuts,
• 1:01:08
  and he had a big basket. And so his head's
• 1:01:11
  down a bit with the tump line, and the basket
• 1:01:13
  probably weighs, you know, 60 pounds.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 2: Suddenly a jaguar jumps out of the tree right on
• 1:01:20
  his back, but it got the basket and not him,
• 1:01:23
  and it pulled the basket off his head, and he
• 1:01:26
  shot it with an arrow. Oh, my God. But they
• 1:01:29
  tell me that when you shoot a jaguar with an arrow,
• 1:01:32
  the jaguar forgets about you and keeps trying to get
• 1:01:34
  the arrow out. And by that time, you've got three
• 1:01:37
  or four more arrows in it. So these guys are
• 1:01:41
  deadly accurate with bows and arrows.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: So if they did that and, like, maybe— they got attacked,
• 1:01:48
  would they change their name after that?
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: They could. And I, so I don't completely have it
• 1:01:52
  down to a formula. Oh, okay.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: So it's not, it's not like when they're uncomfortable, sometimes
• 1:01:56
  it's just like, it's time. It's time that Bob becomes Mike.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: It's a subjective reaction to objective experience that causes them
• 1:02:02
  to do this.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: And they, do they announce it to the village?
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: They announce it to their, like their spouse or their kids.
• 1:02:09
  And then the word spreads. And so I'll come back in.
• 1:02:12
  I came back in after six months and my buddy,
• 1:02:14
  my main language teacher, And his name was, when I left,
• 1:02:20
  it was Kohoi Behe, which means blood eater. And when
• 1:02:24
  I got back, I said, you know, and the nickname
• 1:02:27
  is Ko. Hey, Ko. You know, I asked, how are
• 1:02:28
  you doing? And nobody responds. He didn't turn and look
• 1:02:31
  at me or anything. And I called him again and again.
• 1:02:33
  He said, you talking to me? I said, yeah. He said,
• 1:02:35
  that's not my name. And so I had to learn
• 1:02:38
  his new name was Ka Paobi, you know, which, and
• 1:02:42
  he was serious about it. He wouldn't respond anymore to
• 1:02:44
  that old name. Wow.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: How odd. The first time that happened, were you like, oh,
• 1:02:50
  my God, these people are fucking crazy?
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: No, I thought, I'm pretty stupid. I can't even remember
• 1:02:54
  their names. Wow. That was my first reaction.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: How quickly did this happen from you first, like, encountering
• 1:03:01
  these people?
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I would be gone for three or four months
• 1:03:06
  at a time and then come back because I was
• 1:03:09
  doing linguistic.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: Oh, so you never experienced it, like, as it was happening?
• 1:03:13
  You only experienced it... One time.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: One time there was... You really need to spend at
• 1:03:17
  least a full year there so you can see all
• 1:03:19
  the seasons and all the changes. Then I saw some
• 1:03:22
  of the stuff. But many of the name changes happened
• 1:03:24
  when I was out of the village. Some of them
• 1:03:26
  happened when I was in the village. But my best friends,
• 1:03:28
  their name changes seemed to happen when I was out
• 1:03:30
  of the village. And they were very serious about enforcing
• 1:03:34
  those new name changes. So if you ask them to
• 1:03:39
  tell stories about their childhood, you get these very vague stories.
• 1:03:44
  And they'll say, you know, but I'm talking about this person,
• 1:03:47
  you know. Or they'll tell me, you know, they changed
• 1:03:49
  my name twice, you know. And so they name me
• 1:03:53
  and they– so a guy comes up to me and
• 1:03:54
  he says, that name is rotten, which is the same
• 1:03:58
  word you use for spoiled food. You know, your name
• 1:04:01
  is spoiled. So I'm going to give you this name.
• 1:04:04
  And then I got– then one time I was in
• 1:04:06
  there and was staying with this guy. He's just wearing
• 1:04:09
  a loincloth and the other Peter Hoff fearing because he's
• 1:04:12
  this fierce– And he says, you're really old. They always
• 1:04:18
  tell me that. He said, you're really old. And I said,
• 1:04:21
  I'm not that old. He said, yeah, you are. My
• 1:04:22
  dad's dead and you're about the same age as he was.
• 1:04:25
  They don't know what the age is. He said, I'm
• 1:04:27
  going to give you my dad's name. And Bao Aisi,
• 1:04:30
  which is just the name of his dad. So that's
• 1:04:32
  been my name ever since. I've had that name now
• 1:04:34
  for about 15 years.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: And when you go back, what happens if they want
• 1:04:39
  to switch it up again? You have to learn a
• 1:04:40
  new name? Yeah, yeah. And that could easily happen, right?
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it could easily happen. It just depends on which
• 1:04:45
  village you go to and which person you're talking to.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: What is the population of these people?
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 2: When I first got there, it was under 200. And
• 1:04:51
  now it's around 700 to 800. They've grown because they've
• 1:04:57
  had more medical assistance. I gave them medical assistance, my
• 1:05:00
  wife and I, for 20 years.
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: And so your goal was to convert them to Christianity. Right.
• 1:05:08
  And when it's– so no one's buying it. So what
• 1:05:12
  are you doing? What do your days consist of while
• 1:05:15
  you're there?
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: Well, my days consist of linguistic analysis and translation effort.
• 1:05:22
  So I'll work with somebody. And so I worked with
• 1:05:24
  this guy, for example– And we went through the story
• 1:05:27
  of Jesus. I had translated a large part of the
• 1:05:30
  Gospel of Luke, and I tell him this story. And
• 1:05:33
  then I showed film strips, you know, made by, you know,
• 1:05:37
  where Jesus looks like an American and has a beard
• 1:05:40
  and all this stuff. And I explained it. They don't
• 1:05:43
  make a difference between drawings and photographs, so they figured, well,
• 1:05:47
  this must be Jesus. He saw Jesus. So that night,
• 1:05:50
  after I had told him all this and we had
• 1:05:52
  seen the film strips, His village was across the river.
• 1:05:55
  I lived in one village, and across the river was
• 1:05:57
  another village, and they went across the river. And all
• 1:06:00
  night long, I heard screaming and yelling and people running
• 1:06:03
  around and women laughing and then women screaming. And the
• 1:06:07
  next morning, he comes back to work with me, and
• 1:06:08
  I said, so what was going on all night? He said, oh,
• 1:06:11
  Jesus came to our village. I said, what? He said, yeah,
• 1:06:15
  he came to our village, you know, and he had
• 1:06:17
  a penis three feet long. They don't have words for feet,
• 1:06:20
  so I'm just going by his hand thing. He said,
• 1:06:23
  and he was trying to stick it in all the women.
• 1:06:25
  And so, you know, the women don't want to know
• 1:06:27
  anymore about Jesus.
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: What?
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 2: This is their way of rejecting it. So I never
• 1:06:34
  expected that. In all my Bible training and things.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: Did they say, so they wouldn't admit if one of
• 1:06:41
  them became like they become a fast talker if they
• 1:06:44
  just became Jesus. Right. But that could have been what happened.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: I'm sure that's what happened.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: So one guy just decided I'm Jesus.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But everybody took him, you're Jesus.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 2: And this is what Jesus is trying to do.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: But they would ask questions like, you know, hey, Dan,
• 1:07:02
  what does Jesus look like? Is he brown like us
• 1:07:04
  or is he white like you? And I say, well,
• 1:07:05
  you know, some people say he was brown like you
• 1:07:07
  and some people say he was white like me. And
• 1:07:09
  they said, yeah, yeah, but you've seen him. What did
• 1:07:11
  he look like? And I said, well, I never saw him. Well,
• 1:07:14
  your dad saw him. No, my dad never saw him.
• 1:07:17
  He lived a long time ago. I don't know anyone
• 1:07:19
  who's ever seen Jesus. And they said, you don't know
• 1:07:21
  anyone who's ever seen him and you're just talking about
• 1:07:23
  him the whole time, telling us about him? They said,
• 1:07:26
  we don't want to hear about this anymore. And that
• 1:07:30
  was like.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: But you at the time were a believer. You're a
• 1:07:33
  true believer. Yeah. So when did that start to slip away?
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: It started to slip away from two sides. One, I
• 1:07:42
  was spending a lot of my time in the intellectual
• 1:07:45
  world and trying to do serious linguistic science. And it
• 1:07:49
  slipped away mainly, however... by constant interaction with the Pirahã.
• 1:07:53
  Because as I've gotten to know these people over the years,
• 1:07:56
  these are really smart people. They're very intelligent people. They
• 1:08:00
  had me figured out before I had them figured out.
• 1:08:03
  And they can predict my behavior better than I can
• 1:08:05
  predict theirs, even today. And so they would come to
• 1:08:09
  me and they would say this, you know, they say, Dan,
• 1:08:11
  you keep telling us about Jesus, but it seems that
• 1:08:15
  only Americans believe in Jesus because we don't know any
• 1:08:17
  Brazilians that we've ever met that believe in Jesus. And
• 1:08:20
  So this seems like an American thing, but we're not Americans.
• 1:08:23
  And then they would say, you know, where did you
• 1:08:25
  get your evidence? And I began to think, you know,
• 1:08:28
  these are good questions. I can't just throw these questions off.
• 1:08:30
  What is my evidence? You know, I went to Bible school.
• 1:08:33
  I've been surrounded by Christians. I've surrounded myself by people
• 1:08:37
  who believe. And this is what happens in linguistic theory
• 1:08:40
  or other scientific theories. You surround yourself with a community
• 1:08:44
  that believes the same thing, and pretty soon it's hard
• 1:08:47
  for you to consider alternatives. Right. And so I started
• 1:08:51
  considering the alternative and I realized– I was an atheist
• 1:08:55
  back when I met my first wife in front of
• 1:08:59
  a gym. Hendrix concert. I was an atheist and then
• 1:09:01
  I became a Christian and then I thought maybe I
• 1:09:04
  was right to begin with. And so eventually I told them.
• 1:09:10
  I said, you know, I don't believe this stuff anymore either.
• 1:09:12
  And they started laughing. All the guys started laughing. I said,
• 1:09:14
  why are you– they said, oh, now you're like us.
• 1:09:17
  But– But then they told me one time, they said,
• 1:09:20
  you know, from what we understand, Christians don't drink and
• 1:09:24
  they don't sleep with other women. And, you know, we
• 1:09:27
  like to do those things. So we're not interested.
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: What was convincing for you, though? If you're a true believer,
• 1:09:36
  you think your path is the right way when you're
• 1:09:39
  hanging out with these people. What is making you question it?
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: Well, several things. One of the most important things was
• 1:09:45
  that having spent so many years as a Christian, and
• 1:09:48
  knowing Christians both in the U.S. and missionaries, who are
• 1:09:51
  the cream of the crop, supposedly, I didn't know anyone
• 1:09:56
  in the Christian faith who was as well-adjusted, who could
• 1:09:58
  cope with life as well, who was as satisfied and
• 1:10:01
  content with their lives as the Piraha. They were like
• 1:10:04
  the ultimate Zen masters, and the ultimate, you know, if
• 1:10:08
  you thought, what is Jesus supposed to do for your life?
• 1:10:11
  They already had it. And I didn't know many Christians
• 1:10:13
  who did. So first it was quality of the spiritual life.
• 1:10:16
  They seem to me to have the highest quality of
• 1:10:18
  spiritual life. So one MIT guy who came down, an
• 1:10:22
  MIT PhD student, said, these look like the happiest people
• 1:10:25
  in the world. And I said, well, what kind of
• 1:10:28
  statement is that? How would you measure who's happiest? He said, well,
• 1:10:32
  I would spend time, I would see how long they
• 1:10:35
  smile and laugh every day and compare it to others
• 1:10:37
  and how much time they spend laughing and smiling. And
• 1:10:40
  I'll guarantee you, he said, I've never seen a peda
• 1:10:43
  here who's not smiling or laughing at frequently. So it
• 1:10:48
  was that quality of character, and it was also just
• 1:10:51
  the fact that I began to realize that the scientific
• 1:10:54
  principles that I've been learning and that I'm applying in
• 1:10:57
  linguistics almost have to be suspended to apply them to
• 1:11:02
  the faith. Because, you know, for example, I've heard a
• 1:11:06
  lot of stories of people being healed. But this is
• 1:11:12
  anecdotal evidence. And I'm not going to deny anybody's experience.
• 1:11:16
  If you tell me you had inoperable cancer, but now
• 1:11:22
  you don't, something happened, and I can't tell you what
• 1:11:25
  it was. But at the same time, there's no statistical
• 1:11:28
  relevance to that. It's also the case that even when
• 1:11:32
  I was in Bible school, one of my teachers said,
• 1:11:37
  I wonder why healers, faith healers, never start with amputees.
• 1:11:41
  you know. They always start with diseases you can't see,
• 1:11:44
  like cancer, and explain how it went away. But they
• 1:11:49
  said also in the Bible, and the Bible itself, you know,
• 1:11:51
  says this, Jesus not only healed people, he raised them
• 1:11:55
  from the dead. So if somebody claims to be a
• 1:11:57
  healer in the same vein as Jesus, I'd like to
• 1:12:00
  see them start at cemeteries and start raising people from
• 1:12:04
  the dead. We're not seeing that, and we don't see
• 1:12:06
  amputees healed. We see things that are sort of subjective experiences.
• 1:12:10
  So that And I'm not claiming that nobody has a
• 1:12:13
  right to believe what they believe or that I'm right
• 1:12:15
  about all these things. But these are the reason– this
• 1:12:17
  is part of the reasoning process that went through my mind.
• 1:12:20
  And I thought, yeah, I just can't do this anymore.
• 1:12:25
  I cannot tell these people to believe something that they
• 1:12:29
  have reasonable objections against and I don't have reasonable answers for.
• 1:12:34
  So to me, they made more sense than I did.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: Well, there's– So many of these ancient religions that have
• 1:12:42
  very similar stories to the Jesus story.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: It seems like a very old story. And I'm of
• 1:12:51
  the opinion that what you're getting with all of these
• 1:12:55
  religious texts is there were some events and there's some
• 1:13:01
  sort of a documentation of this events, but it's very hard.
