The Joe Rogan Experience - August 27, 2026


Joe Rogan Experience #2547 - Daniel Everett


Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 37 minutes

Words per minute

184.25

Word count

29,034

Sentence count

2,418


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
00:00:02.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
00:00:13.000 Good to see you, sir.
00:00:14.000 Good to be here.
00:00:15.000 Thank you very much for doing this.
00:00:16.000 I'm really excited to talk to you.
00:00:17.000 I've been looking forward to this a lot.
00:00:19.000 Thanks very much for having me.
00:00:21.000 You have a very, very unique life story.
00:00:25.000 So I want to start with how did you become, let's lay it out for people.
00:00:32.000 What got me interested in you is you became a Christian missionary and then went to the jungle and met these people.
00:00:42.000 Let me say this right.
00:00:42.000 The Pitahai?
00:00:43.000 Pitaha.
00:00:44.000 Pitaha.
00:00:45.000 Pitaha.
00:00:46.000 And stopped being a missionary and lived with them for how long?
00:00:51.000 Well, the total time that I lived with them is about eight years in the jungle with them over a period.
00:00:57.000 But I've been working with them for 40 years.
00:00:59.000 I go back a lot.
00:01:00.000 Wow.
00:01:01.000 But you lived with them for eight years, and during that eight year time period, you kind of.
00:01:08.000 Is it safe to say you're an atheist?
00:01:10.000 Yes, it's safe to say that.
00:01:12.000 And so let's take it back to the beginning.
00:01:14.000 How did you become a missionary?
00:01:15.000 Did you come from a religious family?
00:01:17.000 No, I came from a very unreligious family.
00:01:22.000 In fact, I was standing out in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968 trying to sell LSD to get in.
00:01:30.000 And this guy that I knew from high school that was really straight laced came up with his sister.
00:01:34.000 She was very cute.
00:01:35.000 So I went up to try to sell them some LSD.
00:01:37.000 They didn't use drugs.
00:01:39.000 And so I said, Well, you got any change?
00:01:40.000 I need to get some money to get into the concert.
00:01:43.000 And I saw that she went to the same high school that I did.
00:01:47.000 So after the concert, which she didn't like, but I loved, I went to see her in high school.
00:01:52.000 I went sat by her during lunchtime and found out that she was a missionary and had been raised in Brazil.
00:01:59.000 And that really intrigued me because it was the 60s and I didn't want to have just the typical U.S. life.
00:02:08.000 And living in the Amazon sounded really cool.
00:02:11.000 But then I became a genuine, strong, believing Christian.
00:02:16.000 Went to Bible school.
00:02:17.000 I did my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology.
00:02:20.000 And I was an ordained minister in the Wesleyan church and very active in church and was preached on street corners and did all that kind of thing.
00:02:30.000 How did you make this transition from being a guy with a bag of acid in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert to.
00:02:38.000 Well, her father, who had been a missionary now for 20 years, was the most influential person outside my family.
00:02:46.000 In my life.
00:02:47.000 And he and I would sit up late at night talking.
00:02:50.000 And, you know, I was 17 and I found everything he said to be very convincing and very interesting.
00:02:56.000 But mainly I loved his stories of the jungle and what it was like to live in the jungle.
00:03:01.000 And I wanted to do that.
00:03:02.000 And I became a believer.
00:03:05.000 It was a gradual process.
00:03:06.000 Well, actually, no, it wasn't that gradual.
00:03:08.000 It was my father was just astounded.
00:03:11.000 He said, you know, from one minute I'm worrying about you getting arrested.
00:03:14.000 And now you're going to church every Sunday with these people I don't even know.
00:03:17.000 He wasn't.
00:03:18.000 That's happy about it.
00:03:20.000 He'd rather you just get loaded in front of the Hendrix concert?
00:03:23.000 Yeah, he would have actually because he was a heavy drinker and a construction worker and he considered that to be part of the masculine experience, you know.
00:03:31.000 But acid?
00:03:32.000 Was acid okay with him?
00:03:33.000 I don't think he knew I was doing acid.
00:03:35.000 But he knew I was doing, you know, weed and things like that.
00:03:35.000 Oh, okay.
00:03:39.000 But he didn't mind that?
00:03:40.000 No, that was, he didn't want me doing it in the house, which I did.
00:03:44.000 So your rebellion was to become an outstanding citizen and a Christian missionary?
00:03:49.000 Right.
00:03:50.000 That was my greatest form of rebellion against the life I had been leading.
00:03:53.000 Yeah.
00:03:53.000 Interesting.
00:03:55.000 Yeah, that's what happens when parents push their kids into a certain direction.
00:03:59.000 Right, right.
00:03:59.000 Little people don't like being told what to do.
00:04:02.000 So, you immediately, it seems like, go become a Christian.
00:04:09.000 And then, how long before you are actually doing missionary work in the jungle?
00:04:13.000 Well, there's a lot of training you have to do.
00:04:15.000 So, first, I had to do four years of college, Bible and theology.
00:04:19.000 And then, I had to do some linguistics training.
00:04:23.000 And then, not a graduate degree or anything like that, just some linguistics training from the missionary organization because I wanted to be a Bible translator.
00:04:31.000 Mm hmm.
00:04:32.000 And then we did jungle training in southern Mexico.
00:04:34.000 So we went to the jungles of Chiapas and had to do survival training and all of this.
00:04:38.000 Whoa.
00:04:39.000 What do you have to do there?
00:04:41.000 Well, there are several phases to it.
00:04:43.000 The family goes, and the family's part of it.
00:04:45.000 But the hardest thing is to really see how much you've learned.
00:04:49.000 They take you on what's called a survival hike, and they leave you alone for about a week in the jungle.
00:04:53.000 You're not allowed to take any food or any supplies of any kind.
00:04:58.000 For a week?
00:04:58.000 Yeah, for a week or more.
00:05:00.000 It's going to be at least a week.
00:05:00.000 You don't know.
00:05:02.000 In my case, it was about.
00:05:04.000 10 days.
00:05:07.000 And you've got to set up your camp how best you can, figure out how to get a fire going.
00:05:12.000 Do they teach you how to do all this stuff?
00:05:13.000 They don't just like figure it out.
00:05:15.000 This is like the final exam.
00:05:17.000 So you've had almost four months of training before they finally take you out on this survival.
00:05:23.000 Do you have water?
00:05:25.000 You have maybe a quart of water when you leave, but you're going to be out there for 10 days.
00:05:30.000 So you've got to find water.
00:05:31.000 So we learned which vines have water and how to cut the vines.
00:05:34.000 We did have a machete.
00:05:36.000 So, I was able to jump up and cut a vine at the top first and then at the bottom.
00:05:41.000 And no one's monitoring you.
00:05:43.000 They're just leaving you out there and they're not making sure you're okay.
00:05:46.000 No, they just come along when the time's up.
00:05:48.000 And if you're there, you're there.
00:05:49.000 Oh, boy.
00:05:50.000 And if you're not, you're dead?
00:05:52.000 You could be.
00:05:53.000 So then, that's insane.
00:05:56.000 Yeah, well, this is what happens when you live by faith.
00:06:00.000 You know, you're out there and God's supposed to be supervising your training, but it's really rigorous training.
00:06:06.000 So, by the time I actually got To the Amazon, which was eight years after I converted, took that long, it felt like I was coming home.
00:06:15.000 I wasn't surprised by things.
00:06:17.000 Well, the training was good then.
00:06:18.000 I mean, I would imagine if you really want someone to be able to survive alone in the jungle, the best way to do it is to test them by making them survive alone in the jungle.
00:06:27.000 So you get an actual version of the experience.
00:06:30.000 It's not simulated.
00:06:31.000 You actually are getting water from vines.
00:06:34.000 What were you eating?
00:06:36.000 Well, I learned different kinds of plants that you could eat.
00:06:39.000 And then I learned how to make.
00:06:42.000 With a stick, you know, with like two, you know, make a stick the size of a toothpick sharpened on both ends.
00:06:49.000 And I did have some fishing line, I would attach that to that.
00:06:52.000 And I was so proud of myself because I brought up two fish that were about three inches long.
00:06:58.000 And I ate those.
00:06:59.000 And most of the time, I ate plants and went hungry.
00:07:02.000 So when I see the programs like Alone, that wouldn't bother me.
00:07:08.000 That's the kind of stuff we had to do.
00:07:12.000 They didn't even give you fish hooks?
00:07:13.000 No.
00:07:14.000 You can't have that kind of stuff.
00:07:16.000 You have to learn to cope on your own.
00:07:17.000 You've got to make your own.
00:07:18.000 You've got to be able to recognize the plants, which ones are poisonous, which ones are not poisonous.
00:07:23.000 Did you try to make like a bow and arrow or anything?
00:07:25.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:07:26.000 I did.
00:07:26.000 You did?
00:07:27.000 I made a bow and arrow.
00:07:28.000 How'd you do that?
00:07:30.000 Well, I had a machete, and that's what I had.
00:07:33.000 It's crazy they give you a machete, they won't give you fish hooks.
00:07:35.000 Like, come on, guys.
00:07:37.000 Fish hooks are so much easier to carry.
00:07:39.000 But the machete, you need for firewood, you need for lots of things.
00:07:39.000 Right.
00:07:44.000 You know, when I got to the Amazon, what?
00:07:46.000 Do you have a lighter?
00:07:47.000 How are you making fires?
00:07:47.000 No.
00:07:49.000 Well, I had just, they let me take just a few matches.
00:07:54.000 Oh, Lord.
00:07:55.000 And so, no lighter, but a few matches, which you kept in a 35 millimeter film case.
00:08:01.000 Those little, yeah, carpet.
00:08:02.000 I don't know about those things, those little containers.
00:08:04.000 Yeah.
00:08:05.000 How many matches do they give you for 10 days?
00:08:07.000 Well, you had one of those little containers with about 10, 15 matches in it at the most.
00:08:13.000 Oh, boy.
00:08:14.000 So, you've got to match a day.
00:08:15.000 You've got to keep your fire going all the time.
00:08:17.000 You always have to keep that fire going.
00:08:18.000 So, before you start it, you spend half the day just cutting firewood.
00:08:22.000 And I would imagine it's very wet.
00:08:25.000 It's all wet.
00:08:26.000 So you've got to find something dry to get it going.
00:08:30.000 And as they told us.
00:08:31.000 And they said, keep it going.
00:08:32.000 Yeah, they said, once it's hot enough, it'll burn anything.
00:08:35.000 But until it gets hot, you can't just throw that wet wood on there.
00:08:38.000 It'll put it out.
00:08:40.000 So, you know, you have to spend a lot of time exploring, trying to find dry, crackly wood and leaves and things and get it going.
00:08:47.000 And then slowly introduce the thinner pieces of wet wood until finally you can throw on a sopping log.
00:08:53.000 So a big part of your day, essentially, is making sure that fire stays lit.
00:08:57.000 Yeah.
00:08:57.000 That's a big part of your day.
00:08:59.000 And you can't get too far from it.
00:09:00.000 No.
00:09:01.000 You have to stay fairly close to it.
00:09:03.000 And at night, you definitely want to keep it going.
00:09:04.000 So I remember one night waking up and hearing heavy steps around my camp.
00:09:10.000 And I was up immediately, blowing on that fire for everything I was worth to get that thing up.
00:09:16.000 Yeah.
00:09:17.000 Was it Jaguars?
00:09:20.000 I suspect that it could have been, although I didn't see it.
00:09:23.000 I had my machete, which when I got to the Amazon and actually saw Jaguars, I realized that would have been a pretty pathetic experience.
00:09:30.000 Thing to try to go against a jaguar with a machete.
00:09:34.000 They would rip your head off before.
00:09:35.000 Everybody likes to think they have a chance, though.
00:09:37.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:09:38.000 But what I found out is jaguars, you know, they get up to 400 pounds and they're the third biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger.
00:09:46.000 And they often hunt in pairs.
00:09:49.000 And so you wouldn't have a chance against a jaguar unless you were one of the Piedaha.
00:09:55.000 I know that guys alone by themselves have killed jaguars, but.
00:09:58.000 Really?
00:09:59.000 What are they using to kill a jaguar?
00:09:59.000 Yeah.
00:10:02.000 Well, they're always with their bows and arrows.
00:10:06.000 Bow and arrow range for a jaguar.
00:10:07.000 That's crazy.
00:10:08.000 Well, you better have it ready because it sneaks up on you.
00:10:11.000 There's another group that I worked with for quite a while several months called the Banawa, and they use poison darts and poisoned arrows.
00:10:19.000 So there's this story of this guy who went out hunting and he reached a clearing in the jungle and he saw a deer come out running straight for him.
00:10:29.000 And at first he was happy and he was going to kill the deer.
00:10:32.000 Then he realized deers don't just come running out of the jungle towards people.
00:10:35.000 And then right behind the deer came a jaguar.
00:10:38.000 And the jaguar saw him, the guy, and he was bigger than the deer, so the jaguar just took off straight for him and jumped up.
00:10:46.000 And the guy got his bow, his blowgun out in front of him.
00:10:50.000 They're about seven or eight feet long, these big blowguns.
00:10:53.000 And they're very sturdy.
00:10:54.000 And the jaguar, he holds it away.
00:10:57.000 The jaguar's back legs are tearing the meat off of his legs.
00:11:01.000 And the jaguar's head just keeps snapping at his face, trying to get his face.
00:11:05.000 And what saved his life was the jaguar.
00:11:08.000 Jumped off to go around the back and try to get him from the back, but he had a poisoned arrow and he stabbed the jaguar with it, and that hurts.
00:11:15.000 The jaguar started to run off, and then he shot it with a poisoned arrow.
00:11:20.000 But he passed out, and his family found him a couple of days later with his legs just infected and torn to pieces, but he survived.
00:11:33.000 And so, these Pitahad would they go hunt the jaguars?
00:11:37.000 If they saw that it was a danger, if a woman went out, And a jaguar or a mountain lion scared her, the men would go out to kill it.
00:11:48.000 So I've eaten jaguar.
00:11:50.000 What does it taste like?
00:11:52.000 Well, this one was sort of – this was a sick jaguar, but it's stringy meat.
00:11:57.000 I mean, it's very muscly meat.
00:11:59.000 It's not tender.
00:12:01.000 Yeah, that's how they wound up killing it.
00:12:03.000 I found out later.
00:12:04.000 I was really impressed.
00:12:05.000 They killed a jaguar.
00:12:07.000 And they have killed many jaguars, but this one turned out to be a sick jaguar, which is why he attacked the woman.
00:12:11.000 Like he was starving to death or something?
00:12:13.000 Yeah, he was starving.
00:12:14.000 So the men killed it and ate it.
00:12:16.000 But I did – my children were with me this whole time, so I told my children, I said, just remember who's eating whom.
00:12:22.000 Okay.
00:12:23.000 So do you remember what it tastes like?
00:12:26.000 Well, it's a stringy meat.
00:12:29.000 It's really hard to describe all the taste.
00:12:31.000 Munchy.
00:12:31.000 Like very sinewy.
00:12:33.000 Yeah, sinewy and very tough.
00:12:35.000 And my general rule of thumb I eat anything that they kill, but my general rule of thumb is I usually have a bottle of Tabasco sauce.
00:12:44.000 And if you put Tabasco sauce on it, it's okay.
00:12:47.000 And so these pita high, am I saying it right?
00:12:51.000 Pita high?
00:12:51.000 That's right.
00:12:52.000 They don't preserve anything, right?
00:12:55.000 They just kill things and cook them.
00:12:57.000 Yeah.
00:12:58.000 They don't, you know, many, many different groups smoke the meat or salt the meat if they have salt or dry it.
00:13:05.000 And the Pitahas know how to do that.
00:13:08.000 I don't know where they learn how to do it because they never do it except if they want to trade the meat with Brazilian boats who come up.
00:13:14.000 But among themselves, they don't preserve any meat.
00:13:16.000 You know, I was talking to a guy one time and, you know, why don't you preserve your meat?
00:13:21.000 And he says, oh, I preserve it in the belly of my brother.
00:13:23.000 So they share it.
00:13:26.000 And if I get meat, I give you some.
00:13:28.000 And if you get meat, you give me some.
00:13:29.000 So why would I. Right.
00:13:31.000 So, there's no need to store, and also, I guess it's very abundant.
00:13:34.000 There's a lot of life where they live, like in terms of fish and game.
00:13:38.000 There have been, yeah.
00:13:40.000 I mean, they live on this river, the My Sea River, and they're the only humans that live along the river for almost 300 miles of the curvy river.
00:13:50.000 And it's a relatively large river by U.S. standards.
00:13:53.000 In Brazil, it doesn't even make many of the maps, but it's a couple of hundred yards across.
00:13:57.000 75 feet deep, 100 feet deep.
00:14:04.000 So there's plenty of fish for them.
00:14:07.000 In recent years, that's changed because the Brazilian government has allowed the construction of dams across various rivers, not their river, but they affect the water level so much that it's taken all the fish, most of the fish out of their river.
00:14:21.000 So now they're starving.
00:14:23.000 And this has led to conflict with Brazilians who live not too far away and they've killed a few people stealing food from their farms and things.
00:14:32.000 Oh, man.
00:14:33.000 Can you imagine you just have this kind of harmonious existence with nature and someone just decides to make a dam?
00:14:41.000 Like you've got it so dialed in that you don't need to preserve your food.
00:14:45.000 Right.
00:14:45.000 Because everyone's just like happy and eating fish right out of the river.
00:14:49.000 Right.
00:14:50.000 And, you know, that's, they don't know where the dam is.
00:14:55.000 I told them that they built something that crosses the river like a wall.
00:14:55.000 They've never seen the dam.
00:14:59.000 And they say, why do they do that?
00:15:02.000 And I said, well, they want electricity, which they barely understand.
00:15:05.000 They've seen, I have a generator.
00:15:07.000 I never had one for the first 20 years I was working with them, but I eventually got a generator and they could see what electricity was.
00:15:15.000 And I said, so that's where they get the lights.
00:15:17.000 But they don't understand it, and it's for the first time in their history, and they've been living there as far as I can tell for almost 300 years on this one river.
00:15:28.000 For the first time in their history, they can't be self-sufficient in protein.
00:15:36.000 That's crazy.
00:15:38.000 And how long ago did they build this dam?
00:15:40.000 I think it was about 10 years ago.
00:15:43.000 Ago.
00:15:45.000 But they didn't, when it first went into operation, then it flooded the entire lots of farmland, lots of settlements and things up on the Madera.
00:15:54.000 But what was shocking was that way downriver from the dam, it affected the water levels so much that when their river, the My Sea, goes to its lowest point in the dry season, there's still only a few places where you can see the bottom of the river.
00:16:15.000 Most of the places, even when it's at its lowest, you Can't see the bottom of the river.
00:16:19.000 But in the last couple of years, it's gotten so low you can walk across.
00:16:23.000 Oh, wow.
00:16:24.000 And the fish don't stay there.
00:16:28.000 So, what are these people eating?
00:16:30.000 Well, they go hunting, which they don't like to do.
00:16:33.000 But of course, when the fish are gone and when the river's gone, you lose a lot of the game from the jungle.
00:16:39.000 So, they have to go, instead of going a mile into the jungle, they have to go many miles into the jungle.
00:16:45.000 And they're still not successful.
00:16:46.000 So, It's busting up communities.
00:16:49.000 Some people are moving out of their normal area to other areas to try to, you know, back on bigger rivers.
00:16:56.000 But then that means they're surrounded by Brazilians and they're no longer leading the life that they used to lead.
00:17:04.000 So when they move into these civilization areas, are they integrating or are they trying to, like, stay as a tribe removed from urban society?
00:17:15.000 Like, how are they doing it?
00:17:16.000 Well, up until about five years ago, They would never have thought about integrating.
00:17:22.000 They would live in like ghettos.
00:17:25.000 If they were out near some town, they would live in the jungle away from the town because that whole part of Brazil is covered in jungle.
00:17:31.000 Even the cities are bordered by jungle.
00:17:34.000 But nowadays, because there's no food anywhere, they're trying to integrate more and they're trying to learn Portuguese.
00:17:41.000 And it's a very unfortunate situation for them right now.
00:17:48.000 God, it's such a bummer.
00:17:50.000 That sucks so hard.
00:17:52.000 So, when you first got there, your aim was to try to convert them to Christianity.
00:17:59.000 That's right.
00:18:00.000 I went there to translate the Bible and plant a church and get everybody believing.
00:18:04.000 And why Piedaha?
00:18:05.000 Why did you go to those people?
00:18:07.000 Well, we were in our training, and the missionary organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, offered us three areas.
00:18:14.000 They said you can go to New Guinea, we need people in New Guinea.
00:18:17.000 You can go to Mexico, or you can go to Brazil.
00:18:20.000 And in Brazil, There's this tribe called the Piedaha that we've had two teams assigned to, and nobody's been able to figure out the language because it's not related to any other known living language.
00:18:31.000 And so they said, if you're up for that challenge and we know you did well in linguistics, we'd be happy to have you take that group.
00:18:37.000 So I thought, well, sure, I'm up for a challenge, so we took that.
00:18:42.000 And so this was 1977.
00:18:47.000 We were assigned there in 1976, and I made my first trip in in December of 1977.
00:18:53.000 And so, how much of the language did you know before you got there?
00:18:58.000 Nothing.
00:18:58.000 Nothing?
00:18:59.000 No.
00:18:59.000 What do we know in terms of like before you got there?
00:19:03.000 Was it recorded?
00:19:04.000 Was it something that people understood?
00:19:06.000 Take your training to the next level with AG1's new product, AG1 Pro.
00:19:11.000 It's back and it's already sold out once, so get it now.
00:19:14.000 AG1 Pro takes the original next gen formula, the vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, pre and probiotics, and more.
00:19:23.000 And packs in even more support for physical performance.
00:19:26.000 It adds five grams of CREA Vitalis creatine monohydrate and HMB to reduce protein breakdown and support recovery.
00:19:35.000 They've also added zinc carnosine for even more gut support.
00:19:39.000 It's one drink more effective, and it's NSF certified for sport, so you know exactly what's in it.
