#439 - Bible Expert Rejects Religion After Decoding Ancient Amazon Language | Daniel Everett

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Daniel Everett is a linguist, anthropologist, and author best known for studying the Pirahã people and their language in the Brazilian Amazon. https://daneverettbooks.com SPONSORS https://qualialife.com/danny - Get 50% off & save an extra 15% with the code DANNY. https://livemomentous.com - Use code DANNY for up to 35% off. https://takeultra.com - Use code DANNY for 15% off. https://superpower.com - Use code DANNY at checkout for $50 off your membership. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://daneverettbooks.com *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Linguistic Training for Missionaries & Ancient Languages 08:50 - The Pirahã People & Training to Survive in the Amazon 17:40 - Lost Ancient Cities of the Amazon 21:24 - Homo Erectus, Early Language & the Oldest Structure Discovered 32:51 - Bicameral Mind Theory & Where Language Lives in the Brain 38:34 - Polyglots, IQ & Language Intelligence 42:14 - Noam Chomsky's Theory of Language & Universal Grammar 48:49 - Memory Capacity of the Pirahã 53:36 - Dark Matter of the Mind & Theory of Culture 01:02:56 - Teaching the Pirahã About Jesus 01:07:46 - Tithing & Biblical Generosity 01:17:30 - How Much Pastors Should Get Paid 01:20:11 - Pirahã's Questions on Jesus & Why Daniel Became Atheist 01:27:52 - Pirahãs Don't Believe in Gods or Afterlife 01:33:45 - Fear of Death & Pirahã Lifespans 01:37:01 - Pirahãs Change Their Names Over Time 01:43:23 - When Daniel Questioned & Abandoned His Faith 01:50:02 - Pirahã Medicine, Drugs & Sex Habits 02:00:24 - LSD, Mind Expansion & Religion 02:07:06 - Uncontacted Tribes Kill White People on Sight 02:13:22 - Daniel's Relationship with Noam Chomsky 02:17:13 - Fine Line Between Genius & Crackpot 02:27:34 - Pirahã's Reaction to Technology & Telepathic Communication 02:37:08 - The Deceit of Written Texts 02:43:58 - Cannibalistic Tribes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:23Danny Jones?

  How many linguists and anthropologists also end up being Christian missionaries? Is that a common thing, or?

• 1:31Speaker 03

  It's not that common, but it's not all that unusual either. One of the greatest linguists of the 20th century was Kenneth Pike, and he was also a missionary. And so in the early days, when more people believed in God than today, and when missionary was considered a very high prestige sacrificial service for Christianity, there was no stigma attached to it, and people could be scientists and missionaries at the same time. But it's pretty rare today. And when I was, started my linguistic career, I was a missionary

• 2:15Speaker 03

  first, and when I started my linguistic career, I was ostracized by a lot of linguists who had very strong opinions against missionaries, and they really didn't want to accept a missionary. So there's been a lot of cultural shift over the last 50 years.

• 2:29Danny Jones?

  So for you who don't know, can you define what is a linguist?

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Okay, a linguist, in the popular definition, is somebody who speaks a lot of languages. But in the, as a profession, it's somebody who studies language scientifically. What is the nature of language? What's the origin of language? How is it structured? Why are languages alike, and how are they unalike? So it can be very, so you have various branches of linguistics. You have phonetics, which is the study of the physical properties of sound. You have phonology, which is the study of how speakers represent the sounds in their mind. And then you have morphology, how words are put together, and syntax, how sentences

• 3:12Speaker 03

  are put together, and philosophy of language. There are a whole lot of areas attached to it. So it's, if you take all of those areas, applied linguistics, how do people learn second languages? So it's quite a big field.

• 3:26Danny Jones?

  And was there any, what came first, your, your interest in Christianity, or your interest in linguistics and languages? And did one influence the other at all?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Yes, I first became Christian when I was 17. And the people who first talked to me about, I was an atheist until I was 17, and the people who first talked to me about Christianity in a detailed way were missionaries from Brazil. And I wanted to do that, and I married their daughter, and she wanted to do that. And so I found out that the training I would need to become a missionary, a Bible translator, included linguistics. And so I asked my then father-in-law, the missionary, you know, what is linguistics? He says, oh, you'll find out. So the missionary call was much sooner than, so I became a Christian

• 4:21Speaker 03

  when I was 17. And then I did my first linguistics training when I was 25.

• 4:27Danny Jones?

  Did you study Greek at all?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yes, I did. I took New Testament Greek when I was, I did my bachelor's degree in Bible and theology, and then I did all my graduate work in linguistics. But when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, very fundamentalist evangelical school, we had to take two years of Greek, and I just loved that. That was one of the reasons I knew I was going to enjoy linguistics.

• 4:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, one of the things that I've learned is that linguists, philologists, and Bible scholars are all sort of in their own silos, and none of them really communicate with each other. Because a lot of the, the people that I've met and talked to on this podcast, who are scholars of the Bible or the New Testament or whatever, they, they subscribe to that belief. So, so like, they're doing this scientific study of something, but like simultaneously believe, believe it, you know, it's like, it's their religion. So it's like this weird thing, you know?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Well, I was that way for many years. I was, before I, I'd be re-conferred back to atheism and gave up my Christian faith, I was Reverend Dr. Daniel Everett. And I studied the Bible, and I was interested in the ancient texts. My research moved on then to Amazonian languages, and then the nature of human language. But I certainly understand that, and I read a lot of philology. And so I always have a lot of respect for the people who study the biblical languages, whether they believe it or not. But although I'm

• 6:14Speaker 03

  an atheist, I, you know, many in my family are still believers and still interested in that. I have two daughters who are still missionaries. So, you know, I don't try to convert anyone away from Christianity, although my position is well-known in my family and outside my family these days.

• 6:34Danny Jones?

  How much did you like, look into, like, the ancient language of Europe, like ancient Greek and Hebrew and all that stuff?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great question. If you're going to be a Bible translator, you need to know Hebrew and Greek. I did not study Hebrew, however, but I did spend two years in Koine Greek, which is the common dialect of Greek that was spoken at the time that the New Testament was written. And so I still have all that, and I can still read the New Testament in Greek, and I have all the Greek tools that I got when I was studying Greek, the books and things. So, so yeah, I mean, Greek opened a whole new world to me, studying Koine Greek, and I realized it came pretty easily, you know, I wasn't always a good student growing up. I was a very bad student in high school. But once I got to college,

• 7:27Speaker 03

  by some miracle, I got to college, I realized that languages, I mean, I liked a lot of subjects by that time, but languages really attracted me.

• 7:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's always been interesting to me, you know, like the explosion of intellect in ancient Greece, you know, in classical Greece. I always wonder, like, did that have anything to do with the language of ancient Greek, you know, because it had like, from what I understand, it had like, over a million unique words compared to Hebrew, which only has like, 7,000 unique words. And, you know, it's such a deep language, they didn't, they didn't have like, if you read the ancient Greek text, there's no spaces, there's no, you know, it's just like on scrolls, never-ending.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Right, and they go left to right on one line, and right to left on the other line.

• 8:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  So it's a challenge. I mean, if you get Greek, like, if you purchase a Koine Greek New Testament today, the lines will go in one direction, and they'll be separated, and the words will be separated, all these things that help us understand them. But Greek was to the 5th century B.C., up until the advent of the Roman Empire, when Latin took over, it was the main language spoken by educated people throughout the world.

• 8:39Danny Jones?

  It was like English today, right?

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. That was, it was the major trade language, you know, there've been several over the deck, over the centuries. It was Greek, there was Latin, at one time it was Portuguese, and then Spanish, you know, at the time that the Spanish and Portuguese were conquering and discovering the world. And then it was French, but these days, it's English. And who knows what'll come next?

• 9:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Could be Mandarin.

• 9:06Danny Jones?

  Honestly, yeah, you're probably right about that. I think that's a good chance.

• 9:11Danny Jones?

  So the first time I heard about you was, I had a lady on the show, Heather Lynn, and she was discussed, she's an expert, she's, she studied Sumerian, the Sumerian language.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 9:25Danny Jones?

  And she was telling me about this missionary who went down to the Amazon and found a culture of these Pirahha folks that had no concept of God.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  You're the first one who's pronounced it correctly the first time.

• 9:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, am I really?

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:41Danny Jones?

  That's only because I've been listening to you talk for the last two days. Who had no God, they have no language, no concept, or not no language, no concept of, of, like, numerical, like, they don't have numbers, they don't have

• 9:53Speaker 03

  No numbers, no counting.

• 9:54Danny Jones?

  Anything like that. And, and it wasn't until recently, until I learned about your, your story, I'm like, oh my God, this is the guy who did all this. So it's amazing to be able to talk to you. So when you first went down to the Amazon as a missionary, were you already aware of this culture? Or did you run into them by accident? Or how did that, how did that work?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Well, I knew they were there. I did really well in my linguistics training. Most of that was with the missionary organization called at that time, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the Wycliffe Bible Translators. And two teams from that mission had tried to work with the Pirahha, and they stayed there several years each, but none of them could figure out how the language worked. They learned to speak it, you know, learning to speak a language doesn't mean that you know how the language works grammatically, which you have to know to do translation. So if you ask most English speakers, John said he went to town, what is the "t" in there? What is the "to" in there doing? John

• 11:00Speaker 03

  said he went to town, or John wants to work, what is that "to" doing? Well, everybody knows, every native English speaker knows how to use it, but they don't know exactly why they use it. It's just part of English. So.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  These people had learned to speak the language okay, but they didn't understand how the grammar worked. And so the last team was getting ready to leave and they wanted someone to replace them. And he wrote me and asked me if I would be willing to take on this group in the middle of the Amazon, because he knew I wanted to work with the mission in the Amazon. And I needed to hear nothing more but that it was a challenge and nobody had figured it out yet. And that made me want to go there. So we took that assignment in seventy-six and I met the people in December of seventy-seven for the first time.

• 11:50Danny Jones?

  Wow. How old were you?

• 11:51Speaker 03

  I was twenty-five.

• 11:53Danny Jones?

  Gee.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  When I went in there, yeah. Which I clearly am not now.

• 11:57Danny Jones?

  What did you, were you prepared for that? Like being in the Amazon jungle and surviving through that?

• 12:04Speaker 03

  I was. The missionary organization has, they call themselves now S I L International. They have an excellent training program that includes linguistics, which is just a basic introduction to linguistics, but also jungle training and living. So when I finished my linguistics training, my family and I went to southern Mexico, to the state of Chiapas in the jungle for, it's called Jungle Camp. And it's five months of training, how to live in the jungle, how to, you know, kill animals and can meat and learn indigenous

• 12:44Speaker 03

  languages. So when I was getting ready to finish, the two major exams I had were Survival Hike, which is how well do you do in the jungle when you're left on your own with no food, no water, just to survive for ten days or so. And the other exam was I had lived with, we had to live with the Celtales, the people that are descended from the Mayans. And I was given a conversational test. How well could I converse with those people?

• 13:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  At the end of my time with them.

• 13:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting. And so how long were you out there in Chiapas?

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Five months.

• 13:22Danny Jones?

  Five months.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Five months. But the last two, two months of that time was actually way out in the jungle. And the last two weeks of that time was by myself in the jungle, doing what they called Survival Hike.

• 13:40Danny Jones?

  How long were you by yourself, you said?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Uh, two weeks.

• 13:44Danny Jones?

  Two weeks.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  In the jungle, yeah. I mean, I was, my family was with me the rest of the time.

• 13:48Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  So the first phase of that training is you go to a place called Main Base. And there were a lot of missionaries there and we're all starting. And then when you finish that, which includes lots of hiking, fifty mile hikes through the jungle and all sorts of things to get you in condition, then they would put each family in a different Celta Indian village. And you're not supposed to have contact with any other family from that point on.

• 14:15Danny Jones?

  Make sure you talk right into here.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Okay. All right, sorry.

• 14:18Danny Jones?

  Talk close to that as you can.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:19Danny Jones?

  Got this loud rain in the background right now. So we gotta make sure that we drown it out.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  So they moved us to a Celta village. And my family lived there for six weeks. And my children started learning Celta. And my wife learned Celta fairly well. And I was learning Celta. And then at the end of that time, they move you to another area called Advanced Base. And you arrive there with your family. There's no house. There's nothing. You have to, you have to build a house in the jungle for your family using only a machete and jungle vines. You're not allowed to use any other tools.

• 14:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, geez.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  So I made bunk beds and, you know, just with sticks and vine and a roof with thatch. And then the last two weeks of that time, they randomly are just living there. And they randomly come around and say, come on. And you're going out to Survival Hike. And you have no idea when that's gonna be, or when they're gonna call you. So they call you and you can't take much with you. I got to take some matches and a canteen and my machete and a rain poncho. And that was it. And change of clothes. I'm not a change, the clothes I had on.

• 15:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  And so they just walk you out in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles.

• 15:34Danny Jones?

  They walk, oh, so they walk with you out there?

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, until they say, stay here. And then you don't see them again for two weeks.

• 15:42Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  So they just leave you off in the middle of nowhere. There's no shelter. There's no water. There's no food. It's just you with your machete in it.

• 15:49Danny Jones?

  But would you know how to, if shit hit the fan, would you know how to get back?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Yes. Because they teach you, that's part of the test. They teach you how to mark your trail when you go.

• 16:00Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  How to mark your trail. So, you know, you put two notches with your machete on this, on one side of the tree, and then one notch on the other. And that's supposed to be an arrow that tells you which way you were coming.

• 16:12Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  And you go the opposite way. However, if you step off your little path, you can't see them anymore.

• 16:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  So it's still very easy to get lost. You have to be very careful not to get lost. And at the end of that time, they brought everybody together and they gave us, the way they evaluate you is what kind of mental state you're in, how well you fed yourself, what your shelter looks like. So they want to know, not only can you live out there for two weeks, I mean, most people aren't gonna die in two weeks unless they get bit by a snake. Plenty of those. But they want to know if you thrived while you were out there. So by the time I got to the Amazon, I felt very confident. I was, I felt very confident in the Amazon. It was a bigger jungle than Chiapas, Mexico. It was, but it was very similar.

• 17:04Danny Jones?

  What was different about it?

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Well, for one thing, the, the plants and animals are quite different. You know, everything you ever hear about that's in the jungle is in the Amazon. You know, I mean, there's, I've seen jaguars and twenty-one foot alligators and been attacked by anacondas and seen

• 17:24Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Just about every kind of snake there is. So I didn't really see many snakes when I was in the jungles of Chiapas. And I think part of the reason is that even though it's jungle, there still are a lot of Celtales that live around there. And so there's people constantly hunting and going through there. But when you go to where the Pita Hare located, that's three hundred people scattered over three hundred and fifty thou, well, three hundred and fifty miles of river and about five hundred thousand square acres of jungle. And so those three hundred people are not gonna keep the wildlife depleted. The wildlife is just thriving there.

• 18:05Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  So you see a lot more animals.

• 18:08Danny Jones?

  That's a lot of land to spread out three hundred people.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's their traditional land. And I was actually with the Brazilian government when that land was, I went with the government to serve as an interpreter with the people to talk to them about what lands they used. And Brazil's such a huge country, you know, Brazil is larger than the continental U.S. by quite a bit. So there are some Brazilians in politics now who complain about the amount of land the Indians have, but nobody's using that land. It's just, it's not good for agriculture because it floods every year. And the soil of the Amazon jungle is not good. A lot of people think it's great, but

• 18:45Danny Jones?

  The terra preta?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. That, which is really good, the black earth. Terra preta means that somebody was there before. It's land that's where there've been burning and fields. So if you're walking along the Amazon and you see that darker earth, somebody used to live there. They used to live around there. So we're finding that the Amazon used to have large populations of people that are now totally disappeared. And they had relatively large settlements and cities even. So

• 19:17Danny Jones?

  Like in where the jungle currently is now?

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Right, right. And they did a lot to affect the growth of the jungle. When I taught at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a PhD student, Mike Heckenberger, who's now a professor at the University of Florida. And he told me he wanted to do archaeology in the Amazon. And I said, how in the world are you gonna do archaeology in the Amazon? What, there's nothing there? He said, oh, yes, there is. There's soil. And he made us, he discovered all kinds of really cool things and became a major archaeologist, probably the leading archaeologist of the Amazon, who pioneered all of these methods using soil and now lead our technology that can

• 19:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Look at, and see under the jungle, the signs of civilization. So

• 20:02Danny Jones?