• 1:13:06
  to figure out what exactly happened. Like, for instance, Paul
• 1:13:11
  never met Jesus. No. When most people find that out,
• 1:13:15
  they go, wait, what? So all that stuff that Jesus said,
• 1:13:18
  Paul's writing down. And well, how does Paul know this?
• 1:13:22
  And then you go, oh, well, Paul met Jesus in
• 1:13:24
  a dream. Like, hold the fuck on.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: Right, right. See, ironically, the Pentecost might actually take that
• 1:13:31
  as evidence.
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: Right. I mean, Jesus came back to their camp as
• 1:13:34
  a fast forward.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: But we said, you know, I learned in Bible school
• 1:13:39
  that all the apostles had to have met Jesus. And
• 1:13:42
  Paul was an apostle, therefore he had to have met Jesus.
• 1:13:44
  And so I said, well, when did he meet Jesus?
• 1:13:46
  And they said, on the road to Damascus. He had
• 1:13:48
  the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus, so
• 1:13:50
  he met him.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: But— It's tricky.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 2: It's tricky.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: It's tricky. It's also– again, when you get especially to
• 1:13:59
  the Old Testament, like what were they documenting? What are
• 1:14:05
  these events? What happened there? There's some stories that you
• 1:14:11
  say– like the flood story for example. Boy, there's a
• 1:14:13
  lot of those. There's a lot of those in all
• 1:14:15
  sorts of ancient religions. It seems to be some sort
• 1:14:19
  of a historical record. of some sort of a catastrophe. Right.
• 1:14:24
  All the other stuff that's attached to it, you just
• 1:14:26
  got to go, I'm not sure what this means. Right.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: You know, when I was a little boy, you know,
• 1:14:31
  my mother died when I was very young, but when
• 1:14:33
  I was a little boy, we would drive up from
• 1:14:34
  Imperial Valley, California to San Diego, and you've got to
• 1:14:36
  go through the mountains. And there's this line of white
• 1:14:40
  stones that I noticed near the top of the mountains.
• 1:14:43
  And I said, you know, what caused that? And my
• 1:14:46
  mother said, the flood. And I thought, Well, that makes sense.
• 1:14:49
  It must be the flood. I'm like seven. And so
• 1:14:54
  this is– some of this stuff gets started this way
• 1:14:56
  and it becomes truth.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's certainly when you're talking about a
• 1:15:00
  time thousands of years ago where just the ability to
• 1:15:06
  read was very limited. And then you're translating things from
• 1:15:09
  languages that we don't even speak anymore. It gets real
• 1:15:13
  squirrely when you try to figure out what these events
• 1:15:16
  actually were that they were documenting. It's– having a belief system,
• 1:15:22
  I think there's a lot of value to it. I
• 1:15:24
  think it gives you a moral scaffolding, gives you structure
• 1:15:27
  in your life, and that alone is like super beneficial
• 1:15:30
  to people. And the people that I know that are
• 1:15:33
  like true Christians, really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ,
• 1:15:37
  they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. I
• 1:15:38
  think there's really great benefit to that. The problem is
• 1:15:41
  like what are we saying here? You know, what exactly–
• 1:15:46
  like do you– the Adam and Eve one. It's like, okay,
• 1:15:48
  what do you think happened? Do you think there's two people?
• 1:15:51
  That's the only two people on earth? And then where
• 1:15:53
  do the other people come from? The brothers and sisters
• 1:15:55
  just have sex with each other? Right.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 2: What? Yeah, I mean evolution explains that obviously very well.
• 1:16:02
  But Adam and Eve, you know, I remember when my
• 1:16:04
  mother told me the story of eating the apple and
• 1:16:08
  betraying God. And Adam is hiding out and God says,
• 1:16:13
  where are you? And I asked my mother, I said,
• 1:16:17
  I thought God knew everything. Why is he asking him
• 1:16:19
  where he is? I don't understand that. And she said, well,
• 1:16:22
  he wants him to confess it. Well, there's always that
• 1:16:24
  kind of answer. You can always give that kind of answer.
• 1:16:27
  But we, you know, you don't have to focus on religion.
• 1:16:29
  You can even go to paleoanthropology and you can look at,
• 1:16:33
  are there 20 species of Homo that used to exist
• 1:16:36
  in the past or more? Or were there just three, Erectus, Neanderthal,
• 1:16:41
  and Sapiens? And what does it mean to be a species?
• 1:16:45
  And how can we really prove some of that stuff
• 1:16:48
  before the work of Svante Paibo and decoding the DNA,
• 1:16:53
  the genome of ancient creatures doing this thing that people
• 1:16:58
  thought was impossible? That was speculation. It was really hard
• 1:17:01
  to tell. And there were a lot of controversies. And
• 1:17:06
  now we can look at the genetic record and we
• 1:17:09
  can look at the genome, but that still doesn't tell
• 1:17:12
  us everything. So a lot of straight history and a
• 1:17:15
  lot of paleoanthropology and paleoarchaeology, all of these things always involve,
• 1:17:21
  as any theory does, speculation. You're guessing and then trying
• 1:17:27
  to test your guess. And some things are easier to
• 1:17:30
  test than other things. And so science is a community
• 1:17:35
  of people who believe they can work towards the truth,
• 1:17:38
  but the only way to do that is to have
• 1:17:41
  good guesses and know how to test them and be
• 1:17:44
  willing to admit that you're wrong and then move on
• 1:17:47
  to the next best guess. Right. And every scientist recognizes this,
• 1:17:53
  but in practice, it's really hard.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: Well, it's certainly hard if you're also a fundamentalist Christian.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. That makes it much harder.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: Because then you're living in conflict all the time. Right.
• 1:18:02
  You believe a guy came back from the dead, but
• 1:18:04
  show me proof for everything else.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You believe in miracles, but you can't. They certainly
• 1:18:09
  can't be produced. on demand anymore.
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: You also believe that people tell the truth. That's, that's
• 1:18:14
  part of the problem. Part of the problem with all
• 1:18:16
  this stuff is like, look, the Bible condones slavery, talks
• 1:18:20
  about slavery in multiple passages. Yeah. Um, that's a person thing.
• 1:18:25
  That's a people thing.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: That's.
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: And the Bible talks about, um, all sorts of things that,
• 1:18:31
  you know, we don't, uh, agree with, uh, today, but
• 1:18:35
  we try to, um, interpret it in such a way
• 1:18:38
  that we can live with it. Right, exactly. You know,
• 1:18:41
  so God, I mean, if you read anything by Mark
• 1:18:44
  Twain about God, which is not only brilliant but funny,
• 1:18:48
  you know, just makes fun of the whole notion that
• 1:18:54
  … It.
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: Says religion started when the first con man made the
• 1:18:57
  first sucker.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And how many germs– he has this story about
• 1:19:02
  Noah's Ark about how Noah's family had to be so
• 1:19:05
  infested with germs so they could survive the flood.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: When you stop and think about it, I mean, like,
• 1:19:13
  you know, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat,
• 1:19:17
  and then all these creatures had to boogie on down
• 1:19:20
  to Australia almost immediately. And so you get these stories,
• 1:19:24
  and people don't want to talk about those things. They say, well,
• 1:19:27
  I don't know how God did it.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: I think there was an event, and I think this
• 1:19:32
  version of it, this doctrine that you're supposed to adhere to,
• 1:19:37
  is woefully uninformed about the actual like real facts of
• 1:19:43
  the event. I don't think anybody could possibly know. But
• 1:19:46
  I think when you have the epic of Gilgamesh, which
• 1:19:49
  mirrors the story of Noah's Ark, which mirrors the story
• 1:19:52
  of other religions that have similar flood myths or flood stories,
• 1:19:56
  it's probably something happened. Yeah, it's probably one of the
• 1:20:00
  things that happened.
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: Right. I mean you can tell people– It would be
• 1:20:06
  intellectually dishonest to tell people that all the claims of
• 1:20:09
  their religion are false. How do you know that? You
• 1:20:12
  don't know that. And I used to tell Christians, I said,
• 1:20:15
  you know, when I was a Christian, the best evidence
• 1:20:18
  for God is what he's done in your life. And
• 1:20:21
  are you living a better life? And if you're not
• 1:20:23
  living a better life, then why are you saying that
• 1:20:25
  he saved you? And if you can't live a more
• 1:20:28
  moral life than people who don't know Christ, then what
• 1:20:33
  are you saying? You've claimed that he changed your life
• 1:20:35
  for the good, but you're not living a life for
• 1:20:37
  the good. You know, I went to work in construction
• 1:20:40
  when I was still in high school for a Christian contractor.
• 1:20:45
  And I was in the union. I joined the laborers union,
• 1:20:47
  which meant that as a hod carrier, that's the hardest
• 1:20:50
  job I ever did, that you got paid $ 8.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: 25 an hour.
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: And this is 1968. And that was a lot of
• 1:20:54
  money in 1968. And the guy told me when I
• 1:20:55
  got hired, he said, The union says, I got to
• 1:21:02
  pay $ 8. 25 an hour, but I'm not going to pay
• 1:21:05
  you that. I'm going to write you down as only
• 1:21:06
  working four hours a day, but you're going to work eight.
• 1:21:09
  And that's how he got around it. And I thought,
• 1:21:12
  this guy's a Christian and he's lying on these forms
• 1:21:15
  and on his taxes and he's going to church. And, um,
• 1:21:19
  I got the job through my Christian missionary father-in-law who
• 1:21:22
  knew this guy. And, and I saw that happening time
• 1:21:26
  and time again. Um, So very often, unfortunately, people who
• 1:21:30
  claim to be religious and follow the commandments of Jesus,
• 1:21:34
  which are much more difficult to follow than the commandments
• 1:21:36
  of the Old Testament because they affect your thoughts and
• 1:21:40
  not just your overt action. When you don't see consistency,
• 1:21:46
  the answer could be, well, we're just humans. We're not perfect.
• 1:21:49
  And that's true. But why doesn't the Holy Spirit that
• 1:21:53
  you say you believe in make a bigger difference in
• 1:21:55
  your life than he does in Joe Schmo down the
• 1:21:57
  street who doesn't claim anything, and he's leading a more
• 1:22:01
  moral life than you are.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: Especially if you're robbing laborers.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And lying on your taxes. Yeah.
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: And so when you're with a pedaha, they live a
• 1:22:12
  subsistence lifestyle.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: And there's been a lot of evidence that subsistence lifestyles
• 1:22:20
  are some of the Most compatible lifestyles in terms of
• 1:22:25
  like people's happiness and peace and having like a sense
• 1:22:31
  of meaning. Like your life is wrapped around the gathering
• 1:22:36
  of food and community and spending time together. And they're
• 1:22:39
  the happiest people in the world. Right.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 2: You know, I monitor them for a while. How many
• 1:22:43
  hours a week does a hunter work? And I came
• 1:22:46
  up with about 15 or 20 hours a week. Yeah.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: Unless it's not going well.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And then, yeah, like now they're doing it all
• 1:22:53
  the time. But when the fish are jumping, it's that.
• 1:22:57
  And then so what do you do with the rest
• 1:22:58
  of your time? You lay around the fire and tell
• 1:23:00
  jokes and talk to people and play with your kids.
• 1:23:03
  You know, the men love to play with everybody.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: They're in pure subsistence too because they're not even preserving food. Right.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 2: If they don't find food today, they go hungry today.
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People?
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 2: I haven't seen that. I did meet him once, but
• 1:23:19
  I haven't seen that documentary. He's really big into these
• 1:23:24
  kinds of societies. I know that.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: That's what Happy People is about. It's about these people
• 1:23:28
  that live in Siberia. Right. There are hunters and trappers
• 1:23:31
  that live in Siberia, and they're all happy. Right. Yeah,
• 1:23:35
  and they basically just spend most of their time gathering food,
• 1:23:38
  gathering food and then spending time with the communities. Yeah.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: Well, the documentary that was made about the Pitaha by
• 1:23:44
  the Smithsonian and a couple of other– It's called The
• 1:23:48
  Grammar of Happiness because the film crew that went with
• 1:23:53
  me was very small, like three people. But they were
• 1:23:57
  deeply impressed by what they saw and the level of happiness.
• 1:24:00
  And all the psychologists that I've taken and linguists have
• 1:24:03
  also been very impressed by the level. If they get
• 1:24:05
  past the heat and they get past the confrontation with
• 1:24:09
  your body and the pita hump, don't have outhouses they
• 1:24:13
  don't have you know i mean if somebody needs to
• 1:24:15
  take a dump they walk off 10 feet into the
• 1:24:17
  bush and do it um and so we have.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: To have toilet paper no what do they do a
• 1:24:25
  stick or leaves oh sticks yeah hey.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 2: Or if you have corn cobs that's great but they
• 1:24:29
  don't have corn cobs good lord yeah so so yeah
• 1:24:35
  but it's just not a big deal they grow up
• 1:24:36
  that way it's just a function you know and so
• 1:24:39
  you ask them things about life what happens to you
• 1:24:41
  after you die What do you mean? Well, when you're dead,
• 1:24:44
  what happens? Well, you're dead. And so there's like a
• 1:24:48
  dead monkey that somebody just brought back and they're going
• 1:24:50
  to eat. He says, he's dead. What else is there?
• 1:24:54
  Why are you asking this question? We die, we die.
• 1:24:57
  And they don't fear death. They don't make up a
• 1:25:00
  story to make themselves not fear death.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: Were there a lot of them injured?
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. They live a violent life. I have people
• 1:25:09
  bitten by snakes, cut I had people who split their
• 1:25:12
  hand almost in two with a machete, run arrows all
• 1:25:15
  the way up their arm, step on sticks that go
• 1:25:18
  all the way through their foot. I mean, these are
• 1:25:20
  people who are naked running through the jungle. And they
• 1:25:23
  get scratches and, you know, if you get bitten by
• 1:25:27
  a snake that's hemotoxic, like this is jararaca. I don't
• 1:25:34
  know what it is. It's a bushmaster. When you get
• 1:25:37
  bit by one of those things, Even if you survive,
• 1:25:40
  a lot of the flesh is going to come off
• 1:25:42
  whatever they bit. So you see people with one leg
• 1:25:45
  normal and one leg that looks like bone because it's
• 1:25:47
  basically bone with a little bit of muscle covered in
• 1:25:50
  skin because the flesh all fell off after the snake bite.