00:19:45.000 The training's only half of it.
00:19:47.000 Recovery is where the gains actually compound.
00:19:50.000 AG1 Pro is built for both.
00:19:52.000 Go to drinkag1.comslash Joe Rogan to get a free AG1 Pro shaker in your Pro Welcome Kit.
00:20:00.000 That's drinkag1.comslash Joe Rogan.
00:20:05.000 Yeah, in 1784, Portuguese explorers made contact, and they didn't take.
00:20:12.000 Lists of words.
00:20:14.000 They wrote a few descriptive things about the language and about the people, and those things still fit them today.
00:20:21.000 And then in 1821, a German explorer went there and he took a long list of words, which was amazing because he didn't have linguistics or anything like that, and his list of words is pretty good.
00:20:36.000 And then in 1920, another German who naturalized Brazilian, the founder of Brazilian anthropology, went there and took A much larger word list, and that one is very good.
00:20:50.000 And so I had those little word lists.
00:20:51.000 They're not much, and there's no how does the grammar work or anything like that.
00:20:55.000 It's just a list of words.
00:20:56.000 So I had looked at those, but it's a tone language.
00:21:01.000 And so they hadn't written the tone, so I had no idea how to pronounce the words.
00:21:06.000 To give you an example of what a tone language is, so if I want to say friend, I say magiai.
00:21:13.000 And if I want to say enemy, it's magiai.
00:21:18.000 What's the difference?
00:21:19.000 So, if I whistle it, friend is.
00:21:22.000 And if I whistle enemy, it's.
00:21:26.000 If you can't hear the tones, you don't know what's going on.
00:21:29.000 So, the word for me is.
00:21:35.000 And the word for shit is.
00:21:37.000 So, you know, you can be talking about yourself, and everybody starts laughing because you've called yourself shit.
00:21:44.000 Because you have the wrong tone.
00:21:46.000 Because you have the wrong tone.
00:21:47.000 So, you know, there are a lot of tone languages in the world Mandarin, tonal, Korean.
00:21:51.000 Somewhat tonal, and many languages of Africa are tonal.
00:21:54.000 But for those of us who speak European languages, this is just really weird and it's hard to hear.
00:22:02.000 A complete mind shift.
00:22:03.000 Yeah.
00:22:05.000 So you've got to be able to pay attention to those tones.
00:22:11.000 But the first thing you have to do is start just collecting words.
00:22:13.000 So I would point at things my first day, my first hour, I was pointing at things and writing down what they said.
00:22:18.000 And that was the basic linguistics I had had, phonetics, how to write down sounds of the world's languages.
00:22:25.000 And when you got there, so on day one, how do you make a connection?
00:22:31.000 Do you just show up, hey, brought you the Bible, everyone have a seat?
00:22:34.000 How do you do this?
00:22:35.000 Well, I got off and I started handing candy to the kids.
00:22:40.000 That works.
00:22:40.000 Good move.
00:22:42.000 And the people were very curious because I'm this white guy with red hair.
00:22:48.000 At that time, I had bright red hair.
00:22:50.000 And they found me curious to look at.
00:22:52.000 And so they came around.
00:22:54.000 They could tell, you know, at least I think they thought they could tell that I was no.
00:22:58.000 Danger to them.
00:23:00.000 They know how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger.
00:23:04.000 So then I would just start pointing at things.
00:23:07.000 I had my pen and paper, and I would get a stick, and I would say in English, stick.
00:23:14.000 And they know that I'm trying to communicate something, so they would say back, and I thought it probably means stick.
00:23:20.000 And I would write that down.
00:23:21.000 And then I would take the stick and drop it, and they would say, and that means stick fell to the ground.
00:23:28.000 And that's what I thought it meant.
00:23:30.000 So that's how I started.
00:23:31.000 That's what you thought it meant.
00:23:34.000 What is their reaction to this person coming in and demanding that they teach the language?
00:23:41.000 Well, I didn't demand.
00:23:42.000 Well, you know, you have a requirement.
00:23:44.000 You can't communicate, but you're there.
00:23:47.000 So they're kind enough to welcome you.
00:23:48.000 Yes.
00:23:49.000 Are you in the actual camp with all these people?
00:23:52.000 Yeah, I'm in the middle of their village.
00:23:53.000 The plane let me off, you know, landed on the river.
00:23:56.000 You don't even ask.
00:23:56.000 I got out.
00:23:57.000 You just, like, wander into their camp.
00:24:00.000 There's no way to contact them ahead of time.
00:24:02.000 This is crazy.
00:24:03.000 Yeah.
00:24:03.000 And you're just assuming they're not going to kill you.
00:24:05.000 Is this you?
00:24:06.000 This is the Pitaha.
00:24:07.000 This is a Pitaha village.
00:24:08.000 Yep.
00:24:09.000 And so this is what it looked like when you showed up.
00:24:10.000 You're like, hi, what's a stick?
00:24:12.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:24:13.000 You land on the river and you get there, and that's the Pitaha.
00:24:18.000 Wow.
00:24:19.000 And so they're very friendly and they start talking.
00:24:25.000 But of course, I don't know what they say.
00:24:26.000 They just see me as a very.
00:24:28.000 Guy's got a Ferrari t shirt on.
00:24:29.000 What's up?
00:24:30.000 Yeah, they.
00:24:32.000 River boats go in and give clothes.
00:24:34.000 If a river boat hasn't been there in a long time, they'll all be naked.
00:24:38.000 Oh, wow.
00:24:39.000 So, and so, like day one, they just accept the fact that this redheaded dude just showed up and is hanging out with us now?
00:24:51.000 Yeah, there were a couple of things that counted in my favor.
00:24:53.000 I was all by myself.
00:24:54.000 And so, giving out candy was a big factor.
00:24:58.000 They like to chew tobacco.
00:25:01.000 And I had been told this by somebody who had been there.
00:25:04.000 So, I took in a big long horn of tobacco.
00:25:06.000 I don't know if you've ever, there's a really old fashioned way to.
00:25:08.000 A horn?
00:25:09.000 Yes.
00:25:10.000 Like an animal horn?
00:25:11.000 No, it looks like an animal horn, but it's probably eight feet, nine feet long, just rolled up tight, tobacco wrapped in latex.
00:25:20.000 Really?
00:25:21.000 Yeah, and you just cut it off for them and they chew it and they like it.
00:25:24.000 So I would, you know, the ones who would help me, I would give them a little bit of tobacco or candy.
00:25:33.000 And I also brought canned food for me, and I would trade that to them for fish and other things that they got.
00:25:42.000 And they liked that.
00:25:43.000 How long did you stay initially?
00:25:45.000 The first time was just to see what it was like before I brought my family.
00:25:49.000 So I stayed 10 days.
00:25:51.000 And then I came back with my family and we stayed a year at that time.
00:25:54.000 We just stayed there the whole year.
00:25:56.000 When you say your family, so your wife and how many kids?
00:25:59.000 Three kids.
00:26:00.000 How old were the kids when you got there?
00:26:00.000 There they are.
00:26:02.000 Well, my oldest daughter, who there is about 12, was nine.
00:26:06.000 And the middle daughter was six.
00:26:08.000 And then my son was three years old.
00:26:12.000 So, this is around that time.
00:26:16.000 And so, my kids grew up among the Pitahan.
00:26:19.000 Both my older daughters learned to speak the language fairly quickly.
00:26:22.000 Wow, that's a risky move.
00:26:26.000 You brought your little kids to the jungle.
00:26:28.000 Yeah, so my son got.
00:26:29.000 What is that decision like?
00:26:31.000 Was that a difficult decision?
00:26:32.000 Well, today it would be, but I was a Christian and I believed in miracles and I believed God would take care of us.
00:26:38.000 And so, I went there and figured he was in charge, he would take care of us.
00:26:42.000 So, my son got meningitis.
00:26:46.000 My two daughters got malaria.
00:26:49.000 I got malaria.
00:26:50.000 In fact, after a few years, I went to San Diego and I came down with malaria.
00:26:55.000 And in University Hospital San Diego, they were thrilled because I was the only person that ever seen with all three strains of South American malaria at the same time.
00:27:04.000 Did you have a relapse of malaria or was that because I have a friend who got malaria in the Congo and it came back.
00:27:13.000 It can come back, and I've had relapses, but it's been a long time now that I haven't had relapses.
00:27:18.000 I've taken so much medicine that supposedly it won't come back anymore, but I can never give blood because it's always in my blood.
00:27:26.000 Ugh.
00:27:27.000 What do they give you?
00:27:28.000 Like, what medicine are they giving you?
00:27:29.000 Well, Daraprim, Primaquin, straight quinine.
00:27:34.000 When my wife almost died, she weighed 115 pounds, and then she got malaria and almost died.
00:27:43.000 She got down to 76 pounds.
00:27:46.000 And the doctor told me she's going to die tonight.
00:27:48.000 We don't have any way to keep her alive.
00:27:50.000 Oh, my God.
00:27:52.000 And they put her on blood transfusions because you lose a lot of blood, it kills the blood cells.
00:27:56.000 And they put her on blood transfusions and also straight quinine, which caused her to be in agony for.
00:28:04.000 Several days of just constant retching, and it's just quinine's a really bad experience.
00:28:10.000 But at the end of it, she pulled through.
00:28:11.000 She pulled through.
00:28:12.000 Oh my God.
00:28:13.000 Yeah.
00:28:13.000 Yeah.
00:28:13.000 We all pulled through.
00:28:15.000 You had to be like questioning your decisions.
00:28:18.000 I mean, this has to be a trialing, you know, very difficult time because you chose to be there.
00:28:26.000 Yeah.
00:28:27.000 And so we were leaving the village to find help because my wife and daughter were dying of malaria at this time where she got down to 76 pounds, and my daughter lost.
00:28:36.000 A lot of weight, too.
00:28:37.000 She was just skin and bones.
00:28:39.000 And I'm getting my boat out of there.
00:28:42.000 And I had never been out by boat.
00:28:43.000 In fact, I didn't have a boat.
00:28:44.000 We were, I had no idea how to get out of there.
00:28:47.000 So this Catholic priest came up to see what the Protestant missionaries were doing.
00:28:52.000 And I said, Can I borrow your boat?
00:28:53.000 I got to get my family out of here.
00:28:54.000 He had this very narrow aluminum canoe with a six horsepower Johnson.
00:28:59.000 And I got my whole family in there.
00:29:01.000 And he just stayed there in the jungle and let my family take off in his boat.
00:29:06.000 And, I didn't know where we were, but I was thinking, you know, I've read all these books about missionaries and now I'm having a missionary experience.
00:29:14.000 But it wasn't fun.
00:29:16.000 It was really.
00:29:17.000 It was horrific.
00:29:18.000 It was a horrific experience, and I just didn't know what was going to happen.
00:29:23.000 So your goal was to convert these people.
00:29:26.000 And how long were you there for?
00:29:29.000 Well, I was there.
00:29:31.000 In 1980, I spent the whole year there.
00:29:34.000 In all the other years from 1977 to 2013, I was there for three to six months every year.
00:29:41.000 So I was there a lot and got sick every time I went.
00:29:47.000 I had typhoid fever and all this stuff.
00:29:49.000 But attacked by snakes and stuff like that.
00:29:53.000 But it was just a mind altering experience.
00:30:00.000 Things didn't go the way I thought.
00:30:02.000 And the people started questioning me.
00:30:06.000 They started asking me, Why do you believe in this Jesus you keep telling us about?
00:30:10.000 What's he like?
00:30:12.000 And you're doing this also, you're translating these concepts from English to Pitaha.
00:30:18.000 From Greek to Pitaha.
00:30:21.000 Going from the Greek New Testament, because I was translating the New Testament.
00:30:24.000 So I'm going from Greek to Pitaha, but I'm referencing English and Portuguese at the same time.
00:30:29.000 Oh, my goodness.
00:30:30.000 I'm staying in there.
00:30:31.000 And you expect these people to understand what you're saying?
00:30:35.000 So, you know, if you're in the middle of the jungle and Jesus does something out in a desert, how do you describe desert?
00:30:35.000 Yeah.
00:30:42.000 Isn't their language a completely different language than ours?
00:30:46.000 Like, in terms of like, they have no words for color.
00:30:50.000 They have no words for direction.
00:30:50.000 Right.
00:30:51.000 They don't have a left or a right.
00:30:52.000 Right.
00:30:54.000 So, and this all takes time to find out because when I went there, I thought everybody had words for colors.
00:30:59.000 Everybody had words for numbers.
00:31:00.000 Everybody had a concept of God.
00:31:02.000 They don't have words for numbers.
00:31:02.000 Right.
00:31:04.000 That's so crazy.
00:31:05.000 They don't have.
00:31:05.000 Yeah.
00:31:06.000 Do they have numbers?
00:31:08.000 No numbers.
00:31:09.000 So they don't count.
00:31:10.000 How many fish did you catch today, Mike?
00:31:12.000 A lot.
00:31:13.000 That's it.
00:31:14.000 A lot or a little?
00:31:15.000 A lot or a little.
00:31:17.000 Or a good amount.
00:31:18.000 Yeah.
00:31:20.000 In fact, that claim was really controversial.
00:31:23.000 I've had psycholinguists and cognitive scientists come down with me to do experiments.
00:31:28.000 Didn't you get into it with Chomsky about that?
00:31:31.000 Well, I got into it with Chomsky about their grammar.
00:31:35.000 Oh, that's right.
00:31:35.000 Yes.
00:31:36.000 Chomsky made this claim.
00:31:37.000 I've gotten other people.
00:31:39.000 There are people who find every claim controversial.
00:31:42.000 So some people can't believe they don't have numbers.
00:31:44.000 Some people who don't believe they don't have a concept of God.
00:31:48.000 Other people who don't believe they don't have colors.
00:31:52.000 But Chomsky claimed that all languages are built on a common property called recursion.
00:31:59.000 And recursion is this.
00:32:02.000 English has it all over the place.
00:32:03.000 So it's the ability to put one unit inside another unit of the same type.
00:32:09.000 So take a noun.
00:32:10.000 If I take the noun truck and the noun driver and I put them together, I can form a third word, truck driver.
00:32:18.000 And so that's recursion.
00:32:19.000 I put one noun inside another and I get a third noun.
00:32:22.000 Or with a sentence, I can say, John spoke.
00:32:25.000 There's no recursion there.
00:32:26.000 I can say, John said that Bill spoke.
00:32:29.000 And now that's got recursion because Bill spoke is a sentence inside John said that.
00:32:36.000 And so Chomsky claimed, and in my opinion, without doing a lot of homework on this, I mean, he just was basing it on languages that he happened to know, which aren't many, that all languages were built on this.
00:32:50.000 And he had principles built into his theory that required this.
00:32:50.000 It made sense.
00:32:54.000 So when I came along and said they don't have it, and now I know there are other languages that don't have it, this was like saying you're wrong.
00:33:05.000 And for me, a relative nobody, to tell the most famous linguist in history, somebody that Chomsky was called by the New York Times the most important intellectual alive, to tell him that he's wrong, a lot of people found that very weird.
00:33:23.000 Problematic.
00:33:24.000 Yeah, problematic.
00:33:25.000 But facts are facts.
00:33:27.000 Yeah.
00:33:28.000 I mean, it should be exciting for a linguist to look at something that violates all the laws of other known languages.
00:33:33.000 It was exciting for some linguists.
00:33:36.000 And really off pissing for a lot of other linguists.
00:33:39.000 That's so gross.
00:33:39.000 It's not gross.
00:33:40.000 That is one of the grossest things about intellectuals this gatekeeping of information and this appeal to authority that they're the only person who could possibly know.
00:33:49.000 Especially when you're talking about languages.
00:33:51.000 How many languages are there?
00:33:54.000 There are about 8,000 separate languages in the world.
00:33:57.000 How the fuck could you know all the rules to 8,000 languages?
00:34:02.000 We don't have data on more than about 1,200 or so.
00:34:05.000 Well, isn't there also an issue with the Aboriginal tribes?
00:34:08.000 Of Australia.
00:34:09.000 My good friend Adam Greentree, he's from Australia and he was running a mine there for a while and worked with a lot of Aboriginal people and really learned a lot about their cultures.
00:34:21.000 They're called mobs.
00:34:22.000 Their tribe is called a mob.
00:34:26.000 There could be a mob that's just like 30 kilometers over that way.
00:34:30.000 They have no idea what they're saying.
00:34:33.000 They don't know the language and it's not written anywhere.
00:34:35.000 There's hundreds of these.
00:34:35.000 They're all over the place.
00:34:37.000 Trevor Burrus, right.
00:34:38.000 The bit of field work that has been done there are some really good Australian linguists trying to figure out these things.
00:34:44.000 But the fieldwork that has been done has found properties that aren't like anything else we know about.
00:34:49.000 So languages can vary so much that it's really premature, in my opinion, to be writing laws that languages are supposed to follow, all 8,000 of these languages.
00:35:01.000 Well, all you'd have to do is say, as far as we've observed, and then you're okay.
00:35:06.000 But as soon as you say it has to have this, and if someone says actually a language that doesn't have this, and then there's a controversy, you're a bad guy for pointing this out, and you're, you know.
00:35:17.000 What a heretic.
00:35:18.000 Output transcript Out and you're, you know.
00:35:20.000 Well, I had one of Chomsky's followers who was Brazilian write to the Brazilian Indian Agency, which is where I get my authorization to visit these tribes, and say, this Dan Everett guy, he's a racist.
00:35:33.000 That's what they always say.
00:35:35.000 Isn't that the fun one?
00:35:36.000 The moment they want to get rid of you, you're a racist.
00:35:40.000 Well, she was silly because she said, he's trying to reduce the Piedahas to primates.
00:35:43.000 And I said, well, in fact, I am because we're all primates.
00:35:46.000 I'm a primate, you're a primate.
00:35:48.000 But it's the thing, if Chomsky says that all languages have X and I say here's a language that doesn't have X, then either A, Chomsky's wrong or B, these aren't humans.
00:35:59.000 And so the only person who would claim they're not humans is a racist.
00:36:03.000 That's such a crazy way to put it.
00:36:05.000 It's so stupid.
00:36:06.000 God.
00:36:06.000 This is typical in science.
00:36:09.000 As I got more and more into science, it's very unfortunate.
00:36:12.000 It's men.
00:36:13.000 It's men and their egos.
00:36:16.000 That's what it is.
00:36:16.000 I'm sure women as well, but primarily men.
00:36:19.000 Well, you don't get a lot of money when you're a scientist.
00:36:24.000 It's not a money making profession.
00:36:26.000 What is the biggest rate of exchange among scientists?
00:36:29.000 It's ego.
00:36:30.000 But it's just so crazy to think that if it doesn't have this one characteristic of language that you're calling them primates, it's not a value judgment.
00:36:39.000 You're saying it's a different kind of language, and this is fascinating.
00:36:42.000 That's my take.
00:36:42.000 Many anthropologists took that.
00:36:42.000 Exactly.
00:36:44.000 For example, they originally said that Homo erectus.
00:36:51.000 Had no capability for human speech.
00:36:54.000 And I thought that was kind of a questionable statement since, you know, I've read a lot on Homo erectus, wrote a book about it, and they don't, all their accomplishments, they had to have pretty advanced language to account for the fact that the ocean was never a barrier for them.
00:37:14.000 And so I said that Homo erectus had language, and I think the evidence supports that, but they don't have the kind of language Chomsky says necessarily.
00:37:22.000 And so an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool wrote me and he says, My specialty is Homo erectus, and I think you're right.
00:37:31.000 So we wrote a paper together.
00:37:33.000 And then after we wrote the paper, he discovered last year the oldest wooden structure known in all of human history, a 500,000 year old structure built by Homo erectus in Zambia.
00:37:45.000 And he showed that it has interlocking pieces and parts that nobody ever expected Homo erectus to be able to do.
00:37:55.000 And their brains weren't that much smaller than ours.
00:37:57.000 You know, the average size of a modern human's brain is about 1200 cc's for men and about 950 to 1100 cc's for women.
00:38:06.000 And since we know that men aren't more intelligent than women, the size of the brain can't be what's determining that.
00:38:13.000 Homo erectus had brains of 950 to 1,000 cc's, you know, cubic centimeters.
00:38:19.000 You measure that by taking the skull and filling it full of sand and seeing how much sand fits in there.
00:38:25.000 So, they were able to make these complex structures and they were able to make boats and they were able to do all these things.
00:38:34.000 Yeah, that's what Larry Barham from the University of Liverpool discovered.
00:38:37.000 This structure, you see the cross piece.
00:38:41.000 And he recently gave a talk to a world association of archaeologists to get their judgment on what this could be.
00:38:50.000 Not archaeologists, but architects to get their professional judgment.
00:38:53.000 And they were really impressed by this.
00:38:56.000 They said, that's actually a pretty advanced structure for building.
00:38:59.000 You know, a walkway or a house?
00:39:02.000 We actually discussed this yesterday.
00:39:03.000 I had a guy on named Michael Button.
00:39:07.000 He's got a fantastic YouTube channel.
00:39:08.000 It's all about, like, sort of the mysteries of human history.
00:39:11.000 of the mysteries of human history.
00:39:14.000 We talked about the seafaring aspect and how much evidence there is that these people were seafaring as much as a million years ago.
00:39:21.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:39:22.000 In my book, How Language Began, I have – They had to be communicating.
00:39:25.000 Yeah.
00:39:25.000 There's an archaeologist in Australia, Bednarick is his name, and he showed by – he did experiments and they're not exact because you can't find humans today that don't have any language, normal humans.
00:39:41.000 But he got humans from different languages who couldn't communicate with each other that well to see if they could build a boat.
00:39:49.000 And then another linguist wrote a paper based on some of this called How Much Language Does It Take to Build a Boat?
00:39:55.000 And it turns out you've got to have language to build a boat.
00:39:59.000 And so if they were building these boats that could carry water and could carry as many as 20 people, because you've got to have enough to.
00:40:05.000 If you find a colony of Homo erectus on an island that was always an island, it was never connected by land.
00:40:12.000 There had to be more than one person that washed up there on some vegetation.
00:40:17.000 There has to have been a community.