  Right. I think they found pyramids under the canopy, some pyramids in some parts of the rainforest there.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've been finding so much stuff recently, it's hard to believe. Because when I went there, the, the theory was that no civilization could be supported in the Amazon. The jungle just had soil that was too poor. And so if you saw any signs of it, like on this island at the mouth of the Amazon called Marajó, which is an island larger than the country of Switzerland, they had a civilization there, the Marajó civilization. And we still find beautiful pottery that they made and all kinds of signs. But one of the theories was that they just left to not be dominated by the Incas. And they went to the first fertile soil, which was all the way at the mouth of the Amazon. But now we know that's not entirely accurate. There were civilizations of different sizes in

• 20:52Speaker 03

  the Amazon itself, what today is just solid jungle.

• 20:55Danny Jones?

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• 22:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:09Danny Jones?

  You know, like what was really happening. And we only have like blunt tools to figure that out. You know, we can study languages, we can do anthropology.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:19Danny Jones?

  You know, archaeology and all that stuff, but like, again, a lot of those people don't collaborate. So we have like different stories of the past. And that's another thing that that frustrates me is, you know, a lot of the archaeologists that I talk to, a lot of like the biblical scholars and the ancient, people who study ancient texts, a lot of them have very different opinions on things.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:40Danny Jones?

  None of them agree.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  I mean, the problem about studying the past is that science likes replicability. They like to be able to repeat the experiments and get the same results. But that's really hard when we're talking about the past. I, I wrote a book called How Language Began, in which I argued that language originated before Homo sapiens with Homo erectus.

• 23:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  And most linguists thought that was crazy. But then an archaeologist from the University of Liverpool in England wrote me and he said, I agree with you and my specialty is Homo erectus. And so we wrote a couple of articles together arguing that Homo erectus had language, but in the last couple of years, Larry Barham is his name. And in the last couple of years, he discovered the oldest wooden structure known. 500,000 year old

• 23:32Speaker 03

  joined pieces of wood that were made by Homo erectus. Nobody else was around at the time in, in modern day Zaire, which probably was part of a house that they had built.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  So Homo erectus was capable of a lot more than we think. And they've been the most, they were the longest living species of humans. They started 2 million years ago. Yeah, there's, that's Larry, right there in the fork, in the, right there. Finding that piece of wood that looks.

• 24:00Danny Jones?

  Is there a better photo of the piece of wood?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there it is.

• 24:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, there it is.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, the average person seeing that would think.

• 24:08Danny Jones?

  It looks like nothing.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  It looks like nothing, but it's 500,000 years old. It's two pieces of wood joined together. And Larry had already written a book on this vast technological improvement that putting two things together meant. So he, he wrote about the stone tools that didn't have handles. And then the great, much greater efficiency of stone tools that did have handles. And how putting two things together is a great technological improvement. So that piece of wood confirmed what he was saying. And also, you, we've both talked about, you can't build a canoe, you can't build a house. You can't do that kind of thing. Yeah. So you see it's.

• 24:48Danny Jones?

  Well, that's, that's a lot bigger.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  It's quite large. Yes. And you can't do this kind of thing without language. So Homo erectus, Larry agrees with me, which makes me very happy because he knows a lot of moral, a lot more about them than I do, that had to have had language.

• 25:04Danny Jones?

  They had to have had language to be able to construct something.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Right. And, and they also Homo erectus was not stopped by ocean boundaries. We find Homo erectus on islands off of Africa. We find Homo erectus on Crete. We find Homo erectus in, on islands in Indonesia, on the island of Flores.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  So they were an amazing species of human. And for some reason, some archaeologists today don't even like to call them human, but they were clearly human. They stood about five foot 10, five foot 11.

• 25:44Danny Jones?

  Homo erectus did.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, men. And their brains were probably, you know, if you take the skull off and scoop out all the wet stuff and fill it with sand, you measure how many cubic centimeters of sand you get in the skull. And so the average man Homo sapiens today has a cranial capacity of about 1,250 cc's. Homo neanderthalensis had a capacity of about 1,450 cc's. Their brains were bigger than ours. And Homo erectus had an average of about 950 cc's, which is equivalent to a modern human woman. So we know that women are every bit as smart as men, even though they have smaller brains, because they also have smaller bodies.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  So erectus was no doubt less intelligent than us, but they had enough of a brain to support language. Even if it were, you know, they wouldn't have talked about the things we talked about. And who knows how extensive their conversations were. But with the accomplishments they have and the archaeology, archaeological records that we have, we know that they could talk. I mean, I know they could talk. It's still a case to present to others, but this is the problem of the past. People come up with different explanations for these things, although I don't find them at all convincing and when it comes to Homo erectus, but these are exciting things, but you can't, you can't prove it, right? You can't, words don't leave fossils.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  If they're, if it's not a written language. So there's no record of the actual words that would have been used. There is no way to interview a Homo erectus. They died out about,

• 27:28Speaker 03

  they lived from 200, 2 million years ago to about 140,000

• 27:36Speaker 03

  years ago. So no other species of humans, not Neanderthals, and so far not even us, have lived as long as Homo erectus lived.

• 27:44Danny Jones?

  And that's one of the other mysteries is how did we get from them to us? You know, it seems like such a big leap. What the human brain, obviously the human brain size didn't double. It was very similar. But that's like one of the tropes that you really hear, like the, the doubling of the brain size.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Well, it doubled from chimpanzees.

• 28:00Danny Jones?

  From chimpanzees. Right, right, right. But like if Homo erectus was that long ago and that close to us, like there must be a long fucking lineage somewhere, right? There, there's a huge gap.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Well, this is, this is a mystery. So, so people who study the DNA of ancient species, such as Sivante Pebo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his discovery of the genome, his pioneering methods to get the genome of Neanderthals. But as they say, they're, they're distinct genetically, but my view of Homo erectus is that that's who we are. And we came out of Homo erectus. I mean, that is not to say, I mean, there was a time, most likely when Homo erectus, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens were all on the planet at the same time. And we would have seen each other almost certainly.

• 28:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  But Homo erectus was the original species of humans coming out of Africa. And that's also where Homo sapiens came from. Neanderthal is the only species of humans. Well, that used to be the case. It's not now, but Neanderthal is of the big three species. It's the one that didn't originate in Africa. But it came out of Homo erectus in Europe.

• 29:18Danny Jones?

  Can you find a drawing or a picture, like a rendition of a Homo erectus? I'm just curious. I want to see exactly what that looks like. And so the idea is that Homo erectus mated with the Homo sapiens?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Well, no, the idea is that Homo erectus gradually evolved into Homo sapiens. That we, they became us. Yeah. So

• 29:38Speaker 03

  I like that picture on the far left of the guy with the long hair.

• 29:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  I often use that picture and tell people, you know, you can do 23andMe and all the DNA tests you want, but that's who we go back to.

• 29:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  This is the ancestor of all of us. But also I make the point that if, if you shave this guy and clean him up and put a suit on him and send him to college, not too many people would notice, you know?

• 30:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right. Yeah. I got some friends who look like that.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So especially, you know, you see with the short hair.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  I think he looks quite cool, actually.

• 30:16Danny Jones?

  He does look pretty cool.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So to me, these are the inventors of language. And I mean invention, because I don't think language was just the product of some biological

• 30:29Speaker 03

  mutation. I think that as our brains got larger, larger, we did what all species who are living do. We communicated.

• 30:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  And all species communicate with the same tools, like

• 30:44Speaker 03

  indexes, like if a dog is sniffing some other animal, that smell is an index of what, of the animal that left it.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  If a dog sees an image of an animal, that's called an icon. Icons are images, indexes are physically connected.

• 31:02Speaker 03

  And a few animals invent symbols, but not many, and they're not usually productive. What makes humans different from all other creatures is that we can create symbols, which are these things that are created conventionally. They're sort of arbitrary. You know, we just decide that we're going to call what we're walking on ground. And we all agree to that and we call it ground. And that's the typical hallmark of a symbol. It's that it's a conventional creation. And other creatures have them. Dogs can recognize up to a thousand if they're trained properly, but they don't they don't tend to invent many on their own.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  But humans can invent them at will. We can just create as many symbols as we want. And I believe that once we got to that stage, that's where language came from.

• 31:49Danny Jones?

  You know, there's these other theories out there of how human beings evolved

• 31:57Danny Jones?

  to where we are today, to have, you know, the capacity of language and, you know, the capacity of everything that we have today. Either psychedelics could be responsible for, that's the stoned ape theory. And then there's also, I think it's called catching fire or like cooking meat or something had to do with it.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Those, those are all, they, it's possible that all of those things contributed to language. To me, the greatest contributor was when our brains reached a certain size and we were able to invent symbols. That seems to me to have been the greatest breakthrough.

• 32:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  And the evidence suggests that that happened perhaps as long ago as 2 million years ago, whereas many people who believe in language and focus on Homo sapiens think that it's in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years. But I think when the first Homo sapiens stood up, they were born into a language speaking world. I think that Homo erectus groups already had language and the first Homo sapiens. Would have been born into a linguistic world.

• 32:59Danny Jones?

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• 33:43Danny Jones?

  That's the Momentus standard, improving the creatine itself and not just dressing up the package. If you want to try Momentus Signature Spec Creatine, head on over to livemomentous.com and use the promo code DANIE for up to 35% off your entire first order. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com, promo code DANIE for up to 35% off. livemomentous.com promo code DANIE. Are you familiar with the, um, the idea of the, the bicameral mind?

• 34:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:15Danny Jones?

  The idea of how, um, you know, like, one of the examples that was recently explained to me was like, you know, long time ago, if, um, a father was telling his children some of the lessons of his father, of the grandfather, he could be like, sort of like channeling the, the grandfather through him to the children, or like, teaching the lessons of the grandfather, but like, there's no distinction of, like, is that the grandfather talking, or is that me talking, right? It's like, there's not, there wasn't really a sense of self. It was just like, these thoughts are the, I said, these things that are floating through our minds that we're trying to communicate are coming from some higher source.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  The, um, Russian author, Dostoevsky, was studied by another Russian, Mikhail Bakhtin. And Bakhtin argued that what made Dostoevsky different from all of the writers, that he created a whole new way of writing, was that every voice in his, in his novels had equal authority, so that you couldn't tell which was supposed to, you know, the author's voice was no more important than any of the other voices in his characters. So in that sense, he was channeling all of these different characters in his writing, which made his writing stand out so uniquely from other, other authors.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  And I do think that people, um, people, when they are raised in a particular, and they hear these stories, and they have absorbed certain cultural values, that all enters what I call the dark matter of the mind, these things we know, but we don't know we know, and we use, um, and sometimes they come up and, and, and we don't know about them, the unconscious, um, not the deep unconscious that Freud might have talked about, but, um, this, and I think this is where culture comes from. We have these experiences and we interpret them, and we don't realize that we're interpreting them, but when we are in the same environment with other people, we all kind of construct

• 36:27Speaker 03

  the same view of reality, because we're interacting with one another, and this is where culture comes from. And I do think that when you're talking, a lot of cultural voices come through you that you're not even aware of where you got this information.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  I have a, a very good friend at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Evelina Fedorinko, and she's one of the greatest authorities in the world on language in the brain. I mean, there are many authorities, a lot of people like to study language in the brain, and there've been a lot of breakthroughs, but her work is exciting because she has identified a network in the brain, and we don't know how it got there, we don't know, um, what it would be for, um, otherwise, but, um, it's, she calls it the language network, and she's studied languages from all over the world, from many different language families,

• 37:24Speaker 03

  and she has found that, um, whenever you're speaking or hearing a language, this network lights up in your brain. And in fact, she put me in, um, in an MRI scanner for three and a half hours to study me listening to Peta Ha and listening to English and a couple of other languages that I know, and she was able to show that roughly the same areas light up, no matter what language I'm listening to. She gave a, a talk on this, something about Dan Everett's brain, or something like that, but, uh, um, that's a very exciting discovery. What that was used for before language, or if it was, uh, nobody knows. One, one interesting thing about the brain is that there are things that, parts of the

• 38:07Speaker 03

  brain that specialize for different things, so the back of your brain specializes for vision, but what if you're born blind? If you're born blind, the brain uses it for other things. It's not needed, so it uses it for other stuff.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  And that's what, the plasticity of the human brain is one of the most exciting things about it, but in, in the meantime, healthy, normal individuals tend to localize things in different parts of their brain. So there's a part of my brain where I store my ability to tie shoes, or make burritos, or that kind of thing. It doesn't mean that making burritos is an innate capacity. It does mean that the cells of that part of the brain are more compatible with certain kinds of knowledge and tasks and things, so.

• 38:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Her discoveries have been great. Then there's also, um, another friend of mine, Eddie Chang, who is a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who's actually had success with people who've lost the power of speech, and hooking neurons up in their brain to computers, and, and then with the help of large language models that can help predict their sentences, um, can actually take their thoughts and translate them into sounds over the computer, so that by thinking, they can communicate with other people. And so that's a combination of his incredible ability as a neurosurgeon, and his knowledge of the neurons and the structure of the, of language in the brain, but also large language models, which can help complete the thoughts.

• 39:37Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 39:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just an astounding breakthrough that for people who've lost the power of speech gives tremendous hope.

• 39:47Danny Jones?

  Now, okay, so on the topic of, of, that's so interesting that you were in the MRI machine, and you were speaking, or they were talking to you in different languages.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:58Danny Jones?

  How many different languages do you know?

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Well, I, I would say that I speak fairly fluently four, English, Portuguese, Peta Ha, and Spanish, um, but I've been exposed to lots of languages, and I read about, you know, 15 languages.

• 40:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  So, um, so they, I told them that I could do this, probably shouldn't have told them, because then they played me samples of all these different languages.

• 40:20Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  And they did detect, um, they, Evelina's work can detect not only where the language is in your brain, but how well you speak it, and how much of an effort it is for you to learn other languages. So she's identified that people who speak multiple languages, polyglots, tend to expend less energy learning a language than people who aren't polyglots, people who have, struggle with language. So it's not like you work harder, it just comes easier, uh, for some reason. And, uh, so at the end of her talk, which was a conference in my honor at MIT, she argued that the data suggests that not only do I speak these languages, but learning languages is not such a great effort.

• 41:01Danny Jones?

  Now, what about like, learning abstract concepts or new ideas, or being, being able to understand some new abstract idea that you've never been, that's never been posited to you before, or just learning in general? Like, if you understand multiple languages, you can, you can connect the dots to, you know, abstract ideas and, and concisely attribute them to specific words across multiple languages, does that have any, like, overall effect on your intellect?

• 41:29Speaker 03

  It's, it's a very, that's a very good question. You know, abstract learning, learning physics, for example, or learning mathematics, um, uses different parts of the brain than I have developed well. But, um, at the same time, um, when we do learn other languages, and we learn the concepts that are associated with different words, we expand our knowledge, we expand our ability to link concepts with words, and so there are some studies that argue that people's intelligence actually changes. We know that the brain changes when you learn other languages.

• 42:12Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  It, it causes alterations in the brain, so does literacy, when you learn to read and write.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  So, um, yeah, I do think it helps increase intelligence.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Intelligence is a weird concept to begin with, because if it were just absolutely genetic, you would expect that you could take an IQ test and it would never change. Whatever score you got when you were in eighth grade would be the same score you got when you got out of college, but we know that's not true. IQ changes over time, and the, the USA, if you take the IQ tests that we took back at the beginning of the 20th century, and the IQ tests, if they still take them, that people take today, the entire US population's intelligence has, has come up. It's changed.

• 42:55Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  So, these are hard things for people to explain who believe that IQ is fixed once for all by, by our genetics.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  But there is something that genetics clearly does, and teasing apart the role of genetics versus culture versus individual development and experience is, is pretty hard, but people have been working on it for quite a while.

• 43:18Danny Jones?

  Um, so, so this idea, what I, what I, what I wanted to get to was from those scans that were done on you when you, they were playing the different languages that were lighting up certain part of your brain. This sounds sort of like Chomsky's idea, and Chomsky had the idea, correct me if I'm wrong, but that there was a certain part of the brain that was responsible, inherent in human beings for language, and that we were, we were born with that, right?