• 1:25:55
  So they know what it is to suffer, and they're tough.
• 1:25:58
  You know, if you get a toothache, how do you
• 1:26:01
  fix it? Well, if I'm there, I have some things
• 1:26:03
  that can help with the pain or I can pull
• 1:26:05
  the tooth. But most of the time, it rots out.
• 1:26:09
  That's how they deal with it. So they learn— you know,
• 1:26:13
  I was talking to a woman one time, you know,
• 1:26:15
  really for, you know, pina ha, a looking, very feminine-looking woman,
• 1:26:19
  and she gets bit by a wasp on the face
• 1:26:21
  while I'm talking to her. And she pulls the stinger out,
• 1:26:25
  and she doesn't—it doesn't stop her conversation. And I've been
• 1:26:27
  stung by those wasps, and I know they hurt like hell.
• 1:26:30
  And I said, didn't that hurt? Yeah. But you didn't
• 1:26:33
  say anything. She says, I'm not a baby, you know.
• 1:26:37
  So— this is the way they are. From the time
• 1:26:40
  they're children, they learn to deal with pain. They learn
• 1:26:42
  to be tough. In fact, they have an expression for that.
• 1:26:44
  He wants to be hard. And that means you deliberately
• 1:26:48
  sleep sometimes less than you need. You go hungry on
• 1:26:51
  purpose and you put yourself in hard situations because you
• 1:26:54
  want to be tough because that's what the environment demands.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: So they build their resilience on purpose. Yes. Voluntarily. Well,
• 1:27:03
  I would imagine that's like the most important thing to
• 1:27:06
  have if you're running around naked in the jungle. You
• 1:27:08
  have to be tough.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 2: Right. You have to be. And, you know, like I
• 1:27:13
  go barefoot sometimes in the village. You know, I get–
• 1:27:17
  you can get parasites that way. But, you know, I
• 1:27:19
  do it anyway. But when I go to the jungle,
• 1:27:22
  I always put on shoes because my feet can't take
• 1:27:25
  all the thorns and everything. And theirs are covered with
• 1:27:28
  like a whole layer of callus all around their foot.
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: They have those crazy splayed out toes as well.
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the way feet are supposed
• 1:27:37
  to look really. Right. Ours don't look that way because
• 1:27:39
  we protect them. But their feet are tough. Their hands
• 1:27:44
  are tough. Their skin is tough. It's like leather. Even
• 1:27:46
  a little kid, their little kids, rather than crawl, they
• 1:27:50
  scoot around on their butt. And so you pick a
• 1:27:53
  little kid up and you look at their butt and
• 1:27:54
  it's just callous. It's just solid callous. And these kids
• 1:27:58
  are tough. But– By their standards, they're very gentle to
• 1:28:06
  their kids. I had a guy with me one time
• 1:28:07
  and he was trying to sleep at night and a
• 1:28:09
  baby was screaming all night. And he said, why don't
• 1:28:13
  they tell that baby to shut up? And I said, why?
• 1:28:16
  I said, they don't need to tell it to shut up.
• 1:28:18
  That's just part of life. They don't have a schedule
• 1:28:20
  to keep tomorrow. He said, what would happen if I
• 1:28:22
  went over and swatted it on the behind? I said,
• 1:28:24
  they'd kill you. They'd kill me. I said, yeah, you
• 1:28:27
  don't hit kids. They don't believe in hitting kids.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: Swat a baby to get it to– does he think
• 1:28:32
  that's how babies stop screaming?
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: I mean– Does he have any kids?
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 2: I don't think this guy did. But Christian– often believe,
• 1:28:41
  really believe, spare the rod and spoil the child. And
• 1:28:44
  they believe very much in corporal— Back then at least, right? Yeah,
• 1:28:47
  back then. I don't know today. But, you know, so
• 1:28:51
  the Bidahav never believed this. They don't accept it.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: Well, I think they're probably correct. It is interesting how
• 1:29:00
  those people are happier. Like we've done something to ourselves
• 1:29:03
  by forcing ourselves into cities and jobs and constant stress
• 1:29:07
  and bills and taxes and all these external things that
• 1:29:11
  we've attached to our lives that we think are 100
• 1:29:14
  percent necessary. Don't bring anybody any happier. Don't bring anybody
• 1:29:19
  any more happiness. In fact, make you way more miserable,
• 1:29:23
  make you susceptible to a bunch of stress-related illnesses.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I've had friends visit me in the jungle, researchers
• 1:29:30
  who are friends, and they'll say things like, I've never
• 1:29:34
  seen you so relaxed. You know, you seem tense when
• 1:29:37
  you're at the university, but down here you just seem
• 1:29:39
  totally laid back. And I said, well, I didn't notice it,
• 1:29:43
  but that makes perfect sense to me because all these
• 1:29:45
  people are laid back. There's Peter Howe that I go
• 1:29:47
  to talk to the guy, and I find myself nodding off.
• 1:29:50
  And I'm not even sleepy when I go over there,
• 1:29:52
  but he's just so laid back and talks so calmly
• 1:29:56
  and softly. and telling jokes and things that it just
• 1:30:00
  puts me to sleep.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: God, it's such a bummer that those people have to
• 1:30:02
  struggle now.
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's terrible.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: What do they hunt? What do they eat?
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 2: 70% of their diet before they started having river problems
• 1:30:13
  was fish. So the average diet of a Pidaha family
• 1:30:19
  is fish and water and jungle nuts and things you
• 1:30:23
  get from the jungle. Hunter-gatherers, which they are, have healthier
• 1:30:28
  diets than agriculturalists. Because, you know, we had this outbreak
• 1:30:33
  of disease from lettuce recently in this country. They don't
• 1:30:37
  grow vegetables, so they're never going to get that kind
• 1:30:39
  of thing. They don't get that in naturally occurring things
• 1:30:42
  out in the jungle.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 2: So their diets are healthier. They're eating protein. I know,
• 1:30:48
  for example, that I could take any Pitaham man out
• 1:30:51
  of the jungle at random, and if I weigh him,
• 1:30:55
  he's going to be 155 pounds. He's going to have
• 1:30:59
  about a 25-inch waist, 26. He's going to have about
• 1:31:04
  4% body fat, and he's just going to be lean,
• 1:31:08
  mean machine. And they do try to harden themselves, but
• 1:31:13
  that's just what the life does to you.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: But they're not overweight. They're not dealing with obesity.
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 2: No, you're never— Only when outsiders, you know, representatives of
• 1:31:25
  the Brazilian government thought it would be good to give
• 1:31:27
  them something to rely on. So they brought in a
• 1:31:30
  lot of rice and they started letting the people feed.
• 1:31:33
  The people don't grow rice, but the government would supply it.
• 1:31:36
  So now all of a sudden you see people overweight
• 1:31:40
  because they're eating starch, which they never used to eat
• 1:31:42
  that much of. Or I took a dentist in once
• 1:31:45
  about 25 years ago and we inspected the mouth of
• 1:31:49
  every living pitaha and not one cavity. He was disappointed.
• 1:31:53
  He said, I thought I was going to be able
• 1:31:54
  to do some free dental work here, And nobody has
• 1:31:57
  a cavity. Well, then somebody introduced sugarcane into their fields
• 1:32:02
  from the outside world, and now it's almost 100% cavities.
• 1:32:06
  Everybody has cavities because they eat sugarcane.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: So you keep away the sweets, you keep away the starch,
• 1:32:13
  and you get healthier people. This is just living proof
• 1:32:15
  of what we often read about diets, but that we're
• 1:32:19
  so tempted by that we don't normally follow.
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: I heard another issue with them is when they get
• 1:32:25
  introduced to soda.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's bad.
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 2: Also whiskey, but that's a different matter.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 2: They're both bad. Soda is– yeah, I mean they love it.
• 1:32:35
  They call it sweet water and they will drink the
• 1:32:38
  hell out of that. If they got five gallons, they'll
• 1:32:41
  drink it all. I had a guy once who wove
• 1:32:43
  a basket for me and I said, what do you
• 1:32:46
  want for it? And he knew that I had some
• 1:32:49
  canned fruit that I used on Sundays for my kids
• 1:32:52
  when we were all living there. And he said, I
• 1:32:54
  want a can of this stuff, which is peaches and
• 1:32:58
  sweet syrup. And it was a big can. And he
• 1:33:01
  ate that whole thing. And the kids came around. And
• 1:33:04
  I've seen guys trade with a boat, and they'll get
• 1:33:07
  like a kilo of sugar, two and a half pounds
• 1:33:09
  of sugar. And they just sit down with a spoon
• 1:33:11
  and eat it.
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: Oh, boy.
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: And so if they have it, they eat it. And
• 1:33:14
  if they don't have it, they don't eat it.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: And they have no idea that it's bad for them
• 1:33:16
  because it tastes good. Why would it be bad? Right.
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 2: You can eat anything you find as a hunter-gatherer, and
• 1:33:22
  you're not going to have enough of it. To be
• 1:33:24
  bad for you.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: Because you're going to get something else the next day.
• 1:33:27
  Or like tobacco. I can take in tobacco. But they're
• 1:33:29
  not going to get addicted to it. They're not going
• 1:33:32
  to– even when they roll cigarettes, they like them. But
• 1:33:35
  they only have it like once or twice a year.
• 1:33:37
  So you don't have to worry about it. If they
• 1:33:40
  had it all the time, they would have serious issues.
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: So they've only developed addictions based on what they've been
• 1:33:46
  introduced from the Western world. Right.
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 2: 100%.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: So tell me about this conversion that you have. Tell
• 1:33:54
  me about how you, like, what are the steps to
• 1:33:57
  go from being a true believer, living with the Pidaha,
• 1:34:01
  and then changing your opinions? How many steps did it take?
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 2: It took some practical steps, and it took a lot
• 1:34:08
  of mental steps.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: How much time?
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 2: I would say that I started seriously doubting my faith
• 1:34:15
  about five or six years into my time. So about 1982, 1983.
• 1:34:21
  And I did not announce that I was not a
• 1:34:22
  Christian until 2000 because Christians were saying things about– actually,
• 1:34:31
  it was 2001. Christians were saying things about the war
• 1:34:34
  in Iraq, about how the soldiers that we send over
• 1:34:38
  there are the blessed peacemakers of the gospel. And I
• 1:34:43
  didn't like that. And so the first step is you
• 1:34:47
  start to doubt. Then you pray so that you won't
• 1:34:50
  doubt because the Apostle Thomas said, Lord, I believe. Help
• 1:34:54
  mine unbelief. But then after a certain point, that doesn't
• 1:34:58
  work so well. So you start to read literature from apologetics,
• 1:35:03
  trying to defend these, you know, defend your mind against
• 1:35:06
  these things that you're thinking. And then you realize, I'm
• 1:35:09
  not satisfied with those answers either. So finally, one day,
• 1:35:13
  you reach the conclusion that I just, I just can't
• 1:35:17
  do it anymore. I can't sustain this belief. I can't
• 1:35:21
  pretend that I have something that I'm not. And so
• 1:35:25
  then eventually I told my wife, I said, I just
• 1:35:28
  don't believe this stuff anymore. I can't believe it. And
• 1:35:34
  pretty much instantaneously, she walked out of the house and
• 1:35:37
  we got a divorce. That was the end of that. Also,
• 1:35:40
  if you're a Christian missionary and you're getting your income
• 1:35:42
  from being a missionary, and then you tell people, oh,
• 1:35:44
  I don't believe anymore, then you're unemployed.
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: Did you have any other issues in the marriage other
• 1:35:48
  than that?
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't. That wasn't the only issue. But she
• 1:35:52
  tracked up all the issues we had to what she
• 1:35:55
  perceived as my declining faith. Oh, of course. Because, you know,
• 1:36:04
  I loved rock music before we met. We met at
• 1:36:06
  a Jimi Hendrix concert, and I went many years without
• 1:36:08
  listening to rock music. And I love rock music. And
• 1:36:11
  so I finally started listening to it again.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: And she got upset.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: That was a sign that I was starting to fade away. And,
• 1:36:22
  you know, so and I'm not a perfect person. You know,
• 1:36:24
  I would go out with Brazilian friends drinking. And that's
• 1:36:27
  definitely a no, no.
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: And any religion that tries to keep you from Hendricks. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:36:35
  Can't be. Can't be a real religion.
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 2: My dad said to me when I first became a Christian,
• 1:36:38
  you know, he was the epitome of an atheist, you know,
• 1:36:41
  and he's. He said, the one thing about religions is
• 1:36:45
  they're always trying to beat their own system. They're always
• 1:36:48
  trying to find an exception so they don't have to
• 1:36:51
  do the unpleasant things that religion tells them they need
• 1:36:53
  to do. And I thought, oh, you don't know anything.
• 1:36:58
  You don't know anything about religion. You've never been in
• 1:37:00
  part of a church. But it's not entirely false. People
• 1:37:04
  are always trying to make, you know, it's like another
• 1:37:07
  expression that comes to mind when you're, If you see
• 1:37:10
  somebody who says they're a believer and now they start
• 1:37:12
  doing things you don't think they should do, there are
• 1:37:15
  two reactions you could have. One is justice and one
• 1:37:18
  is mercy. And everybody wants to give justice and get
• 1:37:21
  mercy for their beliefs and for their transgressions. And so
• 1:37:29
  I was giving myself mercy and my wife was giving
• 1:37:31
  me justice. But in the end, I realized I'm not
• 1:37:35
  going to be bound by these rules anymore. I'm just
• 1:37:37
  going to live my life according to my best lights
• 1:37:39
  and according to the best decisions, and I'm not going
• 1:37:42
  to let this book tell me anymore. The ironic thing is,
• 1:37:44
  you know, I graduated number one in my class at
• 1:37:46
  a Bible school, so I know the Bible really well.
• 1:37:49
  And when people try to reconvert me, I've had many
• 1:37:51
  Christians try to reconvert me. I said, that's not going
• 1:37:54
  to work, you know, because I know the Bible probably
• 1:37:56
  better than you do, so you're not going to give
• 1:37:58
  me a verse I don't know. I said, I'm not
• 1:38:00
  telling you you're wrong, and I'm not even telling you
• 1:38:02
  your interpretation is wrong. I'm just saying it doesn't work
• 1:38:04
  for me, and I can't pretend that it does.