00:40:19.000 Michael brought up that the what was it?
00:40:19.000 Yeah.
00:40:23.000 The what organization that did it?
00:40:25.000 Was it NASA?
00:40:26.000 NASA did a study because they were trying to figure out how many people you need to colonize another planet.
00:40:30.000 And they came up with the number 500.
00:40:35.000 You need a minimum of 500 to begin a colony.
00:40:38.000 Right.
00:40:38.000 In order to have genetic diversity, make sure you're not having sex with your cousin, that kind of jazz.
00:40:45.000 So you can't.
00:40:45.000 Yeah.
00:40:46.000 Just sent a couple over there, Adam and Eve, and expect this to happen.
00:40:50.000 Yeah.
00:40:50.000 How did you feel about that story when you first heard it?
00:40:53.000 Yeah, when you were converting.
00:40:53.000 Adam and Eve?
00:40:55.000 You're 17 years old.
00:40:56.000 I believe you were doing acid.
00:40:57.000 I mean, I was one of these guys who I believe the Bible cover to cover and even the covers.
00:41:01.000 We'll get to that in a minute.
00:41:04.000 Yeah.
00:41:04.000 So, but go back to how this is all going down.
00:41:07.000 With the controversy?
00:41:08.000 Yes.
00:41:09.000 So, I started getting hate mail, and then the article came out when I first proposed this.
00:41:17.000 In the major journal of anthropology, Current Anthropology.
00:41:20.000 I was in Germany at the time at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and right down the hall from me was Svante Pebo, who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding the genome of Neanderthals.
00:41:33.000 And there was a reporter, a German reporter from Der Spiegel, to talk to him.
00:41:40.000 And she found out about my article, so she walked down the hall after she interviewed him and interviewed me.
00:41:45.000 And this came out, and it started to get picked up in the press.
00:41:48.000 In a lot of places, and so the New Yorker did a big profile.
00:41:52.000 But then the reaction came, and it wasn't what I expected.
00:41:57.000 I expected that if you make a proposal, other scientists, if they're skeptical, which they have every right to be, are going to propose experiments to test what you're saying.
00:42:06.000 And they're going to say, well, if they don't have recursion, you should find this, and you should not find that, and you should get this, and this, and this.
00:42:12.000 And I tried to anticipate that, but that's the kind of objection I expected.
00:42:16.000 But instead, they said, I'm a liar, I'm trying to get publicity.
00:42:20.000 I had a New York Times reporter.
00:42:23.000 She called me and she said, Do you try to get publicity?
00:42:26.000 I said, Did I ask you to call me?
00:42:28.000 I said, You called me.
00:42:30.000 I said, It's an interesting story.
00:42:32.000 If people want to talk to me, I'm here to talk to them.
00:42:35.000 But I'm not.
00:42:35.000 I said, If I wrote you at the New York Times and said, I'm an interesting person, interview me, would that make any difference?
00:42:41.000 They're not mutually exclusive.
00:42:43.000 You could be trying to get attention and publicity because you've discovered something that's very important.
00:42:48.000 The idea that you're just trying to get attention.
00:42:51.000 Are you trying to get attention?
00:42:52.000 What are you talking about?
00:42:54.000 Talking about?
00:42:58.000 It's so weird that the intellectuals, the people who are literally professional thinkers, would fall into these common human traps of ego.
00:43:08.000 Well, it was a mind blowing, mind expanding experience for me to see that intellectuals that I otherwise admired as deep thinkers about their subject would not think otherwise.
00:43:24.000 Did they ever engage you on the actual information?
00:43:30.000 Yeah, I had people from MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, from Stanford, Department of Psychology, from Columbia University came down at separate times to run experiments, and they were well designed experiments to test what I said.
00:43:47.000 And they all came away saying, you know, it looks like Dan's right.
00:43:52.000 So, where's the reaction then?
00:43:55.000 And what do they say?
00:43:58.000 About that?
00:43:59.000 Like the people that are negative about this and the people that are calling you a racist and all this saying you're trying to get attention, what are they saying about these results?
00:44:07.000 They don't refer to them directly, but if asked, they often say that these people don't like Chomsky.
00:44:14.000 All of them?
00:44:17.000 Yeah.
00:44:17.000 All of those individual scientists that are running these studies for you don't like Chomsky and that's why they have these skewed results?
00:44:23.000 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
00:44:24.000 That is one of the many objections that people raise, but by and large they ignore it.
00:44:28.000 They ignore it.
00:44:29.000 So they ignore the studies.
00:44:31.000 Yeah, I had Chomsky write me some really nasty emails.
00:44:34.000 You got them?
00:44:36.000 I have one.
00:44:36.000 Do you got them still?
00:44:37.000 Yeah, I do have one.
00:44:38.000 And I asked him, I said, why don't we debate at the Linguistic Society of America?
00:44:44.000 I said, you think I'm an idiot, so here's your chance.
00:44:47.000 You can show that I'm an idiot.
00:44:48.000 Just we'll debate, and you'll make a fool of me in five minutes.
00:44:51.000 Are you saying he thinks you're an idiot when you're explaining a language that he doesn't know?
00:44:55.000 I'm an idiot or I'm a liar.
00:44:57.000 Oh, my God.
00:44:58.000 He gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper, and he said, Dan used to be a fairly good linguist, but he is a charlatan.
00:45:07.000 He's just a 100% charlatan.
00:45:09.000 And he was interviewed on a Spanish station, and they said, What do you think of the contributions of Dan Everett?
00:45:15.000 And he said, They're nothing, nothing, nothing.
00:45:17.000 Oh, my God.
00:45:19.000 He's really popular, you know.
00:45:20.000 I used to really admire him.
00:45:21.000 Yeah.
00:45:22.000 I used to really admire him.
00:45:24.000 Then I found I was close homies with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:45:26.000 That kind of threw a lot of water on that.
00:45:29.000 I was like, What?
00:45:29.000 Yeah.
00:45:30.000 But then it was the stance during the vaccines when he was like, people that weren't vaccinated should be rounded up and put into camps.
00:45:36.000 He had some crazy positions.
00:45:37.000 on the unvaccinated people and very just misinformed, just completely misinformed about whether it was natural immunity or there was other medications that you could use to treat COVID-19 or even the efficacy of the vaccine.
00:45:56.000 It was crazy.
00:45:57.000 That was just one thing about him.
00:45:59.000 It's just like his earlier debates, like he's got these fantastic debates.
00:46:03.000 I think it's him and William F. Buckley.
00:46:06.000 Have you ever seen those?
00:46:07.000 Yes, I have.
00:46:08.000 He's so good in those.
00:46:09.000 He's so brilliant in those.
00:46:11.000 It was a young Chomsky, and his intellect and his reason, it was like a breath of fresh air.
00:46:19.000 It was super well informed.
00:46:21.000 Every time Buckley tried to catch him on something, he judoed him.
00:46:26.000 It was amazing.
00:46:27.000 Yeah, well, the first two books of Chomsky I read when I started doing graduate work in linguistics.
00:46:33.000 I read the Media one.
00:46:34.000 What is it?
00:46:36.000 Oh, A Manufacturer of Consent.
00:46:39.000 That's right.
00:46:40.000 But he had.
00:46:40.000 Yeah.
00:46:41.000 The first book of his I read, it was in linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
00:46:46.000 And if you're a linguist and you're studying linguistics, that's just genius.
00:46:50.000 It is just brilliant.
00:46:51.000 Just brilliant.
00:46:52.000 Then the next book, which he published the same year, was American Power and the New Mandarins, which was about Vietnam.
00:47:00.000 That was also brilliant.
00:47:02.000 For one person to publish two books like that in one year, that's just first order genius.
00:47:09.000 I admired him.
00:47:10.000 What goes wrong with a guy like that, though?
00:47:12.000 If a guy could be that smart, how could he not be curious?
00:47:15.000 When you say something that flies in the face of everything that he's taught, how could he not be curious and want to talk to you?
00:47:25.000 And if you're right, why would he not want to do something with you?
00:47:29.000 Like, if I found someone like you, and I was, I mean, I would have hoped that I would be the same way as I am now.
00:47:34.000 And I had an opportunity, I'd say, we should do a podcast together.
00:47:37.000 We could explain this.
00:47:38.000 This is crazy.
00:47:39.000 Right.
00:47:40.000 I invited him to the Pitaha.
00:47:41.000 He was coming to Brazil.
00:47:42.000 And I said, hey, why don't you come with me to the Pitaha?
00:47:45.000 And I'll ask them any question you want me to ask them.
00:47:48.000 We can talk about it there.
00:47:49.000 And he said, I don't do that kind of thing.
00:47:51.000 I don't do field work.
00:47:52.000 So he didn't come.
00:47:53.000 Good move.
00:47:54.000 You don't want a typhoid.
00:47:55.000 Fever and fucking malaria, bit by snakes, stalked by jaguars.
00:47:59.000 That's all true, you know.
00:48:00.000 It's just very disappointing when people are really brilliant.
00:48:00.000 See, he's smart.
00:48:05.000 He's a brilliant guy and essentially, I mean, especially rather, was really brilliant when he was young.
00:48:11.000 It's just so sad when you see someone like that just behaving with ego because he was the expert.
00:48:18.000 He was the foremost linguist on planet Earth.
00:48:21.000 When the New York Times is saying things like you're the most important intellectual alive and you have people hanging off every word as though it comes from.
00:48:29.000 You know, the Oracle of Apollo.
00:48:31.000 Yeah.
00:48:32.000 I assume that it affects your ego to some degree.
00:48:36.000 Most people, especially back then when there's no internet to check you, you know, you can get a really distorted perception of how you stand.
00:48:36.000 100%.
00:48:44.000 Also, everyone's kissing your ass.
00:48:46.000 You're surrounded by other people that are trying to climb the same ladder you're on.
00:48:51.000 You're in a very lofty position of authority and power.
00:48:54.000 You know, he wrote letters of recommendation for me for my first job in the US.
00:48:59.000 And he wrote a letter of recommendation when I came up for promotion to tenure.
00:48:59.000 Really?
00:49:02.000 At the University of Pittsburgh.
00:49:04.000 Why would you do that if you're an idiot?
00:49:06.000 But I wasn't yet an idiot.
00:49:07.000 I became an idiot.
00:49:10.000 You became an idiot when you disagreed with him.
00:49:13.000 Meanwhile, ha ha, you're right.
00:49:14.000 That's what's funny.
00:49:15.000 In the end, you're right.
00:49:17.000 Yeah, well, I've had so many exchanges in journals and magazines and things with his followers over the years and with him that I go give a talk somewhere and people say, I hope you're ready because there's a lot of skeptic.
00:49:35.000 A lot of skeptics in this audience, and I say, I don't think they're going to ask me any new questions.
00:49:40.000 I've done this so much now that they're going to ask me.
00:49:42.000 I said, I'll be surprised if anybody asks me a question that I haven't heard from Chomsky.
00:49:48.000 And when you have these conversations with Chomsky and you lay out how the Pitaha use their language and how it works, what was his reaction to that?
00:50:00.000 Well, the first time I talked to him about it, he had not made this claim about recursion.
00:50:00.000 You're just incorrect?
00:50:05.000 This was in 1984.
00:50:06.000 I was a visitor at MIT Linguistics, and my office was next to his.
00:50:12.000 And so I talked to him several times that year, and I said, I don't think their language has this property.
00:50:20.000 And he said, you know, he was drinking coffee and looking at the board.
00:50:25.000 He had a blackboard right by his desk, and he said, hmm, wonder what the consequences of that are.
00:50:29.000 And then one of his PhD students told me, oh, you really got gnome thinking.
00:50:32.000 What is this?
00:50:33.000 He found that very intriguing.
00:50:35.000 But then when he came out with the proclamation that all languages had to have it, then I became an idiot.
00:50:40.000 That's so disappointing.
00:50:40.000 Oh, God.
00:50:41.000 Fucking people.
00:50:43.000 Yeah.
00:50:43.000 Fucking people.
00:50:47.000 People.
00:50:48.000 Fucking people.
00:50:48.000 Yeah.
00:50:50.000 Even the brightest minds.
00:50:52.000 They're just.
00:50:53.000 Ego's such a motherfucker.
00:50:55.000 Yeah.
00:50:56.000 Well, it's really disappointing because, you know, he was like my idol for the first part of my linguistic career.
00:51:01.000 And I wasn't.
00:51:01.000 Right.
00:51:03.000 Did you try to have a conversation with him after he denounced you?
00:51:06.000 Did you try to, like, one on one get together with him?
00:51:09.000 Well, we exchanged emails.
00:51:11.000 So for example, in his face.
00:51:13.000 Did you try to do that?
00:51:13.000 Like, right in front of him.
00:51:15.000 He never had.
00:51:17.000 I had always told him when I was going through. Cambridge, that I was coming and maybe he and I could talk.
00:51:22.000 And he always made time.
00:51:24.000 And we talked, you know, I would be living somewhere else and I'd come to MIT and he'd talk to me.
00:51:28.000 And my first PhD student is a full professor at MIT.
00:51:32.000 And he started off in linguistics.
00:51:35.000 He's in brain and cognitive sciences now.
00:51:37.000 So I had a good relationship with Chomsky.
00:51:39.000 But then suddenly he never had time to meet with me.
00:51:42.000 So after his proclamation?
00:51:43.000 Right.
00:51:45.000 Okay.
00:51:45.000 He had no time to meet with me.
00:51:46.000 His wife died and I wrote him a letter saying, I'm so sorry that Carol died.
00:51:51.000 This is really terrible.
00:51:52.000 I know you guys have been together for so long.
00:51:54.000 He wrote back and said, Thank you so much.
00:51:56.000 That means a great deal to me.
00:51:58.000 And then I saw this article in a Sao Paulo paper where he called me a charlatan.
00:52:02.000 So I wrote him right back and I said, Did you call me a charlatan?
00:52:05.000 And he said, Yeah, you are a charlatan.
00:52:08.000 I said, You should be ashamed of yourself.
00:52:09.000 He said, No, you should be ashamed of yourself for saying things you know that can't be right.
00:52:14.000 So that was the last exchange we had.
00:52:16.000 That's a really silly no.
00:52:17.000 Of course, you should have had that in front of him.
00:52:20.000 I mean, just I think people say things in emails that I think is a terrible way to communicate.
00:52:25.000 I agree completely.
00:52:27.000 Yeah.
00:52:28.000 Especially with insults.
00:52:29.000 It's such a.
00:52:31.000 And then you're waiting on the other person's insult in return.
00:52:34.000 Like, God, stop it.
00:52:36.000 Are you fucking 12 years old?
00:52:37.000 Yeah.
00:52:38.000 Stop.
00:52:39.000 So the author, Tom Wolfe, the last book he wrote was called Kingdom of Speech.
00:52:45.000 And he talked about two controversies Darwin versus Alfred Russell Wallace and me versus Chomsky.
00:52:53.000 And so he has a very.
00:52:53.000 Oh, wow.
00:52:55.000 He has some bizarre.
00:52:56.000 Absolutely wrong ideas about where language came from.
00:52:59.000 He's not a linguist, but he did cover that controversy extremely well.
00:53:04.000 And, you know, Tom used to call me every week when he was writing the book.
00:53:08.000 I didn't even know what it was about to get the details right.
00:53:12.000 But he was just shocked how this happened.
00:53:15.000 Yeah.
00:53:16.000 Again, it's disappointing, but even the most brilliant humans are just human.
00:53:21.000 Right.
00:53:22.000 And they're subject to all the flaws and all the traps that the human mind could fall into.
00:53:27.000 Yeah, I've often said after long experience that intelligence is no antidote for stupidity.
00:53:34.000 You can be both.
00:53:36.000 Oh, 100%.
00:53:37.000 Absolutely, especially when ego is involved.
00:53:40.000 So how many people, how many of the Piraha did you convert?
00:53:45.000 Nobody.
00:53:47.000 In decades, they weren't interested.
00:53:51.000 They were so totally because my claims did not meet their standard of evidence.
00:53:56.000 They have a high standard of evidence, and I didn't meet that standard.
00:54:00.000 This episode is brought to you by Blue Chew.
00:54:02.000 Man, let's talk about Blue Chew.
00:54:04.000 They're already the number one brand for better sex, but what they're doing with Blue Chew Gold is completely next level.
00:54:11.000 Gold is a four in one formula designed to make your bedroom noisy again.
00:54:17.000 Obviously, it gets you hard, like you're back in your 20s, and everything is handled 100% online, but gold boosts your arousal, getting you ready for sex physically and mentally.
00:54:30.000 Plus, it dissolves under your tongue for faster absorption.
00:54:33.000 So, you get that spontaneous energy back.
00:54:37.000 Look at the stats gold is three times stronger, five times faster, and eight times longer lasting than old school methods.
00:54:45.000 Blue Chew Gold is the real deal.
00:54:47.000 Right now, buy two months of Blue Chew Gold and get the third free with my code ROGAN.
00:54:53.000 You will also receive free overnight shipping.
00:54:56.000 Head over to bluechew.com for details and important safety information.
00:55:01.000 Check it out.
00:55:02.000 This ad and the products being advertised are intended for a United States audience.
00:55:08.000 But don't they have like mystical creatures and stuff that they believe live in the forest?
00:55:13.000 They do.
00:55:15.000 When I first got there as a Christian, I called these things spirits because that's all I knew how to characterize them.
00:55:22.000 How do they describe them?
00:55:23.000 They describe them as distinct beings.
00:55:26.000 They don't say they're spiritual or anything like that.
00:55:29.000 But you see something.
00:55:30.000 Like you see, maybe there's another Indian hunting, you know, from a different tribe hunting in your jungle because there are some that are close enough to be hunting in the same area.
00:55:39.000 You see them, but you don't see them well.
00:55:41.000 They go behind a tree or something.
00:55:44.000 So you say, oh, that's one of these things.
00:55:46.000 I just saw one of these things.
00:55:50.000 They don't put it to the test necessarily, but they see it.
00:55:52.000 When they see it.
00:55:53.000 These things.
00:55:54.000 So they have three major types of entities besides humans.
00:55:59.000 And they have different types of humans.
00:56:00.000 I'm one type, and they're another type.
00:56:04.000 And so they have things like.
00:56:06.000 How do they make the distinction?
00:56:07.000 Is it the appearance?
00:56:08.000 For humans, yes, it's appearance.
00:56:11.000 Well, actually, for the other entities, it's appearance too.
00:56:13.000 So for me, I'm white.
00:56:15.000 And white means you don't have blood.
00:56:18.000 So they've asked me, they said, so do you have blood?
00:56:22.000 And they asked me one time after I'd been there for years, they said, Do Americans die?
00:56:27.000 And I said, Yeah, we die.
00:56:29.000 But you're really old and you haven't died yet, you know?
00:56:32.000 And so I cut my old clothes.
00:56:33.000 How old were you at the time?
00:56:35.000 Probably 45.
00:56:37.000 And they thought you were a goner.
00:56:38.000 Yeah, because we aged differently.
00:56:40.000 I already had gray hair, you know, not all over.
00:56:42.000 Right.
00:56:43.000 They look a lot different when they're 45.
00:56:45.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:56:45.000 They're all still 100% black hair.
00:56:47.000 Oh, they thought you were a goner with the white hair.
00:56:50.000 So they have an expression, almost about to fall to the ground.
00:56:55.000 And that's the way they described me.
00:56:57.000 Wow.
00:56:58.000 But so Americans are one way, Brazilians are another way.
00:57:02.000 But then there are these things, some of them are called fast mouths.
00:57:05.000 And so they talk in a high pitched voice.
00:57:08.000 And at night, you hear somebody, you know, a creature talking in a high falsetto voice into the village.
00:57:15.000 And I say, What's that?
00:57:16.000 And they said, Oh, that's a fast mouth.
00:57:18.000 I said, But I'm seeing it, and it looks like a pitaha.
00:57:21.000 Oh, yeah, they look just like us, but they're not.
00:57:23.000 They're not us.
00:57:24.000 And so this is where.
00:57:27.000 We come to the border of fact and fiction.
00:57:30.000 And we draw fairly, we try to draw a fairly rigid line between fact and fiction in our society and in most European societies.
00:57:38.000 But to them, they don't have to have the full range of experience with this to describe it.
00:57:48.000 And so a fast mouth is just a fast mouth.
00:57:50.000 And they talk in a, and you know who they are because they talk in a high falsetto voice and they go naked.
00:57:57.000 Often go naked, but if they have clothes, they'll wear them.
00:58:00.000 And the fast mouths will never wear clothes.
00:58:03.000 The fast mouths are also sexually promiscuous.
00:58:06.000 So I had a reporter with me in the jungle from Geo Magazine in Germany.
00:58:11.000 And he said, Can I see one of these fast mouths?
00:58:14.000 And I told one guy, I said, He wants to see a fast mouth.
00:58:17.000 And he said, Well, I'll go get one.
00:58:19.000 And he walks off into the jungle.
00:58:20.000 And then the same guy comes back in naked, talking in this falsetto voice, and starts trying to hump the reporter.
00:58:31.000 And the reporter says, Oh, I'm feeling very uncomfortable.
00:58:34.000 I said, You asked for it.
00:58:34.000 I don't like it.
00:58:35.000 I mean, you know, I mean, that's the way they are.
00:58:37.000 And so I finally told the guy, I said, You know, he doesn't want this.
00:58:40.000 He doesn't want to see the fast mouth anymore.
00:58:42.000 So he talks to me in a high falsetto and he walks off and he comes back on with his clothes on.
00:58:47.000 And I said, Did you see the fast mouth?
00:58:50.000 He said, Was there a fast mouth here?
00:58:52.000 I was gone.
00:58:53.000 What?
00:58:54.000 But it's the same guy.
00:58:56.000 What did you take of that?
00:59:00.000 Did you think that they were playing a prank on you?
00:59:02.000 Did you think this is like some sort of a psychotic state that they fall into?
00:59:08.000 It is a liminal area between being, say, theater.
00:59:13.000 And be in reality.
00:59:15.000 And I don't know if they feel possessed.
00:59:17.000 I don't think they have a concept of possession.