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Right. Um, Chomsky was very amenable to discoveries by people like the French surgeon Broca and the German Verniki, who argued that language was localized in one or two spots in the brain. Evelina has shown that that is not actually the case, that language is spread throughout this network. However, Chomsky never did any research on the brain. Chomsky simply said that language must be innate because everybody has it and everybody learns it before puberty, long before puberty, so it must be innate. That's one possible explanation. And when he sees evidence that there are certain parts of the brain dedicated to it, he has often taken that as evidence that it must be innate.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  But like I said, where I, how I tie my shoes is located in some part of the brain. That doesn't mean that shoe tying is innate. It just means that your knowledge is in the brain, it's got to be stored somewhere, and certain cells facilitate the storage of certain things better than other cells. It's still, to a large degree, a mystery for many people. I'm sure there's a neuroscientist somewhere who thinks they have it figured out, but for me, it's still, to, to a large degree, a mystery. So Evelina's work, and Evelina would be one of the first people to tell you this, it doesn't address one way or the other whether language is innate. She wouldn't say that it's evidence for it or evidence against it. I don't think she herself believes the evidence that language is innate is very strong, but

• 45:15Speaker 03

  I don't want to put words in her mouth. But I do know that the fact that there's a language network doesn't mean that language itself is innate.

• 45:23Danny Jones?

  Right. Now, you came up as a, a Chomsky fanatic, right? Like, wasn't your dissertation kind of like an homage to Chomsky?

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Yes, all of my early work was Chomsky. And my, my kids, who are all grown now, when they were little, they said, "You seem to talk about Chomsky as much as you talk about Jesus," and in, in sort of the same way, you know? So, yeah, he was a, he was an intellectual hero. He's, he's, you know, he's a brilliant, brilliant person who had a lot of great ideas. And if I were to stop there, everybody who's a linguist might agree with me, but then, after a while, I thought, yeah, there are a lot of great ideas, but so far, none of them have panned out. So, we don't have, you know, all the evidence that language is innate is, is highly indirect, and there are many other explanations for it.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  So, in, in a new book I have just submitted to Oxford University Press, I argue that the human ability to infer one thing from another is an ability that's shared with many, many other creatures, probably all creatures. And this is just, you, you see one thing, and you know that relates to another thing.

• 46:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  And then that relates to something else. So, it's recursive, it's actually, even though I've argued against recursion, recursion in the grammar, I've never argued against recursion in the brain, the ability of one thing to recur time and time again. So, this ability to infer things is far more developed in humans than in any other creature, you know? I keep reminding people that we shouldn't be too conceited that we're humans because, you know, we've only had toilet paper for a couple of hundred years.

• 47:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  You know, we're basically hairless chimps that walk upright with a certain degree of ease, but not totally, because that's why we get back problems, because we originally evolved to walk on all fours. But, um, so, the ability to infer, in, in my new book, this, this replaces the need for a universal grammar. In fact, the first person to talk about universal grammar was, to use that term, which is Chomsky's term, that's what he's known for, this innate universal grammar, was the monk from the 13th century, Roger Bacon, who was a brilliant person.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  When he talked about language, he talked about a logical, not a biological, universal grammar. So, that language was constrained by logic. Now, if we jump forward to 1865, 600 years after Roger Bacon, we get to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Charles Sanders Purse, who argued that, uh, for universal grammar. And he was the first American to use the term universal grammar, but he didn't mean it as a biological capability, well, it is a biological capability, but he didn't mean it as an innate biological entity, that we're all born with language. He said, "The brain is large enough and our powers of inference are great enough because

• 48:36Speaker 03

  of that brain that we can infer the structure of the language that we're hearing. We can build it as we hear it." So, the greatest, in my opinion, the greatest thing that's ever been discovered in the history of the universe is the human brain, and it's still in many ways a mystery, this little piece of wet stuff, and it's, a lot of, a lot of it is just saturated fat in our skull, that we're able to figure out all the things we've figured out with, that we have figured out in the course of our history. And it's interesting, too, that over the last, since erectus disappeared with 950

• 49:15Speaker 03

  cc brain, and then we got 1,250 cc's with the first humans over 200,000 years ago, there doesn't seem to have been much brain evolution. I wouldn't deny that there has been perhaps some for different populations, but the brain hasn't really evolved. What's evolved is our culture and the ability to store knowledge to, in a, in a network.

• 49:35Danny Jones?

  Outside of the brain.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Outside of the brain.

• 49:37Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, that's a very interesting thing, you know? Like, you know, you hear the stories of, you know, in ancient Greece, when people would walk around reading Homer, or singing Homer, right? The Homeric Hymns. And, you know, how the hell do you memorize a, a part of an ancient scroll that's not pagnated? You know, you can't go back and reference that book, that page, that paragraph, you have to, like, the, the memory capacity of people in antiquity or before.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  Well, even today, I mean, all the people that I work with in the Amazon are, are pre-literate. They all use, another way of saying that is, that's, pre-literate sort of indicates that they're somehow not fully developed, but a graphic means they don't write anything. So, they have to remember everything, every, any pitahah you stop from about 10 years of age and older knows the name of every plant, animal, fish, I mean, everything. They know the name of everything in their universe. They know the names of many stars. They, they observe a lot, and they don't write it down, they just all know it.

• 50:43Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 50:44Speaker 03

  So, this, you know, oral tradition that has been the hallmark of human, of humans since we got language is not dead, and it still works. And so, you know, I was walking with the pitahah in the jungle one time, and normally I would carry, this before iPhones and before electronic stuff that was portable, and so I would carry a pen and waterproof ink and, and a plastic-covered notebook. And when I asked them questions, I would pull out my notebook and write it down. But this time, we were out there, I was with a few guys hunting, and I said, "Oh, what's the name of this tree?" And they told me, and I said, "Well, what's the name of that tree over there?" And they told me, and they said, "You don't have your paper and pen, you're not going to remember this." And so, they stopped telling me, because they knew that without my paper and pen, I

• 51:29Speaker 03

  would forget it.

• 51:30Danny Jones?

  That you can't remember anything.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  And I, because that's the way my brain has become dependent on writing things down, and theirs aren't, they just remember it.

• 51:37Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  And so, if you tell a pitahah a word in English, they're not going to forget it, they're going to remember it.

• 51:46Danny Jones?

  And do you think they're, they are?

• 51:52Danny Jones?

  That group of people has evolved in their own way to have a better memory? Or do you just think the way they're brought up in that culture to not have any writing and just to remember stuff?

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I believe it's cultural.

• 52:05Danny Jones?

  Right, so hypothetically, if one of the pitahah was born in New York City with an iPhone and books and all that stuff, they would not have anywhere, they would have the same memory as us?

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Right, that's what I believe. I mean, there are a number of traits that the pitahahs have and don't have that are unusual for some of us from different cultures. But I have met pitahah who were kidnapped from the village as children and raised as Brazilians in nearby towns.

• 52:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  And they speak perfect Portuguese, they run a store and do all the arithmetic that's needed for running the store, and they just don't act like pitahahs, they act like Brazilians.

• 52:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's fascinating.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  So that's the sort of real test for me. If I found a pitahah that had been raised in a Brazilian town and still couldn't do numbers and had no words for color and shared all these cultural characteristics, then I would think there was something maybe biologically different. But I don't see any evidence for biological differences, just profound cultural differences. This is why, you know, society is so important to us. Science is a social enterprise. Everything we do is dependent on society. There's no creature on earth that is more dependent on society than humans. Chimps, there are a lot of social creatures. Chimps are, baboons are, the primates, all of the primates, well, not all, but most of the primates tend to be very social.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  But there's, if you take a pitahah who grew up in the jungle and you move them 20 miles into that same jungle by themselves, they're not going to survive for a long time because they depend on each other to help them with the tasks that they have. We evolved to live as members of society.

• 53:50Danny Jones?

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• 54:33Danny Jones?

  a boosted mood without nicotine, sugar, or calories. New customers can use the code DANYE to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's T-A-K-E-U-L-T-R-A dot com for 15% off when you use the code DANYE. After you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you. You mentioned a little bit earlier, something about the dark matter of the mind, this being like the unconscious mind that we're not really aware of and that we don't actively think about.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:04Danny Jones?

  What got you thinking about that?

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Well, what got me thinking about it is, when I wrote my first books and articles about culture being such an influence on language, many skeptics said, "Yeah, but what do you mean by culture? Culture is this term that everybody uses." So I wrote a book called Dark Matter of the Mind, in which I tried to develop my own theory of culture, which is, as we go through the world, whether it's stubbing our toe or seeing someone we find attractive, or reading a book that really moves us, our brain stores all of that, and not all of it is stored in our consciousness.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  And that, you know, for example, why do certain foods taste better than others? We don't know why. But the reason is because we have stored this knowledge and our preferences below the conscious level based on our culture, so that, you know, when I stand in a normal standing position, when nobody's around and I'm not conscious of it, I'll have my two feet parallel and my arms hanging at my side. And I think most people stand like that. But if you're a pitahah, and you're standing and you're nonchalant and nobody's around,

• 56:31Speaker 03

  you're gonna have both arms crossed like this and both legs crossed while you stand.

• 56:34Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  And if I sit, I'm gonna sit cross-legged on the ground, whereas if I'm a pitahah, I'm gonna sit with my legs straight out in front of me. Why do they sit like that? We have the same human body, you know? But when I told my wife this, she's a scuba diver, and she said, "Well, that's how you dive. You have your hands like this so that they take, they have less resistance in the water and you can dive faster." And so I thought about that, and I thought, "Oh, when they're walking through the jungle paths, having your hands like this." I walk, swinging my arms, and I'm always hitting thorns.

• 57:09Danny Jones?

  They walk through the jungle like this?

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, they walk through the jungle like this most of the time. They hold their bows and arrows, but they also, very often, especially if they're not, if they have a bag, a basket with a tump line over their head, they will have their arms in front of them like this because their paths are very narrow. And if you walk like most Americans walk, and they also walk single file all the time, they don't walk side by side. I was with a pitahah in the city, and I was trying to talk to him, but he stayed right behind me. And I said, "Walk by me," and he never did. That's just not the way they walk. They would never walk by somebody, side by side, they walk single file. And in the jungle, that's very adaptive, that works really well.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  And there are so many thorns and snakes and things that hang out on the trees by the path that when you walk like this, that's a much safer way to walk. So then they've internalized that. They don't even know they're standing that way, just like most of us don't know how we're standing. When I see two Americans, or three, or four, walking down a narrow sidewalk, taking the whole space, and people have to step out in the street and go around them, I think, it's too bad they're not pitahahs, because we could all use the same sidewalk, we wouldn't have to step off the sidewalk, although it's harder to converse when somebody's behind you than when they're at the side.

• 58:24Danny Jones?

  They probably have way better hearing.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Well, they do, they can hear things far away that we can't hear. I mean, at night, they will tell me that, I can almost do this now after living with them for a long time, but at night, they will say, "Oh, a boat's coming." And I listen, and I can't hear anything. And then maybe 10, 15 minutes later, I'll start to hear the slightest putt, putt, putt, putt, putt of these little diesel engines that travel the Amazon, and they hear it like that. It's like, sometimes reminds me of Darth Vader, because, you know, the force is really strong in this one. They can sort of detect, and that's the way I've described it sometimes, any alteration in the force or in the universe, in the environment that they're in.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  And they actually, their language doesn't have a separate word for jungle and a separate word for cleared space or anything like that. Our whole living environment is the same word. So it is usually associated with jungle, but if I want to tell you, "Don't move," and you're sitting in a canoe, I will say, "Don't disturb the jungle," which means stay still, don't move into the environment in any way. So their whole conception of the way the world is, is different. You know, we make all these boundaries and things, they don't, you know, they don't have a word for mother, and they don't have a word for father, they have a word for parent.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  So they don't make any distinction based on...

• 59:55Danny Jones?

  On sex, on gender.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  And they don't have brother and sister, they have sibling. And they don't have grandfather and grandmother, they have big parent. And the only sex distinction they make is for your son and daughter. Then they have a word for daughter and a word for son, but after that, there's no gender distinctions.

• 1:00:15Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's so fascinating.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  And so they don't perceive these things, right? And they're all siblings. Everybody in the tribe is a sibling. So they all see themselves as one big family, and that affects the way, we don't see ourselves as one big family. I mean, we know that we're all Americans, but you see first, your first culture that you encounter is your family. The second culture is maybe your school. And then it starts going outwards, like in concentric circles. But it's that cultural experience, that society that we were raised in, that shapes our unconscious as well as our conscious. So, you know, we always, we cut something with a knife and fork, and we put the knife down and then put the fork in our right hand. But if you're in England, you see them, or France, you see them cut it with the forks

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  in their left hand, and they put it in their mouth with, and that has their historical explanations for that, when the spoon and the fork first arrived in the different societies, we use the spoon longer than they did, and so it's harder to use a spoon with your left hand, so. But nobody knows these things unless you study them, this is just part of the unconscious that we're all born with, you know? Why do you do this?

• 1:01:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Why do we smile the way we smile? Why do we laugh out loud versus not, you know, pitahah, laughing really loudly is something they do a lot of, but they know, they use different contexts than we use. So these are all things that we do every day that we don't know that we do, and I believe this is all stored in each individual based on their experience. But when we get a people together that have had a lot of same experiences, that's where culture comes from. So I don't think you can point to something and say, "That's culture." Culture is stored in the minds of the individuals.

• 1:02:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  And it emerges sometimes in artifacts, like microphones come out of our culture that would not come out of pitahah culture. In fact, pitahah have told me, when I started taking microphones in to record them, they said, "Yeah, we could have had that stuff, but we never needed it." So without knowing what it takes to build a microphone, they're just not that impressed because they don't use this stuff, so what's the value of it?

• 1:02:24Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, it almost seems like to me that the more conveniences a culture has, the more technology a culture has, the less happy they are.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  This is, you know, I haven't studied that, but I do know that when we start to accumulate things, that becomes a sign of success in a way that when you have fewer things...

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  You feel less happy. Some studies have shown that happiness of a society goes down when the television is introduced, especially in third world countries, because they see things, especially if you're watching like an American movie. You see these fancy cars and you see all these electronic devices.

• 1:03:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  Things of technology that they don't have, and suddenly they want it. They were fine before. They never wanted those things. But now that they have seen them, they want them. And I've had indigenous peoples of Brazil that have a lot of contact with Brazil, with Brazilians, unlike the Pirahá. You know, one guy was with me in a store and said, "Buy me this and buy me that." And I said, "I can't buy you all this stuff." He said, "Well, we never wanted these things. It was you people who made us want them." So that's, so the Pirahá don't, that's one reason they're so happy, I think, is because there's nothing we have that they really want. You know, they're self-sufficient when

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  they're left alone. And, you know, so their attitude and talking to them about Jesus, it was like talking to them about something that could not have possibly been less relevant.

• 1:04:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, walk me through that. I'm very, very interested in that whole process of how that worked. When you, being a young missionary, going into the jungles of the Amazon with this tribe, this primitive tribe. And so, my first question is, were you the first person to try to introduce the concept of Jesus and Christianity to them?

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  The two other missionary families that were there before us tried. I think I'm the first one who did it in a way that they could sort of understand what I was getting across. And so...

• 1:04:45Danny Jones?

  So, did you, did you understand their language at that already? Did you take the time to already like learn their language?

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  I spoke the language really well. And I had written a 400-page book that was published in 1989 on their grammar and how their language works. So, I had been spending almost every day, all day for years, just trying, working on their language till I had it, the parts that I was interested in figured out. Nobody figures out an entire language completely. Not even English. There are still new doctoral dissertations coming out about English. And you would think that if there's a language, we understood backwards and forwards, it would be English. But languages are inexhaustible. But there were a couple of factors that sort of came together for me in the village. One was that I was starting

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  to study science seriously. My doctorate is a doctorate of science of language. So, doesn't mean, you know, that linguistics has a lot of mathematics, but a lot of parts of linguistics do have a lot of mathematics, but, which I consider to be fundamental to science. But I was starting to realize what it meant to replicate experiments, what it meant to get data and test it. And so, induction, building general ideas from specific facts, deduction, going from general ideas to predict the specific facts, and abduction, which is guessing at the facts that you're going to test. So, most science happens by guesswork,

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  which is then tested. If you don't test it, it's just guessing.

• 1:06:19Danny Jones?

  Have a hypothesis.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, hypothesis. Yeah. So, you have a hypo, you have an object you don't understand, you have a hypothesis. If you stop there, you're not a scientist.

• 1:06:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  But have an object and a hypothesis, and you test the hypothesis, then you come up with an alternative hypothesis, and you test that. So, God was, in that sense, for me, I began to realize, since I made the decision to follow God when I was 17, a hypothesis. And I was starting to think about it in terms of hypothesis, and I was starting to test it. But when I met the Pirahá, who test everything, they don't take anything at face value. You know, there's this whole philosophy of empiricism that, you know, or pragmatism, American pragmatism, which is, if you can't tell somebody how to implement something practically, you don't understand it. And you have to be able to test it. You have to be able to do something

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  that shows, that supports what you believe.