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: Right. It's got to be weird to have your beliefs
• 1:38:14
  confronted by a group of people where as you're learning
• 1:38:17
  their language, you're realizing that this moral framework and the
• 1:38:23
  scaffolding that you've only attributed to Christianity and you think
• 1:38:26
  that it's just Christianity and religion that makes people good people.
• 1:38:31
  And then here's people that don't have any God. Right. Yeah.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 2: So like, you know, you're in a big storm. The
• 1:38:37
  Amazon has storms in the rainy season. So somebody's house
• 1:38:40
  blows over because their houses, they're hunter gatherers and they're
• 1:38:43
  semi nomadic. So they don't build the best houses. So
• 1:38:46
  it's pouring rain and somebody's house blows over and they're
• 1:38:49
  just stuck there in the rain. What is their reaction?
• 1:38:52
  They start laughing like it's the funniest thing that ever happened.
• 1:38:56
  And they will go off into other people's huts and
• 1:38:58
  sleep on the ground or get near the fire or
• 1:39:00
  they might come to my house, that's very common, and
• 1:39:02
  want to sleep with me. And then the next day
• 1:39:04
  they'll rebuild it. There's nothing except for fear of immediate
• 1:39:08
  threat from the outside or from animals that gets them
• 1:39:11
  to lose their cool. And when they do lose their cool,
• 1:39:15
  It's not really losing their cool. It is calculated defense.
• 1:39:21
  They know how to take care of themselves. When I
• 1:39:24
  mentioned to this guy that they would kill him, I said,
• 1:39:27
  they kill for a living. Don't forget that. That's how
• 1:39:29
  they make their living. Every man there, every boy here
• 1:39:33
  could shoot you through the eye at 50 yards with
• 1:39:36
  one of those arrows. They're not going to miss. If
• 1:39:39
  they decide to kill you or me, we're dead. So
• 1:39:42
  they don't because they make a difference between killing out
• 1:39:45
  of necessity and killing to murder. But if they think
• 1:39:49
  they have to defend their family, you're dead.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: But their culture doesn't encourage squabbles. Like they just– they're easygoing.
• 1:39:56
  They take everything.
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 2: The biggest– if there's a concept of sin among the pitaha,
• 1:40:00
  it is anger. You don't raise your voice in anger.
• 1:40:03
  You don't hit another pitaha in anger. I saw a
• 1:40:07
  guy get drunk. When they get alcohol, they get drunk.
• 1:40:11
  and he took a shotgun that he had gotten from
• 1:40:13
  a Brazilian, and he shot a dog that belonged to
• 1:40:16
  his brother. And his brother runs up to the dog,
• 1:40:21
  and he's just sobbing because they love their dogs, and
• 1:40:23
  he's just crying that his dog's dead. And I went
• 1:40:26
  up to him, and I thought, oh, God, there's going
• 1:40:27
  to be some violence here. I got to get ready
• 1:40:29
  for this. And I said, what are you going to do?
• 1:40:31
  He said, what do you mean? I said, are you
• 1:40:34
  going to do anything to your brother? He shot your dog.
• 1:40:36
  He said, I don't do anything to my brother. He's
• 1:40:38
  my brother. He shouldn't have shot my dog, but he's
• 1:40:40
  drunk and his head's not working. You know, I miss
• 1:40:43
  my dog. I love my dog, but I love my brother.
• 1:40:45
  I'm not going to hurt my brother. So they just
• 1:40:47
  don't react that way.
• 1:40:48
  Speaker 1: So do they have punishment for crimes?
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: They have punishment if it threatens the survival of the village.
• 1:40:55
  So there was one young man, a teenager, and I
• 1:40:58
  talk about him in, um, in both my book, don't
• 1:41:02
  sleep through our snakes. And in the new one that's
• 1:41:04
  coming out next year, born of the river, um, who
• 1:41:08
  was paid in alcohol and a new shotgun to kill
• 1:41:12
  somebody who was living up the river, who wasn't a pitaha,
• 1:41:17
  living on the same river. And he killed him. And
• 1:41:21
  the pitaha saw this as an existential threat to the
• 1:41:25
  whole community because they knew that the police could come up.
• 1:41:28
  They knew that soldiers could come up. They knew that
• 1:41:31
  many pitaha could be killed if this wasn't handled. So
• 1:41:34
  they didn't hurt him, but they kicked him out of
• 1:41:36
  the village. He had to live on his own. And
• 1:41:37
  he died about two months later. He was dead. It's
• 1:41:41
  hard to live on your own in the middle of
• 1:41:42
  the jungle with no community and nobody who has anything
• 1:41:45
  to do with you. Just shun. Wow. So that's the
• 1:41:49
  worst punishment they have. Banishment. Banishment.
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: Banishment in the jungle is crazy. Yeah. What did they
• 1:41:56
  give him to survive? Was it like you when you
• 1:41:58
  were learning?
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 2: He got nothing.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: Nothing.
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, get out. He could take what he had. But
• 1:42:03
  nobody gave him anything else. So he had a bow
• 1:42:05
  and arrow, no food, no clothes.
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: How did he die?
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 2: Well, that I don't know because I just know that
• 1:42:12
  when I came, I would ask about him, and then
• 1:42:15
  they said, oh, he's dead. So there's two possibilities. He died,
• 1:42:19
  naturally death, which I think is probably what happened, or
• 1:42:22
  somebody killed him.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 1: And then changed their name. I didn't do it.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. That could have easily happened.
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: The change of the name gag is awesome.
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 2: Everybody up there is violent. You see Brazilians coming up
• 1:42:34
  in these boats. Many of them are like pirates. I mean,
• 1:42:37
  they don't practice piracy now. Some of them do. But
• 1:42:40
  you go on a boat with these guys, and these
• 1:42:43
  are some tough-looking guys. They've got scars on their faces
• 1:42:46
  and scars on their– these are knife fights. These are
• 1:42:48
  guys who– like I got really mad at somebody once,
• 1:42:55
  and I mentioned to another Brazilian. I said, if he
• 1:42:57
  keeps doing that, I'm going to punch him in the face.
• 1:42:59
  And he says– If you punch him in the face,
• 1:43:01
  he's going to kill you. He'll either get a knife
• 1:43:03
  or he'll get a gun. So if you decide you're
• 1:43:05
  going to hit somebody, you better be armed because they're
• 1:43:07
  going to come at you with whatever weapon they can
• 1:43:09
  get their hands on.
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: You really thought that you were just going to be
• 1:43:11
  able to punch him?
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 2: I was just talking, but I obviously didn't have a
• 1:43:16
  lot of– my dad liked to fight a lot.
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: Were you guys drunk at the time when you were
• 1:43:22
  doing this? Oh, no.
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 2: I wasn't drunk. This guy was drunk and he was
• 1:43:27
  pushing and he was– giving my daughters, who by that
• 1:43:29
  time were pretty little blonde teenagers, a hard time. And
• 1:43:33
  I told him to get away. And he wanted to fight.
• 1:43:38
  And I got it calmed down, but I thought, you know,
• 1:43:41
  if he keeps trying, I'm going to punch him in
• 1:43:42
  the face. And I told this guy that, and he said,
• 1:43:45
  you don't do that out here. Unless you're willing to
• 1:43:47
  kill him right now, don't do that. Because he's not
• 1:43:50
  going to fight you fair. He's going to come at
• 1:43:52
  you when you're not expecting it, and you're going to die.
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: So.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 2: This is– it's just a different concept. So avoiding violence
• 1:44:00
  has lots of reasons to be done.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: I agree with that at all times. Yeah. I think
• 1:44:08
  people should constantly avoid violence.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 2: I completely agree too and the PETA has shown you that.
• 1:44:12
  These are people who are much better at violence than
• 1:44:16
  most people in this country without guns.
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: And they avoid it at all costs.
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 2: And they avoid it at all costs.
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Wise. Wise.
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, very wise.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: What did you think when you were just looking at
• 1:44:28
  the framework that they live by that these people don't
• 1:44:32
  have a God, that they don't have like someone watching over,
• 1:44:36
  making sure they're doing the right thing all the time
• 1:44:38
  or this punishment of being burning forever in hell? None
• 1:44:42
  of that is motivating them. No.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 2: And I also thought that they would be afraid of death.
• 1:44:47
  They're not. I thought they would be afraid of the unknown.
• 1:44:51
  They're not. They're willing to learn. I sit outside on
• 1:44:55
  the riverbank with them and they point out satellites going
• 1:44:59
  overhead because they know the sky so well that they say,
• 1:45:03
  what's that? And I look and it's like, must be
• 1:45:06
  a satellite. I said, it's like a radio thing because
• 1:45:08
  they have radio. I mean, they don't have radios, but
• 1:45:10
  I have radio. And they said, well, who put that
• 1:45:14
  up there? I said, I don't know. I said, Americans,
• 1:45:18
  I think. And they said, You know how to do that?
• 1:45:21
  I said, no, I don't know how to do that.
• 1:45:22
  So they said some other Americans know how to do that.
• 1:45:24
  I said, yeah, I don't know how to do that.
• 1:45:27
  But they're very conscious of their environment. Right. And they're
• 1:45:32
  very curious and they want to learn these things. But
• 1:45:34
  if I told them that God put it up there,
• 1:45:36
  they wouldn't pay attention.
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: Now, they have these spirits that we talked about earlier
• 1:45:42
  where they believe a thing embodies a spirit. Like it
• 1:45:47
  could be like a jaguar embodies a spirit. Yes, exactly.
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 2: So they have some spirit. So that's a spirit we
• 1:45:53
  haven't talked about yet. So they have this spirit, Igagai,
• 1:45:56
  which they believe. So they might see a man and
• 1:46:00
  then they might see a jaguar and then they say,
• 1:46:02
  it must be the same thing. This man became a
• 1:46:04
  jaguar or the jaguar became a man. And this is
• 1:46:08
  a belief that is in fact shapeshifting. It's not an
• 1:46:13
  uncommon belief in the Amazon among even Brazilians that live there.
• 1:46:17
  So– One time I got up in the morning and
• 1:46:21
  everybody was yelling and pointing at the beach on the
• 1:46:23
  other side. And I said, what are we looking at?
• 1:46:28
  They said, can't you see it? I said, I don't
• 1:46:30
  see anything. And they said, that's Igagai. And I didn't
• 1:46:34
  see anything. Then later, a few nights later, somebody said,
• 1:46:38
  we've seen Igagai. It's dark. It's night. And the guy
• 1:46:41
  wakes me up. He says, we've seen Igagai. He's not
• 1:46:43
  far behind your house. Would you come with us? Because
• 1:46:45
  we know you're not afraid of him. And I fail
• 1:46:48
  for that. And so we go out there, and then
• 1:46:51
  I turn around, and they're not by me. Because Igagai
• 1:46:54
  can also refer to the jaguar shape. So there's a
• 1:46:57
  jaguar out there. And I just won't go walking out
• 1:47:00
  there with a machete. And then I realize they're not
• 1:47:03
  with me. And I go back, and they said, did
• 1:47:05
  you see it? I said, no, I didn't see anything.
• 1:47:08
  But if they see a jaguar, they believe that it
• 1:47:13
  could be a jaguar or it could be Igagai.
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: But when they were seeing this Igagai and you couldn't
• 1:47:19
  see anything, they were seeing it.
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 2: Yes. And I was looking for a human-looking creature. But
• 1:47:27
  it's very possible that there was a jaguar just inside
• 1:47:31
  the forest that I didn't see.
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: But they could see it and you couldn't.
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because– well, yeah. But if you walk around with
• 1:47:36
  them in the jungle, you find that they can see
• 1:47:38
  a lot of things you can't see. So once I
• 1:47:41
  was walking with a guy down a path and he said, oh,
• 1:47:43
  don't step on that snake. It's a bushmaster. And I said, what?
• 1:47:47
  And I'm looking down. I'm looking at the path. I
• 1:47:49
  don't see anything. And I said, what snake? And he
• 1:47:52
  takes his bow and he shoots. And the arrow starts
• 1:47:56
  flocking around like that. And he pulls it up. And
• 1:47:58
  there's a Bushmaster at the end. He said, that one.
• 1:48:00
  Don't step on that one. And I didn't see it.
• 1:48:03
  And I've almost put my hand on snakes. I don't
• 1:48:07
  know why I'm still alive. Because it's like I'm a
• 1:48:12
  special needs person. They have to watch out for me
• 1:48:15
  when I'm in the jungle. Because It takes a lot
• 1:48:18
  of skill to be able to see these things. Just
• 1:48:20
  like when I take them to the city for like
• 1:48:22
  medical work, they get totally lost. They can't– it's hard
• 1:48:26
  for them to understand how I can find my way
• 1:48:28
  around the city because the cues that I'm using are
• 1:48:33
  totally different than the things they're used to.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: So this Igagai, this thing that they said they saw,
• 1:48:38
  they could have just been seeing an animal and saying
• 1:48:41
  it was Igagai and agreeing that it was a spirit.
• 1:48:44
  And that's not like they're seeing a spirit that you're
• 1:48:47
  not seeing. Did you ever take that into consideration that
• 1:48:50
  perhaps they can see things you can't see?
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, that is another possibility. And I definitely took that.
• 1:48:55
  In fact, for the first several years before I had
• 1:48:58
  really investigated the different shape shifting of Igagai, I thought
• 1:49:02
  that's all it could mean. They were seeing something. And
• 1:49:05
  I couldn't see it. They were all seeing it.
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: So you took that into consideration that maybe they have
• 1:49:10
  a sense that you don't have? Yes.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 2: And it's clear that they have senses in the jungle.
• 1:49:16
  They're able to sense things that I cannot.
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: Like how?
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 2: Well, like I say, they've grown up learning. So let's
• 1:49:26
  say that you see a branch move in a tree.
• 1:49:29
  Was that the wind? Was that a monkey moving? Was
• 1:49:32
  that a snake up in the tree? What was it?
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 2: I barely noticed that the branches make moving. But they
• 1:49:40
  know not only that it's moving, but exactly what caused it.