00:59:20.000 I've asked them and I've investigated this and I've never seen that.
00:59:23.000 But they definitely believe that they're gone and this other creature is there in their place.
00:59:31.000 Do they have memory of when they become a fast mouth?
00:59:34.000 They deny it.
00:59:35.000 I've tried to get them to talk about it.
00:59:37.000 I don't know.
00:59:38.000 I wasn't here.
00:59:39.000 Everyone denies it?
00:59:40.000 Everybody denies it.
00:59:41.000 Wow.
00:59:42.000 Do you think that being a fast mouth is like almost like a license?
00:59:47.000 To go and do stuff you're not supposed to do, go fuck everybody.
00:59:50.000 And you think that's what it is?
00:59:52.000 Yeah, because they also change names very frequently.
00:59:55.000 So if I go back there now, all my old friends will have different names.
00:59:59.000 And anything done under the old name is, you know, you'll say, You remember when you did this?
01:00:04.000 Well, I didn't do that.
01:00:05.000 That was the guy with this name.
01:00:08.000 So they don't even claim.
01:00:09.000 So the concept of constancy of identity throughout time, they deny this.
01:00:15.000 So when did they choose to make a new name?
01:00:18.000 Or did they get a new name assigned to them?
01:00:20.000 They can.
01:00:23.000 Children often get new names for different phases of life.
01:00:25.000 But adults, if you're out in the jungle and you think you saw something and you can't explain it, you might take a new name.
01:00:36.000 Not a bad idea, right?
01:00:37.000 This is a way of coping with things.
01:00:39.000 Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense.
01:00:41.000 If something really traumatic happens to you and you want to reclaim your life, you change your name, start over from scratch.
01:00:47.000 Right.
01:00:48.000 And some of us do it in American culture, but it's a lot harder legal process to change your name.
01:00:53.000 How often do they get killed by jaguars?
01:00:57.000 Nobody's ever been killed in my almost 50 years coming and going, but many of them have been attacked.
01:01:02.000 Really?
01:01:03.000 Like one guy was coming back from getting Brazil nuts, and he had a big basket.
01:01:03.000 Yeah.
01:01:10.000 And so his head's down a bit with the tump line, and the basket probably weighs 60 pounds.
01:01:17.000 And suddenly a jaguar jumps out of the tree right on his back, but it got the basket and not him, and it pulled the basket off his head, and he shot it with an arrow.
01:01:28.000 Oh my God.
01:01:28.000 But they tell me that when you shoot a jaguar with an arrow, the jaguar forgets about you and keeps trying to get the arrow out.
01:01:36.000 And by that time, you've got three or four more arrows in it.
01:01:40.000 So these guys are deadly accurate with bows and arrows.
01:01:43.000 So if they did that and maybe they got attacked, would they change their name after that?
01:01:49.000 They could.
01:01:51.000 So I don't completely have it down to a formula.
01:01:53.000 Oh, okay.
01:01:54.000 So it's not like when they're uncomfortable, sometimes it's just like, it's time.
01:01:58.000 It's a subjective reaction to objective experience that causes them to do this.
01:02:03.000 And do they announce it to the village?
01:02:06.000 They announce it to their spouse or their kids, and then the word spreads.
01:02:11.000 And so I'll come back in.
01:02:12.000 I came back in after six months, and my buddy, my main language teacher, his name was, when I left, it was Kohoi Beihai, which means blood eater.
01:02:24.000 And when I got back, I said, and the nickname is Koheiko.
01:02:28.000 I asked, how are you doing?
01:02:29.000 And nobody responds.
01:02:30.000 He didn't turn and look at me or anything.
01:02:32.000 And I called him again and again.
01:02:33.000 He said, You talking to me?
01:02:35.000 I said, Yeah.
01:02:35.000 He said, That's not my name.
01:02:37.000 And so I had to learn his new name was Kapaubi, you know, which.
01:02:42.000 And he was serious about it.
01:02:43.000 He wouldn't respond anymore to that old name.
01:02:46.000 Wow.
01:02:47.000 How odd.
01:02:48.000 The first time that happened, were you like, oh my God, these people are fucking crazy?
01:02:52.000 No, I thought I'm pretty stupid.
01:02:54.000 I can't even remember their names.
01:02:55.000 Wow.
01:02:56.000 That was my first reaction.
01:02:57.000 How quickly did this happen from you first encountering these people?
01:03:02.000 Well, I would be gone for three or four months at a time and then come back because I was.
01:03:09.000 Doing linguistic.
01:03:10.000 Oh, so you never experienced it as it was happening?
01:03:13.000 You only experienced it?
01:03:14.000 One time there was a.
01:03:16.000 You really need to spend at least a full year there so you can see all the seasons and all the changes.
01:03:21.000 Then I saw some of the stuff, but many of the name changes happened when I was out of the village.
01:03:25.000 Some of them happened when I was in the village, but my best friends' name changes seemed to happen when I was out of the village.
01:03:32.000 And they were very serious about enforcing those new name changes.
01:03:38.000 So if you ask them to tell.
01:03:40.000 Stories about their childhood, you get these very vague stories.
01:03:44.000 And they'll say, you know, but I'm talking about this person, you know.
01:03:48.000 Or they'll tell me, you know, they changed my name twice, you know.
01:03:52.000 And so they name me, and so a guy comes up to me and he says, that name is rotten, which is the same word you use for spoiled food.
01:04:00.000 You know, your name is spoiled.
01:04:03.000 So I'm going to give you this name.
01:04:05.000 Then one time I was in there and was staying with this guy.
01:04:05.000 And then I got it.
01:04:08.000 He's just wearing a loincloth, and the other Piedahan fearing because he's this fierce.
01:04:14.000 Guy, and he says, You're really old.
01:04:18.000 They always tell me that.
01:04:19.000 He said, You're really old.
01:04:20.000 And I said, I'm not that old.
01:04:22.000 He said, Yeah, you are.
01:04:22.000 My dad's dead, and you're about the same age as he was.
01:04:25.000 They don't know what the age is.
01:04:27.000 He said, I'm going to give you my dad's name, and Pao Aisi, which is just the name of his dad.
01:04:32.000 So that's been my name ever since.
01:04:33.000 I've had that name now for about 15 years.
01:04:36.000 And when you go back, what happens if they want to switch it up again?
01:04:40.000 You have to learn a new name?
01:04:41.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:04:41.000 And that could easily happen, right?
01:04:43.000 Yeah, it could easily happen.
01:04:44.000 It just depends on which village you go to and which person you're talking to.
01:04:48.000 What is the population of these people?
01:04:50.000 When I first got there, it was under 200, and now it's around 700 to 800.
01:04:56.000 They've grown because they've had more medical assistance.
01:04:58.000 I gave them medical assistance, my wife and I, for 20 years.
01:05:02.000 And so your goal was to convert them to Christianity.
01:05:06.000 And when it's so no one's buying it.
01:05:11.000 So what are you doing?
01:05:12.000 What do your days consist of while you're there?
01:05:15.000 Well, my days consist of linguistic analysis.
01:05:17.000 And translation effort.
01:05:19.000 So I'll work with somebody.
01:05:22.000 And so I worked with this guy, for example, and we went through the story of Jesus.
01:05:27.000 I had translated a large part of the Gospel of Luke, and I tell him this story.
01:05:32.000 And then I showed film strips, you know, made by, you know, where Jesus looks like an American and has a beard and all this stuff.
01:05:40.000 And I explained it.
01:05:42.000 They don't make a difference between drawings and photographs.
01:05:44.000 So they figured, well, this must be Jesus.
01:05:47.000 He saw Jesus.
01:05:48.000 So that night, after I had told him all this and we had seen the film strips, His village was across the river.
01:05:55.000 I lived in one village, and across the river was another village, and they went across the river.
01:05:58.000 And all night long, I heard screaming and yelling and people running around and women laughing and then women screaming.
01:06:04.000 And the next morning, he comes back to work with me, and I said, So what was going on all night?
01:06:10.000 He said, Oh, Jesus came to our village.
01:06:12.000 I said, What?
01:06:14.000 He said, Yeah, he came to our village, you know, and he had a penis three feet long.
01:06:17.000 They don't have words for feet, so I'm just going by his hand thing.
01:06:22.000 He said, And he was trying to stick it in all the women.
01:06:24.000 And so, You know, the women don't want to know anymore about Jesus.
01:06:27.000 What?
01:06:28.000 This is their way of rejecting it.
01:06:31.000 Of rejecting it.
01:06:34.000 So I never expected that.
01:06:36.000 In all my Bible training and things.
01:06:38.000 Did they say, so they wouldn't admit if one of them became like they'd become a fast talker if they just became Jesus?
01:06:46.000 Right.
01:06:46.000 But that could have been what happened.
01:06:48.000 One guy decided.
01:06:48.000 That's what happened.
01:06:49.000 So one guy just decided, I'm Jesus.
01:06:51.000 Yeah.
01:06:52.000 But everybody took him, you're Jesus.
01:06:54.000 Yeah.
01:06:55.000 And this is what Jesus is trying to do.
01:06:57.000 Oh, boy.
01:06:58.000 But they would ask questions like, you know, hey, Dan, What does Jesus look like?
01:07:03.000 Is he brown like us or is he white like you?
01:07:05.000 And I said, Well, you know, some people say he was brown like you and some people say he was white like me.
01:07:09.000 And they said, Yeah, yeah, but you've seen him.
01:07:11.000 What did he look like?
01:07:12.000 And I said, Well, I never saw him.
01:07:14.000 Well, your dad saw him.
01:07:16.000 No, my dad never saw him.
01:07:17.000 He lived a long time ago.
01:07:18.000 I don't know anyone who's ever seen Jesus.
01:07:20.000 And they said, You don't know anyone who's ever seen him and you're just talking about him the whole time, telling us about him?
01:07:25.000 They said, We don't want to hear about this anymore.
01:07:30.000 And that was like But you at the time were a believer, you're a true believer.
01:07:34.000 Yeah.
01:07:35.000 So when did that start to slip away?
01:07:38.000 It started to slip away from two sides.
01:07:41.000 One, I was spending a lot of my time in the intellectual world and trying to do serious linguistic science.
01:07:49.000 And it slipped away mainly, however, by constant interaction with the Pitaha.
01:07:53.000 Because as I'd gotten to know these people over the years, these are really smart people.
01:07:58.000 They're very intelligent people.
01:08:00.000 They had me figured out before I had them figured out.
01:08:03.000 And they can predict my behavior better than I can predict theirs even today.
01:08:07.000 And so they would come to me and they would say this.
01:08:11.000 They say, Dan, you keep telling us about Jesus, but it seems that only Americans believe in Jesus because we don't know any Brazilians that we've ever met that believe in Jesus.
01:08:20.000 And so this seems like an American thing, but we're not Americans.
01:08:23.000 And then they would say, Where did you get your evidence?
01:08:26.000 And I began to think, These are good questions.
01:08:29.000 I can't just throw these questions off.
01:08:30.000 What is my evidence?
01:08:32.000 I went to Bible school.
01:08:33.000 I've been surrounded by Christians.
01:08:36.000 I've surrounded myself by people who believe.
01:08:38.000 And this is what happens in linguistic theory or other scientific.
01:08:41.000 You surround yourself with a community that believes the same thing, and pretty soon it's hard for you to consider alternatives.
01:08:41.000 Theories.
01:08:50.000 And so I started considering the alternative, and I realized I was an atheist back when I met my first wife in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert.
01:09:00.000 I was an atheist, and then I became a Christian, and then I thought maybe I was right to begin with.
01:09:07.000 And so eventually I told them, I said, I don't believe this stuff anymore either.
01:09:12.000 And they started laughing, all the guys.
01:09:13.000 Started laughing.
01:09:14.000 I said, Wow.
01:09:15.000 They said, Oh, now you're like us, you know.
01:09:19.000 But then they told me one time, they said, You know, from what we understand, Christians don't drink and they don't sleep with other women.
01:09:26.000 And, you know, we like to do those things.
01:09:30.000 So we're not interested.
01:09:33.000 What was convincing for you, though?
01:09:35.000 If you're a true believer, you think your path is the right way when you're hanging out with these people.
01:09:40.000 What is making you question it?
01:09:42.000 Well, several things.
01:09:44.000 One of the most important things was that.
01:09:46.000 Having spent so many years as a Christian and knowing Christians both in the U.S. and missionaries who are the cream of the crop, supposedly, I didn't know anyone in the Christian faith who was as well adjusted, who could cope with life as well, who was as satisfied and content with their lives as the Pitaha.
01:10:03.000 They were like the ultimate Zen masters and the ultimate, you know, if you thought, what is Jesus supposed to do for your life?
01:10:11.000 They already had it.
01:10:12.000 And I didn't know many Christians who did.
01:10:14.000 So first, it was quality of the spiritual life.
01:10:16.000 They seem to me to have the highest quality of spiritual life.
01:10:19.000 So, one MIT guy who came down, an MIT PhD student, said, These look like the happiest people in the world.
01:10:26.000 And I said, Well, what kind of statement is that?
01:10:28.000 How would you measure who's happiest?
01:10:30.000 He said, Well, I would spend time, I would see how long they smile and laugh every day and compare it to others and how much time they spend laughing and smiling.
01:10:40.000 And I'll guarantee you, he said, I've never seen a Pitaha here who's not smiling or laughing frequently.
01:10:46.000 Yeah.
01:10:47.000 So it was that quality of character.
01:10:50.000 And it was also just the fact that I began to realize that the scientific principles that I've been learning and that I'm applying in linguistics almost have to be suspended.
01:11:00.000 To apply them to the faith.
01:11:04.000 Because, you know, for example, I've heard a lot of stories of people being healed.
01:11:12.000 But this is anecdotal evidence.
01:11:14.000 And I'm not going to deny anybody's experience.
01:11:16.000 If you tell me you had inoperable cancer, but now you don't, something happened, and I can't tell you what it was.
01:11:25.000 But at the same time, there's no statistical relevance to that.
01:11:31.000 It's also the case that even when I was in Bible school, One of my teachers said, I wonder why healers, faith healers, never start with amputees.
01:11:42.000 They always start with diseases you can't see, like cancer, and explain how it went away.
01:11:47.000 But they said also in the Bible, and the Bible itself says this, Jesus not only healed people, he raised them from the dead.
01:11:56.000 So if somebody claims to be a healer in the same vein as Jesus, I'd like to see them start at cemeteries and start raising people from the dead.
01:12:04.000 We're not seeing that, and we don't see amputees healed.
01:12:08.000 We see things that are sort of subjective experiences.
01:12:10.000 So that, and I'm not claiming that nobody has a right to believe what they believe or that I'm right about all these things, but these are the reasons, this is part of the reasoning process that went through my mind.
01:12:20.000 And I thought, yeah, I just can't do this anymore.
01:12:26.000 I cannot tell these people to believe something that they have reasonable objections against and I don't have reasonable answers for.
01:12:34.000 So to me, they made more sense than I did.
01:12:37.000 Well, there's so many of these ancient religions that have very similar stories to the Jesus story.
01:12:46.000 Yes, that's true.
01:12:47.000 It seems like a very old story.
01:12:49.000 And I'm of the opinion that what you're getting with all of these religious texts is there were some events and there's some sort of a documentation of these events, but it's very hard to figure out what exactly happened.
01:13:08.000 Right.
01:13:09.000 Like, for instance,.
01:13:11.000 Paul never met Jesus.
01:13:12.000 No.
01:13:14.000 When most people find that out, they go, wait, what?
01:13:16.000 So, all that stuff that Jesus said, Paul's writing down, and, well, how does Paul know this?
01:13:22.000 And then you go, oh, well, Paul met Jesus in a dream.
01:13:25.000 Like, hold the fuck on.
01:13:28.000 Right.
01:13:29.000 See, ironically, the Pinahas might actually take that as evidence.
01:13:32.000 I mean, Jesus came back to their camp as a fast forward.
01:13:32.000 Right.
01:13:35.000 But we said, you know, I learned in Bible school that all the apostles had to have met Jesus.
01:13:42.000 And Paul was an apostle, therefore he had to meet Jesus.
01:13:44.000 And so I said, Well, when did he meet Jesus?
01:13:46.000 And they said, On the road to Damascus.
01:13:48.000 He had the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus, so he met him.
01:13:51.000 But it's tricky.
01:13:53.000 It's tricky.
01:13:54.000 It's also, again, when you get especially to the Old Testament, like what were they documenting?
01:13:54.000 It's tricky.
01:14:04.000 What are these events?
01:14:06.000 What happened there?
01:14:08.000 There's some stories that you say, okay, look at the flood story, for example.
01:14:13.000 Boy, there's a lot of those.
01:14:14.000 There's a lot of those in all sorts of ancient religions.
01:14:17.000 It seems to be some sort of a historical record of some sort of a catastrophe.
01:14:23.000 Right.
01:14:24.000 All the other stuff that's attached to it, you just got to go, I'm not sure what this means.
01:14:29.000 Right.
01:14:29.000 You know, when I was a little boy, you know, my mother died when I was very young, but when I was a little boy, we would drive up from Imperial Valley, California to San Diego, and you got to go through the mountains, and there's this line of white stones that I noticed near the top of the mountains.
01:14:43.000 And I said, you know, what caused that?
01:14:45.000 And my mother said, the flood.
01:14:47.000 And I thought, whoa, that makes sense.
01:14:49.000 Must be the flood.
01:14:51.000 I'm like seven, you know.
01:14:53.000 And so this is the, some of this stuff gets started this way, and it becomes truth.
01:14:58.000 Well, I mean, it's certainly when you're talking about a time thousands of years ago where just the ability to read was very limited, and then you're translating things from languages that we don't even speak anymore.
01:15:12.000 It gets real squirrely when you try to figure out what these events actually were that they were documenting.
01:15:20.000 It's having a belief system, I think there's a lot of value to it.
01:15:24.000 I think it gives you a moral scaffolding, gives you structure in your life, and that alone is like super beneficial.
01:15:31.000 To people.
01:15:31.000 And the people that I know that are like true Christians, really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met.
01:15:38.000 Right.
01:15:38.000 I think there's really great benefit to that.
01:15:41.000 The problem is like, what are we saying?
01:15:44.000 You know, what exactly, like, do you, the Adam and Eve one, it's like, okay, what do you think happened?
01:15:50.000 Do you think there's two people?
01:15:50.000 Right.
01:15:51.000 That's the only two people on earth?
01:15:52.000 And then where do the other people come from?
01:15:54.000 The brothers and sisters just have sex with each other?
01:15:57.000 Right.
01:15:57.000 What?
01:15:58.000 Yeah.
01:15:58.000 I mean, evolution explains that obviously very well.
01:16:02.000 But Adam and Eve, you know, I remember.
01:16:04.000 When my mother told me the story of eating the apple and betraying God, and Adam is hiding out, and God says, Where are you?
01:16:15.000 And I told, I asked my mother, I said, I thought God knew everything.
01:16:17.000 Why is he asking him where he is?
01:16:19.000 I don't understand that.
01:16:21.000 And she said, Well, he wants him to confess it.
01:16:23.000 Well, there's always that kind of answer.
01:16:25.000 You can always give that kind of answer.
01:16:27.000 But we, you know, you don't have to focus on religion.
01:16:29.000 You can even go to paleoanthropology and you can look at, are there 20.
01:16:35.000 Species of Homo that used to exist in the past or more?
01:16:38.000 Or were there just three, Erectus, Neanderthal, and Sapiens?
01:16:43.000 And what does it mean to be a species?
01:16:45.000 And how can we really prove some of that stuff?
01:16:48.000 Before the work of Svante Pebo and decoding the DNA, the genome of ancient creatures doing this thing that people thought was impossible, that was speculation.
01:17:01.000 It was really hard to tell.
01:17:04.000 And there were a lot of controversies.
01:17:06.000 And now, We can look at the genetic record and we can look at the genome, but that still doesn't tell us everything.
01:17:13.000 So, a lot of straight history and a lot of paleo anthropology and paleoarchaeology, all of these things always involve, as any theory does, speculation.
01:17:25.000 You're guessing and then trying to test your guess.
01:17:29.000 And some things are easier to test than other things.
01:17:32.000 And so, science is a community of people who believe they can work towards the truth, but the only way to do that.
01:17:40.000 It is to have good guesses and know how to test them and be willing to admit that you're wrong and then move on to the next best guess.
01:17:48.000 Right.
01:17:50.000 And every scientist recognizes this, but in practice, it's really hard.
01:17:56.000 Well, it's certainly hard if you're also a fundamentalist Christian.
01:17:59.000 That makes it much harder.
01:17:59.000 Oh, yeah.
01:18:00.000 Because then you're living in conflict all the time.
01:18:02.000 You believe a guy came back from the dead, but show me proof for everything else.
01:18:05.000 Yeah.
01:18:06.000 You believe in miracles, but they certainly can't be produced on demand.
01:18:06.000 Yeah.
01:18:11.000 You also believe that people will tell the truth.
01:18:14.000 That's part of the problem.
01:18:15.000 Part of the problem with all this stuff is like, look, the Bible condones slavery, talks about slavery in multiple passages.
01:18:23.000 Yeah.
01:18:24.000 That's a person thing.
01:18:25.000 That's a people thing.
01:18:26.000 Right.
01:18:28.000 The Bible talks about all sorts of things that we don't agree with today, but we try to interpret it in such a way that we can live with it.
01:18:39.000 Right.
01:18:40.000 Exactly.
01:18:41.000 So, God, I mean, if you read anything by Mark Twain about God, which is not only brilliant but funny, you know.
01:18:50.000 He just makes fun of the whole notion that.
01:18:54.000 Says religion started when the first con man made the first sucker.
01:18:58.000 Yeah.
01:18:59.000 And, you know, how many germs.
01:19:00.000 He has this story about Noah's ark about how Noah's family had to be so infested with germs so they could survive the flood, you know.
01:19:11.000 When you stop and think about it, I mean, like, you know, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, and then all these creatures had to boogie on down to Australia almost immediately.
01:19:22.000 And so.
01:19:24.000 You get these stories, and people don't want to talk about those things.
01:19:26.000 They say, Well, I don't know how God did it.