• 1:07:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  So, I wasn't finding that with God. And then the Pirahá weren't finding that with God. They kept asking me facts. So, these weren't the only facts. I've had some people make little videos saying, "I gave up God for the stupid reason that some primitive tribe didn't find him convincing." That is not it. First of all, the Pirahá are sophisticated intellectually. And if you have a long talk with them, first you have to learn their language. But if you have a long talk with them, they are really, really insightful people, and their intelligence is second to none. But, at the same time, they don't take things at face value. You know, we call the US state of Missouri, the "show me" state,

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  because people don't believe something unless you can show them. Well, that's the Pirahá. They don't believe something unless you can show them. And that is, in a sense, just like the science I was learning, that you have a hypothesis, but show me. Show me how that works. And test it. And if you can't test it, if there's no way to test it, if you don't have any facts to support it. So, for example, somebody says Jesus is their savior. And this is the way I was thinking. I'm not making this up now. If I say Jesus is my savior, what does that mean empirically for me? I've even preached on this in churches. If you say that Jesus, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, and he makes your life better, how is your life better? Okay, so there was you before Jesus,

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  and there's you after Jesus, and how is it better? And I don't mean happier because now you have more friends. I mean, how are you morally superior to the person you were before?

• 1:08:54Danny Jones?

  Right. Morally superior.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Morally superior.

• 1:08:57Danny Jones?

  That's very interesting. I don't mean to cut you off here.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  No, that's fine.

• 1:09:00Danny Jones?

  I had a conversation, hold that thought, please. I don't mean to derail you.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:09:03Danny Jones?

  I had a conversation with a young woman the other day, in her early twenties, who was telling me how, when her and her boyfriend recently went to their church and tithe a bunch of money, the pastor told her and her boyfriend that they were going to make more money in their businesses.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:24Danny Jones?

  As a response to them tithing to God, which is very counterintuitive to what you just said.

• 1:09:29Speaker 03

  Right. One interesting thing about Christians, and since I was one, I can say this, is that some of the parts of the Bible that don't seem to be intended to be taken literally, such as the creation, the six-day creation, they take very literally. But some of the other parts of the Bible that I think were meant to be taken literally, like turn the other cheek, sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, they say is not literal. So, I, you know, I was talking to a guy one time, and I said, you know, "What do you do about the fact that Jesus said to the young man who wanted to follow him, 'Sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor.'" And that guy did not follow Jesus because he thought to himself, "I got a lot of stuff." You know,

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  he didn't want to sell it all. So, and then the response was, "Well, you don't have to actually do that. You have to be willing to do it." I said, "Okay, so you're willing to do it? Yes." "Well, there are a lot of poor people in the world. Why don't you do it then? If you're willing to do it, do it." And, and that, they don't want to take literally. So, if you see, there are very, you know, I have met priests living in the middle of nowhere, in the jungle, like an Italian priest, born and raised, say, in Rome, and he comes to the Amazon, and he's living in complete poverty, along with the people. And he's out there working with them every day, and then he has mass for them. Now, I consider

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  that much closer to living according to the morality of the gospel.

• 1:11:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  Than I do the prosperity gospel, which says that God actually wants us rich. If there's anything the Bible teaches me, it's what Jesus said, "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven." And then I had a Christian respond with saying, "Yeah, but see, the eye of the needle was the name of a specific gate into Jerusalem."

• 1:11:21Danny Jones?

  They cope with everything.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  That was narrow, but you can get through it. I said, "No, that's not what it meant. It meant an actual needle with an eye in it. So, it's impossible."

• 1:11:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  That's, so...

• 1:11:32Danny Jones?

  And the reason I got into this deep conversation with this young lady the other day was, I was kind of getting in a back and forth. I was like, I was really trying to understand her thinking to like, she really believed that this money was going to God and was going to earn them more money, and that this is the right thing to do. And meanwhile, the pastor who she gave the money to drove to the church in a Rolls Royce, and was wearing a gold Rolex.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is, this is so common. If that's the way God works, he's just another investment. You know, he's just a sure investment. I don't know anybody who tithe. Most of the people I know who tithe are not wealthy. I know a lot of people who are wealthy, who didn't tithe, but there are a lot of poor people who tithe. In fact, the interesting thing is, the Apostle Paul, when he was trying to raise money from some of the wealthy churches that he was going to, for the poorer churches, actually for churches that were having emergencies, that, you know, they having famine or something, he went to the poor people because he said their own poverty makes them want to give more.

• 1:12:32Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Because they know what it's like to be poor. And I have often found that there are very generous, wealthy people. Not all of them are Christians. They're just generous people. And there are very wealthy, poor people. I mean, not wealthy in money, but wealthy in generosity of the spirit, that give what they have. If I'm traveling the Amazon in my outboard motor, and I've done that over 1,000 miles at a time with all my gas with me, usually I camp on a beach somewhere by myself. But I know that if I see a little shack with a family in it, I can pull up there, and they'll put me up for the night, and they'll feed me. And they're poor as dirt. They'd have almost nothing. But what they have, they're going to give to me. They're going to share with me. And

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  also, because I know that's how they are, I also give them a lot of canned food and stuff like that.

• 1:13:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Sort of repay them. But

• 1:13:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  There's nobody who's going to say, "Get out of here." They're going to give me, if they have one cup, they're going to give me coffee in that cup. You know, they're just going to share everything.

• 1:13:32Danny Jones?

  That feeling is, it's contagious. Because when you have that feeling of going to that family in that hut, and them helping you and giving you coffee or whatever, it makes you, when you're in their situation, want to do the same thing for someone else, because you know how good you felt when they helped you.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, my ex-father-in-law, who had been a missionary in Brazil and the Amazon for many years, he liked to pitch up, when he was in the States, he would pick up hitchhikers. And he would bring them home, and he would feed them, and give them a place to stay. And then he might drive them 100 miles down the road to their next ride, or drive them to their final destination. And that's biblical, that is literal interpretation, you know, Jesus said, if a person asks for your sweater, give them your coat too. If they want you to take, go with them a mile, go with them two miles. If they ask you for this, give them double. Be generous. Generosity is, is what Jesus taught. And that's a rare quality. I mean, it's not unknown.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  A lot of people are generous, but I think my father-in-law, after, and it affected me too, when you experience all that generosity from people who really don't seem to have anything to give, you need to be generous. You feel a need to be generous yourself. So would I today, if somebody poor came to my house and asked to spend the night, would I let him into my house to spend the night? I used to, and I like to think that I would now, still. You know, I remember being in the city, because I would spend half the year at the university, whether I was either studying or teaching after I finished my graduate work, or I would be in the tribe. And, and one time where I'm just sitting in my house, having a cup of coffee with my wife, and three Chavante Indians from

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  the Xingu Park of Brazil, you know, with their paint and long hair and pierced ears with the guys, came up the house and said in broken Portuguese, "Somebody said you work with Indians." I said, "I do." They said, "We want to stay with you. We have to be here for four days and we don't have a place to stay." So they came into my house and they took over the house, you know, I was cooking for them and doing all this stuff for them, and their dog was pooping all over the house, and because they had a little puppy with them. And I'm thinking, you know, this is, this is what it means to be a missionary. This is what it means to follow Jesus, is to give what you have and share your last crust of bread with people like that. And so when I see Christians doing that, I can

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  think, yeah, maybe they're morally superior to what they were before. I don't expect us to compare ourselves to other people, because we don't, we've never walked in the same shoes. Everybody has a different life story. What I want is people to compare themselves with themselves. What were you like before you became a Christian? And what are you like now that you're a Christian? Well, I was, I took a lot of drugs. I, I didn't study. And when, when I became a Christian, I started getting straight A's, and I stopped using drugs and all of that. I now explain that socially, rather than spiritually.

• 1:16:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  But

• 1:16:31Danny Jones?

  Did that make you a better person, that you were no longer, you know, slinging acid in front of a, what was it, a Jimi Hendrix concert?

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert, yeah. But I, which I don't actually consider immoral. But

• 1:16:41Danny Jones?

  Right, me neither.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  That's a different matter. But I hope that it made me more moral. I think I struggle with some of the same things I've always struggled with, you know, I worry too much about certain things. I, I've always had a, a bad temper that I try to keep under control. And so I used to, when I was successful, I would say, "That's the Holy Spirit," you know. As I used to tell people when I spoke, you know, I say, "If you see something about me that's irritable, that you don't like, that's flawed, well, that's just me. That's who I am. If you see something about me that's really generous and sweet and good, that's the Holy Spirit." That's what happened after I converted, because that's not how I ever was.

• 1:17:22Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  And, and that's what I preach, that's the message I used to preach a lot, that if God has really changed you, what has he changed you into? And how does that stack up to people who don't know God? What is the evidence in your life that Jesus is really the Savior, as opposed to somebody else? Everybody wants to be rich. So if you think the reason to give money to God is to get a lot of money back, you're no different than anybody else out in the world. That hasn't made you stand out for Jesus. There's one thing you can say about Jesus, as all, all we know about him is he wasn't rich. And he wasn't interested in being rich. And he was interested, and when he saw people trying to make money in the temple, you know, he chased them out. People have a hard time

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  understanding that violence, but he was against wealth, he was against, especially using the church to get wealthy. So

• 1:18:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  That, that view just contradicts everything I believe about the Bible.

• 1:18:19Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a great Thomas Paine book about the age of, called The Age of Reason, and I'm familiar with it.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:18:26Danny Jones?

  It's really interesting, you know, how he talks about like the lineage, or the bastard, the bastardization of Christianity from Jesus Christ, you know, when all, everything was written until now. How you have like, the church fathers who rely to make money off preaching this gospel, and like, how like, over time, that gets more corrupt.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:46Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  So there are some denominations today in which the pastor is always a lay pastor, which means he has a regular job, like everybody else, but he's considered to be a good teacher of the Bible. And so on Sundays, in addition to everything else he does, he does this, and he accepts no salary. He accepts no house. I think that's a lot closer aligned to the New Testament. The, the New Testament does say that a worker is worthy of his pay. So some pastors say they can take pay. I asked a, an African-American pastor in Chicago once, when I was out there at Moody's studying, I said, "You drive a Cadillac, and nobody

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  else in your church drives, and many of them don't have cars." And he said, "Well, this is a fact that many white people don't understand about the black church." He said, "We're all poor. And when we have a church, we can make one person look really good, and we want it to be the pastor, because he represents us." So they're, they're paying for this stuff for me, because I am their representative, and they don't want people to think that their representative is poor. That might be true. I, I really liked this guy very much. And so I actually think that, that was an accurate statement. This was 1974. So who knows whether anybody believes this kind of stuff anymore, but he did. And, but

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  when you see a white pastor who's really wealthy, and they're in a wealthy congregation, or especially if they're wealthy and they're in a poor congregation, I find this to be absolutely

• 1:20:21Danny Jones?

  Problematic.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  problematic with regard to the New Testament. You know, there's, some pastors have come up with the idea that the pastor's salary should be more or less the average salary of people in their church, because they're representing that social group. Yeah, that, that might be okay, but I actually think that the pastor's salary should be, he should be the, one of the poorest people. He should be living this example of

• 1:20:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Of, and yeah, she, the pastor needs books, the pastor needs a place to study. He doesn't need to own those things, though. Those things can be provided. But this is such a radical difference. You have to go all the way back to Jesus to see somebody who lived like that.

• 1:21:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  Unless you find one of these incredible priests that I have located in different parts of the jungle.

• 1:21:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Who are living the New Testament far more faithfully than many Protestants I know.

• 1:21:16Danny Jones?

  So going back to you teaching this stuff to the, no, I'm forgetting how to pronounce their name again.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Pita-ha.

• 1:21:26Danny Jones?

  Pita-ha. When you're, when you're explaining this stuff to the Pita-ha, you've learned their language, you understand how to communicate with them, you're telling them, you start by telling them about Jesus.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:35Danny Jones?

  Right. And you're saying that they look at everything in life pragmatically, like, "How does this affect me? I need to see it to believe it."

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:46Danny Jones?

  And you're explaining to them essentially myths.

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  Right. So, so just to emphasize that I already was struggling with this from my scientific training. So it wasn't that the Pita-ha were the first ones to do this. But when they started acting like scientists with me, then that really affected my thinking. But they would ask, just first, first of all, mundane questions, like, "What's Jesus look like? What's his color?" They really wanted to know the color of Jesus, because my color, white, is considered quite unhealthy. They're not even sure if you have blood, because if you have blood, how can you be white?

• 1:22:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  But they saw me bleed one time, so they said, "Well, that's interesting. He's white, but he has blood," you know?

• 1:22:23Danny Jones?

  New data point.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so they would ask me questions, "So what color was he?" And I couldn't tell them for sure, because nobody knows for sure. I said, "Some people think he was white, some people think he was brown." And they couldn't believe that I hadn't seen him, and I didn't know anybody who had seen him. And they said, "You don't even know what he looks like. What is, you know, how did he do this? How did he do that?" They wanted to know about Jesus the Person, because I was always talking to them about Jesus the Person. And I realized, I have the hypothesis of Jesus, and I don't have any evidence to back it up. And, and this to me is, the people sometimes ask me, "Why are you an atheist instead of an agnostic?" Because an agnostic says there could be a God, but I don't know.

• 1:23:08Danny Jones?

  Right. They don't believe and don't not believe.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

  An atheist says there is no God. So how could you be so certain? Have you been to every planet to check it out and see there's no God? And I say simply, "It is the scientific principle of parsimony. What is the quickest and shortest explanation?" Or William of Ockham, Ockham's razor, what is the easiest explanation? There has been nothing in my life that I need God to help me explain. There's not a single fact of my life anymore that the hypothesis of God plays any role in. There are a lot of things I don't understand, but I don't need God to help me not understand them, you know? There are a lot of things

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  I do understand, or I think I understand fairly well, through scientific method and through other people. You know, we learn things because of authorities, that's the most dangerous. An authority says, "This is the truth, and we believe it because the authority said it."

• 1:24:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Or we believe things because we've used the scientific method to arrive at our beliefs. We've had hypotheses, and we test the hypotheses, and we keep testing them all our lives. We've never done testing our hypotheses about what gets us through life. So the combination of my

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  Changed thinking to what I consider to be more scientific thinking, as well as the much more scientific thinking of the Pirahhas. So I sort of get offended when people say he converted due to some Stone Age primitive group. There's no Stone Age group in the world today. The Stone Age disappeared thousands and thousands of years ago. There are, even if you just find a group that can only use stones, that doesn't mean they're living in the Stone Age. These are modern humans with modern human brains and modern human cultures. They just live very differently and technologically much more simply. But these are modern human beings that choose not to live any differently than they live. And they've seen the city, they've seen other things, they don't desire those things.

• 1:25:10Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  To live the way they live. They're not, as the Bible talks about, the sin of covetousness. Well, that's one thing Pirahhas don't have. If you have something you want to share with them, they, fine, we'll take it, you know? That's great. But the only thing they ever ask me for are really small things. They'll ask for like, they'll see that I have fish hooks. So when they teach me their language, they've all been so good to me over the last 50 years, teaching me, and I'm the student still. I'm, I've gone in there as the student, not the teacher. That's another thing that the missionary occupation irritates me a little bit, because not only is it a sort of colonial activity, but it's, the missionary comes in as the teacher. But the missionary isn't, nobody from the outside is the teacher, they're the student.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  So as I talked to the Pirahha and realized how happy they were, and how I didn't have the evidence that I needed to really say that I had tested my hypothesis meaningfully, and I saw that both as a scientist and as a missionary, I began to think, you know, maybe they're on to something. And they would never tell you, one time, a group of men came into the house and they said, "Hey, Dan, yeah, we really like you. You know, you're here with us, you do medical work for our kids, and, and you're funny, and we like you, and, but we don't want to hear any more about Jesus, you know? We're not Americans. And, and we don't want somebody who tells us we can't have sex with other women. We don't want somebody who tells us we can't drink. We do what we want.

• 1:26:41Speaker 03

  That's the Pirahha way. We all do what we want. And nobody tells other people what they should be doing. That's not entirely true, but it's pretty close to true. And so they said, you know, we don't know any Brazilians who do this either. We only know Americans who do this. So this seems to be an American thing.