• 1:49:42
  I can see bubbles coming out of the water from
• 1:49:45
  the river. They're just bubbles to me. But to them,
• 1:49:49
  they represent either a rock underneath or an alligator or
• 1:49:55
  some other creature that's under the water. And they can
• 1:49:58
  tell by the bubbles. But I can't. So they've learned to...
• 1:50:02
  interpret their world in a way that I can't.
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: So it's not that they don't have senses that they
• 1:50:10
  have senses that you don't have, but that they have
• 1:50:12
  pattern recognition.
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 2: That's the way I would put it. But again, you
• 1:50:18
  would need to do some sort of psychological testing and
• 1:50:22
  much more controlled conditions than I've ever been able to
• 1:50:25
  do to sort those things out. But my view now
• 1:50:29
  is that they simply have the ability to recognize and,
• 1:50:34
  and perceive things that they've grown up with that I
• 1:50:37
  miss entirely.
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: And this spirit thing, does it always embody a creature
• 1:50:45
  that they're, that they're, that's common like a Jaguar or
• 1:50:48
  does it sometimes take on another form?
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 2: It can take these, these, um, entities that I've talked about.
• 1:50:58
  So there's another one, um, um, I, which has long teeth.
• 1:51:07
  And so they see these different creatures. One's naked, talks
• 1:51:10
  in a high voice. And so they're putting experiences they
• 1:51:16
  can't explain into the shapes of these entities that they
• 1:51:20
  can explain. So just like us, we see so many
• 1:51:23
  things in the world we don't understand. That's what science
• 1:51:26
  is all about. So we create theoretical entities to be
• 1:51:30
  able to explain those observations that we otherwise have no
• 1:51:33
  explanation for. So in a sense, these separate entities are
• 1:51:39
  a primitive form. I shouldn't even use the word primitive.
• 1:51:41
  They're a form of science given what they have. They're
• 1:51:45
  reducing the unexplained to the explainable.
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: And their audit of the jungle is limited to the
• 1:51:53
  places that they've traveled. Right. So their version of the
• 1:51:57
  world is entirely limited to the language they possess. Is
• 1:52:01
  it written at all?
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 2: I developed a writing system for them, yes.
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: But before you know.
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: Before you know.
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: So non-written language, verbal language with no historical database to
• 1:52:11
  draw from. Right.
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 2: But they actually get some really good skills out of this.
• 1:52:16
  So I took a guy to the nearest town. a
• 1:52:19
  big town, Porto Velho. It's the capital of a Brazilian
• 1:52:21
  state because he had cirrhosis of the liver, however he
• 1:52:25
  got that. And I took him to the hospital. First,
• 1:52:28
  we went to my house that I had in that
• 1:52:30
  city on the missionary compound. He had never been out
• 1:52:34
  of the jungle before in his life. So we go
• 1:52:35
  there and we have lunch. And I said, now it's
• 1:52:38
  time to go to the hospital. So I take him
• 1:52:40
  to the hospital and he says, I don't want to
• 1:52:42
  stay here. I said, the doctors say you have to
• 1:52:44
  stay here so they can make you feel better. And
• 1:52:47
  so then I drive off after I spent a couple
• 1:52:49
  of hours with him. And the next morning, about 6 a.m.,
• 1:52:55
  there's this knocking on my door. So this is 30
• 1:52:57
  miles away. The hospital is 30 miles away. And he's
• 1:53:01
  standing there wearing a hospital gown with no underwear or
• 1:53:03
  anything on. And I said, how did you find my house?
• 1:53:07
  He said, well, I just walked here. I said, but
• 1:53:10
  how did you know how to walk here? Well, I
• 1:53:12
  saw it yesterday. But all he had to do was
• 1:53:14
  get the river where the river is. And then mentally
• 1:53:18
  compute where we're at. So many experiments have shown that
• 1:53:22
  people who don't have right and left, front and back,
• 1:53:25
  but use absolute directions like up river, down river, to
• 1:53:28
  the jungle, away from the jungle, are better at finding
• 1:53:32
  their way in new places than we are. You know,
• 1:53:35
  I can tell you turn north, and you might know
• 1:53:37
  what I'm talking about. For the average person, I say
• 1:53:40
  turn north. If your life depends on it, you don't
• 1:53:42
  know which way to turn. But they would know. And
• 1:53:45
  so that gives him a better sense of a map
• 1:53:49
  of where they're at.
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: So do they have a word for north?
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: No, they only use upriver. So the first thing they
• 1:53:56
  have to do, the first thing he did when we
• 1:53:57
  got him out to town was, where's the river? And
• 1:54:01
  I showed him the river. And now he knew where
• 1:54:03
  everything was. Because he got the river and he's got
• 1:54:07
  my house. Now he knows where everything is.
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: 30 miles away.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 30 miles away.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: But doesn't the river wind?
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, but they know how rivers work. And they can
• 1:54:17
  tell by the direction which way it's flowing. And when
• 1:54:19
  he looks at it, he knows which way is up
• 1:54:20
  river and down river based on the way the water
• 1:54:22
  is flowing. And he walked out barefoot with nothing but
• 1:54:25
  a hospital gown on, 30 kilometers. And so he left
• 1:54:29
  at night and he got there first thing in the morning.
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 2: And I said, well, we have to go back. He said,
• 1:54:34
  I am not going back. I said, well, the doctor
• 1:54:36
  says you'll die if you don't go back. He says, well,
• 1:54:38
  I'm going to die then because I'm not going back.
• 1:54:40
  He said, I would rather go back and die with
• 1:54:42
  my people. And so I took him back and a
• 1:54:44
  few days later he was dead.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: Was he a drinker?
• 1:54:48
  Speaker 2: He had been, yeah. There was a time before I
• 1:54:51
  helped the Indian agency demarcate their reservation so it could
• 1:54:56
  be controlled that boats came up and down all the
• 1:54:59
  time when the Brazil nuts were falling and when there
• 1:55:04
  were other jungle products like latex and sorva, which is
• 1:55:07
  a product used to make chewing gum and all sorts
• 1:55:09
  of other things. And Copaiba, which is used for suntan lotion.
• 1:55:12
  So the Brazilian boats would come up and trade for
• 1:55:15
  all these things. And they always traded with whiskey because
• 1:55:17
  that's the– I mean sugarcane rum, cachaça, which is the
• 1:55:21
  cheapest thing. It's $ 0. 30 a bottle. It was a lot
• 1:55:25
  easier to give them that and the pitahal like it.
• 1:55:27
  I told him one time. I said, this stuff is
• 1:55:28
  really cheap. He said, not for us it isn't. We
• 1:55:31
  don't otherwise get it and we like it. So they
• 1:55:35
  like to drink.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: Did they understand the concept of health? Of the consequences
• 1:55:40
  of drinking alcohol?
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 2: No, because if you're a hunter-gatherer and you're not used
• 1:55:44
  to having something in constant supply, you don't have to
• 1:55:47
  worry about it. But once it comes in constant supply,
• 1:55:50
  then you do have to worry about it. And when
• 1:55:52
  these guys keep coming up, leaving this stuff off, then
• 1:55:55
  it becomes a serious health problem. Whereas before, it was
• 1:55:58
  like I got drunk six months ago. Right. You know,
• 1:56:01
  it's not a big deal. Right.
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: So once it became commonplace. Yeah. And Do they adjust
• 1:56:06
  their behavior based on people dying of like liver sclerosis?
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 2: Not that I've ever seen. They don't– I can tell
• 1:56:14
  them until I'm blue in the face that it's the
• 1:56:16
  alcohol that's doing this or the tobacco that's doing this.
• 1:56:21
  Why would they believe me? They know a lot of
• 1:56:23
  guys who have drunk a lot of whiskey and they
• 1:56:25
  don't have it. So these couple of guys got it.
• 1:56:29
  How do I know that's what caused it? So they
• 1:56:33
  don't take their word on faith.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: It's very childlike.
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 2: It is childlike in the sense that children learn by evidence.
• 1:56:40
  And if children don't have evidence for something, I mean–
• 1:56:44
  and it takes a while for the evidence to start
• 1:56:46
  to sink in. You've got to repeat the experiment.
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: Right. But you would imagine that if they're intelligent people,
• 1:56:52
  you could explain this consumption of alcohol when done infrequently,
• 1:56:57
  it's OK. But the everyday consumption of alcohol because you
• 1:57:01
  have an endless supply of it now is becoming a
• 1:57:03
  real problem.
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 2: That's a very good point, and I have brought that
• 1:57:06
  up with them before, and they say, yeah, we know
• 1:57:10
  a lot of Brazilians that drink, and they don't get
• 1:57:11
  that sickness. So they come right up. It's like I
• 1:57:15
  could tell you that the COVID vaccine is really good
• 1:57:19
  for you, and you can say, well, I know a
• 1:57:20
  lot of people didn't get it, and they didn't get
• 1:57:22
  COVID either. They weren't vaccinated. They didn't get COVID. So
• 1:57:25
  you have to look at the statistics, and even there,
• 1:57:30
  it's hard.
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: They just don't seem very concerned with dying anyway.
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 2: They're not. They don't want to die right now, but
• 1:57:39
  it happens, and they're not worried about it.
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: What do they think? Do they have a purpose for life?
• 1:57:46
  Do they have a thing they worship at all?
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: No, they don't worship anything. The community is everything. You
• 1:57:55
  make a contribution to the community while you're alive, and
• 1:57:59
  that's your purpose.
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: That's it.
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: That's it. And it doesn't take any thought. You don't
• 1:58:04
  need somebody to give a lesson. This is what our
• 1:58:07
  purpose is, folks. You just see everybody living. and that's
• 1:58:10
  how you live.
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: Isn't it odd that that's not the primary way people
• 1:58:14
  live that makes you so happy? It's interesting because even me,
• 1:58:19
  I'm hearing this. I'm like, God, it's so appealing. But
• 1:58:21
  part of me is like, I'm not fucking living like that.
• 1:58:23
  You know, nobody wants to live like that. It just
• 1:58:25
  seems too crazy, too difficult, too daunting. I don't want to.
• 1:58:29
  get bit by a snake and have my bones exposed?
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 2: Well, I often think this when I talk to people
• 1:58:34
  who are extreme ecologists who think we need to not
• 1:58:37
  affect the environment. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, go live
• 1:58:40
  with the pitaha. You know, you're not going to last
• 1:58:42
  three days there with them. Maybe a few days more,
• 1:58:46
  but not much. So it is very appealing. And I
• 1:58:51
  live there and enjoyed it. But while I was living there,
• 1:58:54
  I had things they didn't have access to. So I
• 1:58:56
  I can't fairly say that I live just like them.
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: And you could always leave.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: And I can always leave, yeah. I mean, I can
• 1:59:02
  get in my motorboat and take off. Or in the
• 1:59:06
  worst case, I can get on my two-way radio or
• 1:59:09
  satellite phone and call for help.
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 1: Did you ever think about just saying, fuck it, stay
• 1:59:13
  there forever? Yeah.
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 2: In the early years, I did think about it. I
• 1:59:17
  thought about not pursuing any kind of graduate degree, not
• 1:59:20
  worrying about ever coming back to the U.S. And I
• 1:59:23
  was really loving it there. But then I realized— My
• 1:59:26
  kids wanted a wider experience, and I didn't have the
• 1:59:31
  right to deprive them of that.
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: So you think if you were single, you would have
• 1:59:34
  just integrated?
• 1:59:35
  Speaker 2: It's very possible. Yeah, I mean, that would have been
• 1:59:38
  easy to do, although I would have had to become
• 1:59:41
  much better at outdoor skills than I ever was. I mean,
• 1:59:45
  I would not stand up to a pitaha's standards of
• 1:59:48
  hunting and fishing, and no woman would have married me
• 1:59:51
  because they would have starved to death.
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: Did you ever get better at those things?
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 2: Not really. No? For one thing, I like to hunt.
• 2:00:03
  I started hunting when I was like 10 years old,
• 2:00:05
  pheasant hunting, dove hunting. And so I do enjoy that,
• 2:00:09
  but I've never given it the time to become really
• 2:00:14
  good at it. Now, if I were abandoned in the jungle,
• 2:00:16
  I probably would, but it would take me a long time.
• 2:00:19
  These guys are using bows and arrows from the time
• 2:00:22
  they're two years old. So by the time they get
• 2:00:24
  To be teenagers, they're perfect. They are absolutely unmatchless in
• 2:00:29
  their skill. And I've done little archery contests before to
• 2:00:32
  see how good they are. And it's just astounding. So
• 2:00:36
  I would have to spend many years practicing to get
• 2:00:39
  as good as they are. And then in the meantime,
• 2:00:41
  I would starve to death because they're not going to
• 2:00:43
  feed me.
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: How are they making their bows?
• 2:00:48
  Speaker 2: There's a couple of different kinds of wood that they use.
• 2:00:51
  But there's one that is a bright red wood. And
• 2:00:55
  it's called piranha food because it grows near the edge
• 2:01:04
  of the river and it drops flowers off the tree
• 2:01:07
  into the river. And the piranhas love to eat those flowers.
• 2:01:10
  So if you see a lot of those flowers in
• 2:01:12
  the water, probably not good to swim there. But they
• 2:01:15
  take a section of the bark, a big section. It
• 2:01:17
  might be like four inches by four inches or six inches.
• 2:01:23
  And it's just a hard piece, maybe eight feet long.
• 2:01:29
  And they bring that back, and they have a special tool.
• 2:01:32
  And it could be wood or bone, or if they
• 2:01:35
  have a machete, they use that. And they just start
• 2:01:37
  shaping it until finally they get a bow that's probably
• 2:01:42
  two inches wide and an inch and a half thick.
• 2:01:46
  And it's taller than they are. It's about seven feet long.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: And....
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 2: Then they get the bark from a tree, a certain
• 2:01:54
  kind of tree, and they get it off in strands.
• 2:01:59
  And so a man, a brother or a father or
• 2:02:02
  a husband will give it to their closest woman relative,
• 2:02:06
  and she takes those strands and she makes a bowstring.
• 2:02:09
  So the bow represents man and woman working together. A
• 2:02:13
  man can make the wood. A woman makes the string.
• 2:02:16
  And they get the arrows. A man gets the feathers.