01:19:28.000 I think there was an event, and I think this version of it, this doctrine that you're supposed to adhere to, is woefully uninformed about the actual real facts of the event.
01:19:44.000 I don't think anybody could possibly know, but I think when you have the Epic of Gilgamesh, which mirrors the story of Noah's Ark, which mirrors the story of other religions that have similar flood myths.
01:19:55.000 or flood stories, it's probably something happened.
01:19:58.000 Yeah, it's probably one of the things that happened.
01:19:58.000 Yeah.
01:20:01.000 Right.
01:20:02.000 I mean, you can tell people, it would be intellectually dishonest to tell people that all the claims of their religion are false.
01:20:11.000 How do you know that?
01:20:12.000 You don't know that.
01:20:13.000 And I used to tell Christians, I said, you know, when I was a Christian, the best evidence for God is what he's done in your life.
01:20:20.000 And are you living a better life?
01:20:22.000 And if you're not living a better life, then why are you saying that he saved you?
01:20:26.000 And if you can't live a more moral life than people who don't know Christ, then what are you saying?
01:20:34.000 You claim that he changed your life for the good, but you're not living a life for the good.
01:20:38.000 You know, I went to work in construction when I was still in high school for a Christian contractor.
01:20:45.000 And I was in the union.
01:20:46.000 I joined the laborers union, which meant that as a hod carrier, that's the hardest job I ever did, that you got paid $8.25 an hour.
01:20:55.000 And this is 1968.
01:20:56.000 And that was a lot of money in 1968.
01:20:59.000 And the guy told me when I got hired, he said, the union says I've got to pay $8.25 an hour, but I'm not going to pay you that.
01:21:05.000 I'm going to write you down as only working four hours a day, but you're going to work eight.
01:21:10.000 And that's how he got around it.
01:21:11.000 And I thought, this guy's a Christian, and he's lying on these forms and on his taxes.
01:21:17.000 And he's going to church.
01:21:18.000 And I got the job through my Christian missionary father-in-law who knew this guy.
01:21:23.000 And I saw that happening time and time again.
01:21:28.000 So very often, unfortunately, people who claim to be religious and Follow the commandments of Jesus, which are much more difficult to follow than the commandments of the Old Testament because they affect your thoughts and not just your overt action.
01:21:44.000 When you don't see consistency, the answer could be, well, we're just humans.
01:21:48.000 We're not perfect.
01:21:49.000 And that's true.
01:21:51.000 But why doesn't the Holy Spirit that you say you believe in make a bigger difference in your life than he does in Joe Schmo down the street, who doesn't claim anything and he's leading a more moral life than you are?
01:22:02.000 Especially if you're robbing laborers.
01:22:04.000 Yeah, exactly.
01:22:06.000 And lying on your taxes.
01:22:07.000 Yeah.
01:22:08.000 And so when you're with a Pitaha, they live a subsistence lifestyle.
01:22:14.000 Right.
01:22:15.000 And there's been a lot of evidence that subsistence lifestyles are some of the most compatible lifestyles in terms of people's happiness and peace and having a sense of meaning.
01:22:33.000 Your life is wrapped around the gathering of food and community and spending time together.
01:22:38.000 They're the happiest people in the world.
01:22:40.000 Right.
01:22:40.000 I monitored them for a while.
01:22:42.000 How many hours a week does a hunter work?
01:22:45.000 And I came up with about 15 or 20 hours a week.
01:22:48.000 Unless it's not going well.
01:22:48.000 Yeah.
01:22:51.000 And then, yeah, like now they're doing it all the time.
01:22:51.000 Yeah.
01:22:54.000 But when the fish are jumping, it's that.
01:22:56.000 And then, so what do you do with the rest of your time?
01:22:58.000 You lay around the fire and tell jokes and talk to people and play with your kids.
01:23:02.000 You know, the men love to play with their.
01:23:04.000 But they're in pure subsistence, too, because they're not even preserving food.
01:23:08.000 Right.
01:23:09.000 If they don't find food today, they go hungry today.
01:23:12.000 Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People?
01:23:15.000 I haven't seen that.
01:23:17.000 I did meet him once, but I haven't seen that documentary.
01:23:21.000 He's really big into these kinds of societies.
01:23:25.000 I know that.
01:23:25.000 That's what Happy People is about.
01:23:27.000 It's about these people that live in Siberia.
01:23:28.000 Right.
01:23:29.000 They're hunters and trappers that live in Siberia, and they're all happy.
01:23:33.000 Right.
01:23:34.000 And they basically just spend most of their time gathering food, gathering food and then spending time with the communities.
01:23:34.000 Yeah.
01:23:40.000 Yeah.
01:23:41.000 Well, the documentary that was made about the Piedaha by the Smithsonian and a couple of other institutions is called The Grammar of Happiness.
01:23:49.000 Because the film crew that went with me was very small, like three people, but they were deeply impressed by what they saw and the level of happiness.
01:23:59.000 And all the psychologists that I've taken and linguists have also been very impressed by the level.
01:24:04.000 If they get past the heat and they get past the confrontation with your body, and you know, the Pinaha don't have outhouses.
01:24:13.000 They don't have, you know, I mean, if somebody needs to take a dump, they walk off 10 feet into the bush and do it.
01:24:18.000 And so we have to have do they have toilet paper?
01:24:22.000 No.
01:24:23.000 What do they do?
01:24:24.000 A stick or leaves.
01:24:25.000 Oh, sticks?
01:24:26.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:24:27.000 Or if you have corn cobs, that's great, but they don't have corn cobs.
01:24:27.000 Hey.
01:24:30.000 Good Lord.
01:24:32.000 So, but it's just not a big deal.
01:24:32.000 Yeah.
01:24:36.000 They grow up that way.
01:24:37.000 It's just a function, you know?
01:24:39.000 And so you ask them things about life.
01:24:40.000 What happens to you after you die?
01:24:42.000 What do you mean?
01:24:43.000 Well, when you're dead, what happens?
01:24:45.000 Well, you're dead.
01:24:45.000 And so there's like a dead monkey that somebody just brought back and they're going to eat.
01:24:50.000 And he says, he's dead.
01:24:51.000 What else is there?
01:24:53.000 Why are you asking this question?
01:24:55.000 We die, we die.
01:24:56.000 And they don't fear death.
01:24:58.000 They don't make up a story to make themselves not fear death.
01:25:02.000 Were there a lot of them injured?
01:25:03.000 Oh, yeah.
01:25:05.000 They live a violent life.
01:25:06.000 I have people who, you know, people bitten by snakes, cut.
01:25:10.000 I had people who split their hand almost in two with a machete, run arrows all the way up their arm, step on sticks that go all the way through their foot.
01:25:19.000 I mean, these are people who are naked running through the jungle and they get scratches and, you know, if you get bitten by a snake that's hemotoxic, like a.
01:25:30.000 This is Jaradaka.
01:25:33.000 I don't know what it is.
01:25:34.000 It's a bush master.
01:25:36.000 When you get bit by one of those things, even if you survive, a lot of the flesh is going to come off whatever they bit.
01:25:43.000 So you see people with one leg normal and one leg that looks like bone because it's basically bone with a little bit of muscle covered in skin because the flesh all fell off after the snake bite.
01:25:53.000 So they know what it is to suffer and they're tough.
01:25:58.000 You know, if you get a toothache, how do you fix it?
01:26:01.000 Well, If I'm there, I have some things that can help with the pain, or I can pull the tooth.
01:26:05.000 But most of the time, it rots out.
01:26:09.000 That's how they deal with it.
01:26:09.000 out.
01:26:12.000 So they learn, you know, I was talking to a woman one time, you know, really for, you know, Pinaha, looking very feminine looking woman, and she gets bit by a wasp on the face while I'm talking to her.
01:26:23.000 And she pulls the stinger out, and she doesn't, it doesn't stop her conversation.
01:26:27.000 And I've been stung by those wasps, and I know they hurt like hell.
01:26:30.000 And I said, didn't that hurt?
01:26:32.000 Yeah.
01:26:33.000 You didn't say anything.
01:26:34.000 She says, I'm not a baby, you know.
01:26:37.000 So this is the way they are.
01:26:39.000 From the time they're children, they learn to deal with pain.
01:26:41.000 They learn to be tough.
01:26:43.000 In fact, they have an expression for that.
01:26:44.000 He wants to be hard.
01:26:46.000 And that means you deliberately sleep sometimes less than you need.
01:26:50.000 You go hungry on purpose and you put yourself in hard situations because you want to be tough.
01:26:56.000 Because that's what the environment demands.
01:26:58.000 So they build their resilience on purpose.
01:27:00.000 Yes.
01:27:02.000 Voluntarily.
01:27:03.000 Well, I would imagine that's like the most important thing to have if you're running around naked in the jungle.
01:27:08.000 You have to be tough.
01:27:09.000 You have to be.
01:27:09.000 Right.
01:27:10.000 And, you know, like I go barefoot sometimes in the village.
01:27:14.000 I'm, you know, I get.
01:27:17.000 You can get parasites that way, but you know, I do it anyway.
01:27:20.000 And, um, but when I go to the jungle, I always put on shoes because my feet can't take all the thorns and everything.
01:27:27.000 And theirs are covered with like a whole layer of callus all around their foot.
01:27:32.000 They have those crazy splayed out toes.
01:27:34.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:27:35.000 And that's the way feet are supposed to look, really.
01:27:37.000 Right.
01:27:38.000 You know, ours don't look that way because we protect them, but their feet are tough.
01:27:42.000 You know, their hands are tough.
01:27:44.000 Their skin is tough.
01:27:45.000 It's like leather.
01:27:46.000 Even a little kid, they, They're little kids.
01:27:48.000 Rather than crawl, they scoot around on their butt.
01:27:52.000 And so you pick a little kid up and you look at their butt and it's just callous.
01:27:56.000 It's just solid callous.
01:27:58.000 And these kids are tough.
01:28:03.000 But by their standards, they're very gentle to their kids.
01:28:06.000 I had a guy with me one time and he was trying to sleep at night and a baby was screaming all night.
01:28:12.000 And he said, Why don't they tell that baby to shut up?
01:28:14.000 And I said, Why?
01:28:16.000 I said, They don't.
01:28:17.000 Need to tell it to shut up.
01:28:18.000 That's just part of life.
01:28:19.000 They don't have a schedule to keep tomorrow.
01:28:21.000 He said, Well, what would happen if I went over and swatted it on the behind?
01:28:24.000 I said, They'd kill you.
01:28:25.000 They'd kill me.
01:28:26.000 I said, Yeah, you don't hit kids.
01:28:28.000 They don't believe in hitting kids.
01:28:30.000 Swat a baby to get it to.
01:28:32.000 Does he think that's how babies stop screaming?
01:28:34.000 I don't know.
01:28:35.000 I mean, does he have any kids?
01:28:37.000 I don't think this guy did, but Christians often believe, really believe, spare the rod and spoil the child.
01:28:44.000 And they believe very much in corporalism.
01:28:46.000 Back then, at least, right?
01:28:47.000 Yeah, back then.
01:28:47.000 I don't know today.
01:28:48.000 But.
01:28:50.000 So, the Pita Hob never believed this.
01:28:54.000 They don't accept it.
01:28:56.000 Well, I think they're probably correct.
01:28:58.000 It is interesting how those people are happier.
01:29:01.000 Like, we've done something to ourselves by forcing ourselves into cities and jobs and constant stress and bills and taxes and all these external things that we've attached to our lives that we think are 100% necessary.
01:29:15.000 Don't bring anybody any happier.
01:29:18.000 Don't bring anybody any more happiness.
01:29:20.000 In fact, make you way more miserable.
01:29:23.000 make you susceptible to a bunch of stress-related illnesses?
01:29:26.000 Yeah.
01:29:27.000 I've had friends visit me in the jungle, I mean, researchers who are friends, and they'll say things like, I've never seen you so relaxed.
01:29:36.000 You know, you seem tense when you're at the university, but down here you just seem totally laid back.
01:29:41.000 And I said, well, I didn't notice it, but that makes perfect sense to me because all these people are laid back.
01:29:46.000 There's Pinaha that I go to talk to the guy, and I find myself nodding off, and I'm not even sleepy when I go over there.
01:29:53.000 He's just so laid back and talks so calmly and softly and telling jokes and things that it just puts me to sleep.
01:30:01.000 God, it's such a bummer that those people have to struggle now.
01:30:03.000 Yeah, it's terrible.
01:30:08.000 What do they hunt?
01:30:09.000 What do they eat?
01:30:10.000 70% of their diet before they started having river problems was fish.
01:30:15.000 So the average diet of a Piedaha family is fish and water and jungle nuts and things you get from the jungle.
01:30:24.000 Hunter-gatherers, which they are, have healthier diets than agriculturalists.
01:30:30.000 Because, you know, we had this outbreak of disease from lettuce recently in this country.
01:30:37.000 They don't grow vegetables, so they're never going to get that kind of thing.
01:30:40.000 They don't get that in naturally occurring things out in the jungle.
01:30:44.000 So their diets are healthier.
01:30:46.000 They're eating protein.
01:30:48.000 I know, for example, that I could take any Pitaha man out of the jungle at random.
01:30:53.000 And if I weigh him, he's going to be 155 pounds.
01:30:57.000 He's going to have about a 25-inch waist, 26.
01:31:02.000 He's going to have about 4% body fat.
01:31:06.000 And he's just going to be lean, mean machine.
01:31:09.000 And they don't they do try to harden themselves, but that's just what the life does to you.
01:31:16.000 But they're not overweight.
01:31:17.000 They're not dealing with obesity.
01:31:18.000 No, you're not.
01:31:19.000 No diabetes.
01:31:20.000 Only when outsiders, you know, representatives of the Brazilian government thought it would be good to give them something to rely on.
01:31:29.000 So they brought in a lot of rice and they started letting the people feed.
01:31:33.000 The people don't grow rice, but the government would supply it.
01:31:36.000 So now all of a sudden you see people overweight because they're eating starch, which they never used to eat that much of.
01:31:43.000 Or.
01:31:44.000 I took a dentist in once about 25 years ago, and we inspected the mouth of every living pitaha and not one cavity.
01:31:52.000 He was disappointed.
01:31:53.000 He said, I thought I was going to be able to do some free dental work here, and nobody has a cavity.
01:31:58.000 Well, then somebody introduced sugarcane into their fields from the outside world, and now it's almost 100% cavities.
01:32:06.000 Everybody has cavities because they eat sugarcane.
01:32:09.000 Wow.
01:32:10.000 So you keep away the sweets, you keep away the starch, and you get healthier people.
01:32:14.000 This is just living proof of what we often read about diets.
01:32:19.000 But that we're so tempted by that we don't normally follow.
01:32:23.000 I heard another issue with them is when they get introduced to soda.
01:32:27.000 Yeah, that's bad.
01:32:28.000 Yeah.
01:32:29.000 Also whiskey, but that's a different matter.
01:32:31.000 Sure.
01:32:32.000 They're both bad.
01:32:33.000 Soda is, yeah, I mean, they love it.
01:32:35.000 They call it, you know, sweet water, and they will drink the hell out of that.
01:32:39.000 If they've got, you know, five gallons, they'll drink it all.
01:32:41.000 I had a guy once who wove a basket for me, and I said, you know, what do you want for it?
01:32:48.000 And he knew that I had some canned fruit.
01:32:50.000 That I used on Sundays for my kids when we were all living there.
01:32:54.000 And he said, I want a can of this stuff, which is peaches in sweet syrup.
01:32:59.000 And it was a big can.
01:33:01.000 And he ate that whole thing.
01:33:02.000 And the kids came around.
01:33:04.000 And I've seen guys trade with a boat and they'll get like a kilo of sugar, two and a half pounds of sugar.
01:33:09.000 And they just sit down with a spoon and eat it.
01:33:11.000 Oh, boy.
01:33:12.000 And so if they have it, they eat it.
01:33:14.000 And if they don't have it, they don't eat it.
01:33:15.000 And they have no idea that it's bad for them because it tastes good.
01:33:17.000 Why would it be bad?
01:33:18.000 Right.
01:33:19.000 You can eat anything you find as a hunter gatherer and you're not going to have enough of it.
01:33:24.000 To be bad for you.
01:33:25.000 Because you're going to get something else the next day.
01:33:25.000 Right.
01:33:27.000 Or like tobacco.
01:33:28.000 I can take in tobacco, but they're not going to get addicted to it.
01:33:31.000 They're not going to, you know, even when they roll cigarettes, they like them, but they only have it like once or twice a year, so you don't have to worry about it.
01:33:40.000 You know, if they had it all the time, they would have serious issues.
01:33:43.000 So they've only developed addictions based on what they've been introduced from the Western world.
01:33:48.000 Right.
01:33:49.000 100%.
01:33:51.000 So tell me about this conversion that you have.
01:33:54.000 Tell me about how you like what are the steps to go from being a true believer, living with the Pitaha, and then changing your opinions?
01:34:03.000 How many steps did it take?
01:34:05.000 It took some practical steps and it took a lot of mental steps.
01:34:09.000 How much time?
01:34:12.000 I would say that I started seriously doubting my faith about five or six years into my time, so about 1982, 1983.
01:34:21.000 And I did not announce that I was not a Christian until 2000.
01:34:26.000 And because Christians were saying things about, actually, it was 2001, Christians were saying things about the war in Iraq.
01:34:36.000 About how the soldiers that we send over there are the blessed peacemakers of the gospel.
01:34:41.000 And I didn't like that.
01:34:44.000 And so the first step is you start to doubt.
01:34:48.000 Then you pray so that you won't doubt because the Apostle Thomas said, Lord, I believe, help mine unbelief.
01:34:56.000 But then after a certain point, that doesn't work so well.
01:34:59.000 So you start to read literature from apologetics, trying to defend your mind against these things that you're thinking.
01:35:07.000 And then you realize, I'm not satisfied with those answers either.
01:35:11.000 So finally, one day, you reach the conclusion that I just can't do it anymore.
01:35:17.000 I can't sustain this belief.
01:35:20.000 I can't pretend that I have something that I'm not.
01:35:23.000 And so then eventually I told my wife, I said, I just don't believe this stuff anymore.
01:35:30.000 I can't believe it.
01:35:31.000 And pretty much instantaneously, she walked out of the house and we got a divorce.
01:35:38.000 That was the end of that.
01:35:39.000 Also, if you're a Christian missionary and you're getting your income from being a missionary, and then you tell people, Oh, I don't believe anymore, then you're unemployed.
01:35:46.000 Did you have any other issues in the marriage other than that?
01:35:50.000 Yeah, it wasn't that, wasn't the only issue.
01:35:52.000 But she tracked up all the issues we had to what she perceived as my declining faith.
01:35:58.000 Oh, because, of course, you know, I loved rock music before we met.
01:36:05.000 We met at a Jimi Hendrix concert, and I went many years without listening to rock music, and I love rock music.
01:36:11.000 And so I finally started listening to it again, and She got upset.
01:36:16.000 That was a sign that I was starting to fade away in my faith.
01:36:23.000 And I'm not a perfect person.
01:36:24.000 I would go out with Brazilian friends drinking, and that's definitely a no no.
01:36:31.000 Any religion that tries to keep you from Hendrix can't be a real religion.
01:36:36.000 My dad said to me when I first became a Christian he was the epitome of an atheist.
01:36:41.000 And he said, One thing about religions is they're always trying to beat their own system.
01:36:48.000 They're always trying to find an exception so they don't have to do the unpleasant things the religion tells them they need to do.
01:36:54.000 And I thought, oh, you don't know anything.
01:36:58.000 You don't know anything about religion.
01:36:59.000 You've never been in part of a church.
01:37:00.000 But it's not entirely false.
01:37:03.000 People are always trying to make it.
01:37:05.000 It's like another expression that comes to mind when you're, if you see somebody who says they're a believer and now they start doing things you don't think they should do, there are two reactions you could have.
01:37:17.000 One is justice.
01:37:18.000 And one is mercy.
01:37:19.000 And everybody wants to give justice and get mercy for their beliefs and for their transgressions.
01:37:27.000 And so I was giving myself mercy and my wife was giving me justice.
01:37:32.000 But in the end, I realized I'm not going to be bound by these rules anymore.
01:37:37.000 I'm just going to live my life according to my best lights and according to the best decisions.
01:37:41.000 And I'm not going to let this book tell me anymore.
01:37:43.000 The ironic thing is, you know, I graduated number one in my class at a Bible school, so I know the Bible really well.
01:37:49.000 And when people try to reconvert me, I've had many Christians try to reconvert me.
01:37:52.000 I said, That's not going to work, you know, because I know the Bible probably better than you do.
01:37:57.000 So you're not going to give me a verse I don't know.
01:37:59.000 I said, I'm not telling you you're wrong.
01:38:01.000 And I'm not even telling you your interpretation is wrong.
01:38:04.000 I'm just saying it doesn't work for me and I can't pretend that it does.
01:38:07.000 It's got to be weird to have your beliefs confronted by a group of people where as you're learning their language, you're realizing that this moral framework and the scaffolding that you've only attributed to Christianity and you think that it's just Christianity and religion that makes people good people.
01:38:07.000 Right.
01:38:30.000 And then here's people that don't have any God.
01:38:33.000 Yeah, so like, you know, you're in a big storm.
01:38:36.000 The Amazon has storms in the rainy season.
01:38:38.000 So somebody's house blows over because their houses, they're hunter-gatherers and they're semi-nomadics, so they don't build the best houses.
01:38:45.000 So it's pouring rain and somebody's house blows over and they're just stuck there in the rain.
01:38:50.000 What is their reaction?
01:38:52.000 They start laughing like it's the funniest thing that ever happened.
01:38:55.000 And they will go off into other people's huts and sleep on the ground or get near the fire or they might come to my house, that's very common, and want to sleep with me.
01:39:03.000 And then the next day they'll rebuild it.
01:39:04.000 There's nothing except for fear of immediate threat from the outside or from animals that gets them to lose their cool.
01:39:12.000 And when they do lose their cool, it's not really losing their cool.
01:39:17.000 It is calculated defense.
01:39:20.000 They know how to take care of themselves.