• 1:26:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  So like great anthropologists, they discovered that what I was trying to share with them was really more about America and America's interpretation of the New Testament than it was about other countries' interpretation of the New Testament. There are a lot of people who believe in the gospel who don't believe in missionaries, don't believe that missionaries should be sent out. That's very foreign to many Americans. But the number of missionaries going into the world today is, is, from what I've read, I haven't, you know, I've stopped studying, my undergraduate degree involved a lot of missionary studies, but the number is less, because most churches today don't want to give money from their church to send people abroad. They want to spend the money on, from the church, on the church itself.

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  So it's more of this gospel where Jesus wants us to get wealthier and wealthier, which is just, in my opinion, millions of people would disagree with me, but that's the opposite of the gospel.

• 1:27:50Danny Jones?

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• 1:28:34Danny Jones?

  I personally like it because it incorporated all of my previous lab tests and incorporated into the new system, which gave me a more long-term comprehensive outlook on, on how I can optimize my body, my supplements, and my daily routine. Superpower is about being proactive with your health instead of waiting for something to go wrong. Take control of your health with Superpower. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 50 bucks off their Superpower membership. Head over to superpower.com and use the code DANIE for 50 dollars off. After you sign up, they're going to ask how you heard about Superpower, and please tell them the Danny Jones podcast sent you. So they had no concept for gods whatsoever, like, in, in general? No concept of spirits or ghosts?

• 1:29:17Speaker 03

  I thought they had concepts of spirits when I first got there. And in some of my publications, I've talked about their spirits. But that was a contamination of my Christian mind. I could only, so they were talking about entities of the jungle that they saw that I couldn't see. And it, it took me a while to realize that these weren't spirits. These were just unexplained things they had seen, but they categorized them. So they might hear somebody talking with a high voice, and they would give that a particular name, "kawaboge," which means "fast mouth," talking fast, like in records, speed it up, you know, with a high voice. And they might see something, it could have been a deer, you know? But it could have been a, they thought it was a person-like thing, but it had long teeth,

• 1:30:01Speaker 03

  and so they call that "big tooth." And they have these things, but they're sort of a mixture of fact and fiction. They see these entities, and they tell stories about them, and those stories are very entertaining. So it's like the Boogeyman or Little Red Riding Hood.

• 1:30:14Danny Jones?

  Like Bigfoot?

• 1:30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, Bigfoot, exactly. It's, it's, it's very much like, like Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman. And so I, and then I realized, well, they don't have spirits. And talking to God, you have to, that concept just means nothing to them. So, you know, anthropologists, one or two anthropologists have gone in and said, "They do have a concept of God, but these people don't speak the language." If you don't learn to speak the language fluently, the Pirahhas have learned some stories in very simple Portuguese that have been told to them by Brazilians, which are part of the river culture of Brazil, legends and entities and things like this.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  So some people record these stories and don't realize they're getting them secondhand. These aren't Pirahha stories. They sound like Pirahha stories, but when you speak the language, you hear the Pirahha tell the real stories, the stories they tell among themselves. And you realize, you know, there's nothing like a God. And so if you want to talk about God, how do you, how do you describe God? You know, you, you can say, "God tells everybody what to do. Nobody, everybody has to obey God." That's like antithetical to Pirahha culture, which, in which nobody tells anybody what to do. That's a high value for them. "You don't tell me what to do, and I don't tell you what to do. We work together, but if you don't want to work with me and you don't want to go hunting,

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  well, your family's going to go hungry, but that's up to you, that's your business." So, so many of the things, like, like Christians often talk about being born again. This is not something that is going to appeal to a Hindu who is always being born again on the cycle of life, and in fact, would like to reach Nirvana and not have to do that anymore. So, so these are cultural concepts that we import poorly into other societies, and you often find what you're looking for. So if you're looking for God, you're going, you might latch on to something that sounds like a God's concept. In fact, many missionaries believe that every single culture has concepts,

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  they call them "redemptive analogies," that you can use, once you understand the culture, to bring in the message of Jesus. But I found no evidence for that in the more or less 20 groups of the Amazon that I've worked with.

• 1:32:32Danny Jones?

  Did you ever have any conversation with them about like, do they have any belief of what happens when they die? Or do they just think it's, they're dead and gone and there's nothing there?

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. You know, I've asked somebody, "What happens when you die?" And there's a dead monkey lying by the fire. He said, "Well, that's what happens, you're just dead."

• 1:32:49Danny Jones?

  You're food.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, you know, they, they bury people, you know? They just dig a hole in the ground and put somebody in, and it's not systematic. It's not like they always bury everybody the same way. They bury them usually with the things they own, and they usually bury them sitting, sitting in a narrow hole, because that takes less work than digging a hole for them to lie down in. And then they put some sticks over their head and some banana leaves, and then they pack it full of dirt. And they like to build the graves by the riverbank, which is going to cave in in a few years because of the erosion. And so the, the graves don't last very long. They're washed into the river after the person is totally decomposed.

• 1:33:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  And so they miss people. I have somebody come in from the field one time, a guy, and a friend of ours had just died that year. And his name was Isabe, and he came in and he says, "I almost cried today in the field because I was thinking of Isabe. He was such a good friend, but he's dead and he's gone. It's not, he lives on in the memory, but they don't think he's in heaven or with God or anything like that." I've had some people say, "So you think," you know, like, my mother died when I was 11, and I, and I have missed her in 1962, the same day that Kennedy died in 1963. And I, so I've missed my mother now for 64 years. But I don't plan to ever, I don't expect to ever see her again.

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  And for some people, that's really hard to, but if I'm dead and she's dead, neither one of us is going to miss the other. You know, as Mark Twain said, "I, I live for, I, eternity was no problem for me billions of years before I was born."

• 1:34:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  And I don't think it will be for billions of years after I'm gone. So, yeah, I just don't find, I agree with the Pirahha that there doesn't seem to be any evidence worthwhile that says we're anything other than dead when we're dead.

• 1:34:47Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, it's probably the same thing, well, there's probably, we probably experienced the same thing that we experienced before we were born.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, which is unconsciousness, you know?

• 1:34:59Danny Jones?

  Man, that's a terrifying thought, though. It's very uncomfortable. Like, the fear of death is like, there's been a lot of, lots of people who theorize, like, the fear of death is what drives our psyche, right?

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably that has something to do with it. I don't fear death, I fear the pain. I don't want to die in a flaming car accident.

• 1:35:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  I don't, if, but I don't fear death itself. But, you know, it's...

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  I don't understand the fear of death, but it is a very big thing and it affects people psychologically. Freud had a lot to say about it. You know, many other pioneering psychoanalysts and psychologists talk about the fear of death. And I, the ironic thing is, the people who are most preoccupied with death, when I was a missionary, are other missionaries.

• 1:35:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  And they're worried about death. And I'm, like my father-in-law, he was a really cool guy, brave guy and everything, but he was terrified of death. And I said, "Why are you afraid of death? Isn't that the whole point, is for to remove the fear of death from people? You know, you're gonna go in heaven and be singing hymns or whatever it is you're gonna be doing up there. Why would you fear death?" But he was terrified of death.

• 1:36:06Danny Jones?

  And these people aren't?

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  No, they're not afraid of death. They don't want to die right now, but they're not afraid of it. It happens to everybody. They, they see everybody die. And life requires a lot of effort. If you're a hunter-gatherer, you, you cannot let days go by mourning. You've got to get right back out there and hunt, or your children are gonna go hungry. And so, they don't stop for anything. They might mourn. I've seen them cry, but I've also seen them bury somebody, cry, and then head right out hunting. Because you're still hungry, you still have to have food, and they don't have a custom of everybody bringing you casseroles after the funeral.

• 1:36:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  So...

• 1:36:46Danny Jones?

  What's their lifespan?

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  Well, to figure out the lifespan, you have to take into account infant mortality.

• 1:36:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  And when we first got there, I would say that very few children made it to 10 years of age. They died really young. That's improved a bit because we helped them, and also the Brazilian government still makes trips and helps them now with vaccinations and things. I don't know if they're still doing it, but they were. But, once you get past that critical period, I know people who seem to be in their 70s and 80s. I would talk to a guy back in 1978, who, I showed him a picture that was taken in 1917 by an explorer there, and he was surrounded by Pirahã. He said, "That's me right there." I remember that guy.

• 1:37:34Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  So, he remembered this picture that's taken in 1917, and this is, we're talking 1978. So, 61 years later, well, I can remember things now that happened 61 years ago.

• 1:37:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  So, it just meant that he was in his 70s. He was unusual, but you do see a lot of people. It's also hard to estimate their age if you don't know exactly when they were born, because we could, I got, I was getting gray hairs when I was in my late 30s and early 40s. They were not, they don't get gray hair until they're, well into their 60s, and then it's not much. It's just like a strand. If you see somebody with all white hair, that, you do see it, but it's highly unusual.

• 1:38:15Danny Jones?

  Wow. And you were, you were mentioning something about how, like, if they do something that violates, that violates any of their cultural guidelines, or like laws, or if they do something bad, they will change their whole identity to like, get away, separate themselves from that?

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Yes. They have, they have different names throughout their life. And those names are based on what they consider to be major transitions. So, a very common name for children, little children who are like, 5 to 10 years of age, but usually around 4, 5, is corn. Chehua. So, when we first got there, my son, who was, you know, not even 2 years old, had really blonde hair, and they called him corn. But that's a common name with them. My daughters had common names for different kinds of straw. But as you get older, you take, once you get to puberty, you take on a different name. But if you've also had

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  some traumatic experience, or some wonderfully pleasurable experience, you change your name. And then who you were before then, you know that, that you're associated with them, but that's not who you are today, you know? So, if you did something really bad under one name, you, you're not necessarily responsible that, for that when you change names.

• 1:39:37Danny Jones?

  Ah, that's so interesting.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  So, they go through life metamorphosizing, sort of morally and experientially. And they, you know, we've all gone through traumatic experiences. We've all had these life-changing experiences. We just don't name ourselves differently after every one. But that's a good way to keep record of how many of those experiences we've had. But I came into the village one time, and my main language teacher was, you know, his name was one thing, and I started calling him by that name. And he didn't respond. And then he turned, and he knew that I didn't know his new name. So, he turned, he says, "You're calling that guy,

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  that's not me anymore." That name got old and rotten. It spoiled like meat. Now I use this name. And, so, you know, and we, we do that to a much smaller scale, you know? Sometimes people have names for writing. They have a different name for writing. You have Nom de Plume, or somebody writes a book. Like Stephen King has written so many novels, but not all of them under the name Stephen King. I forget what his other name is, but he's written several novels under a different name. And J.K. Rowling wrote books under a different name. And sometimes celebrities, they take a different name, you know?

• 1:40:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  And, you know, my, one of my favorite singers.

• 1:41:01Danny Jones?

  Garth Brooks?

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Muddy Waters, he was McKinley Morganfield, you know, which doesn't have the same ring as Muddy Waters.

• 1:41:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:41:12Speaker 03

  You know? But, so, Muddy Waters represents, "I'm a bluesman. I'm a bluesman now. I'm not McKinley Morganfield, I'm Muddy Waters." And, so, it's not unheard of in our, in our culture, but for the Pirahãs, universal, everybody changes names.

• 1:41:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, it seems like, you know, maybe it's like some sort of a way of releasing trauma, or, you know, getting away from, you know, like a similar way to coping that like Christians will do, where they like, confess their sins, they feel like they're being released. Maybe this is kind of like, similar. They feel like they're releasing themselves, or forgiving themselves.

• 1:41:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:53Danny Jones?

  Of all, of the negative stuff they've done, or whatever, and transforming into somebody else that's not associated with any of that stuff anymore.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  Right. And, and the Pope usually takes a different name once they're made Pope, you know? The King of England takes a different name. This king didn't, Charles, but often they can, he can take any name he wants. He wants to be known as, as King Leon. He can be called King Leon. It just depends on the tradition. But, the name change represents a change in life. So, it's not unheard of for us. It's just that not everybody does it. You know, the Egyptians mummified the people from wealthy families. But the first civilization of the Americas, the Carl Supé civilization of ancient Peru, 10,000 years ago, was mummifying everybody. If you died, you were mummified. So, they had a process

• 1:42:44Speaker 03

  of mummification, quite sophisticated, you know, 10,000 years ago, but it wasn't reserved for the wealthy. So, we do all these things as a society, name changes, mummification, and all of this, to indicate these transitions, and indicate our relationship with the person, and, and that person's own relationship with themselves, you know? So, I, I think it's very interesting, but it is a way to, you know, get free of guilt, in a sense. You know, Christians are told that once they accept Christ, all their sins are forgiven, and they should not feel guilty anymore. All that's been forgiven. And that's a huge, if you're a person who's done a lot of bad things and feel really guilty, that's a huge attraction, right?

• 1:43:26Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  And some churches, you take on a new name. So, it's very similar to the Pirahãs, but there's no baptism, and there's no religion involved.

• 1:43:34Danny Jones?

  Now, when you were starting to question your own faith, like, how, how long did that take? Like, how much time did you have to spend down there, living with those people, before you started to question that? And then also, something we didn't mention, at one point, you actually brought your, your entire family, including your small children, down there to live.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Yes. So, I first went to them in 1977. And then in 1979, and from that point onward, whenever I went, my whole family went. So, my kids were pretty much raised there, and they still today speak Pirahã. My middle daughter sometimes sends me texts in Pirahã, which is really cool. And if I start speaking Pirahã, my kids understand it just fine. So, they grew up there.

• 1:44:22Speaker 03

  But I forget the other question that you asked.

• 1:44:25Danny Jones?

  I was gonna, yeah, the first part of it was like, what was that process like?

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:44:31Danny Jones?

  Of you starting to like question your own faith and you know, you're down there with your entire family who obviously they're also Christians, right?

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  Yes, oh, very strong Christians. So I would read the Bible by kerosene lamp every night to my kids and my family. We would always pray together. I also read other books like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Chronicles of Narnia and stuff. We, no TV, no radio, you just set your family out there in the middle of the jungle. So by the kerosene lamp, they would, we would sit around in a circle and it was the one part of the house where I asked the pita ha not to come to because it was where the kids slept and I wanted to read to them before they went to bed. So we had this one private time as a family. In the meantime, I'm going back and forth between graduate school and the tribe. I'm spending about six months in each place and I was getting challenges to my faith from science down in graduate school and I was getting challenges to my faith and I prayed

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  about it because the Apostle Thomas said that he was struggling with his faith and he, so he told Jesus, "Lord, I believe. Help mine unbelief." And so I prayed like that. I said, "I'm, I'm struggling believing God. Help me with my belief." So after about, probably after about eight years, I was starting to lose the battle of keeping my faith. And there was a time, so I became a Christian in 1968 and by about 1988, I realized that I didn't believe anymore. This process took several years. So from about 1982 to 1988,

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  I was struggling with faith. 1988, I went over to the dark side of science and realized that there's no scientific support for this stuff that was so important to me, but I didn't tell anybody. My wife sort of knew. I never told her exactly, but she sort of knew. And I stopped leading prayers a lot and stuff because I felt hypocritical, you know, praying with my children when I didn't actually.

• 1:46:35Danny Jones?

  But you didn't have a conversation with them about this?

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  Eventually, but it was, it was not until 2002.

• 1:46:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

  So the Iraq war started and I started getting emails from Christians telling me that the soldiers are the angels of peace of God. And I thought, that's like the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. And they, and they were talking about God's work in Iraq through the American soldiers. And I'm thinking, yeah, we're wiping out people and burning them with napalm and I don't want to be associated with this. So I didn't, I decided, because when you're a missionary and a pastor and you say, "I don't believe," you lose your job. But by this time, I had a sta- a stable job in academics. I was teaching at the University of Manchester in England and my children were grown and gone. And I told my wife after

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  I got that email, I read it to her and I said, "Dick, I'm not going to pretend to believe anymore. I do not believe this stuff." So she walked over to the phone and made a long distance call from England to the US and told my kids that your father says he doesn't believe anymore. And this led to lots of turmoil and she, it led to divorce and

• 1:47:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  Uh, stuff like this. And she still lives down in Brazil, near the pita ha's. They come out and visit her.

• 1:47:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, she does?

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, you know, she's so, you know, this

• 1:47:53Danny Jones?

  She's still trying to convert them?

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, she still is.