• 2:02:18
  A man gets the shaft. The woman makes the strings
• 2:02:21
  that tie everything on. So she's the glue. And once
• 2:02:25
  you get that, that thing, yeah, there's one right there,
• 2:02:29
  this guy. And those are the arrows, really long arrows? Yeah, yeah,
• 2:02:33
  those are the arrows. And these are fishing arrows, so
• 2:02:36
  they're much longer. But actually, they're not both fishing arrows.
• 2:02:39
  One of them is just a regular arrow. So their
• 2:02:40
  arrows are quite long. And that thing is a very
• 2:02:44
  powerful bow. And you can see the thickness of the
• 2:02:47
  string there.
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: So....
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the bow.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: They eat a lot of monkeys?
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they eat a lot of monkeys.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: Isn't that weird?
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: No, I asked them once. I said, do monkeys look
• 2:03:04
  like people? And they say, no, why would you ask that?
• 2:03:08
  I said, they look like people to me. And he said, no, no,
• 2:03:11
  they're covered in hair. You're not covered in hair. So
• 2:03:14
  I went to the Trans-Amazon Road. I was traveling out
• 2:03:19
  all by myself, hitchhiking, and I stayed with this Brazilian. Um,
• 2:03:24
  and I said, do you have any cold water? He said,
• 2:03:26
  and he had a kerosene, um, refrigerator. And so I
• 2:03:30
  went over and I opened it to get his cold water.
• 2:03:32
  And at the bottom, it looked like there were like
• 2:03:33
  four dead babies. And I'm thinking, Oh my God, what
• 2:03:37
  is that? I said, what is this? He said, Oh,
• 2:03:39
  it's just some monkeys. I skinned him, you know, and
• 2:03:43
  a monkey that's been skinned does look a lot more human. Um, and, uh,
• 2:03:47
  but nobody thinks twice about it, you know? Um, I said,
• 2:03:52
  are the monkeys more like us or are they more
• 2:03:55
  like dogs? Oh, they're like dogs. They're much more like
• 2:03:57
  dogs than they are like us. So they just don't
• 2:03:59
  see the problem.
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 1: It's just food.
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just food. And so, you know, and they
• 2:04:06
  love– the favorite part of any animal is the brains.
• 2:04:09
  And one reason the brains are so good is because
• 2:04:12
  brains have a lot of saturated fat. It's a great
• 2:04:15
  source of saturated fat. They eat monkey brains? Yeah, they
• 2:04:19
  eat monkey brains. Okay. The favorite thing, I was talking
• 2:04:21
  to a woman one time and I was making a sandwich.
• 2:04:25
  I had brought in some lunch meat and bread. I
• 2:04:27
  had just gotten there. It was my first day there.
• 2:04:29
  And so I had a little bit enough to make
• 2:04:31
  a sandwich for that night. And I'm squirting mustard. And,
• 2:04:34
  you know, when you get to the end of the
• 2:04:36
  mustard bottle and you're squeezing, it makes a sound like
• 2:04:39
  somebody who's got diarrhea. And she says, what is that
• 2:04:45
  bird shit stuff you're eating? And I said. Well, it's good.
• 2:04:49
  It's mustard. Do you want to try some?
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 1: Oh, no.
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 2: And she said, look at this bird shit. He's eating
• 2:04:55
  bird shit. And then I look at her, and she's
• 2:04:58
  eating the brains out of a rat. And he's got
• 2:05:02
  this rat head, and she's sucking the brains out. And
• 2:05:06
  they're cooked, of course. But she's sucking the brains out.
• 2:05:10
  This is a great example for an introductory class in anthropology,
• 2:05:16
  you know, how different we perceive things. That's great to her.
• 2:05:19
  This is great to me. But it grosses the other
• 2:05:21
  one out. That's wild.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: Mustard is disgusting. Rat brain is great. Yeah. And isn't
• 2:05:27
  there an issue with eating primate brain tissue? Can you
• 2:05:31
  get prion diseases?
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 2: Well, there are diseases that they discovered in New Guinea
• 2:05:36
  from cannibals who were eating human brains.
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 2: But I'm not aware of any diseases that are passed
• 2:05:42
  by eating monkey brains or other kinds of brains. They'll
• 2:05:46
  eat any animal's brains.
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: So the prion diseases that you get are from animals
• 2:05:52
  eating the same animal, right? Like mad cow disease is
• 2:05:55
  because they serve cows literal brain and neural tissue from
• 2:05:59
  other cows. Right.
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 2: So I'm not an expert on that, but I do
• 2:06:03
  know that I've never seen a case of them getting
• 2:06:05
  disease from that. And the superficial reading that I've done
• 2:06:08
  on it suggests that Humans get it from eating human brains.
• 2:06:12
  Speaker 1: Interesting. So they can eat deer brains, rat brains, no problem. Right.
• 2:06:17
  Speaker 2: So the favorite part of any animal is the head.
• 2:06:20
  So if they bring me a fish, they'll give me
• 2:06:22
  a fish. They like to trade fish for canned meat
• 2:06:26
  because canned meat keeps. But I like fish cheeks, but
• 2:06:31
  my wife hated the fish heads. She didn't want the
• 2:06:34
  fish heads around.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 2: They would be happy to keep the fish heads and
• 2:06:38
  they just make a big stew of fish heads and
• 2:06:39
  they eat the brains and the eyeballs and everything. Those
• 2:06:42
  are really tasty bits.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: And probably rich in nutrients.
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they are rich in nutrients. They know what they're doing.
• 2:06:48
  They love all the internal organs.
• 2:06:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's so weird how we've moved away from all
• 2:06:52
  that stuff.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of the things that happens with wolves.
• 2:06:56
  The alpha in the pack is the one that eats
• 2:06:58
  the liver.
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 1: They know something's going on. There's a lot of nutrients
• 2:07:02
  in these organ meats and we've moved away from that
• 2:07:05
  in a very strange way. People are disgusted by the
• 2:07:08
  idea of liver. Yeah.
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 2: So, you know, you go to some– if you go
• 2:07:11
  to northern Brazil and you go to one of these churrascarias,
• 2:07:13
  Brazilian steak restaurants.
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: Love those.
• 2:07:17
  Speaker 2: If you're in an everyday person's, you're going to get
• 2:07:20
  a lot of heart and you're going to get liver.
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 1: Kidney.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 2: Kidney. You're going to get all that stuff. You know,
• 2:07:27
  so that is stuff they love to eat.
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: Sure. A lot of cultures. Mexicans, Menudo. Menudo, it's got
• 2:07:36
  tripe in it and organ meat.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: Right. And, you know, my brother-in-law, deceased now, but he
• 2:07:42
  was Mexican. And that's the first thing he insisted that
• 2:07:46
  my sister learn how to make in terms of true
• 2:07:48
  Mexican food was menudo. And he wanted that every Saturday,
• 2:07:52
  and she loved to make it for him. So then
• 2:07:55
  she made this pozole with cow feet in it.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: Whoa.
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: And, you know, got the hooves and everything in the pozole,
• 2:08:02
  but cooks all day.
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: I remember when I was a kid, pickled pig's feet
• 2:08:07
  was a big thing.
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so internal organs are really good.
• 2:08:12
  You know that a Brazilian churrascaria is authentic if they
• 2:08:15
  serve chicken hearts.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 2: You know? And so if I go to one and
• 2:08:19
  they don't have chicken hearts, I'm quite disappointed.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: It's westernized.
• 2:08:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: They're still great, but, yeah, I know what you mean.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I went to one when I was in Brazil.
• 2:08:28
  It was awesome.
• 2:08:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. It's Brazilian fast food.
• 2:08:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it is fast, and it's amazing food, too.
• 2:08:34
  It's like they know how to eat. If you're in
• 2:08:36
  a rush, a churrascaria is the best place to eat. Yeah.
• 2:08:38
  Because you sit down, you flip that cart over to green,
• 2:08:41
  the food keeps coming. Twenty minutes later, you're stuffed. Exactly.
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. And you ate much more nutrition than having
• 2:08:47
  a McDonald's Big Mac or something like that. Sure.
• 2:08:49
  Speaker 1: And it's all you can eat. Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: I used to come out of the village and go
• 2:08:55
  straight to one of those. I've been out of the
• 2:08:56
  village for six months and I was really hungry and
• 2:08:59
  I was coming out on my motorcycle. And the first
• 2:09:01
  one I saw, I pulled over and I ate until
• 2:09:03
  I could barely move.
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: Did you eat monkey when you were in the jungle? Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 2: I didn't eat the brains, but they didn't offer them
• 2:09:09
  either because that's the best part.
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: Would you have if they offered you some?
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would have. I would have. I've tried a
• 2:09:16
  lot of stuff there. And when I was doing my
• 2:09:18
  field experience in southern Mexico in Chiapas, I spent some
• 2:09:22
  time with the Celtales, the Celta people, descendants of the Mayas. And,
• 2:09:28
  you know, I ate this stuff they chew up and
• 2:09:31
  spit out and let ferment.
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 1: Oh, I've heard of that. That's a beverage. Is that
• 2:09:36
  like an alcoholic beverage?
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And so I was trying to fit in. And
• 2:09:39
  so they gave me just a little bit. And they said,
• 2:09:43
  what did you think? And I'm trying to be this
• 2:09:46
  cool guy. And I said, I loved it. I hated it.
• 2:09:48
  But I said I loved it. And so they bring
• 2:09:50
  me a big bowl. And so then– Drinking people's spit.
• 2:09:55
  That night I was up with things coming out of
• 2:09:59
  both ends all night long. And the next morning my
• 2:10:03
  blood pressure was 60 over 40 and I had to
• 2:10:05
  be flown out. They had to get me on a
• 2:10:08
  mule and get me out to the nearest airstrip and
• 2:10:11
  out and– But I did my bit. I was accepted
• 2:10:14
  as a great gringo for eating this stuff, you know,
• 2:10:17
  for drinking it. What happened to you? Well, whatever it was,
• 2:10:24
  my body didn't like it.
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: So is it just like the bacteria in it, you think?
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: Probably. I think it had to be that because it
• 2:10:31
  didn't gross me out. I didn't like the taste of it,
• 2:10:33
  but it wasn't grossing me out. And it was a
• 2:10:35
  happy time. We had little ribbons and stuff. We were
• 2:10:37
  having a festa and I was sitting with the men
• 2:10:40
  at the table.
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: And And their gut bacteria just knows how to handle it.
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 2: There you go. There you go.
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: It says that the human saliva creates the fermentation.
• 2:10:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right.
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: Come on, people. Isn't there a better way to get drunk?
• 2:10:58
  Good Lord.
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: If you want to get drunk and you want it
• 2:11:01
  bad enough, there it is.
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 1: And I bet that stuff you're not going to drink
• 2:11:05
  every day because it's so disgusting. It's not going to
• 2:11:08
  become a problem.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 2: Once it's fermented, Nobody really cares, you know, who's around
• 2:11:12
  that culture.
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: Boy.
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 2: You know, but.
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 1: What does a monkey taste like?
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 2: Well, there again, I don't have a vocabulary to describe
• 2:11:21
  all these meats. It's a tough meat, but I pressure it.
• 2:11:25
  I put the.
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 1: A crock pot? Yeah.
• 2:11:28
  Speaker 2: I put it in a pressure cooker over a fire.
• 2:11:29
  I take in a pressure cooker, you know, not an
• 2:11:31
  electric pressure cooker, obviously. One of these pressure cookers you
• 2:11:34
  can sit on top of the fire. And after I
• 2:11:36
  pressure it, it's falling off the bone and I take
• 2:11:39
  the meat off. And I throw it in a bowl
• 2:11:40
  and I put some manioc meal on top of that.
• 2:11:43
  And then I cover it in Tabasco. And it's great.
• 2:11:46
  It's very filling and it tastes really good.
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 1: Wow. Did you feel weird eating a monkey?
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 2: When you see the monkey and you put the little
• 2:11:55
  monkey body inside the pressure cooker and it looks like
• 2:11:58
  a baby, it doesn't look too good. But once you
• 2:12:01
  open up the pressure cooker and it's all cooked and
• 2:12:03
  the bones are separated from the meat and then it's
• 2:12:05
  just meat floating in there. And when you're out in
• 2:12:09
  the jungle and you've been out there long enough, just
• 2:12:11
  about any kind of meat sounds pretty good. I worked
• 2:12:15
  with a group called the Wadi. I actually wrote a
• 2:12:18
  540-page grammar of their language, co-wrote it. And they were
• 2:12:22
  cannibals up until 1962. And they had two– they had
• 2:12:28
  endocannibalism and exocannibalism. Exocannibalism was eating their enemies and endocannibalism
• 2:12:35
  was eating their people. And so if you die in
• 2:12:38
  the village at that time, up until 1962, they keep
• 2:12:43
  your body. They call all the relatives. Your body might
• 2:12:46
  sit there in the Amazon sun for three days. And
• 2:12:49
  your relatives come from all over. And then they cook
• 2:12:53
  you over a grill. And slowly they roast the body.
• 2:12:58
  And then they cut it into chunks and they eat
• 2:13:00
  them with, like, little toothpicks. And– They eat it until
• 2:13:04
  everything is gone. They eat the bones. They eat the brains.
• 2:13:07
  They eat everything.
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: They eat human brains. Yeah.
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 2: And the purpose, as best I've been able to figure out,
• 2:13:13
  anthropologists have tried to answer this, so my answer might
• 2:13:15
  not be theirs, but it's based on interviews with the people,
• 2:13:19
  is to give your relatives eternal life because they live
• 2:13:23
  in you and you're going to live in somebody else,
• 2:13:24
  so you just continue living. But exocannibalism, I kill a
• 2:13:29
  guy in warfare. I'm going to eat him like an animal.
• 2:13:31
  I just chop him up and grill him and eat
• 2:13:33
  it and throw the bones off into the forest.
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: Boy.
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 2: So that's totally different.
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: Some Native Americans practice that.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: It's been said. Eating the brain though, wouldn't that– what
• 2:13:45
  is that disease? What is this called? Jakob Kretzfeld? Is
• 2:13:48
  that what it's called?
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, something like that. I should know that.
• 2:13:52
  Speaker 1: But it's mad cow disease essentially.