01:39:22.000 You know, somebody's, when I mentioned to this guy that they would kill him, they said, I said, they kill for a living.
01:39:28.000 Don't forget that.
01:39:29.000 That's how they make their living.
01:39:30.000 Every man there, every boy here could shoot you through the eye at 50 yards with one of those arrows.
01:39:37.000 They're not going to miss.
01:39:38.000 If they decide to kill you or me, we're dead.
01:39:40.000 So they don't because they make a difference between killing out of necessity and killing to murder.
01:39:48.000 But if they think they have to defend their family, you're dead.
01:39:51.000 But their culture doesn't encourage squabbles.
01:39:53.000 Like they just, they're easygoing, they take everything.
01:39:56.000 The biggest, if there's a concept of sin among the Pitaha, it is anger.
01:40:01.000 You don't raise your voice in anger, you don't hit another Pitaha in anger.
01:40:06.000 You know, I saw a guy get drunk.
01:40:08.000 When they get alcohol, they get drunk.
01:40:10.000 And he took a shotgun that he had gotten from a Brazilian and he shot a dog that belonged to his brother.
01:40:17.000 And his brother runs up to the dog and he's just sobbing because they love their dogs and he's just crying that his dog's dead.
01:40:25.000 And I went up to him and I thought, oh God, there's going to be some violence here.
01:40:28.000 I got to get ready for this.
01:40:29.000 And I said, what are you going to do?
01:40:31.000 He said, what do you mean?
01:40:32.000 I said, are you going to do anything to your brother?
01:40:35.000 He shot your dog.
01:40:36.000 He said, I don't do anything to my brother.
01:40:38.000 He's my brother.
01:40:39.000 He shouldn't have shot my dog, but he's drunk and his head's not working.
01:40:41.000 You know, I miss my dog.
01:40:43.000 I love my dog, but I love my brother.
01:40:45.000 I'm not going to hurt my brother.
01:40:46.000 So they just don't react that way.
01:40:48.000 So do they have punishment for crimes?
01:40:50.000 They have punishment if it threatens the survival of the village.
01:40:55.000 So there was one young man, a teenager, and I talk about him in both my book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, and in the new one that's coming out next year, Born of the River, who was paid in alcohol and a new shotgun to kill somebody who was living up the river, who wasn't a Pitaha, living on the same river.
01:41:18.000 And he killed him.
01:41:20.000 And the Pitaha saw this as an existential threat to the whole community because they knew that the police could come up.
01:41:28.000 They knew that soldiers could come up.
01:41:29.000 They knew that many Pitaha could be killed if this wasn't handled.
01:41:33.000 So they didn't hurt him, but they kicked him out of the village.
01:41:36.000 He had to live on his own.
01:41:37.000 And he died about two months later.
01:41:39.000 He was dead.
01:41:40.000 It's hard to live on your own in the middle of the jungle with no community and nobody who has anything to do with you.
01:41:45.000 Just shut up.
01:41:46.000 Wow.
01:41:47.000 So.
01:41:48.000 That's the worst punishment they have.
01:41:50.000 Banishment.
01:41:50.000 Banishment.
01:41:51.000 Banishment.
01:41:52.000 The jungle's crazy.
01:41:54.000 Yeah.
01:41:55.000 What did they give him to survive?
01:41:56.000 Was it like you when you were learning?
01:41:58.000 He got nothing.
01:41:59.000 Nothing.
01:42:00.000 out.
01:42:00.000 Yeah, get out.
01:42:01.000 He could take what he had, but nobody gave him anything else.
01:42:04.000 So he had a bow and arrow, no food, no clothes.
01:42:07.000 How did he die?
01:42:10.000 Well, that I don't know because I just know that when I came, I would ask about him and then they said, oh, he's dead.
01:42:17.000 So there's two possibilities.
01:42:18.000 He died, naturally death, which I think is probably what happened, or somebody killed him.
01:42:23.000 And then changed their name.
01:42:24.000 I didn't do it.
01:42:25.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:42:26.000 That could have easily happened.
01:42:29.000 The change of the name gag is awesome.
01:42:31.000 Yeah.
01:42:31.000 Everybody up there is violent.
01:42:33.000 You see Brazilians coming up in these boats.
01:42:35.000 Many of them are like pirates.
01:42:37.000 I mean, they don't practice piracy now.
01:42:39.000 Some of them do.
01:42:40.000 But you go on a boat with these guys, and these are some tough-looking guys.
01:42:44.000 They've got scars on their faces and scars on their these are knife fights.
01:42:48.000 These are guys who, you know, like I got really mad at somebody once, and I mentioned to another Brazilian, I said, you know, if he keeps doing that, I'm going to punch him in the face.
01:42:59.000 And he says, if you punch him in the face, he's going to kill you.
01:43:02.000 You know, he'll either get a knife or he'll get a gun.
01:43:04.000 So if you decide you're going to hit somebody, you better be armed.
01:43:07.000 Because they're going to come at you with whatever weapon they can get their hands on.
01:43:09.000 You really thought that you were just going to be able to punch them?
01:43:13.000 I was just talking, but I, you know, obviously didn't have a lot of, you know, my dad liked to fight a lot, but, you know, he liked to.
01:43:20.000 Were you guys drunk at the time when you were doing this?
01:43:24.000 Oh, no, I wasn't drunk.
01:43:25.000 This guy was drunk and he was pushing and he was giving my daughters, who by that time were pretty little blonde teenagers, a hard time.
01:43:33.000 And I told him to get away.
01:43:36.000 And he wanted to fight.
01:43:38.000 And I got it calmed down.
01:43:40.000 But I thought, you know, if he keeps trying, I'm going to punch him in the face.
01:43:43.000 And I told this guy that.
01:43:44.000 And he said, you don't do that out here.
01:43:46.000 Unless you're willing to kill him right now, don't do that.
01:43:50.000 Because he's not going to fight you fair.
01:43:52.000 He's going to come at you when you're not expecting it, and you're going to die.
01:43:55.000 So it's just a different concept.
01:43:58.000 So avoiding violence has lots of reasons to be done.
01:44:04.000 I agree with that at all times.
01:44:07.000 Yeah.
01:44:07.000 I think people should constantly avoid violence.
01:44:10.000 Yeah, I completely agree, too.
01:44:11.000 And the Piedahas show you that.
01:44:12.000 These are people.
01:44:14.000 Who are much better at violence than most people in this country without guns.
01:44:21.000 And they avoid it at all costs.
01:44:23.000 Yeah, wise.
01:44:24.000 Yeah, very wise.
01:44:25.000 What did you think when you were just looking at the framework that they live by that these people don't have a God, that they don't have someone watching over, making sure they're doing the right thing all the time, or this punishment of being burning forever in hell?
01:44:42.000 None of that is motivating them.
01:44:44.000 No.
01:44:45.000 And I also thought that they would be afraid of death.
01:44:47.000 They're not.
01:44:48.000 I thought they would be afraid of the unknown.
01:44:51.000 They're not.
01:44:52.000 They're willing to learn.
01:44:54.000 I sit outside on the riverbank with them, and they point out satellites going overhead because they know the sky so well that they say, What's that?
01:45:04.000 And I look, and it's like, Must be a satellite.
01:45:07.000 I said, It's like a radio thing because they have radio.
01:45:09.000 I mean, they don't have radios, but I have radio.
01:45:11.000 And they said, Well, who put that up there?
01:45:15.000 I said, I don't know.
01:45:16.000 I said, Americans, I think.
01:45:19.000 And they said, You know how to do that?
01:45:21.000 I said, No, I don't know how to do that.
01:45:22.000 So they said, Some other Americans know how to do that.
01:45:24.000 I said, Yeah, I don't know how to do that.
01:45:27.000 But they're very conscious of their environment.
01:45:31.000 And they're very curious and they want to learn these things.
01:45:34.000 But if I told them that God put it up there, they wouldn't pay attention.
01:45:37.000 Now, they have these spirits that we talked about earlier where they believe a thing.
01:45:45.000 Embodies a spirit like it could be like a jaguar embodies a spirit, yes.
01:45:50.000 So, uh, they have some spirits, so that's a spirit we haven't talked about yet.
01:45:54.000 So they have this spirit, igagai, which they believe, you know, so they might see a man and then they might see a jaguar and then they say, that must be the same thing, you know, this man became a jaguar or the jaguar became a man.
01:46:07.000 And this is a belief that is in fact shape shifting is not an uncommon belief in the Amazon among even Brazilians that live there.
01:46:17.000 So one time I got up in the morning and everybody was yelling and pointing at the beach on the other side.
01:46:25.000 And I said, What are we looking at?
01:46:28.000 They said, can't you see it?
01:46:29.000 I said, I don't see anything.
01:46:31.000 They said, that's Egagai.
01:46:33.000 And I didn't see anything.
01:46:35.000 Then later, a few nights later, somebody said, we've seen Egagai.
01:46:39.000 It's dark.
01:46:40.000 It's night.
01:46:41.000 And the guy wakes me up.
01:46:41.000 He says, we've seen Egagai.
01:46:43.000 He's not far behind your house.
01:46:45.000 Because we know you're not afraid of him.
01:46:45.000 Would you come with us?
01:46:48.000 And I failed for that.
01:46:49.000 And so we go out there, and then I turn around, and they're not by me.
01:46:53.000 Because Egagai can also refer to the jaguar shape.
01:46:57.000 There's a jaguar out there.
01:46:59.000 And I just won't go walking out there with a machete, you know.
01:47:02.000 And then I realize they're not with me.
01:47:03.000 And I go back and they said, Did you see it?
01:47:05.000 I said, No, I didn't see anything.
01:47:07.000 Hmm.
01:47:08.000 But they, if they see a jaguar, they believe that it could be a jaguar or it could be Igagai.
01:47:17.000 But when they were seeing this Igagai and you couldn't see anything, they were seeing it.
01:47:21.000 Yes.
01:47:22.000 And I was looking for a human looking creature, but it's very possible that there was a jaguar just inside the forest.
01:47:31.000 That I didn't see it and you couldn't.
01:47:34.000 Yeah, because well yeah, but if you walk around with them in the jungle, you find that they can see a lot of things you can't see.
01:47:40.000 So once I was walking with a guy down a path and he said oh, don't step on that snake, it's a bush master.
01:47:46.000 And I said, what?
01:47:47.000 And i'm looking down, i'm looking at the path, I don't see anything.
01:47:50.000 And I said, what snake?
01:47:52.000 And he takes his bow and he shoots and the arrow starts flaking around like that and he pulls it up and there's a bush master at the end.
01:47:59.000 He said that one don't step on that one.
01:48:02.000 And I didn't see it.
01:48:03.000 I was um, and i've almost put my hand on snakes, I don't know why I'm still alive because they can, they, they, it's like I'm a special needs person.
01:48:13.000 I, you know, they have to watch out for me when I'm in the jungle because it takes a lot of skill to be able to see these things.
01:48:20.000 Just like when I take them to the city for like medical work, they get totally lost.
01:48:25.000 They can't, they, it's hard for them to understand how I can find my way around a city because the cues that I'm using are totally different than the things they're used to.
01:48:35.000 So, this Igagai, this thing that they said they saw, they could have just been seeing an animal and saying it was Igagai and agreeing that it was a spirit.
01:48:44.000 Yes.
01:48:45.000 And that's not like they're seeing a spirit that you're not seeing.
01:48:48.000 Did you ever take that into consideration?
01:48:51.000 Oh, I did.
01:48:51.000 They can see things you can't see?
01:48:53.000 Yes, that is another possibility.
01:48:54.000 And I definitely took that into consideration.
01:48:55.000 In fact, for the first several years, before I had really investigated the different shape shifting of Igagai, I thought that's all it could mean.
01:49:03.000 They were seeing something and I couldn't see it.
01:49:06.000 They were all seeing it.
01:49:06.000 So you took that into consideration that maybe they have a sense that you don't have?
01:49:11.000 Yes.
01:49:13.000 And it's clear that they have senses in the jungle.
01:49:16.000 They're able to sense things that I cannot.
01:49:18.000 Like how?
01:49:20.000 Well, like I say, they've grown up learning.
01:49:24.000 So let's say that you see a branch move in a tree.
01:49:29.000 Was that the wind?
01:49:31.000 Was that a monkey?
01:49:32.000 Was that a snake up in the tree?
01:49:34.000 What was it?
01:49:36.000 I barely notice that the branches make moving.
01:49:36.000 I don't know.
01:49:39.000 But they know not only that it's moving, but exactly what caused it.
01:49:43.000 I can see bubbles coming out of the water from the river.
01:49:47.000 They're just bubbles to me, but to them, they represent either a rock underneath or an alligator or some other creature that's under the water.
01:49:57.000 And they can tell by the bubbles, but I can't.
01:50:00.000 So they've learned to interpret their world in a way that I can't.
01:50:06.000 So it's not that they don't have senses that you don't have, but that they have pattern recognition.
01:50:13.000 That's the way I would put it.
01:50:16.000 But again, you would need to do some sort of psychological testing in much more controlled conditions than I've ever been able to do to sort those things out.
01:50:28.000 But my view now is that they simply have the ability to recognize and perceive things that they've grown up with that I miss entirely.
01:50:39.000 And this spirit thing, does it always embody a creature that's common, like a jaguar, or does it.
01:50:49.000 Sometimes take on another form?
01:50:54.000 It can take these entities that I've talked about.
01:50:58.000 So there's another one, Ai, which has long teeth.
01:51:07.000 And so they see these different creatures.
01:51:09.000 One's naked, talks in a high voice.
01:51:13.000 And so they're putting experiences they can't explain into the shapes of these entities that they can explain.
01:51:22.000 So, just like us, we see so many things in the world we don't understand.
01:51:25.000 That's what science is all about.
01:51:27.000 So, we create theoretical entities to be able to explain those observations that we otherwise have no explanation for.
01:51:35.000 So, in a sense, these separate entities are a primitive form.
01:51:40.000 I shouldn't even use the word primitive.
01:51:41.000 They're a form of science, given what they have.
01:51:44.000 They're reducing the unexplained to the explainable.
01:51:49.000 And their audit of the jungle is limited to the places that they've traveled.
01:51:55.000 Right.
01:51:55.000 So, their version of the world is entirely limited to the language they possess.
01:52:01.000 Is it written at all?
01:52:03.000 I developed a writing system for them.
01:52:05.000 Yes.
01:52:05.000 Before you know.
01:52:06.000 Before you know.
01:52:07.000 Non written language, verbal language with no historical database to draw from.
01:52:12.000 Right.
01:52:13.000 But they actually get some really good skills out of this.
01:52:16.000 So, I took a guy to the nearest town, a big town, Porto Velho.
01:52:20.000 It's the capital of a Brazilian state because he had cirrhosis of the liver, however, he got that.
01:52:26.000 And I took him to the hospital.
01:52:28.000 First, we went to my house.
01:52:29.000 that I had in that city on the missionary compound.
01:52:33.000 He had never been out of the jungle before in his life.
01:52:35.000 So we go there and we have lunch and I say, now it's time to go to the hospital.
01:52:40.000 So I take him to the hospital and he says, I don't want to stay here.
01:52:43.000 I said, the doctors say you have to stay here so they can make you feel better.
01:52:47.000 And so then I drive off after I spend a couple of hours with him.
01:52:51.000 And the next morning, about 6 a.m., there's this knocking on my door.
01:52:57.000 So this is 30 miles away.
01:52:58.000 The hospital's 30 miles away.
01:53:00.000 And he's standing there wearing a hospital gown with no underwear or anything on.
01:53:05.000 And I said, how did you find my house?
01:53:08.000 He said, well, I just walked here.
01:53:10.000 I said, but how did you know how to walk here?
01:53:12.000 Well, I saw it yesterday.
01:53:13.000 But all he had to do was get the river where the river is and then mentally compute where we're at.
01:53:19.000 So many experiments have shown that people who don't have right and left, front and back, but use absolute directions like upriver, downriver, to the jungle, away from the jungle, are better at finding their way in new places than we are.
01:53:35.000 You know, I can tell you turn north, and you might know what I'm talking about.
01:53:38.000 For the average person, I say, turn north.
01:53:41.000 If your life depends on it, you don't know which way to turn.
01:53:43.000 Right.
01:53:44.000 But they would know.
01:53:45.000 And so that gives him a better sense of a map of where they're at.
01:53:50.000 So do they have a word for north?
01:53:52.000 No, they only use upriver.
01:53:55.000 So the first thing they have to do, the first thing he did when we got him out to town was, where's the river?
01:54:00.000 And I showed him the river, and now he knew where everything was.
01:54:06.000 Because he got the river, and so he's got my house, now he knows where everything is.
01:54:10.000 30 miles away.
01:54:11.000 Yeah, 30 miles away.
01:54:12.000 But doesn't the river wind?
01:54:14.000 Yes, but they know how rivers work.
01:54:16.000 And they can tell by the direction which way it's flowing.
01:54:19.000 And when he looks at it, he knows which way is upriver and downriver based on the way the water is flowing.
01:54:23.000 And he walked out barefoot with nothing but a hospital gown on, 30 kilometers.
01:54:28.000 And so he left at night and he got there first thing in the morning.
01:54:31.000 Wow.
01:54:32.000 And I said, well, we have to go back.
01:54:33.000 He said, I am not going back.
01:54:35.000 I said, well, the doctor says you'll die if you don't go back.
01:54:37.000 He says, well, I'm going to die then because I'm not going back.
01:54:40.000 He said, I would rather go back and die with my people.
01:54:43.000 And so I took him back and a few days later he was dead.
01:54:47.000 Was he a drinker?
01:54:48.000 He had been, yeah.
01:54:50.000 There was a time before I helped the Indian agency demarcate their reservation so it could be controlled, that boats came up and down all the time when the Brazil nuts were falling and when there were other jungle products like latex and sorva, which is a product used to make chewing gum and all sorts of other things, and Copaiba, which is used for suntan lotion.
01:55:12.000 So the Brazilian boats would come up and trade for all these things, and they always traded with whiskey because that's the, I mean, sugarcane rum, cachaça, which is the cheapest thing.
01:55:23.000 It's 30 cents a bottle.
01:55:24.000 It was a lot easier to give them that, and the Piedaha like it.
01:55:27.000 I told him one time, I said, this stuff's really cheap.
01:55:30.000 He said, not for us, it isn't.
01:55:31.000 We don't otherwise get it, and we like it.
01:55:34.000 So they like to drink.
01:55:36.000 Did they understand the concept of health, of the consequences of drinking alcohol?
01:55:41.000 No, because if you're a hunter-gatherer and you're not used to having something in constant supply, you don't have to worry about it.
01:55:48.000 But once it comes in constant supply, then you do have to worry about it.
01:55:52.000 And when these guys keep coming up, leaving this stuff off, then it becomes a serious health problem.
01:55:57.000 Whereas before, it was like, I got drunk six months ago.
01:56:00.000 Right.
01:56:01.000 You know, it's not a big deal.
01:56:02.000 Right.
01:56:02.000 So once it became commonplace.
01:56:04.000 Yeah.
01:56:04.000 And do they adjust their behavior based on people dying of like liver sclerosis?
01:56:10.000 Not that I've ever seen.
01:56:12.000 They don't.
01:56:14.000 I can tell them until I'm blue in the face that it's the alcohol that's doing this or the tobacco that's doing this.
01:56:21.000 Why would they believe me?
01:56:22.000 They know a lot of guys who have drunk a lot of whiskey and they don't have it.
01:56:27.000 So these couple of guys got it.
01:56:29.000 How do I know that's what caused it?
01:56:31.000 So they don't take my word on time.
01:56:33.000 It's childlike.
01:56:36.000 It is childlike in the sense that children learn by evidence.
01:56:40.000 And if children don't have evidence for something, I mean, and it takes a while for the evidence to start to sink in.
01:56:47.000 You've got to repeat the experiment.
01:56:49.000 Right, but you would imagine that if they're intelligent people, you could explain.
01:56:54.000 This consumption of alcohol, when done infrequently, it's okay.
01:56:58.000 But the everyday consumption of alcohol, because you have an endless supply of it now, is becoming a real problem.
01:57:05.000 That's a very good point.
01:57:06.000 And I have brought that up with them before.
01:57:08.000 And they say, Yeah, we know a lot of Brazilians that drink and they don't get that sickness.
01:57:13.000 So they come right up.
01:57:15.000 It's like I could tell you that the COVID vaccine is really good for you.
01:57:19.000 And you can say, Well, I know a lot of people didn't get it and they didn't get COVID either.
01:57:23.000 They weren't vaccinated and they didn't get COVID.
01:57:25.000 So you have to look at The statistics, and even there, it's hard.
01:57:30.000 You know, I mean, that was they just don't seem very concerned with dying anyway.
01:57:35.000 They're not, they don't want to die right now, but it happens, and they're not worried about it.
01:57:42.000 What do they think?
01:57:44.000 Do they have a purpose for life?
01:57:46.000 Do they have a thing they worship at all?
01:57:50.000 No, they don't worship anything.
01:57:53.000 The community is everything.
01:57:55.000 You make a contribution to the community while you're alive, and that's your purpose.
01:58:00.000 That's it.
01:58:01.000 That's it.
01:58:02.000 And it doesn't take any thought.
01:58:04.000 You don't need somebody to give a lesson.
01:58:06.000 This is what our purpose is, folks.
01:58:08.000 You just see everybody living, and that's how you live.
01:58:10.000 Isn't it odd that?
01:58:12.000 That's not the primary way people live if that makes you so happy.
01:58:17.000 It's interesting because even me, I'm hearing this, I'm like, God, it's so appealing.
01:58:21.000 But part of me is like, I'm not fucking living like that.
01:58:23.000 You know, nobody wants to live like that.
01:58:25.000 It just seems too crazy, too difficult, too daunting.
01:58:28.000 I don't want to get bit by a snake and have my bones exposed.
01:58:32.000 Well, I often think this when I talk to people who are extreme ecologists who think we need to not affect the environment.
01:58:38.000 And I'm thinking, yeah, well, go live with the Pinaha.
01:58:41.000 You know, you're not going to last three days there with them.
01:58:43.000 Yeah.