• 1:47:55Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  It's not, it's, you're not going to convert them. I've told her this and it just upsets her. But so she's made no, no progress, but she believes it and she's really faithful to it. And she also believes in living in poverty and she lives in incredibly humble circumstances there in the middle of nowhere. And she barely has enough money to feed herself, but she's always taking in money, always taking in food to share with the pita ha as much as she can. And she always has coffee for them when they come or she'll make Kool-Aid or something like that. So they all love her to pieces because she's a sweet person. They can go and if they want to sleep in her house, they can. She doesn't mind. And you know, so it's a dangerous existence for an elderly woman to be living there all by herself in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:48:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  But that's what she does. So she's consistent. She's never wavered in her faith. And I have and I abandoned it and that led to the breakup of our relationship. But she still, she has Starlink and she still sends me videos of the pita ha on WhatsApp and we talk about how they're doing and stuff.

• 1:48:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  She's, you know, she'll say things. I, I don't want to be married again, but you were so good down here and I really do miss having somebody else to talk to who knows this stuff as well as I do.

• 1:49:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, man.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  You know, but, uh, so it took me, it took me a long time and, uh, and, but now it's been 20, 25 years since I've been out and open. It was somewhat, some, something like, I guess, coming out as gay to your family would be like, you know, it's just this confession that all this stuff you thought about me and who you thought I was, was not entirely correct.

• 1:49:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:34Speaker 03

  I have this thing that makes me very, very different than you thought I was. And it took my kids quite a while to get used to it. They are now.

• 1:49:42Danny Jones?

  Are your kids still religious?

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  My two daughters are. My son is not. But my two daughters are very strong in their faith and they say, "You know, I don't care what you believe, Dad. You know, it's up to you. I love you. You're my dad, but it doesn't affect my belief."

• 1:49:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  You know, which I think is very healthy. They're very smart. I think my kids are all smart. They've just reached different conclusions than I have. Radically different conclusions than I have. But, uh, but you know, we, we talk all the time and I know that a couple of my grandkids like the fact that I'm not a believer. I don't know if they're believers or not. I never asked them, you know, and I don't really care one way or the other. And I've had, you know, my, one grandchild that I'm, I'm, I'm close to all my grandchildren. One of them called me and he said, "I'm really worried about you, Grandpa." I said, "Why are you worried about me?" He said, "Because if you don't believe in Jesus, then my belief tells me you're going to go to hell after you die."

• 1:50:38Speaker 03

  I said, "Yes, I understand that. I know your belief. Don't forget that I have an undergraduate degree in Bible and theology and I have no excuse. You know, you don't have to worry about me. Everything, my decision is my responsibility. And if there is a hell, whoops, I made a mistake, you know, but that's up to me. And you don't have to worry about it. Don't have any fear for me. I'm quite happy. I'm pretty confident there is none. You're confident there is one. And I think neither one of us is going to find out who was right because we're both going to be unconscious for eternity."

• 1:51:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  Uh, but don't worry about me. I, I have made myself who I am and I'll have to live with the consequences or not.

• 1:51:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

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• 1:53:13Danny Jones?

  Do they have any, the pita ha, do they have any access to any kind of drugs or, or alcohol or like?

• 1:53:25Speaker 03

  Yes and yes.

• 1:53:26Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  Um, so I've never really seen them use the drugs that much. It's a, the one they've shown me, the only one they've shown me comes from the bark of a certain tree and I've never been with them to collect the bark. I've only seen the bark. And they, they, they let it boil down and they rub this stuff all over their skins, skin and they get really high.

• 1:53:48Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  And they start running everywhere.

• 1:53:49Danny Jones?

  Did you ever try it?

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  No, they never offered it. They never have that much and they never offered it. And by that time, as a missionary, I wasn't interested in trying drugs. I had enough drugs in my life and I don't miss them. Except I do take some cannabis at night to help sleep, but other than that, I don't, don't miss drugs. Alcohol, if you go in there with alcohol, they'll, they're going to drink it until it's gone.

• 1:54:14Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  Every man, woman, and child will get falling down drunk. They're, I told them, I said, "It'll be really easy."

• 1:54:21Danny Jones?

  And child.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, everybody. There's no age limit. They don't, there's no, if they have tobacco, you'll see two-year-olds walking around smoking cigarettes. They just don't make these age distinctions. It's not part of their culture. You're a human being. Why can I do something that you can't do?

• 1:54:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:35Speaker 03

  You know, so, um,

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  You know, it's, it's really funny. They also are very, you know, so they drink. I told them, "It would be very easy to kill all of you." "Oh, how can you kill us?" I said, "Well, a Brazilian could kill all of you." "How?" "We have us run through the jungle. They can't find us." I said, "Oh, no, they just put whiskey on the beach and it's all poisoned." And they said, "Oh, yeah, that would kill us all." Because they know that they would drink it all.

• 1:54:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:00Speaker 03

  You know, they said, "They would almost certainly drink it all. They know that, you know." Um, so they, they're free about that kind of stuff. They're free about sex, you know? There's no age limit for sex. I've seen guys who are

• 1:55:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  Who are like fifty and over with six-year-old girls that they're living with. And, uh, but pedophilia just doesn't, that's a concept we have. It's not a concept they have. Uh, and, and those girls are gonna be normal parts of society and nobody's gonna think that's a, that's a weird thing. You know, I had a married woman, you know, so very attractive married Pirahua woman, married in their culture, and, um, she came to me one time when I was by myself. She said, "Do you wanna get on top of me?" And I said, um, "I already have a wife." She said, "You only want one woman?" I said, "Yeah, I just, I have a wife." And she, she, she turns around, she says, "He won't get on top of me. He says he only wants one woman." So

• 1:55:51Danny Jones?

  And they all laughed at you?

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, they all laughed. What a, what a weirdo, you know? What a weirdo. And then that was, uh, I thought, I suppose not being a Christian has its benefits in some way.

• 1:56:02Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what they talk about. They love that freedom, you know? And so a Christian, a believer, any religion might say, "These are just satanic people." They, they don't like restrictions on sexual contact. They don't like restrictions on drugs and alcohol. Everybody does what they wanna do, and yet they function because the reality of needing to hunt and have those skills, this stuff, that trumps everything. And they don't have that much access to alcohol. And they don't have that much access to drugs. Yeah, they do it once a year. You know, that's a big deal. Alcohol is a little bit more of a problem, but now that they have a reservation and those traders can't come up with their alcohol, then they don't have so much of a problem with it.

• 1:56:43Danny Jones?

  So, so no, no rituals? No ceremonies? Nothing like that?

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  Not really. The closest thing that they have to a ritual is they, when it's dry season and it's a full moon and the night is so beautiful, the jungle is so beautiful at night, they like to walk around in a circle. And if there's enough people, they walk around in a circle the other direction. And they, their music is tonal. I mean, their, their language is tonal. And so by making the high tones a bit higher and the low tones a bit lower and changing the rhythm, it sounds like song. And so they're actually, in a sense, just talking, but it sounds like they're singing. So are they singing or are they talking? It's a sort of, I call it musical speech. And it's a way of talking and communicating, but they'll do that for like three days at a time.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  And there's all kinds of promiscuity that goes on at that time, but they're all just having, that's the closest thing they have to a ritual.

• 1:57:38Danny Jones?

  Wow. So they, so

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  But it doesn't represent any transition or anything?

• 1:57:42Danny Jones?

  But they do have the concept of wives, or no?

• 1:57:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:57:46Danny Jones?

  But they can just, there's no polyg- like polygamy? They, they don't have to stay loyal to that one woman?

• 1:57:52Speaker 03

  No, once in a while you see polygamy. But most of the time, it's like I talk about American culture, serial monogamy. They marry, they have many partners over the course of their life, but it's not the same one. You know, I, my uncle was killed in a drunk driving accident when he was thirty-nine, but he had already been married seven times. Uh, so in that sense, he was more like a Pirahua. Uh, so they change partners, uh, frequently and you decide you wanna stay with somebody else, the two of you disappear and live together in the jungle for a few days. And when you come back, everybody knows, now you're the couple. And the other partners that you did have,

• 1:58:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  They cry or they get upset, but it doesn't last long and then they're done.

• 1:58:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's just, I was, I'm so curious about the drug aspect of it, you know, as far as like, you know, what plants they could use for certain things or like certain medicines or whatever. Because, you know, there's, there's so many things that can go wrong. And when you're living in the jungle, like whether you get attacked by a jaguar or bitten by a snake and like, are there ways that they have figured out to treat that, like, or deal with the pain? Or, you know, like the one thing that nature created was pain and suffering, but nature also created drugs to help with that.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  I, I, I have to confess that I do know that they have a lot of plants that they use for different things, uh, in that sense. But I've never, not being an ethnobotanist,

• 1:59:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:15Speaker 03

  I have never studied it because I don't know the names of all the plants. But I did read a wonderful book about the Amazon, um, by a guy named Plotkin, The Shaman's Apprentice, in which he is an ethnobotanist. And he talks about his time collecting plants and their functions, especially their medicinal functions. And so I thought, I'd need to be making more of an effort in this area. So I was with another group that time, the Bana Oa, and I was starting to study their language. And so I just started collecting pants, plants, because they spoke Portuguese, um, as well as their language. Uh, unlike the Pirahua. So they would tell me the Portuguese names for all these plants and what they were used for.

• 1:59:58Speaker 03

  And I would, I had read that book, so I knew sort of how to store the plants, how to dry them and store them. So I had a big bunch of them with the Portuguese names. Um, and I was trying to get somebody to come in and a, a serious ethnobotanist and do that. And I, I was not able to locate someone. And since I'm not an ethnobotanist, it would have sort of been pointless for me to pursue that further. That's why I have argued, um, that when we go in and study a group in the Amazon, it's, it's very costly and this is an idealization that probably can't happen many times. But we need to go in as a team and we need to have an ethnobotanist and we need to have, uh, an anthropologist

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  and we need to have a linguist and maybe a cross-cultural psychologist and people like this. And, and maybe, um, you know, a biologist, you know? There's so many things to find out about the jungle. I've seen animals. I, I did invest in a couple of books, like Mammals of the Neotropics, in which, you know, you can, there are very clear pictures or drawings at least of all the animals of that part of the jungle that I lived in. And there were, there were these two jungle dogs and it said they hadn't been seen in the wild in over fifty years. And I was looking at the two of them just down the path from me, because the Pirahua were keeping two of them, one of each species.

• 2:01:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:01:17Speaker 03

  And so I knew that they were there, you know? They thought they were probably extinct, but there they were, right there. Um, and so their knowledge is so great and it will be lost at some point, you know? That's one thing when a language goes, if they all learn to speak Portuguese, they won't remember all the creatures that they know now because the Braz- the Portuguese doesn't have those words.

• 2:01:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  You know? Latin does. You know, I, I did work with an ethnobotanist once and, and he would get the name of a plant and he would write it down in the indigenous language in Portuguese, and then he wrote down the Latin. So he knew all their Latin-specific names and I don't. Um, so he was able to do, he was able to find out more in three days than I had and could in three years.

• 2:02:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:04Speaker 03

  You know, with that kind of training.

• 2:02:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm also curious, you know, you find, you say it's hard for them. They, they can't believe anything that they can't actually see and experience, right? So I would be curious, like, what if you gave them some crazy psychedelic, like ayahuasca or something, and they were actually able to have some like fucking transcendental religious experience where they were seeing something that's unexplainable in reality? Would that like, okay, now we see it?

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  Well, um, that probably would work. It would be very interesting because when they dream, they don't make a distinction between dreaming and, they, they do know when they're dreaming and when they're, when they're awake, obviously, but if I have a dream about something, that's an experience I had. And if I see it with my own eyes, that's another experience that I had. Those experiences are equally valid.

• 2:02:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  So they can imagine things when they're dreaming, uh, which I suppose would also apply when they're on drugs. Would, I, I'm not gonna carry out the experiments, but, uh, but when they're dreaming, they, they talk about going up into outer space and seeing the stars and stuff like this. And they tell me about it. And so if I ask the guy a couple of years later, "Have you ever been to the stars?" He'll say, "Yeah, yeah, I went up there," you know?

• 2:03:17Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:03:18Speaker 03

  And so, um, They do have these sort of mind altering, mind expanding experiences through dreams. And it would not surprise me if they use this, an experience as an experience, they're equally valid. If they had that experience when they were on drugs.

• 2:03:34Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Yeah, cuz I often wonder when I read certain parts of the Bible, like, was this, was this drug inspired? Was this guy bombed on drugs when he wrote this? Because it sounds like something that somebody, you know, tripping their balls off would write about.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  Many people talking about the Book of Revelations, uh, uh, that it was somebody on acid or something like that. You know, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that, um, in the Bible that could be more easily explained as a drug trip.

• 2:04:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. What is the last book called?

• 2:04:04Speaker 03

  Book of Revelations.

• 2:04:05Danny Jones?

  That's Revelations, right?

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:07Danny Jones?

  Where they talk about the, the seven churches and all that. Yeah, that, that's what I read first.

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  Wheel and all this stuff.

• 2:04:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Somebody was really tripping out, or God told them all this stuff. But if, if it was God, he didn't communicate it very clearly because we still don't know what it means.

• 2:04:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  So, um.

• 2:04:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it makes me wonder sometimes, is that the origin of religion? Like, was it something like this? Is that how humanity, or how we came up with this concept of, of gods and religions and angels and demons and?

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, I don't know, because I don't study the origin of religions. But I do know that, um, when I was on LSD, I saw a lot of stuff that made me think differently about the world. And I was a seventeen year old person who didn't spend a lot of time contemplating abstractions. Um, so I can easily see that happening. Yeah, you know, I mean, Timothy Leary, when he was pushing LSD back before it was illegal, was talking about mind expansion and, uh,

• 2:05:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:06Speaker 03

  and, and talking about tripping out and seeing all these things. And, you know, we, back in the sixties, when we were doing this stuff, we took it very seriously, you know? We didn't just see it as just recreation. We saw this, you know? I mean, you can see colors and you can, I mean, see sounds and hear colors and, and, you know, I just remember standing in front of the mirror.

• 2:05:31Danny Jones?

  Synesthesia.

• 2:05:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, pulling, yeah, pulling all this stuff out of my head, you know, these thoughts. I was pulling them right out of my head like this. And I was thinking, I can't believe nobody does this all the time.

• 2:05:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

  You know, and, um, so, yeah, drugs are powerful. When I talk to my kids about drugs, when they started getting into teen years and drugs were still, you know, more prevalent for them, I would say, the problem with drugs is not that they feel bad. They feel wonderful. That's the problem with drugs. They feel really good. And I said, the problem is you just want to keep feeling good. And at some point, you're gonna wake up and you've wasted years just doing drugs.

• 2:06:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:06:05Speaker 03

  So I don't have any moral objection to, you know, I've had close relatives who died of heroin addiction and cocaine. And so I'm not neutral on the abuse of drugs. But, you know, you can eat too much, too many McDonald's hamburgers and kill yourself. So it has to do with how you manage your input, what comes in, how much you allow into your body. So, um, you know, I don't have any problem with, with, uh, drug use. Um, I think that drugs should be legalized, although some of the experiments to legalize them have not been successful and you have, you know, um, bad situations in cities.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  Because the problem is the fact that we tend to overdo the things we do, whether it's eating or watching television or drugs or alcohol. We just have a tendency to overdo stuff. Not everybody has that same tendency, but a lot of people do.

• 2:07:03Danny Jones?

  Right. And the Pirahha, they don't have access to all this stuff all the time. Do you think if they did, that they would see this, experience the same issues that we see in Western society?

• 2:07:12Speaker 03

  If they had constant access to alcohol, most of the men would be alcoholics. And the families would starve to death. It would totally destroy the culture.

• 2:07:20Danny Jones?

  Jesus.

• 2:07:21Speaker 03

  Uh, so I used to believe, I think it used to be believed more generally that American Indians had less resistance to alcohol. Uh, but that doesn't seem to be true. They seem to, you know, if you're in the jungle and everything's the same day after day, it's like getting the television for the first time. Now you see things you never thought about before. And it's really nice to be drunk. And if you don't have any understanding of medicine and you don't, you haven't seen this, this social problems that being drunk can produce, then I can see that it would be attractive to just stay drunk, you know?

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  But I've, I buried Pirahha, who died of cirrhosis of the liver, um, from drinking. Um, because they lived in a part of the river that had more river traders coming up and they drank all the time. And the river traders come up, they need the Pirahha to help them get Brazil nuts and natural jungle products. They don't bring cash. They don't bring hammocks and things to trade with them. They bring alcohol. And a Pirahha will work for days for a bottle of alcohol, which,

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:08:27Speaker 03

  I tried to, I showed a Pirahha in a grocery store. He went out with me to, to town. And I showed him the alcohol that the traders gave to him. And I showed him how cheap it was and how a can of meat cost a lot more than that alcohol. It was like, it's very cheap sugarcane rum. And he said, yeah, but for us, it's expensive because we don't get it much.