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 2: It's like that, yeah. So– but they don't eat people
• 2:13:58
  all the time. They eat dead relatives. And if anybody's
• 2:14:01
  ever gotten that disease, it's never been registered.
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: That's crazy. But I mean, even if you're eating dead relatives,
• 2:14:08
  you eat a dead relative, I would imagine you can
• 2:14:10
  get prion disease.
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but it depends on how many die. There's a
• 2:14:15
  whole etiquette about it. You're never allowed to say that
• 2:14:17
  it just tastes really good. You know, for example, you
• 2:14:19
  can't say that.
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: You can't say delicious.
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't say that.
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: Uncle Tom is yummy.
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 2: And I've talked to some of the older men who
• 2:14:25
  have eaten their dead and they say, oh, the The
• 2:14:29
  babies taste really good, but you can't say that.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: The babies taste really good. It's rough.
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 2: It's like human veal. But the Brazilian government put a
• 2:14:42
  stop to that in 62.
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: Good move. Why do they let it sit for three
• 2:14:47
  days before.
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 2: They cook it? Because it takes that long for the
• 2:14:49
  relatives to come because they might be in other villages.
• 2:14:52
  So they've got to send runners out to bring the
• 2:14:53
  whole family together.
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: Doesn't the meat start rotting? Yeah.
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: It starts to smell pretty bad. And there are a
• 2:14:58
  lot of stories about people puking after every bite.
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 1: These are people that can drink that puke beer.
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 2:15:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So you realize cultural differences aren't that superficial.
• 2:15:14
  Speaker 1: What's also probably meat is probably extremely valuable to them.
• 2:15:18
  And they just probably think, look, there's no reason for
• 2:15:20
  this to go to waste when it can sustain us.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 2: It would be very interesting to go back in time
• 2:15:24
  and see how the customs started. They could have started
• 2:15:28
  out of hunger and then you dress it up with
• 2:15:30
  some religious beliefs. Or the religious beliefs could have come
• 2:15:34
  first and you started doing it. But they do have
• 2:15:38
  oral histories about it. But the oral histories never say
• 2:15:42
  we were short of meat so we ate Joe. We
• 2:15:45
  ate our buddy. But they do say we want to
• 2:15:51
  help them live in us and we will live in
• 2:15:52
  somebody else. So that's the explanation you get.
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:15:56
  Speaker 2: Or that I got.
• 2:15:57
  Speaker 1: Wow. Well, when you got there a few years after.
• 2:16:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't start working with them until 1985. Okay.
• 2:16:06
  So it was 20 something years.
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: But they still had stories about. Oh, yeah.
• 2:16:09
  Speaker 2: They still had a lot of stories about it. And,
• 2:16:11
  you know, anybody over 30 had had done it.
• 2:16:15
  Speaker 1: Is there any kind of cannibalism that goes on in
• 2:16:17
  the Amazon still?
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 2: Probably, but none that I know of. But there are
• 2:16:22
  still some uncontacted tribes. And there are still tribes that
• 2:16:26
  behave one way when foreigners are around and another way
• 2:16:28
  when they're not. I have a friend. She died last year,
• 2:16:33
  but she was a missionary among those people from the 50s.
• 2:16:38
  So she remembers the cannibalism. And she told me, although
• 2:16:42
  some anthropologists deny this, but I think she knows them
• 2:16:45
  better than any anthropologist who's ever been there, that she said,
• 2:16:48
  I think when nobody's around, they still do that.
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I bet they do too.
• 2:16:54
  Speaker 2: They don't have warfare.
• 2:16:55
  Speaker 1: They listen to someone else. They don't have warfare.
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: Not anymore. They did. But that's been stopped and they
• 2:17:00
  have– they're isolated from other groups that they used to
• 2:17:04
  be enemies with. But there are still some who believe
• 2:17:07
  the old-time religion and the old-time religion says eat your dead.
• 2:17:14
  So it's quite possible that it happens. But what you
• 2:17:18
  find is that since the 80s– Most of the groups
• 2:17:22
  that have regular contact with the outside have undergone a
• 2:17:26
  very rapid process of enculturation into Brazilian society. So even
• 2:17:34
  among the Pita Hasnauth in the decades since I was
• 2:17:37
  there regularly, I see pictures of them because my ex-wife
• 2:17:41
  still lives right next to them.
• 2:17:43
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 2: And she sends me short videos and pictures of them
• 2:17:47
  when they come up to her little wooden shack on
• 2:17:49
  … the Trans-Amazon Highway by their river. And they're dressing
• 2:17:53
  very differently now. And some of them are speaking some Portuguese.
• 2:17:58
  Not very well, but they're speaking some Portuguese.
• 2:18:00
  Speaker 1: And your ex-wife is still a missionary?
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, she's still trying to convert them. No conversions. They're
• 2:18:07
  not going to convert.
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 1: Boy, you've got to give it up to her for having, like, stick-to-itiveness.
• 2:18:13
  I mean, that's really determined.
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 2: She is absolutely a New Testament first century Christian in
• 2:18:20
  terms of her faith.
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:18:22
  Speaker 2: And she doesn't deviate, and she's not afraid of anything.
• 2:18:25
  I mean, we've been in many life-threatening situations, and I
• 2:18:29
  don't tend to get afraid, and she definitely is not afraid,
• 2:18:32
  not ever.
• 2:18:33
  Speaker 1: So is that because of her belief that she believes
• 2:18:36
  that God is looking out for her and if she dies,
• 2:18:38
  she's going to go to heaven anyway?
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah. A common refrain among Christian missionaries is, I'm immortal
• 2:18:47
  until my task is done. God will protect me until
• 2:18:50
  he's done with me. And so if he's not done
• 2:18:52
  with me, I don't have to worry about it. And
• 2:18:53
  if he is, great. Wow.
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of power in that too. I mean,
• 2:18:58
  how many people just live in this constant state of
• 2:19:01
  existential angst? Yeah.
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 2: That's something she's never had. Wow. She doesn't have that.
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of value to that.
• 2:19:08
  Speaker 2: It's what attracted me to her so much besides the
• 2:19:10
  fact that she was really cute. That attracted me to
• 2:19:13
  her a lot when we first met.
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 1: Were you bummed out when she wanted a divorce because
• 2:19:17
  you lost your faith?
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 2: Well, by that time, we weren't getting along that well
• 2:19:21
  because she's very anti... She's not anti-science per se, but
• 2:19:26
  she's anti- helicopter science. She feels that too many people
• 2:19:32
  who do studies of indigenous groups and languages, come in
• 2:19:36
  for a short time, go out and just speak a
• 2:19:38
  lot of bullshit that nobody's ever going to test. And
• 2:19:41
  so she hates that. And she's seen it happen with
• 2:19:43
  the Piraha. I've seen it happen with the Piraha. I've
• 2:19:46
  seen a couple of anthropologists and linguists go in and
• 2:19:48
  do doctoral dissertations on them that are like totally ridiculous.
• 2:19:51
  But if I say something, I'm a gringo. And I'm
• 2:19:56
  jealous because it disagrees with me.
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 1: Do you think that they do that because no one
• 2:20:00
  is going to check and so they just say, I
• 2:20:02
  want to just write whatever I want to write?
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 2: That does happen. That definitely happens. It's also because people
• 2:20:10
  realize– it sounds really good to go study an indigenous
• 2:20:12
  culture or an indigenous language. When you get there and
• 2:20:14
  you find out this is so damn hard. I had
• 2:20:17
  no– I have no words to put in how hard
• 2:20:21
  this is.
• 2:20:21
  Speaker 1: So they bullshit.
• 2:20:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because you want to say to a Piraha, what
• 2:20:26
  is this? And so how do you ask that? Well,
• 2:20:30
  the phrase in Pirahas, he go, but where do you
• 2:20:33
  get that phrase? You can't ask somebody how to ask,
• 2:20:36
  what is this?
• 2:20:37
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 2:20:38
  Speaker 2: If you don't know the language. So you have to
• 2:20:40
  watch them very carefully and somebody might get something new
• 2:20:44
  or you might even give them something new that they've
• 2:20:46
  never seen, hoping somebody is going to ask them, what
• 2:20:48
  is this? So you can write it down and then
• 2:20:50
  test it. And that's how I got it.
• 2:20:52
  Speaker 1: And so now you're fluent in Pirahas. Yes. So you
• 2:20:56
  can go and have a conversation with them so you
• 2:20:58
  can explore some of these more nuanced subjects and do
• 2:21:02
  it in their language.
• 2:21:03
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:21:04
  Speaker 1: So you can kind of translate things in a way
• 2:21:06
  that they're going to understand what you're saying. Yes.
• 2:21:09
  Speaker 2: And that's what takes the most practice. So when I
• 2:21:11
  first translated the Gospel of Mark into Pitaha, I thought
• 2:21:15
  I had done a marvelous job. And I would read
• 2:21:18
  bits out to the Pitaha and they could explain it
• 2:21:20
  to me and it seemed like they were understanding it.
• 2:21:23
  But I used... a grammar that was largely based on English.
• 2:21:27
  So when I read to them large sections, they were
• 2:21:29
  totally lost. They couldn't understand it at all. And what
• 2:21:32
  does that mean? It means I got it wrong. It
• 2:21:35
  means that I haven't figured out the language as well
• 2:21:37
  as I thought I did. And that's very humbling when
• 2:21:40
  you've spent so many years trying to do it. So
• 2:21:42
  I had to start from the ground up again. And
• 2:21:46
  these are all, you know, before you can learn a language,
• 2:21:48
  you have to murder it. And before you can carry
• 2:21:51
  on a conversation, you just feel like an idiot for years.
• 2:21:56
  And for one thing, people who go in to do
• 2:21:59
  a PhD dissertation on a language like this are going
• 2:22:02
  to take one to two years of their life, and
• 2:22:04
  that's it. And that's not enough time. It takes a
• 2:22:08
  year to get fluent in the language. And I know
• 2:22:10
  many people who've written about many different Amazonian languages who
• 2:22:13
  can't speak a word of the language or speak very
• 2:22:16
  little of it. They'll tell people they speak it, but
• 2:22:18
  you go with them and you realize they don't speak
• 2:22:21
  it that well. So if you don't speak it that well,
• 2:22:23
  how can you ask them to distinguish subtle meaning differences?
• 2:22:28
  You can't. And that means that a lot of this
• 2:22:33
  kind of field work, which is so vital, is not
• 2:22:37
  as reliable as we would like to think it is.
• 2:22:40
  Speaker 1: That's unfortunate. Yeah. Especially if a young student is coming
• 2:22:44
  along and they're interested in pursuing it further and they're
• 2:22:47
  starting off with some faulty assumptions.
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yes, and the other problem is people learn a
• 2:22:54
  theory in graduate school, and they take it as their
• 2:22:59
  job of their dissertation, and this isn't limited to just
• 2:23:02
  linguistics and anthropology, but they take it as the job
• 2:23:04
  of their dissertation to support that theory. So, you know,
• 2:23:10
  it's like Paul Simon says, a man sees what he
• 2:23:12
  wants to hear and disregards the rest. When you're trying
• 2:23:16
  to do theoretical research, field research, shouldn't be that theoretically motivated.
• 2:23:21
  It should be basically descriptive. And then you can do
• 2:23:24
  the theory later. But most people bring the theory into it.
• 2:23:27
  And you can't totally divorce those two. But you see
• 2:23:34
  a fact. So, for example, I've worked with Pinaha, and
• 2:23:36
  I'm asking for a certain kind of data. And they
• 2:23:39
  don't give me what I wanted. And I thought, this
• 2:23:44
  guy's not giving me what I want. What's wrong with him?
• 2:23:45
  What am I saying wrong? Is he stupid? And then
• 2:23:49
  as I learned to speak the language better, I realized, oh,
• 2:23:52
  he's giving me exactly what I needed and I was
• 2:23:54
  too stupid to know it. And so that's hard. You're
• 2:23:58
  the one working for the PhD. He's just a hunter-gatherer.
• 2:24:00
  And it turns out he's at least as smart as
• 2:24:02
  you are and often he's able to know what you
• 2:24:04
  need better than you do. And that's another part of
• 2:24:08
  the humbling experience of doing field research. Wow.
• 2:24:12
  Speaker 1: The amount of commitment that's involved in going as deep
• 2:24:15
  as you went with this is really crazy.
• 2:24:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I give demonstrations and you can find some on
• 2:24:21
  the internet where I take a language that I know
• 2:24:23
  nothing about and I switch to Pinaha, which I know
• 2:24:26
  they know nothing about. And within 20 or 30 minutes,
• 2:24:30
  I'm able to explain to the audience some basic facts
• 2:24:33
  about how their grammar works and what their basic vocabulary,
• 2:24:35
  you know, a lot of basic vocabulary. And I do
• 2:24:37
  this to linguists. I've done it in front of as
• 2:24:39
  many as 500 linguists at a time. And then I
• 2:24:45
  tell them that a lot of people think this is magic.
• 2:24:47
  This is really cool. I said, What you're seeing here
• 2:24:50
  is me working for about an hour. Now, you just
• 2:24:52
  do that every day for two years and you're in.
• 2:24:56
  And that's the part. It's intensive. I get a headache
• 2:25:00
  when I do these demonstrations because my concentration is so hard.
• 2:25:04
  And you miss obvious things and you say bad things
• 2:25:09
  and you're just self-correcting all the time. You're just constantly,
• 2:25:13
  you start off this wide and you're trying to get
• 2:25:15
  this narrow, get down to this point of what it
• 2:25:18
  actually means, what this And as you work through that,
• 2:25:21
  there are no shortcuts. There's no shortcut to doing that.
• 2:25:25
  And you need to be well-trained and you need to
• 2:25:27
  be very committed and you need to have a little
• 2:25:29
  bit of talent and work really hard. And when people
• 2:25:33
  see how easy it looks and then they try it,
• 2:25:36
  they realize they're seeing me at 20 years down the
• 2:25:40
  road from when I started. But yeah, there are methods
• 2:25:45
  to use to learn a language where there's no language
• 2:25:48
  in common.