01:58:45.000 Maybe a few days more, but not much.
01:58:47.000 So it is very appealing.
01:58:51.000 And I lived there and enjoyed it.
01:58:52.000 But while I was living there, I had things they didn't have access to.
01:58:55.000 So I can't fairly say that I lived just like them.
01:58:58.000 And you could always leave.
01:59:00.000 And I can always leave, yeah.
01:59:01.000 I mean, I can get in my motorboat and take off.
01:59:05.000 Or in the worst case, I can get on my two-way radio or satellite phone and call for help.
01:59:11.000 Did you ever think about just saying, fuck it, stay there forever?
01:59:14.000 Yeah.
01:59:15.000 In the early years, I did think about it.
01:59:17.000 I thought about not pursuing any kind of graduate degree, not worrying about ever coming back to the U.S. or, and I was really loving it there.
01:59:25.000 But then I realized my kids wanted a wider experience.
01:59:30.000 And they, it would, I didn't have the right to deprive them of it.
01:59:32.000 So you think if you were single, you would have just integrated?
01:59:35.000 It's very possible.
01:59:36.000 Yeah.
01:59:36.000 I mean, that would have been easy to do, although I would have had to get, become much better at outdoor skills than I ever was.
01:59:45.000 I mean, I would not stand up to a Pinahas.
01:59:47.000 Standards of hunting and fishing, and no woman would have married me because they would have starved to death.
01:59:54.000 Did you ever get better at those things?
01:59:57.000 Not really.
01:59:58.000 No?
01:59:59.000 Yeah, I have.
02:00:00.000 For one thing, you know, I like to hunt.
02:00:03.000 I started hunting when I was like 10 years old, pheasant hunting, dove hunting.
02:00:07.000 And so I do enjoy that, but I've never given it the time to become really good at it.
02:00:14.000 Now, if I were abandoned in the jungle, I probably would.
02:00:17.000 But it would take me a long time.
02:00:19.000 I mean, these guys are using bows and arrows from the time they're two years old.
02:00:23.000 So by the time they get to be teenagers, they're perfect.
02:00:26.000 They are absolutely unmatchless in their skill.
02:00:29.000 And I've done little archery contests before to see how good they are.
02:00:33.000 And it's just astounding.
02:00:35.000 So I would have to spend, you know, many years practicing to get as good as they are.
02:00:40.000 And then in the meantime, I would starve to death because they're not going to feed me.
02:00:45.000 How are they making their bows?
02:00:48.000 There's a couple of different kinds of wood that they use, but there's one that is a bright red wood and it's called Pidanya food, Piranha food, because it grows near the edge of the river and it drops flowers off the tree into the river, and the Piranhas love to eat those flowers.
02:01:10.000 So if you see a lot of those flowers in the water, probably not good to swim there.
02:01:15.000 But they take a section of the bark, a big section, you know, it might be like four inches by.
02:01:21.000 Four inches or six inches, and it's just a hard piece, maybe eight feet long.
02:01:29.000 And they bring that back and they have a special tool and it could be wood or bone or if they have a machete they use that and they just start shaping it until finally they get a bow that's probably two inches wide and an inch and a half thick and it's taller than they are.
02:01:48.000 It's about seven feet long.
02:01:50.000 And then they get the bark from a tree, a certain kind of tree, and they give that and they get it off in strands.
02:01:59.000 And so a man, a brother or a father or a husband will give it to their closest woman relative and she takes those strands and she makes a bowstring.
02:02:10.000 So the bow represents man and woman working together.
02:02:13.000 A man can make the wood, a woman makes the string.
02:02:16.000 Then they get the arrows, a man gets the feathers, a man gets the shaft, the woman makes the strings that tie everything on.
02:02:22.000 So she's the glue.
02:02:25.000 And once you get that, that thing, yeah, there's one right there, this guy.
02:02:31.000 That's a pretty good one.
02:02:32.000 And those are the arrows, really long arrows.
02:02:33.000 Yeah, yeah, those are the arrows.
02:02:34.000 And these are fishing arrows, so they're much longer.
02:02:37.000 But actually, they're not both fishing arrows.
02:02:39.000 One of them is just a regular arrow.
02:02:40.000 So their arrows are quite long.
02:02:42.000 And that thing is a very powerful bow.
02:02:45.000 And you can see the thickness of the string there.
02:02:49.000 So, yeah, and that's the bow.
02:02:54.000 They eat a lot of monkeys?
02:02:56.000 Yeah, they eat a lot of monkeys.
02:02:57.000 Isn't that weird?
02:03:00.000 No, I asked them once.
02:03:01.000 I said, do.
02:03:04.000 Do monkeys look like people?
02:03:06.000 And they say, No, why would you ask that?
02:03:08.000 I said, They look like people to me.
02:03:09.000 And he said, No, no, they're covered in hair.
02:03:12.000 You're not covered in hair.
02:03:14.000 So I went to the Trans Amazon Road.
02:03:18.000 I was traveling out all by myself, hitchhiking.
02:03:21.000 And I stayed with this Brazilian.
02:03:24.000 And I said, Do you have any cold water?
02:03:26.000 And he had a kerosene refrigerator.
02:03:29.000 And so I went over and I opened it to get his cold water.
02:03:32.000 And at the bottom, it looked like there were like four dead babies.
02:03:36.000 And I'm thinking, oh my God, what is that?
02:03:38.000 I said, what is this?
02:03:39.000 He said, oh, it's just some monkeys.
02:03:40.000 I skinned them, you know.
02:03:42.000 And a monkey that's been skinned does look a lot more human.
02:03:47.000 But nobody thinks twice about it, you know.
02:03:51.000 I said, are the monkeys more like us or are they more like dogs?
02:03:55.000 Oh, they're like dogs.
02:03:57.000 They're much more like dogs than they are like us.
02:03:59.000 So they just don't see the problem.
02:04:01.000 It's just food.
02:04:02.000 Yeah, it's just food.
02:04:04.000 And so, you know, and they love, their favorite part of any animal is the brains.
02:04:10.000 And one reason the brains are so good is because brains have a lot of saturated fat.
02:04:14.000 And it's a great source of saturated fat.
02:04:16.000 And if you don't otherwise they monkey brains?
02:04:18.000 Yeah, they monkey brains.
02:04:19.000 So the favorite thing, I was talking to a woman one time and I was making a sandwich.
02:04:25.000 I had brought in some lunch meat and bread.
02:04:27.000 I had just gotten there.
02:04:28.000 It was my first day there.
02:04:29.000 And so I had a little bit, enough to make a sandwich for that night.
02:04:33.000 And I'm squirting mustard.
02:04:34.000 And you know, when you get to the end of the mustard bottle and you're squeezing, it makes a sound like somebody who's got diarrhea.
02:04:42.000 And she says, what is that bird shit stuff you're eating?
02:04:47.000 And I said, well, it's good.
02:04:49.000 It's mustard.
02:04:50.000 You want to try some?
02:04:51.000 Oh, no.
02:04:52.000 And she said, look at this bird shit.
02:04:55.000 He's eating bird shit.
02:04:56.000 And then I look at her and she's eating the brains out of a rat.
02:05:01.000 And he's got this rat head and she's sucking the brains out.
02:05:05.000 And they're cooked, of course.
02:05:08.000 But she's sucking the brains.
02:05:13.000 An introductory class in anthropology.
02:05:15.000 Right.
02:05:16.000 You know, how different we perceive things.
02:05:18.000 That's great to her.
02:05:19.000 This is great to me, but it grosses the other one out.
02:05:22.000 That's wild.
02:05:23.000 Mustard's disgusting.
02:05:24.000 Rat brain's great.
02:05:25.000 Yeah.
02:05:26.000 And isn't there an issue with eating primate brain tissue?
02:05:31.000 Can you get prion diseases?
02:05:33.000 Well, there are diseases that they discovered in New Guinea from cannibals who were eating human brains.
02:05:38.000 Right.
02:05:40.000 But I'm not aware of any diseases that are passed by eating monkey brains or other kinds of brains.
02:05:46.000 They'll eat any animal's brains.
02:05:49.000 So the prion diseases that you get are from animals eating the same animal, right?
02:05:53.000 Like mad cow disease is because they serve cows literal brain and neural tissue from other cows.
02:05:59.000 Right.
02:06:00.000 So I'm not an expert on that, but I do know that I've never seen a case of them getting disease from that.
02:06:06.000 And the superficial reading that I've done on it suggests that humans get it from eating human brains.
02:06:12.000 Interesting.
02:06:12.000 So they can eat deer brains, rat brains, no problem.
02:06:17.000 So the favorite part of any animal is the head.
02:06:17.000 Right.
02:06:20.000 So if they bring me a fish, they'll give me a fish.
02:06:24.000 They like to trade fish for canned meat because canned meat keeps.
02:06:28.000 But I like fish cheeks, but my wife hated the fish heads.
02:06:33.000 She didn't want the fish heads around.
02:06:35.000 So they would be happy to keep the fish heads and they just make a big stew of fish heads and they eat the brains and the eyeballs and everything.
02:06:42.000 Those are really tasty bits.
02:06:44.000 And probably rich in nutrients.
02:06:46.000 Yeah, they are rich in nutrients.
02:06:47.000 They know what they're doing.
02:06:48.000 They love all the internal organs.
02:06:50.000 Yeah, it's so weird how we've moved away from all that stuff.
02:06:53.000 Right.
02:06:54.000 I mean, that's one of the things that happens with wolves.
02:06:56.000 The alpha in the pack is the one that eats the liver.
02:06:59.000 Right.
02:07:00.000 They know something's going on.
02:07:01.000 There's a lot of nutrients in these organ meats and we've moved away from that in a very strange way.
02:07:06.000 Right.
02:07:06.000 People are disgusted by the idea of liver.
02:07:09.000 Yeah.
02:07:09.000 So, you know, you go to some, if you go to northern Brazil and you go to one of these chuhascarillas, Brazilian steak restaurants.
02:07:17.000 If you're in an everyday person's, you're going to get a lot of heart and you're going to get liver.
02:07:17.000 Love those.
02:07:23.000 Kidney.
02:07:24.000 Kidney.
02:07:24.000 You're going to get all that stuff.
02:07:27.000 You know, so that is stuff they love to eat.
02:07:31.000 Well, a lot of cultures.
02:07:31.000 Sure.
02:07:33.000 Mexicans, menudo.
02:07:34.000 Yeah.
02:07:35.000 It's got tripe in it and organ meat and.
02:07:38.000 Right.
02:07:38.000 And, you know, my brother-in-law, deceased now, but he was Mexican.
02:07:43.000 And that's the first thing he insisted that my sister learn how to make in terms of true Mexican food was menudo.
02:07:50.000 And he wanted that every Saturday, and she loved to make it for him.
02:07:54.000 So then she made this pozole with cow feet in it, you know, and, you know, got the hooves and everything in the pozole, but cooks all day.
02:08:04.000 I remember when I was a kid, pickled pig's feet was a big thing.
02:08:07.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:08:08.000 Yeah.
02:08:09.000 And so internal organs are really good.
02:08:12.000 You know that a Brazilian chuhuscaria is authentic if they serve chicken hearts.
02:08:16.000 Right.
02:08:17.000 You know?
02:08:18.000 And so if I go to one and they don't have chicken hearts, I'm quite disappointed.
02:08:21.000 It's westernized.
02:08:22.000 Yeah.
02:08:22.000 Yeah.
02:08:23.000 They're still great, but yeah, I know what you mean.
02:08:25.000 Yeah.
02:08:26.000 I went to one when I was in Brazil.
02:08:26.000 Yeah.
02:08:28.000 It was awesome.
02:08:29.000 Oh, yeah.
02:08:30.000 It's Brazilian fast food.
02:08:32.000 Yeah.
02:08:32.000 And it is fast.
02:08:33.000 And it's amazing food, too.
02:08:34.000 It's like they know how to eat.
02:08:36.000 If you're in a rush, a chuhuscaria is the best place to eat.
02:08:38.000 Yeah.
02:08:39.000 Because you sit down, you flip that card over to green, the food keeps going.
02:08:42.000 20 minutes later, you're stuffed.
02:08:43.000 Exactly.
02:08:44.000 Exactly.
02:08:45.000 And you ate much more nutrition than having a McDonald's Big Mac or something like that.
02:08:49.000 And it's all you can eat.
02:08:49.000 Sure.
02:08:50.000 Yeah.
02:08:51.000 Yeah.
02:08:52.000 Yeah.
02:08:52.000 It's awesome.
02:08:52.000 I used to come out of the village and go straight to one of those.
02:08:56.000 I've been out of the village for six months, and I was really hungry, and I was coming out on my motorcycle, and the first one I saw, I pulled over, and I ate until I could barely move.
02:09:04.000 Did you eat monkey when you were in the jungle?
02:09:06.000 Yeah.
02:09:07.000 Yeah.
02:09:07.000 I didn't eat the brains, but they didn't offer them either.
02:09:10.000 Because that's the best part.
02:09:12.000 Would you have if they offered you some?
02:09:14.000 Yeah, I would have.
02:09:15.000 I've tried a lot of stuff there.
02:09:15.000 I would have.
02:09:17.000 And when I was doing my field experience in southern Mexico, in Chiapas, I spent some time with the Celtales, the Celtal people, descendants of the Mayas.
02:09:26.000 And, you know, I eat this stuff they chew up and spit out and let ferment.
02:09:32.000 Oh, I've heard of that.
02:09:34.000 That's a beverage.
02:09:35.000 Is that like an alcoholic beverage?
02:09:37.000 Yeah.
02:09:38.000 And so I was trying to fit in.
02:09:39.000 And so they gave me just a little bit.
02:09:42.000 And they said, What'd you think?
02:09:43.000 And I'm trying to be this.
02:09:46.000 Cool guy and I said I loved it.
02:09:47.000 I hated it, but I said I loved it.
02:09:49.000 And so they bring me a big bowl.
02:09:51.000 Oh and so drink it.
02:09:53.000 Then that night I was up with things coming out of both ends all night long, and the next morning my blood pressure was 60 over 40 and I had to be flown out.
02:10:07.000 They had to get me on a mule and get me out to the nearest airstrip and out, and.
02:10:13.000 But I did my bit.
02:10:14.000 I was accepted as a great, great Gringo for eating this stuff, you know, for drinking it.
02:10:18.000 What happened to you?
02:10:20.000 Well, whatever it was, my body didn't like it.
02:10:26.000 So, is it just like the bacteria in it, you think?
02:10:29.000 Probably.
02:10:30.000 I think it had to be that because it didn't gross me out.
02:10:32.000 I didn't like the taste of it, but it wasn't grossing me out.
02:10:35.000 And it was a happy time.
02:10:35.000 We had little ribbons and stuff.
02:10:37.000 We were having a festa, and I was sitting with the men at the table.
02:10:41.000 And their gut bacteria just knows how to handle it.
02:10:43.000 You sit, oh, boy.
02:10:46.000 Yeah, there you go.
02:10:47.000 So, they just, oh, I'm going to grow up.
02:10:50.000 It says that the human saliva creates the fermentation.
02:10:53.000 Yeah, that's right.
02:10:54.000 Come on.
02:10:56.000 Isn't there a better way to get drunk?
02:10:58.000 Good lord.
02:10:59.000 If you want to get drunk and you want it bad enough, there it is.
02:11:03.000 Oh, and I bet that stuff you're not going to drink every day because it's so disgusting.
02:11:07.000 Yeah, well.
02:11:08.000 It's not going to become a problem.
02:11:09.000 Once it's fermented, nobody really cares, you know, who's around that culture.
02:11:13.000 Boy.
02:11:14.000 You know, but.
02:11:15.000 Boy.
02:11:16.000 What does the monkey taste like?
02:11:18.000 Well, there again, I don't have a vocabulary to describe all these meats.
02:11:23.000 It's a tough meat, but.
02:11:24.000 I pressure it.
02:11:25.000 I put the A crock pot?
02:11:27.000 Yeah, I put it in a pressure cooker over a fire.
02:11:29.000 I take in a pressure cooker, you know, not an electric pressure cooker, obviously.
02:11:33.000 One of these pressure cookers you can set on top of the fire.
02:11:35.000 And after I pressure it, it's falling off the bone, and I take the meat off, and I throw it in a bowl, and I put some manioc meal on top of that, and then I cover it in Tabasco, and it's great.
02:11:46.000 It's very filling, and it tastes really good.
02:11:48.000 Wow.
02:11:49.000 Did you feel weird eating a monkey?
02:11:52.000 When you see the monkey, And you put the little monkey body inside the pressure cooker, and it looks like a baby, it doesn't look too good.
02:12:00.000 But once you open up the pressure cooker and it's all cooked, and the bones are separated from the meat, and then it's just meat floating in there, you know.
02:12:08.000 And when you're out in the jungle and you've been out there long enough, just about any kind of meat sounds pretty good.
02:12:14.000 I worked with a group called the Wadi.
02:12:17.000 I actually wrote a 540 page grammar of their language, co wrote it.
02:12:22.000 And they were cannibals up until 1962.
02:12:25.000 Yo.
02:12:26.000 And They had two, they had endocannibalism and exocannibalism.
02:12:31.000 Exocannibalism was eating their enemies, and endocannibalism was eating their people.
02:12:37.000 And so if you die in the village at that time, up until 1962, they keep your body, they call all the relatives, your body might sit there in the Amazon sun for three days, and your relatives come from all over, and then they cook you over a grill.
02:12:55.000 And slowly, they roast the body, and then they cut it into chunks and they eat them with like little toothpicks and they eat it till everything's gone.
02:13:05.000 They eat the bones, they eat the brains, they eat everything.
02:13:08.000 They eat human brains.
02:13:09.000 Yeah.
02:13:10.000 And the purpose, as best I've been able to figure out, anthropologists have tried to answer this, so my answer might not be theirs, but it's based on interviews with the people, is to give your relatives eternal life.
02:13:22.000 Because they live in you, and you're going to live in somebody else, so you just continue living.
02:13:27.000 But exo-cannibalism, I kill a guy in warfare, I'm going to eat him like an animal.
02:13:31.000 I just chop him up and grill him and eat it and throw the bones off into the forest.
02:13:35.000 Boy.
02:13:36.000 So that's totally different.
02:13:37.000 Some Native Americans practice that.
02:13:40.000 Yeah.
02:13:43.000 But eating the brain, though, wouldn't that, what is that disease?
02:13:43.000 It's insane.
02:13:46.000 What is this called?
02:13:47.000 Jakob Kreutzfeld?
02:13:48.000 Is that what it's called?
02:13:49.000 Yeah, something like that.
02:13:51.000 I should know that.
02:13:52.000 But it's mad cow disease, essentially.
02:13:53.000 It's like that, yeah.
02:13:55.000 So, but they don't eat people all the time, they eat dead relatives.
02:14:00.000 And if anybody's ever gotten that disease, it's never been registered.
02:14:04.000 That's crazy.
02:14:05.000 But I mean, even if you're eating dead relatives, you eat a dead relative, I would imagine you can get prion disease.
02:14:12.000 Yeah, but.
02:14:13.000 It depends on how many die.
02:14:15.000 There's a whole etiquette about it.
02:14:16.000 You're never allowed to say that this tastes really good.
02:14:19.000 For example, you can't say that.
02:14:20.000 You can't say delicious.
02:14:22.000 Uncle Thomas, yummy.
02:14:23.000 And I've talked to some of the older men who have eaten their dead, and they say, oh, the babies taste really good, but you can't say that.
02:14:33.000 The babies taste really good.
02:14:35.000 It's rough.
02:14:36.000 It's like human veal.
02:14:39.000 But the Brazilian government and missionaries put a stop to that in 62.
02:14:44.000 Good move.
02:14:46.000 Why do they let it sit for three days before they die?
02:14:48.000 Because it takes that long for the relatives to come.
02:14:50.000 Because they might be in other villages.
02:14:52.000 So they've got to send runners out to bring the whole family to the village.
02:14:54.000 Does the meat start rotting?
02:14:55.000 Yeah.
02:14:56.000 It starts to smell pretty bad.
02:14:57.000 And there are a lot of stories about people puking after every bite.
02:15:01.000 Oh, fuck.
02:15:02.000 But these are people that could drink that puke beer.
02:15:05.000 Yeah, yeah.
02:15:06.000 Oh, my God.
02:15:07.000 Yeah.
02:15:08.000 Oh.
02:15:09.000 So you realize cultural differences aren't that superficial.
02:15:14.000 Well, it's also probably meat is probably extremely valuable to them.
02:15:18.000 And they just probably think, look, there's no reason for this to go to waste when it could sustain us.
02:15:22.000 It would be very interesting to go back in time and see how the customs started.
02:15:27.000 They could have started out of hunger, and then you dress it up with some religious beliefs, or the religious beliefs could have come first and you started doing it.
02:15:35.000 But they do have oral histories about it, but the oral histories never say we were short of meat, so we ate Joe, we ate our buddy.
02:15:47.000 But they do say, We want to help them live in us and we will live in somebody else.
02:15:53.000 So that's the explanation you get.
02:15:55.000 Wow.
02:15:56.000 Or that I got.
02:15:57.000 Wow.
02:15:58.000 Well, when you got there a few years after it was.
02:16:02.000 Yeah, I didn't start working with them until 1985.
02:16:05.000 Okay.
02:16:06.000 So it was 20-something years ago.
02:16:07.000 But they still had stories about.
02:16:09.000 Oh, yeah.
02:16:09.000 They still had a lot of stories about it.
02:16:11.000 And, you know, anybody over 30 had done it.
02:16:15.000 Is there any kind of cannibalism that goes on in the Amazon still?
02:16:19.000 Probably.
02:16:20.000 None that I know of, but there are still some uncontacted tribes, and there are still tribes that behave one way when foreigners are around and another way when they're not.
02:16:31.000 I have a friend, she died last year, but she was a missionary among those people from the 50s.
02:16:38.000 So she remembers the cannibalism.
02:16:40.000 And she told me, although some anthropologists deny this, but I think she knows them better than any anthropologist ever been there, that she said, I think when nobody's around, they still do that.
02:16:52.000 Yeah.
02:16:53.000 I bet they do too.