• 2:08:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  And so he just, my lesson didn't work.

• 2:08:49Danny Jones?

  The same, it's the same thing with like sweets and soda and stuff like that, right? Because they never, that's completely alien to them.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  When, when I first went in, I took a dentist in after I'd been there for a few years from the States. And, uh, we looked in every mouth of every Pirahha. We looked, we looked at, and looking for cavities, to help them with cavities. Not one cavity. We traveled up and down the river and we actually looked in the mouth of every living Pirahha. Nobody had a cavity. Couple of years later, the Brazilian government or somebody else introduced sugarcane into their fields. And now everybody has cavities.

• 2:09:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 2:09:24Speaker 03

  Um, and so, you know, sugar's not, sugar's bad for you, but if you don't have access to it, it's not bad for you. If you, I've had guys sit down and eat, back in the days when they had no access to sugar. I've seen a guy pour two pounds of sugar in a bowl and eat it with a spoon. Just eat, and he loved every second of it. But that's gonna be the last time he does that for a couple of years. You know, so it wasn't good on him. His system didn't like it. But he had a great time and he's not gonna have it again for a couple of years. But you leave sugar in there all the time. And now Pirahhas are overweight. They never used to be overweight. Uh, there are several of them that are overweight. They have cavities because some people think it's a kind thing to give them rice and sugar and sugarcane, things that don't form part of their diet.

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  And candy. Um, and, and these things, like all things taken to excess, are just really bad for them.

• 2:10:16Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Now, I have a friend who has been living in the Amazon for probably about, I think, twenty years. And, and he's got a, um, like a nonprofit that helps conserve the Amazon, like to fight the loggers and to fight all the farming that's going in there, trying to like level that, level it out and create cattle farms and stuff like that. And, uh, he was explaining to me that, like, those uncontacted tribes that are out there, as soon as they see a human being, it's like kill on sight. And they've killed a lot of young people, a lot of, you know, travelers and stuff like that, where there's absolutely no contact with any other human beings.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Right. This is, um, I mean, um, many American Indians of North America, the US were like that too.

• 2:11:03Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  Um, the idea of uncontacted tribes, in a sense, all of them have been contacted by disease. They may have had faced, so they, most of these uncontacted groups have heard stories or had some contact in their past that have been transmitted about death is not far behind white people, you know? And, uh, you're gonna get disease. And so they don't want them around. And if white people start to come to your area, kill them. Because your whole group could be in danger. So they know about epid, most of them, I haven't visited them all and talked to them all, obviously. But there's a general feeling among many anthropologists and government workers

• 2:11:45Speaker 03

  that these people maybe a few hundred years ago had contact with some of the first Portuguese explorers that came through. And they saw people dying from disease. They just retreated far into the jungle and they want no more contact. And all their legends and, and myths now have to do with the danger of white people. Um, the Pirahha had legends. When I first came there, I was scary to all the kids because they had legends about white people are, are evil. And they will kill you and they will eat you and drink your blood because they don't have any. So like, I was a vampire.

• 2:12:16Danny Jones?

  Um, wow.

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  And so it took me a long time to overcome that. I would walk up to a little kid and they would just start screaming and running. After they, some of them cried because of my beard, but, you know, the Pirahha said, well, they don't know if you're a man or a dog because we don't have beards, you know? So, but, um, but that's self-preservation. I, I, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm sorry for the white people that try to make contact that get killed. But, um, their history, in, even if they don't have their own stories and things about it, the history of Amazonian Indians with outsiders uh, is a very sad history, just as it is throughout all of the Americas.

• 2:12:57Danny Jones?

  Right. I would be curious how different those uncontacted tribes are from the Pirahha. You know, like, do those, do those tribes that are also in the Amazon that no one has interaction with, do they have any belief in gods? Or how different is their language or their concepts or their values, you know?

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  Some of the uncontacted groups, um, are actually known, they're, we have enough data on their language or from other Indians who have had contact with them to know that they are related to Indians that have a lot of contact.

• 2:13:30Danny Jones?

  Um, oh, okay.

• 2:13:32Speaker 03

  So, so, um,

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  And we know that those Indians they do have contact with that are part of the same language family do have these legends and do have some of the stories that the Pirahá don't have. But it's, but the thing is, there's 8,000 distinct languages spoken in the world today, of which we might have data on 3,500 or so. So the vast majority of cultures and languages in the world, we have very little systematic study, a very little understanding of. And so I think it's very premature to say that this or that is universal among all cultures, because we just really don't know. Until we get people willing to pay the price of going out there to do field research, let's

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  face it, if you're a linguist, you can work in a lab, or you can work on Portuguese or French, and so if you're working on French and you do fieldwork, you go to Paris. That's not the same thing as if you're doing fieldwork on a language of New Guinea or Africa or, and so the people who are my real heroes are these field researchers that go out to work with these small minority languages.

• 2:14:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Speaker 03

  And, and try to figure them out and preserve their stories and figure out how their culture works and learn about their culture and who actually go in as students, almost any field researcher I know of in anthropology or linguistics realizes they're a student first and foremost. And we need a lot more of those kinds of people, but the funding is difficult and the amount of people now who want to leave the air-conditioned office of a university to go out and live in really primitive circumstances and face malaria and leishmaniasis and all the other diseases. I mean, I was hospitalized in San Diego once. There are three strains of malaria in Brazil. There's malariae, vivax, and falciparum, and I was hospitalized in San Diego with all three at once.

• 2:15:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  And the doctors were delighted. There was the doctor of tropical medicine there, and she said, oh, I've never found anyone that has all three at the same time. So I was, you know, like dying, and all these doctors are around talking to me, and then they said, and how is it treated in Brazil when you have these things? So I told them the medicines and the doses, and that's exactly what they gave me.

• 2:15:47Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:15:48Speaker 03

  Yes, because it's kind of rare up here to get somebody with these different strains of malaria. You have Asians coming over, have a kind of malaria found in Asia. We know, we're pretty sure that malaria originated in Africa, because that's where you find the most strains.

• 2:16:02Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  Actually, most things originated in Africa at some point.

• 2:16:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:07Speaker 03

  But, so there are four strains in Africa, there are three strains in Brazil, and all three strains in Brazil are also found in Africa, but not all four strains in Africa are found in Brazil. But I've had all three of them at once, and they have different symptoms.

• 2:16:20Danny Jones?

  Shoo.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  And so any field worker can encounter that kind of stuff. You can have your life threatened, you can have diseases. It's, it's not that pleasant to become a field worker, so.

• 2:16:31Danny Jones?

  No wonder Chomsky didn't want to do that.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, when he and I were on speaking terms, he was coming to, I was trying to get him to come to Brazil, and he was willing to come and speak at universities. I said, and I would love it if you could visit me with the Pirahá, come and spend a few days with, I said, it doesn't have to be long, we can arrange to fly you in and fly you out. He says, yeah, I don't do that. So that was his answer to that. It's ironic that it's that very language that he was invited to visit that has caused him so many issues over the years and that.

• 2:17:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Speaker 03

  And he said I was making stuff up.

• 2:17:04Danny Jones?

  He'd rather go on an airplane, do a little St. James.

• 2:17:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but if he would have come in with me, I think it would have given him a very different perspective on things.

• 2:17:12Danny Jones?

  Right, I'm sure.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  I just think that.

• 2:17:15Danny Jones?

  And you were, you were right across the hall from him at one point, right?

• 2:17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, 1984, 85, I received funding from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies to spend the year as a visitor. I had just finished my PhD on the Pirahá language, and I spent the year as a visitor at MIT, because I was doing all, I was interpreting everything through a Chomsky and lens. My office was right across the hall from Noam's. In fact, I made a trip to Brazil, and when I got back, he walked into my office to talk to me about it, and I spoke to him many times during the year and told him about really unusual things about Pirahá, and he was fascinated. But then when I said, this language shows that you're wrong about this particular claim, then I was, I became persona non grata, and I was a liar and a charlatan.

• 2:18:02Danny Jones?

  That's so, that's such a shame, man.

• 2:18:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Danny Jones?

  That's so unfortunate, that people of his stature are actually like that. But it seems to be more prevalent, you know, more prevalent than people are aware of, you know, a lot of people. No matter, no matter what it is that you're into, right? Whether it be like alternative history, or, you know, studying space aliens, or like, you know, one of these high priests of academia, like Noam Chomsky, whose, you know, reputation is far above, like, as far as academics go, he's in his own orbit, right?

• 2:18:38Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 2:18:39Danny Jones?

  And still, he is deluded by these basic human things like ego and, you know, stuff like that.

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  I mean, that's right. He, I'm sure that a supporter of his might say, look, he's been at this long enough, and he's enough of a genius to know what the possibilities of human language are, and this doesn't fit, therefore you're wrong. But I don't have that opinion. I, one time I thought about him that way, but I've caught him in, you know, so many errors and different things, and that just means he's human, right?

• 2:19:10Danny Jones?

  Right, of course.

• 2:19:11Speaker 03

  It doesn't mean that he's different from anybody else. But one of the things I learned during the period of time that I was so religious is that there's a certain amount of religious fervor that carries over into science.

• 2:19:22Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  Science is a social enterprise, and we like to have heroes, we like to have saviors, and, and this human characteristic contaminates inquiry at times.

• 2:19:34Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  And, and this is just philosophy of science, you know?

• 2:19:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  You're finding people who don't like to be corrected. I mean, who likes to be corrected? But if you're a real scientist, you're looking to have your ideas shown to be wrong, so you can improve them.

• 2:19:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:48Speaker 03

  You have to defend them, because if they're trivially wrong, then you're not a serious thinker. But, you know, somebody asked me once, do you think you could be wrong about Pirahá? And this was a big public meeting I was speaking at of all linguists, 500 linguists. I said, well, that's a silly question, of course I could be wrong, anybody can be wrong. But I said, I've thought about this enough so that I can say it's not going to be easy to show that I'm wrong. But you could show that I'm wrong, impossible.

• 2:20:13Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, that's one of the, that's one of the things, is that, you know, even in science, at the highest levels of science, it's tribalism is prevalent. And, you know, people want to be a part of the right team, or they want to be on the right side of history, or, or whatever it is.

• 2:20:31Speaker 03

  And when you look at innovators, people who are really creating new ideas that are important, there's a very fine line between the genius and the crackpot.

• 2:20:40Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:20:42Speaker 03

  And the genius is a successful crackpot, and the crackpot is an unsuccessful crackpot.

• 2:20:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  So if, if you get enough people to buy your idea, then you're a genius.

• 2:20:54Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:55Speaker 03

  And if nobody buys your idea, you're a crackpot. Now, that's a simplification, and to some degree, if the majority of scientists think you're a crackpot, you might be, actually.

• 2:21:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a lot, a lot of the most, you know, famous scientists of our past are, you know, from, on face value, a lot of people tell stories about how crazy they were in real life. You know, like John Lilly is a great example of that, you know, who was, he was studying, I think, he was trying to study dolphin language.

• 2:21:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:21:22Danny Jones?

  And, you know, he was also getting blasted on ketamine all the time.

• 2:21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Well, you know, a lot of people do that kind of thing. I, you know, I know, I was, I, I shouldn't mention the institution, but I was, I was, I used to, when I lived in Germany for a year, I used to play at a local bar, because I liked to play the guitar and sing, and so I would play at this bar. And, and, you know, I was in my, I was in my late 40s, or maybe even early 50s, and all these young, beautiful, smart people were sitting in the bar, and some guy comes up to me, says, hey, you want to come? We're going to have an orgy.

• 2:22:01Danny Jones?

  This is just.

• 2:22:02Speaker 03

  Interesting. But I was married, I didn't go. But these are really smart, serious people who were doing science.

• 2:22:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:22:09Speaker 03

  Serious science. And they were not always behaving according to the average picture of what a scientist, how a scientist spends their time.

• 2:22:17Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  And they were all drunk when they told me that, too. So I was playing the guitar, and they were drinking, and I was drinking, and.

• 2:22:23Danny Jones?

  I think something also happens to, to people when they become like very recognized globally for some achievement, right?

• 2:22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:35Danny Jones?

  Like when you receive so many accolades for whatever it is, if it's a scientific discovery, or you win a Nobel Prize for something, or even if you're like some, you know, globally recognized rock star, you know?

• 2:22:50Danny Jones?

  You know, some of those people are some of the most can be a lot of times some of the most like self-absorbed egomaniacs who are also thin, super thin-skinned. And you hear stories of people get close to them, they're like, I can't be around this guy, he's just unbearable. But at the same time, they are genius in one aspect of life, of what they do, what they study.

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's that uncommon. I think that very high, highly successful people, still, in that area, they know they're good. And they want to be told that they're good on a regular basis, because that's how they reaffirm that they're good. But they're not that great at a lot of other things, and so they get insecure.

• 2:23:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:38Speaker 03

  And they don't want people to get to know them that well, because they don't want them to see all the things in which they're just another human. But the other thing, you know, when I've

• 2:23:46Danny Jones?

  Jerry Lee Lewis is a great example of that.

• 2:23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He's great. I have a friend who's a well-known linguist, who was also a rock star back in the 50s. He had a top 40 hit. I mean, he wasn't a big star, he was, but with a very well-known band. And he wrote, Jerry Lee Lewis had this, had a movie, he was a star in this musical movie in the 50s called Be My Guest. And this friend of mine wrote the music for that movie. And he, Anyone But Me, or No One Else But Me, that was the song he wrote for Jerry Lee Lewis. And he talked to me about teaching it to Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano.

• 2:24:19Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  And, and playing it with Jerry Lee Lewis and everything. And, and my friend said, I decided I wanted to leave rock and roll. Everybody was just crazy. And so, and I wanted to go into science. So he taught himself a lot of stuff, and he went into science. But he didn't escape the ego. You know, I mean, he doesn't struggle too much. Well, he knows he's smart, and he doesn't, sometimes he'll let you know that he knows he's smart. But most of the time, he's just a really cool guy. I, I met Barry McGuire. Barry McGuire had this song in the 60s called Eve of Destruction, which was number one hit in the United States. And he used to be before that, he was the lead singer for this very popular group, the New Christy Minstrels. And, and he wrote songs for the Kingston Trio, you know, for

• 2:25:05Speaker 03

  a lot of groups back in the 50s and 60s. So he was a big thing then. But he got totally addicted to heroin, and was having all these problems. And then, he became a Christian, and he started hanging out with the Christians, some of them I had brought to Christianity.

• 2:25:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:25:20Speaker 03

  And so, he and I got to know each other a little bit, and we were ushers in a mutual friend's wedding. And he just had all these stories about people who went crazy. He was, when he was at his height, the mamas and the papas were his warm-up group.

• 2:25:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, the mamas and the papas, yeah.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  They were his warm-up group.

• 2:25:36Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  At his concerts. That's how big he was. And he lived with him for quite a while. He had all these stories.

• 2:25:41Danny Jones?

  What was the guy, John, John Phillips?

• 2:25:42Speaker 03

  John Phillips.

• 2:25:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I heard that he made, or he made, he made, you know, people like Mick Jagger look like choirboys with the amount of shit that he would do.

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. His daughter told the story about waking up and having her daughter was, his, her father was injecting heroin into her.

• 2:25:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:58Speaker 03

  And she had been asleep. So, yeah, he was a crazy guy. But that's what Barry said. He said, all these people are just crazy. So, when I got to know him, he was just down-to-earth, sweet guy, who just happened to have a few platinum and gold albums. But he was just a very down-to-earth guy, really sweet guy. So, we were ushers in a wedding. But he had so many stories. There's a book out, I can't remember who it's by, it's called 1968. And on the cover of the book, there's this long blond-haired guy wearing his flowery shirt, laying on top of a girl in a park, and that's Barry. He was like, the epitome of the 60s at one time.

• 2:26:35Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  But I've known so many people who've, who've used drugs, and, you know, the wrong kind of drugs. My rule in the 60s was I wouldn't take anything that needed to be injected.

• 2:26:47Danny Jones?

  Right. It's a good rule.

• 2:26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, but I knew a lot of people who didn't have that rule. And, you know, my sister died of AIDS, from injecting cocaine. And, and her, our cousin, our mutual cousin, was dealing heroin and spent 20 years in prison in Texas before she died. So, the stories of that kind of drug are not very happy.