• 2:25:48
  Speaker 1: But it's got to be very difficult to achieve a
• 2:25:54
  fluent understanding of their language and the way you did
• 2:25:58
  it from the ground literally from starting from what is
• 2:26:01
  this how do you say that and then remembering it
• 2:26:04
  piecing it together and then you have to write it
• 2:26:07
  down then you're writing it down right oh my goodness
• 2:26:10
  and then like imagine if a guy like you didn't
• 2:26:13
  do that like how many people are willing to do
• 2:26:15
  that especially how many people that are you're a linguist.
• 2:26:20
  You want to be a working intellectual. You don't necessarily
• 2:26:25
  want to get malaria. You don't want to get eaten
• 2:26:27
  by a jaguar. You don't want to live in the jungle.
• 2:26:30
  Speaker 2: So there are people who would like to spend that
• 2:26:32
  much time, but they don't have the funding. So the
• 2:26:38
  National Science Foundation and the Brazilian National Science Foundation and
• 2:26:42
  the British equivalent of the National Science Foundation have all
• 2:26:45
  funded my research over the years, but The bulk of
• 2:26:49
  my research was funded by being a missionary. And so
• 2:26:52
  I had all these years because churches were supporting me.
• 2:26:55
  But today.
• 2:26:56
  Speaker 1: But did they ever ask, how come you haven't converted
• 2:26:58
  anybody yet?
• 2:26:59
  Speaker 2: Well, they ask me that all the time. I've had people...
• 2:27:02
  I showed slides of the Pidaha to a church here
• 2:27:05
  in Texas, in Dallas. And the people started getting up
• 2:27:10
  and leaving. And I thought they were interested. They gave
• 2:27:13
  me money to work in these people. And I said,
• 2:27:15
  what's the problem? And they said... You're no good at all.
• 2:27:18
  And I said, well, what are you seeing that you
• 2:27:20
  don't like? They said, these people are naked. And if
• 2:27:23
  you're a Christian missionary, why haven't you taught them to
• 2:27:25
  wear clothes? And I said, well, they don't want to
• 2:27:29
  wear clothes. I said, what in the Bible says you
• 2:27:31
  have to wear clothes? They said, Adam saw Eve's nakedness
• 2:27:35
  and they were ashamed of each other. You must wear clothes.
• 2:27:39
  You're not even teaching. them the basics of Christianity. And
• 2:27:41
  I thought, you know, I guess I'm not. You know,
• 2:27:44
  I didn't realize that's not part of the basics of
• 2:27:46
  Christianity for me. But... How do you tell a guy
• 2:27:51
  who wears a loincloth that it's three inches too short?
• 2:27:58
  Something's peeking out there. So it's not– they don't wear
• 2:28:00
  it for modesty. They wear it to keep from sticks
• 2:28:04
  getting poked in your penis. And so modesty has nothing
• 2:28:08
  to do with it. Why would you– to the average pitaha,
• 2:28:12
  a woman's breast is about as erotic as an elbow.
• 2:28:17
  You see a woman. She's nursing her baby. And then
• 2:28:19
  the baby stops nursing and she's still talking to you
• 2:28:22
  and her tits hanging out. And it doesn't mean anything
• 2:28:24
  to her. And after a while, it doesn't mean anything
• 2:28:26
  to you either. You know, what's the big deal? And
• 2:28:28
  so to get across the idea that it may be
• 2:28:31
  clothes that's causing this problem instead of going naked, which
• 2:28:35
  then eliminates the problem of lust. I mean, it's a
• 2:28:40
  hard concept for some churches, but churches tend to get
• 2:28:43
  very impatient. But then the National Science Foundation, for example,
• 2:28:46
  if I say I'm going to go study language X,
• 2:28:49
  And I need funding for five years. Oh, no, we
• 2:28:52
  fund those and that's a year's funding. Yeah, but nobody
• 2:28:55
  who goes out for a year really learns it that well.
• 2:28:57
  I need to learn it a lot better. Oh, yeah,
• 2:28:59
  we'll go somewhere else. We're not giving you the money
• 2:29:01
  for that.
• 2:29:02
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's ridiculous. Are there really a lot of people
• 2:29:04
  that are willing to do that kind of extensive work?
• 2:29:07
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't say a lot.
• 2:29:08
  Speaker 1: But enough to do it?
• 2:29:10
  Speaker 2: Well, there's 8,000 languages and there's maybe 2,000. 3,000– let's
• 2:29:17
  say 5,000 linguists in the whole world and only a
• 2:29:21
  small percentage of them want to do this kind of work.
• 2:29:23
  The rest of them– most of them want to do
• 2:29:25
  Chomsky's kind of work where you sit at your desk
• 2:29:27
  and you say language has this property and it must
• 2:29:30
  also have this property. And so the rubber is never
• 2:29:33
  meeting the road. I mean if you can do your
• 2:29:37
  field research on database– I shouldn't say that because that's
• 2:29:41
  what my son does. He's also a linguist, and he
• 2:29:43
  grew up in an Indian tribe, the Pitaha. And he
• 2:29:46
  also did a dissertation on another tribe that he learned
• 2:29:48
  to speak the language. But nowadays, he goes through databases
• 2:29:51
  and comes up with statistical generalizations. And it's pretty interesting.
• 2:29:56
  But he'll tell me flat out, he said, yeah, I
• 2:29:58
  don't want to do that fieldwork anymore. That's really demanding,
• 2:30:01
  even though he grew up there. And that's the way
• 2:30:03
  most people are.
• 2:30:05
  Speaker 1: How many more cultures that have completely different languages and
• 2:30:10
  completely different Sets of rules and structure are out there
• 2:30:14
  that we're not aware of.
• 2:30:17
  Speaker 2: Well, back in the 80s, they used to say there's
• 2:30:21
  about 5,000 languages. So 20 years later, 21 years later,
• 2:30:26
  we're saying, or 31 years later, we're saying there are 8,000.
• 2:30:32
  Languages die out at the rate of about one every
• 2:30:35
  two weeks. So they're dying. And once they die, we
• 2:30:39
  can never recover that information. But also languages are being
• 2:30:42
  born on a regular basis because you talk like who
• 2:30:46
  you talk with. So why are Portuguese and Spanish separate languages?
• 2:30:51
  Because you've got the Eber River and you've got natural
• 2:30:54
  divides between– in that part of the Iberian Peninsula. And
• 2:30:58
  so they stop talking to each other and so their
• 2:31:00
  speech diverges. That's how Latin became French and Romanian and
• 2:31:05
  Germanic became English and English. So they stop talking to
• 2:31:08
  each other. So as soon as people stop talking, their
• 2:31:11
  language evolves and they have different languages. So British English
• 2:31:15
  and American English have evolved apart. And yet at the
• 2:31:19
  same time, we have television and movies and things that
• 2:31:21
  keeps them sort of together. But if you don't have
• 2:31:26
  media and you don't have that, then eventually they're talking.
• 2:31:31
  They're not talking with each other at all and they
• 2:31:33
  become different languages. And that's where most languages come from.
• 2:31:37
  Speaker 1: Wow. And there's got to be a lot of these
• 2:31:40
  tribes that aren't talking to each other. And how many
• 2:31:42
  of these tribes have been investigated and how many people
• 2:31:46
  have been embedded? Are there tribes out there where there's
• 2:31:49
  no one has ever examined the language? No one's ever
• 2:31:52
  embedded themselves in their culture?
• 2:31:55
  Speaker 2: There are probably over a thousand where no one's gone there,
• 2:31:59
  but there are a couple of thousand tribes. where no
• 2:32:02
  scientist has gone there to study their language or their culture.
• 2:32:05
  Speaker 1: A couple thousand.
• 2:32:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a couple thousand, I would say, if not more.
• 2:32:09
  Speaker 1: And they probably have completely different languages. Yeah.
• 2:32:12
  Speaker 2: You know, we're worried, and we should be, about the
• 2:32:16
  disappearance of certain bird species and all these other kinds
• 2:32:19
  of species. And we should be concerned about that. But
• 2:32:23
  we're not concerned enough about the disappearance of these languages
• 2:32:27
  and how the new languages are arising. And why should
• 2:32:30
  we be concerned? Well, for one thing, every language is
• 2:32:33
  like a library. It's a repository of information that is
• 2:32:37
  lost when they switch to Portuguese because Portuguese doesn't have
• 2:32:41
  all the same knowledge embedded in it. It doesn't have
• 2:32:43
  the same way of talking about the world. There's a
• 2:32:46
  lot that's missing. Every pitahã, every child, every woman, every
• 2:32:50
  man knows the name of every species of plant and
• 2:32:54
  animal in their environment. They will never just say tree.
• 2:32:58
  Like I walked with the Pitahans to the jungle, and
• 2:33:00
  they said, this is what we call this. And so
• 2:33:03
  I write it down. What do you call it? Tree.
• 2:33:05
  What do you call that over there? Tree. And what's
• 2:33:08
  that over there? Tree. They said, you just have one
• 2:33:10
  word for all these things. But they're calling them by
• 2:33:13
  their species name. And I'm thinking, well, I told them,
• 2:33:16
  I said, well, there's some Americans who do know all
• 2:33:18
  the different names, but I'm just not one of them.
• 2:33:20
  But they find it hard to believe that any American
• 2:33:22
  could get by without that knowledge of their environment. So
• 2:33:27
  when that language goes, we've lost the difference. So a
• 2:33:30
  friend of mine did a study on how a group
• 2:33:33
  in the Amazon classify birds. And they don't classify them
• 2:33:37
  based on their anatomy like Western science. They classify them
• 2:33:41
  based on what they eat. And so if you know
• 2:33:44
  their classification, you know what all these birds eat. And
• 2:33:47
  you know how to deal with those birds to capture
• 2:33:49
  them or to follow them. And when that language is gone,
• 2:33:53
  all that knowledge is gone.
• 2:33:55
  Speaker 1: So.
• 2:33:57
  Speaker 2: It's like the Library of Congress has been blown up
• 2:34:01
  or something when you lose a language. And why do
• 2:34:04
  new languages come into being? What are the conditions? And
• 2:34:06
  what does all this mean for us being human beings?
• 2:34:09
  How do we know ourselves better? How are we to
• 2:34:11
  understand our species if we don't study all the different
• 2:34:15
  exemplars of our species? And that's the challenge, and that's
• 2:34:20
  what keeps the work exciting, but it also is what
• 2:34:23
  makes it a challenge because you tell– You tell a
• 2:34:27
  really bright 25-year-old or 24-year-old PhD student, OK, now you
• 2:34:32
  have to take off to the jungle for three years
• 2:34:35
  or four. And they're thinking, I could get a job
• 2:34:38
  without doing that. I don't need to go spend four
• 2:34:41
  years in the jungle to get a job. And a
• 2:34:43
  professor is a pretty cushy job. It doesn't pay well,
• 2:34:46
  but it's also– it's not like real labor. And people
• 2:34:51
  tell me how hard professors work. I said, yeah, well,
• 2:34:53
  you know, this takes a lot of hours, but I'd
• 2:34:55
  rather do this than run a jackhammer because I ran
• 2:34:56
  a jackhammer. And I'll tell you, this is a lot
• 2:34:58
  easier than running a jackhammer. But you go off to
• 2:35:03
  the field and you spend this time. Ironically, anthropologists seem
• 2:35:07
  more prepared to do this than linguists. And the other
• 2:35:09
  ironic thing is I know, this is anecdote, I know
• 2:35:13
  more anthropologists who speak the language fluently than I know
• 2:35:16
  linguists who speak the language fluently, which I have to
• 2:35:19
  put down to the pernicious influence of certain theories and
• 2:35:23
  linguistics that makes people think they don't have to learn
• 2:35:26
  a language to know how it works. And I tell
• 2:35:30
  people when you're going off to do fieldwork, I did
• 2:35:31
  write a field manual, and I say the first six
• 2:35:33
  months just work on learning the language. Don't take many notes.
• 2:35:38
  Take notes of words and stuff. So I had a
• 2:35:40
  goal where I wanted to learn 10 new words a day,
• 2:35:42
  and I kept a little spiral notebook clip in my
• 2:35:46
  belt buckle. And I would walk around learning these things,
• 2:35:49
  and I would learn new words and write those down.
• 2:35:51
  And then I would spend the evening memorizing those words,
• 2:35:54
  and I would try them out again the next day,
• 2:35:56
  and I'd try to make sentences with them. And when
• 2:35:58
  people start laughing at you, you know that I didn't
• 2:36:00
  get that right. And sometimes they like to teach you
• 2:36:02
  dirty words, right? They think that's hilarious. You know, you'll ask,
• 2:36:07
  so then I, you know, how do you learn the
• 2:36:10
  words for genitals, for example? That's kind of an embarrassing
• 2:36:13
  thing if you stop and think about it. So I
• 2:36:15
  started to ask the guy, I said, what do you
• 2:36:17
  call that? You know, pointed to his dick. And he said,
• 2:36:21
  and he calls, he, you know, he says, I'm not
• 2:36:22
  going to tell you, but he calls a little boy
• 2:36:24
  over who's naked and he shows me every part of
• 2:36:26
  his body. And he said, you call this, this and this, that,
• 2:36:28
  and this, that. And then he says, but the names
• 2:36:31
  change once they start to grow hair. So penis as
• 2:36:36
  a boy is different from penis as a man and
• 2:36:39
  vagina as a girl is different from vagina as a woman.
• 2:36:42
  And so, you know, how do you get those words?
• 2:36:46
  You've got to count on close friendships.
• 2:36:51
  Speaker 1: Like I said at the beginning of this, man, you've
• 2:36:53
  had a fascinating life. You really have. It's very, very interesting.
• 2:36:57
  I really appreciate you sharing everything today. It was really,
• 2:37:01
  really fun.
• 2:37:02
  Speaker 2: Thank you very much for having me.
• 2:37:03
  Speaker 1: I enjoyed it. Jamie, pull up his book. Well, books,
• 2:37:09
  I should say. This one, Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep, There
• 2:37:13
  Are Snakes. Whew. The life and language in the Amazon jungle,
• 2:37:20
  Amazonian jungle.
• 2:37:21
  Speaker 2: That's what they say to each other each night before
• 2:37:23
  they go to bed. Don't sleep, there are snakes.
• 2:37:30
  Speaker 1: Amazing. Thank you very much.
• 2:37:32
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me.
• 2:37:33
  Speaker 1: It was awesome. Bye, everybody.