02:16:54.000 They don't have warfare.
02:16:55.000 They're just kidding to someone else.
02:16:56.000 They don't have warfare.
02:16:57.000 Not anymore.
02:16:58.000 They did.
02:16:59.000 But that's been stopped and they're isolated from other groups that they used to be enemies with.
02:17:05.000 But there are still some who believe the old-time religion, you know, and the old-time religion says, eat your dead, you know.
02:17:14.000 So that probably, it's quite possible that it happens.
02:17:17.000 But what you find is that since the 80s, most of the groups that have regular contact with the outside have undergone a very rapid process of enculturation into Brazilian society.
02:17:33.000 So even among the Pita Hasnelt in the.
02:17:36.000 In the decades since I was there regularly, I see pictures of them because my ex wife still lives right next to them.
02:17:43.000 And she sends me short videos and pictures of them when they come up to her little wooden shack on the Trans Amazon Highway by their river.
02:17:52.000 And they're dressing very differently now.
02:17:55.000 And some of them are speaking some Portuguese.
02:17:58.000 Not very well, but they're speaking some Portuguese.
02:18:00.000 And your ex wife is still a missionary?
02:18:02.000 Yeah, she's still trying to convert them.
02:18:04.000 No conversions.
02:18:07.000 They're not going to convert.
02:18:08.000 Boy, you've got to give it up to her for having like.
02:18:11.000 Stick tootiveness.
02:18:13.000 I mean, that's really determined.
02:18:15.000 She is absolutely a New Testament first century Christian in terms of her faith.
02:18:21.000 Wow.
02:18:22.000 And she doesn't deviate and she's not afraid of anything.
02:18:25.000 I mean, we've been in many life threatening situations and I don't tend to get afraid and she definitely is not afraid, not ever.
02:18:33.000 So is that because of her belief that she believes that God is looking out for her and if she dies, she's going to go to heaven anyway?
02:18:39.000 Yeah.
02:18:40.000 The constant.
02:18:42.000 A common refrain among Christian missionaries is, I'm immortal until my task is done.
02:18:49.000 God will protect me until he's done with me.
02:18:51.000 And so if he's not done with me, I don't have to worry about it.
02:18:53.000 And if he is, great.
02:18:55.000 Wow.
02:18:56.000 There's a lot of power in that, too.
02:18:58.000 I mean, how many people just live in this constant state of existential angst?
02:19:03.000 Yeah.
02:19:03.000 That's something she's never had.
02:19:05.000 Wow.
02:19:05.000 She doesn't have that.
02:19:06.000 There's a lot of value to that.
02:19:08.000 It's what attracted me to her so much, besides the fact that she was really cute.
02:19:12.000 That attracted me to her a lot when we first met.
02:19:15.000 Were you bummed out when she wanted a divorce because you lost your faith?
02:19:18.000 Well, by that time, we weren't getting along that well because she's very anti, she's not anti science per se, but she's anti helicopter science.
02:19:31.000 She feels that too many people who do studies of indigenous groups and languages come in for a short time, go out, and just speak a lot of bullshit that nobody's ever going to test.
02:19:41.000 And so she hates that.
02:19:42.000 And she's seen it happen with the Pitaha.
02:19:44.000 I've seen it happen with the Pitaha.
02:19:45.000 I've seen.
02:19:46.000 I've seen a couple of anthropologists and linguists go in and do doctoral dissertations on them that are like totally ridiculous.
02:19:52.000 But if I say something, I'm a gringo and I'm jealous because it disagrees with me.
02:19:58.000 Do you think that they do that because no one's going to check and so they just say, I want to just write whatever I want to write?
02:20:05.000 That does happen.
02:20:06.000 That definitely happens.
02:20:07.000 It's also because people realize it sounds really good to go study an indigenous culture or an indigenous language.
02:20:14.000 When you get there and you find out, this is so damn hard, I have no words to put in how hard this is.
02:20:21.000 So they bullshit.
02:20:22.000 Yeah.
02:20:23.000 Because, you know, you want to say to a pitaha, what is this?
02:20:27.000 And so how do you ask that?
02:20:29.000 Well, the phrase in pitaha is, hey, go, but where do you get that phrase?
02:20:35.000 You can't ask somebody how to ask, what is this?
02:20:37.000 Right.
02:20:38.000 If you don't know the language.
02:20:39.000 So you have to watch them very carefully and somebody might get something new or you might even give them something new that they've never seen, hoping somebody's going to ask them, what is this?
02:20:49.000 So you can write it down and then test it.
02:20:51.000 And that's how I got it.
02:20:52.000 And so now you're fluent in Piraha.
02:20:55.000 So you can go and have a conversation with them so you can explore some of these more nuanced subjects and do it in their language.
02:20:55.000 Yes.
02:21:03.000 Yes.
02:21:04.000 So you can kind of translate things in a way that they're going to understand what you're saying?
02:21:08.000 Yes.
02:21:09.000 And that's what takes the most practice.
02:21:11.000 So when I first translated the Gospel of Mark into Pitaha, I thought I had done a marvelous job.
02:21:17.000 And I would read bits out to the Pitaha, and they could explain it to me, and it seemed like they were understanding it.
02:21:23.000 But I used a grammar that was largely based on English.
02:21:27.000 So when I read to them large sections, they were totally lost.
02:21:30.000 They couldn't understand it at all.
02:21:32.000 And what does that mean?
02:21:33.000 It means I got it wrong.
02:21:35.000 It means that I haven't figured out the language as well as I thought I did.
02:21:39.000 And that's very humbling when you've spent so many years trying to do it.
02:21:42.000 So I had to start from the ground up again.
02:21:46.000 And these are all, you know, before you can learn a language, you have to murder it.
02:21:49.000 And before you can carry on a conversation, you just feel like an idiot for years.
02:21:56.000 And for one thing, people who go in to do a PhD's dissertation on a language like this are going to take one to two years of their life, and that's it.
02:22:05.000 And that's not enough time.
02:22:08.000 It takes a year to get fluent in the language.
02:22:09.000 And I know many people who've written about many different Amazonian languages who can't speak a word of the language or speak very little of it.
02:22:17.000 They'll tell people they speak it, but you go with them and you realize they don't speak it that well.
02:22:22.000 So if you don't speak it that well, how can you ask them to distinguish subtle meaning differences?
02:22:28.000 You can't.
02:22:29.000 And that means that a lot of this kind of fieldwork, which is so vital, is not as reliable as we would like to think it is.
02:22:40.000 That's unfortunate.
02:22:41.000 Yeah.
02:22:42.000 Especially if a young student is coming along and they're interested in pursuing it further and they're starting off with some faulty assumptions.
02:22:51.000 Yes.
02:22:51.000 And the other problem is people learn a theory in graduate school and they take it as their job of their dissertation.
02:23:01.000 And this isn't limited to just linguistics and anthropology, but they take it as the job of their dissertation to support that theory.
02:23:10.000 You know, it's like Paul Simon says, a man sees what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
02:23:16.000 When you're trying to do theoretical research, field research shouldn't be that theoretically motivated.
02:23:21.000 It should be basically descriptive, and then you can do the theory later.
02:23:25.000 But most people bring the theory into it, and you can't totally divorce those two.
02:23:32.000 But you see a fact.
02:23:34.000 So, for example, I've worked with Pinaha, and I'm asking for a certain kind of data, and they don't give me what I wanted, and I thought, This guy's not giving me what I want.
02:23:45.000 What am I saying wrong?
02:23:45.000 What's wrong with him?
02:23:47.000 Is he stupid?
02:23:49.000 And then as I learned to speak the language better, I realized, oh, he's giving me exactly what I needed, and I was too stupid to know it.
02:23:56.000 And so that's hard.
02:23:57.000 You're the one working for the PhD.
02:23:59.000 He's just a hunter-gatherer.
02:24:00.000 And it turns out he's at least as smart as you are, and often he's able to know what you need better than you do.
02:24:06.000 And that's another part of the humbling experience of doing field research.
02:24:11.000 Wow.
02:24:12.000 The amount of commitment. that's involved in going as deep as you want with this is really crazy.
02:24:18.000 Yeah, I give demonstrations and you can find some on the internet where I take a language that I know nothing about and I switch to Pinaha, which I know they know nothing about.
02:24:28.000 And within 20 or 30 minutes, I'm able to explain to the audience some basic facts about how their grammar works and what their basic vocabulary, you know, a lot of basic vocabulary.
02:24:37.000 And I do this to linguists.
02:24:38.000 I've done it in front of as many as 500 linguists at a time.
02:24:43.000 And Then I tell them that a lot of people think this is magic.
02:24:47.000 This is really cool.
02:24:48.000 I said, What you've seen here is me working for about an hour.
02:24:52.000 Now, you just do that every day for two years and you're in.
02:24:56.000 And that's the part.
02:24:58.000 It's intensive.
02:24:59.000 I get a headache when I do these demonstrations because my concentration is so hard.
02:25:04.000 And, you know, you miss obvious things and you say bad things and you're just self-correcting all the time.
02:25:13.000 You're just constantly, you start off this wide and you're trying to get this narrow, get down to this point of what it actually means.
02:25:20.000 And as you work through that, there are no shortcuts.
02:25:23.000 There's no shortcut to doing that.
02:25:25.000 And you need to be well-trained and you need to be very committed and you need to have a little bit of talent and work really hard.
02:25:33.000 When people see how easy it looks and then they try it, they realize they're seeing me at 20 years down the road from when I started.
02:25:43.000 But yeah, there are methods to use to learn a language where there's no language in common.
02:25:49.000 But it's got to be very difficult to achieve a fluent understanding of their language.
02:25:57.000 And the way you did it from the ground, literally from starting from what is this?
02:26:02.000 How do you say that?
02:26:04.000 Remembering it, piecing it together, and then you have to write it down, and then you're writing it down.
02:26:08.000 Right.
02:26:09.000 Oh my goodness.
02:26:10.000 And then, like, imagine if a guy like you didn't do that.
02:26:13.000 Like, how many people are willing to do that?
02:26:16.000 Especially how many people that are, you know, you're a linguist.
02:26:22.000 You want to be a working intellectual.
02:26:24.000 You don't necessarily want to get into malaria.
02:26:26.000 You don't want to get eaten by a jaguar.
02:26:28.000 You don't want to live in the jungle.
02:26:30.000 But so there are people who would like to spend that much time, but they don't have the funding.
02:26:35.000 You know, so.
02:26:37.000 You know, the National Science Foundation and the Brazilian National Science Foundation and the British equivalent of the National Science Foundation have all funded my research over the years.
02:26:48.000 But the bulk of my research was funded by being a missionary.
02:26:52.000 And so I had all these years because churches were supporting me.
02:26:52.000 Wow.
02:26:55.000 But today well, did they ever ask, how come you haven't converted anybody yet?
02:26:59.000 Well, they ask me that all the time.
02:27:01.000 I've had people I showed slides of the Pitaha to a church here in Texas, in Dallas.
02:27:07.000 And the people started getting up and leaving.
02:27:11.000 And I thought they were interested.
02:27:12.000 They gave me money to work in these people.
02:27:15.000 And I said, What's the problem?
02:27:16.000 And they said, You're no good at all.
02:27:18.000 And I said, Well, what are you seeing that you don't like?
02:27:20.000 They said, These people are naked.
02:27:23.000 And if you're a Christian missionary, why haven't you taught them to wear clothes?
02:27:27.000 And I said, Well, they don't want to wear clothes.
02:27:30.000 I said, What in the Bible says you have to wear clothes?
02:27:32.000 They said, Adam saw Eve's nakedness and they were ashamed of each other.
02:27:37.000 You must wear clothes.
02:27:39.000 You're not even teaching them the basics of Christianity.
02:27:41.000 And I thought, I guess I'm not.
02:27:45.000 That's not part of the basics of Christianity for me.
02:27:48.000 But how do you tell a guy who wears a loincloth that it's three inches too short?
02:27:58.000 Something's peeking out there.
02:28:00.000 They don't wear it for modesty.
02:28:02.000 They wear it to keep from sticks getting poked in your penis.
02:28:06.000 And so modesty has nothing to do with it.
02:28:10.000 To the average Piedaha, a woman's breast is about as erotic as an elbow.
02:28:15.000 You know, you see a woman, she's nursing her baby, and then the baby stops nursing, and she's still talking to you, and her tits hanging out, and it doesn't mean anything to her.
02:28:25.000 And after a while, it doesn't mean anything to you either.
02:28:27.000 You know, what's the big deal?
02:28:28.000 And so, to get across the idea that it may be clothes that's causing this problem instead of going naked, which then eliminates the problem of lust, I mean, it's a hard concept for some churches.
02:28:42.000 But churches tend to get very impatient.
02:28:44.000 But then, the National Science Foundation, for example, if I say, I'm going to go study language X, and I need funding for five years, Oh no, we fund those and that's a year's funding.
02:28:54.000 Yeah, but nobody who goes out for a year really learns it that well.
02:28:57.000 I need to learn it a lot better.
02:28:59.000 Oh, yeah, we'll go somewhere else.
02:29:00.000 We're not giving you the money for that.
02:29:02.000 Oh, that's ridiculous.
02:29:03.000 Are there really a lot of people that are willing to do that kind of extensive work?
02:29:07.000 I wouldn't say a lot.
02:29:08.000 But enough to do it?
02:29:10.000 Well, there are 8,000 languages, and there are maybe 2,000, 3,000, let's say 5,000 linguists in the whole world, and only a small percentage of them want to do this kind of work.
02:29:23.000 The rest of them, most of them want to do Chomsky's kind of work, where you sit at your desk and you say, language has this property.
02:29:29.000 And it must also have this property, and so the rubber's never meeting the road.
02:29:35.000 You know, I mean you, if you can do your field research on database.
02:29:40.000 I shouldn't say that because that's what my son does.
02:29:42.000 He's also a linguist and he grew up in an Indian tribe and you know the Pitaha, and he also did a dissertation on another tribe that he learned to speak the language.
02:29:49.000 But nowadays he goes through databases and comes up with statistical generalizations and it's pretty interesting.
02:29:56.000 But um, he'll tell me flat out.
02:29:57.000 He said yeah, I don't want to do that field work anymore.
02:29:59.000 That's really demanding, even though he grew up there.
02:30:02.000 So, And that's the way most people are.
02:30:05.000 How many more cultures that have completely different languages and completely different sets of rules and structure are out there that we're not aware of?
02:30:17.000 Well, when I was back in the 80s, they used to say there's about 5,000 languages.
02:30:23.000 So, 20 years later, 21 years later, we're saying, or 31 years later, we're saying there are 8,000.
02:30:32.000 Languages die out at the rate of about one every two weeks.
02:30:36.000 So they're dying.
02:30:37.000 And once they die, we can never recover that information.
02:30:41.000 But also, languages are being born on a regular basis because you talk like who you talk with.
02:30:48.000 So why are Portuguese and Spanish separate languages?
02:30:51.000 Because you've got the Eber River and you've got natural divides between in that part of the Iberian Peninsula.
02:30:58.000 And so they stop talking to each other and so their speech diverges.
02:31:01.000 That's how Latin became French and Romanian and Germanic became English.
02:31:06.000 And so they stop talking to each other.
02:31:09.000 So, as soon as people stop talking, their language evolves and they have different languages.
02:31:14.000 So, British English and American English have evolved apart, and yet at the same time, we have television and movies and things that keep them sort of together.
02:31:25.000 But if you don't have media and you don't have that, then eventually they're talking, they're not talking with each other at all, and they become different languages.
02:31:35.000 And that's where most languages come from.
02:31:37.000 Wow.
02:31:39.000 There's got to be a lot of these tribes that aren't talking to each other.
02:31:42.000 And how many of these tribes have been investigated?
02:31:45.000 And how many people have been embedded in these?
02:31:48.000 Are there tribes out there where no one has ever examined the language?
02:31:51.000 No one's ever embedded themselves in their culture?
02:31:56.000 There probably are over a thousand where no one's gone there, but there are a couple of thousand where no scientist has gone there to study their language or their culture.
02:32:05.000 A couple thousand.
02:32:06.000 Yeah, a couple thousand, I would say.
02:32:07.000 Wow.
02:32:08.000 If not more.
02:32:09.000 And they probably have completely different languages.
02:32:12.000 You know, we're.
02:32:12.000 Yeah.
02:32:14.000 We're worried, and we should be, about the disappearance of certain bird species and all these other kinds of species.
02:32:20.000 And we should be concerned about that.
02:32:22.000 But we're not concerned enough about the disappearance of these languages and how the new languages are arising.
02:32:30.000 And why should we be concerned?
02:32:31.000 Well, for one thing, every language is like a library.
02:32:34.000 It's a repository of information that is lost when they switch to Portuguese.
02:32:40.000 Because Portuguese doesn't have all the same knowledge embedded in it.
02:32:43.000 It doesn't have the same way of talking about the world.
02:32:45.000 There's a lot that's missing.
02:32:47.000 Every pitaha, every child, every woman, every man knows the name of every species of plant and animal in their environment.
02:32:56.000 They will never just say tree.
02:32:58.000 Like I walked with the pitaha into the jungle and they said, this is what we call this.
02:33:03.000 And so I write it down.
02:33:04.000 What do you call it?
02:33:04.000 Tree.
02:33:05.000 What do you call that over there?
02:33:07.000 Tree.
02:33:08.000 And what's that over there?
02:33:09.000 Tree.
02:33:09.000 They said, you just have one word for all these things.
02:33:12.000 But they're calling them by the species name.
02:33:14.000 And I'm thinking, well, I told them, I said, well, there's some Americans who do know all the different names, but I'm just not one of them.
02:33:20.000 But they find it hard to believe that any American could get by without that knowledge of their environment.
02:33:27.000 So when that language goes, we've lost the difference.
02:33:30.000 So a friend of mine did a study on how a group in the Amazon classify birds.
02:33:36.000 And they don't classify them based on their anatomy like Western science.
02:33:40.000 They classify them based on what they eat.
02:33:43.000 And so if you know their classification, you know what all these birds eat.
02:33:47.000 And you know how to deal with those birds to capture them or to follow them.
02:33:52.000 And when that language is gone, all that knowledge is gone.
02:33:55.000 So it's like the Library of Congress has been blown up or something when you lose a language.
02:34:03.000 And why do new languages come into being?
02:34:05.000 What are the conditions?
02:34:06.000 And what does all this mean for us being human beings?
02:34:09.000 How do we know ourselves better?
02:34:10.000 How are we to understand our species if we don't study all the different exemplars of our species?
02:34:18.000 And that's the challenge, and that's what keeps the work exciting, but it also is what makes it a challenge because you tell you tell a really bright 25-year-old or 24-year-old PhD student, okay, now you have to take off to the jungle for three years or four.
02:34:36.000 And they're thinking, I could get a job without doing that.
02:34:39.000 You know, I don't need to go spend four years in the jungle to get a job.
02:34:42.000 And, you know, professor is a pretty cushy job.
02:34:45.000 It doesn't pay well, but it's also, it's not like, you know, it's not like real labor.
02:34:50.000 And I told people tell me how hard professors work.
02:34:52.000 I said, yeah, well, you know, it does take a lot of hours, but I'd rather do this than run a jackhammer because I ran a jackhammer.
02:34:58.000 And I'll tell you, this is a lot easier than running a jackhammer.
02:35:00.000 So, but you go off to the field and you spend this time.
02:35:05.000 Ironically, anthropologists seem more prepared to do this than linguists.
02:35:09.000 And the other ironic thing is I know, this is anecdote, I know more anthropologists who speak the language fluently than I know linguists who speak the language fluently, which I have to put down to the pernicious influence of certain theories and linguistics that makes people think they don't have to learn a language to know how it works.
02:35:29.000 And I tell people when you're going off to do field work, I did write a field manual and I say, the first six months just work on learning the language, don't take many notes, you know, take notes of words and stuff.
02:35:39.000 So I had a goal where I wanted to learn 10 new words a day and I kept a little spiral notebook clip in my belt buckle and I would walk around learning these things and I want to learn new words and write those down.
02:35:51.000 And then I would spend the evening memorizing those words and I would try them out again the next day and I try to make sentences with them.
02:35:58.000 And when people start laughing at you, you know that I didn't get that right.
02:36:01.000 And sometimes they like to teach you dirty words, right?
02:36:04.000 They think that's hilarious.
02:36:05.000 You know you'll ask a.
02:36:07.000 So then I, you know, you want, how do you learn the words for genitals, for example?
02:36:12.000 That's kind of an embarrassing thing if you stop and think about it.
02:36:15.000 So I started to ask the guy, I said, what do you call that?
02:36:18.000 You know, I pointed to his dick and he said, and he calls, he, you know, he says, I'm not going to tell you, but he calls a little boy over who's naked and he shows me every part of his body.
02:36:26.000 And he said, you call this, this, and this, that, and this, that.
02:36:29.000 And then he says, but the names change once they start to grow hair.
02:36:35.000 So penis as a boy is different from penis as a boy.
02:36:38.000 A man and vagina as a girl is different from vagina as a woman.
02:36:42.000 And so, you know, how do you get those words?
02:36:47.000 You got to count on close friendships.
02:36:51.000 Well, like I said at the beginning of this, man, you've had a fascinating life.
02:36:54.000 You really have.
02:36:55.000 It's very, very interesting.
02:36:58.000 I really appreciate you sharing everything today.
02:37:00.000 It was really, really fun.
02:37:02.000 Thank you very much for having me.
02:37:03.000 I enjoyed it.
02:37:04.000 Jamie, pull up his book.
02:37:08.000 Well, books, I should say.
02:37:11.000 This one, Daniel Everett.
02:37:12.000 Don't sleep, there are snakes.
02:37:15.000 Whew.
02:37:17.000 The life and language in the Amazon jungle, Amazonian jungle.
02:37:21.000 That's what they say to each other each night before they go to bed.
02:37:26.000 Don't sleep, there are snakes.
02:37:30.000 Amazing.
02:37:31.000 Thank you very much.
02:37:32.000 Really appreciate it.
02:37:32.000 Thank you so much for having me.
02:37:33.000 It was awesome.
02:37:34.000 Bye, everybody.