• 2:27:08Danny Jones?

  I heard there was a connection between John Phillips and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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• 2:27:47Speaker 03

  It could have been, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was really into drugs at one time.

• 2:27:51Danny Jones?

  And they were somehow in like, the same, like, he was getting his drugs from the same person that John Phillips did, or somebody he knew that had a pharmacy in New York. Somebody told me this recently, pretty vague on it.

• 2:28:02Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 2:28:03Danny Jones?

  But yeah, John Kennedy was like, you know, really into all that stuff. Like, he was going down the tubes bad.

• 2:28:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:08Danny Jones?

  In the 70s and 80s.

• 2:28:09Speaker 03

  I don't know that he's fully recovered, but, but, you know, because I've known so many people who abused, I had a, one of my best friends in high school, a guy named Rex, he, he used everything, he would inject wine into his veins. We just did weird stuff. And I saw him, like, 20 years later, which was already a long time ago. And he was just like, had lost his mind. He was just, hey, you know, and he was just barely able to care, complete a sentence. And

• 2:28:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  So, there are drugs, and there are drugs.

• 2:28:40Danny Jones?

  The best rock stars, in my experience, like, they're always at their peak, when they're always just, like, going off the rails on drugs. And whenever they get sober, their music starts to suck. That's my take on it. I don't know what it is.

• 2:28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know that, you know, in the early days, everybody was on drugs, because that's the only way they could keep up with their schedule. John

• 2:28:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  Johnny Cash.

• 2:29:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  Willie Nelson. Then towards, you know, several years ago, Willie Nelson came up with this thing for his band, that said, if you're wired, you're fired.

• 2:29:10Danny Jones?

  If you're wired, you're fired. I love it.

• 2:29:13Speaker 03

  So, I do think that expands consciousness. There are different kinds of drugs, you know. I don't miss it, but I sure liked it when I was doing it. But I don't think I could have accomplished any of the things that I'm glad that I accomplished, had I stayed around drugs. But that's my personality, and different people are different. You know, I mean, that's, the one thing that, that laws miss, and I know why we have to have laws, I'm not complaining about laws, is the individuality of the person, you know, especially in, in particular, in crimes that don't involve hurting anyone else.

• 2:29:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  You know, then why, why are they crimes? I mean, that's the main thing. If they, if you didn't hurt somebody

• 2:29:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:29:57Speaker 03

  in some way. But, these are just, these are just issues that society's never fully dealt with. And, but for the pita-ha, I suppose if, if they all started becoming alcoholics, because alcohol was always around, the women would be, the women don't like it when the men are drunk all the time. The women will also get drunk, but they don't, but when the men are drunk, they don't hunt. And

• 2:30:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:30:24Speaker 03

  And then that makes the kids hungry, and

• 2:30:27Danny Jones?

  That's their priority.

• 2:30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's their priority, is feeding the kids and feeding themselves.

• 2:30:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:32Speaker 03

  So, and the men are normally very responsible, and not violent. But when they get drunk, you know, they're like, it's like, the full moon's out, and they're werewolves. They just become totally transformed into violent people.

• 2:30:51Danny Jones?

  Man.

• 2:30:51Speaker 03

  You know, my dad was like that. My dad was an alcoholic. And when he wasn't drinking, he was a lot of fun to be around. But those were rare times. He was usually drinking.

• 2:31:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  And then he was violent. And so, I, I have much less tolerance for drunks than I do for people on LSD.

• 2:31:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:11Speaker 03

  I find alcohol, in that sense, much more harmful. So

• 2:31:15Danny Jones?

  Has anyone, did anyone ever, has anyone ever showed those guys an iPhone?

• 2:31:19Speaker 03

  They've seen a lot of electronic stuff, but they don't fully grasp it. I mean, they've seen a television. And, so an iPhone is like a little television to them. They don't have the idea, you know, talking in real time.

• 2:31:31Danny Jones?

  Like FaceTime?

• 2:31:33Speaker 03

  Well, that, that would sort of impress them, but it's one of those things where it's so far out of their culture. They've seen me talk to people on the radio, and they've seen television. To see a television where you can talk to people in a, in a little size, they would find that curious, but they wouldn't want it.

• 2:31:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:49Speaker 03

  You know, it's not something that they have any use for. So, it would just be another experience of the oddity of white people.

• 2:31:57Danny Jones?

  Do they have any ambitions above where they're at right now? Like, do they have, like, like we see in Western society, like, we want to accumulate more wealth, invent newer technology and stuff like this, to make, to make life easier? Do they have any ambitions to make their lives more comfortable or easier? Or are they just happy on the trajectory they're on?

• 2:32:16Speaker 03

  They, they are not looking to improve anything, because they feel like they've got it pretty good right now.

• 2:32:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:22Speaker 03

  You want to eat, walk, get in your canoe, and go out and shoot two fish, and bring it back and eat it.

• 2:32:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  The average guy works 15 to 20 hours a week, and the rest of the time, they sit around the fire, talking and laughing, and, you know, running around, chasing each other, you know, having sex, whatever. They just, they have a, they're happy. And there's nothing that ambition would really apply to. They don't want the things that we have. They have everything they need. So, ambition really isn't one of their values.

• 2:32:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What do you think about when you hear some of these tech folks in society today, talk about brain implants, making us able to communicate telepathically without words? You know, like Elon has said, like, once I do my Neuralink, we'll be able to communicate telepathically, and we'll just be able to convey intentions or emotions to people?

• 2:33:11Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not sure how, what medium he's going to use to get the thoughts from my brain to your brain. There are, Eddie Cheng, who I mentioned earlier, can hook people up to their neurons and get them to speak through a computer. So, there's definitely a lot to be said for the science in developing that. And I would never want to say what can't happen. But

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  It's not clear what use that would have for the Pita Ha, although, um, who knows?

• 2:33:42Danny Jones?

  I mean, like, for us, you know, how would that change our society? Because it seems like the, the, one of the fundamental things that is evolving us is technology, you know? And with, with the way it's, it's been changing us, maybe evolution is the wrong word, maybe culturally is the right word. Um, the way it's been changing our society, you know, just over the last 20 years, the development of the, of the iPhone and social media and all that, like, people are not going out and meeting other people in public, people are finding their mates just over like pictures of them on dating apps and stuff like that. When there's obviously so much more like, biologically, there's so much more that goes into mate selection than just seeing a picture of them, a two dimensional picture of them,

• 2:34:27Danny Jones?

  right? So like, if hypothetically, you could develop some way of people to not communicate with language, where they're just transmitting thoughts or conveying intentions, it's like, I relate that to social media, right? Like, if I'm just typing out 240 characters or something real quick on social media, I can instantly transmit it to people across the world. Like, that editorial process is not very, there's not much that goes into that, right? Like, if you're writing a book, or you're writing a dissertation, there's a, a long process of editorialization of, of that. Like, it starts from a thought in your head, an abstract concept, you put it on paper,

• 2:35:12Danny Jones?

  you write it out, then you edit that, you change stuff up, you redact stuff, you add stuff, to make that message communicated more accurately to the person who's reading it. So like, if I am just thinking of something spontaneously and transmitting it to you, like, that's gonna be miscommunication on another level, I would imagine.

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  Well, you know, it's like, you push the send button too soon on your email, and you wished you could have taken it back.

• 2:35:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:40Speaker 03

  I have all my emails set up with a 30 second delay.

• 2:35:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 2:35:44Speaker 03

  So I can, maybe, oh, I didn't mean that, you know? But, um, the interesting thing is, every bit of technology that becomes, that we become dependent on, um, exacts a price in the lowering of our abilities.

• 2:36:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  So, you know, the second we got pen and paper, which is such a part of my life and everybody's life, um, we started depriving ourselves of what the Pita Ha have, if that's the ability to remember things that you just hear.

• 2:36:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:36:15Speaker 03

  Very accurately.

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  I don't think we can ever escape language if, just, there are a number of reasons I say that, but if, if we are able to communicate telepathically, it will be in signs that are very similar to language. We will, maybe even if it's like, um, um, Morse code, it, that's still based on language. So it may not be the language that we currently speak, but it'll be another language.

• 2:36:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:36:45Speaker 03

  But, um, so, so when we have computers and phones, I mean, how many can, I, I, I'm writing this biography of Charles Sanders Purce, who I consider to be one of the smartest people who's ever walked the face of the earth. And, and, um, when he's doing calculations, he was, he was good at so many things, including mathematics, and when he was doing his mathematics, there was no computer. And you see him, you see his notes where he worked all this stuff out longhand.

• 2:37:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:15Speaker 03

  Amazing formulas and stuff. And today, we could do that in a few seconds, and it took him like a whole day to work this out, even though he knew what he was doing.

• 2:37:25Speaker 03

  Did we lose anything by having the calculator do it so quickly? You know? I used to pride myself, when I first got married, was 18, and I was working at a service station, that I could always make change instantly in my head. No matter what they gave, I could make it instantly. I didn't rely on the adding machine or anything like that. If they gave me this amount of money, and I knew they had, had this amount of debt, I could just immediately just hand them the change. And I felt very good about that. And if you told me your phone number, I wouldn't forget it. I would just remember it. But, um, partly as a function of getting older, I suppose, but also as a function of just committing everything to writing now, because the way my life has changed, I find it a little more difficult to remember some of those things that were so easy for

• 2:38:10Speaker 03

  me at that time. And I don't think it's all age. I don't, I haven't noticed any real decline in my mental powers, and I don't know that my children or my, anybody else has noticed it.

• 2:38:21Speaker 03

  So, I do think that's, that's one of the prices of technology is, so, you know, I just read an article this morning about the effects of TikTok on literacy. You know, I, I used to ask my students, how many of you read a book a week? And there would always be somebody who raised their hand, that they read a book a week. And now I can say, how many read a book a month, and nobody will read their hand, raise their hands, and I can even say, how many read three books this year? Nobody. It's very, people just aren't reading it. You know, book sales are going down unless they're really superficial books, but the, more difficult to understand, Dostoevsky, um, one of my favorite writers, could he be a star today? I mean, could he make money today? Would anybody read his books? I don't think anybody's much is reading his books anymore.

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  Or Tolstoy, or, or even Mark Twain, you know?

• 2:39:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:39:10Speaker 03

  His books were real, as rich as anybody's, but also very humorous. But I don't know how many people today would decide, I wanna read all the way through Mark Twain's books. And when I read his books, I laugh out loud. They're just so funny that I can't stop laughing, and yet they're really good about, um, so I do think that literacy and the ability to get information on our own without having somebody else tell us or build it in, is a vital part of what it means to be human, and that can't function apart from society. So, I do think society's evolving, and we get brain implants that'll probably cause, if enough people get it over enough amount of time, it'll probably chart, cause changes in brain evolution for the first time in 200,000 years.

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  So who knows what's gonna come out on the other side?

• 2:39:57Danny Jones?

  It's also, writing is inherently deceptive, too. Because, you know, it's, it's funny that we study history based on, mostly on ancient texts and translating ancient writing and stuff like that, but just because you're reading something that was written down 2,000 years ago, doesn't mean that was the, of the fact of what was happening on the ground.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:19Danny Jones?

  You know, just the same way, in 2,000 years from now, somebody reading The Lord of the Rings, they're not gonna know, like, is this something that happened? Was there this guy named Gandalf?

• 2:40:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:30Danny Jones?

  You know? At the, who had this, you know, lived in the center of the earth or whatever? It's like, you have to find, from what I understand, you have to find like corroboration across cultures, across languages, many people talking about it, and like, it's, it's one of those weird things. And there's like, I had this lady on, this psychologist, one time, who, she had this kind of a interesting take on the Adam and Eve story. She said that, um, the, the forbidden fruit, the knowledge was like, symbolic of technology or the written word. And she, she thought that it could have been a divergence from intuitive knowledge

• 2:41:12Danny Jones?

  to knowledge through like, reading and the, and the written word. Because there's a big difference between those two.

• 2:41:18Speaker 03

  Right. So, there are a couple of things, you know, because these are things that I think about.

• 2:41:26Speaker 03

  You know, we, we, we fix our beliefs based on science, based on stubbornness, based on what sounds attractive, and based on authority. Writing can become an authority. That oral language isn't for many of us. So when you see it written, it sounds, and we take it as more authoritative than when it's just spoken. A pastor can stand up in a church and give a beautiful sermon, but people might take the same words in a published book more seriously.

• 2:42:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:01Speaker 03

  Than in there. So, so one of the dangers is to put too much authority in one form or another.

• 2:42:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:10Speaker 03

  Also, we write differently than we talk. If you look at, if you listen to the way people speak, um, on a day to day basis, their sentences are not that complicated. But if you look at the writing of the same person who's a accomplished scholar, let's say, then the writing becomes much more complicated, the sentences are much more complicated. When I'm writing, uh, a scientific book, I don't worry so much about this, because I'm writing it for a very small audience of people who know all this, know all the terms. If I'm writing a book for the general public, I read it out loud, uh, regularly, or I simply, if I wanna tell stories, first I tell them to my tape recorder, and then I listen to

• 2:42:55Speaker 03

  them. And somehow, I feel like my writing's more effectively when it's, effective when it's informed by this oral medium as well. So, I can, I have also found that I tell stories when I write, and people react to it okay, but when I tell the same stories orally, they react to it much more positively. So there's something about my oral communication that I have to work to get into my written communication. So there's various differences between written and oral communication. And the, the biggest danger is, as you just said, we take written as somehow more authoritative.

• 2:43:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, definitely. And that seems to be one of the biggest things, um, like, in these people that study these ancient texts for religious reasons, and try to study like, what was Jesus actually? Right? Like, there's so many different texts that you could read about Jesus, and have your own interpretation of what he was.

• 2:43:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:43:45Danny Jones?

  Which is why there's people who have books about, Jesus was a mushroom. Jesus was, you know, I had one guy on here who was obsessed with Mark 14, and Jesus in the park, thinking that Jesus was like preying on little kids and using drugs in the park, and, you know, was this drug associated guy.

• 2:44:01Speaker 03

  Well, this is the kind of thing that causes the Pita Ha to reject it entirely.

• 2:44:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:06Speaker 03

  They don't write it, and they don't see any authority in it. You're just, I'm telling you the story, well, he could tell me another story about something else. So, uh, why should I believe this is any more authoritative than anything else if I don't have a written?

• 2:44:18Danny Jones?

  This is not gonna feed my family.

• 2:44:19Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. This has no use to me whatsoever. And you don't even seem to know what you're talking about. So, that makes you think, but, that is a very good point. In a culture like that, that has no written tradition, there is no form of language that they consider more authoritative than the way they normally talk. And they certainly don't consider outsiders any more authoritative than they are.

• 2:44:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:41Speaker 03

  Just because I have a, a nice boat, and I have a radio, and, um, canned, canned meat, doesn't mean that my words carry any more authority than theirs.

• 2:44:52Danny Jones?

  Well, Dan, thank you so much for doing this, man. This has been fascinating. Do you ever plan on going back to see those guys down there?

• 2:44:58Speaker 03

  I was hoping to go back this summer, but there was a lot of turmoil there. They actually killed somebody who was trying to invade and

• 2:45:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 2:45:05Speaker 03

  So the government shut it off, but I'm still hoping that I can go back.

• 2:45:09Danny Jones?

  Why did they kill somebody?

• 2:45:13Speaker 03

  It's they had, they were facing hunger for the first time in their history because of dams that were causing the river to get too low and the fish were leaving.

• 2:45:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 2:45:22Speaker 03

  So they went up to a farm that was actually built on their reservation. And they stole some chickens and they killed a cow and took a lot of meat. And they were getting back to the village. Three young guys from the farm took off after them with shotguns. And you shouldn't do that with the pitahah on their land. So the pitahahs knew they were after them, so they just pulled over to the side, hid their canoes and waited with bows and arrows and shot them all. And so that was the end of those guys.

• 2:45:50Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 2:45:52Speaker 03

  You can't sneak up on the pitahahs in their land.

• 2:45:55Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:45:57Speaker 03

  So these guys thought they had shotguns and they were, they were really young, all in their twenties, looked really fit and probably were tough guys, but they had no idea what they were getting into.

• 2:46:07Danny Jones?

  Jesus, man, that's insane. Yeah, I wonder, you know, I really hope that, you know, some of these logging

• 2:46:18Danny Jones?

  organizations and the farming stuff that's happening down there that's like eating up part of the rainforest doesn't encroach on them and it doesn't, you know, affect them too bad. I hope it's, I mean, they're protected pretty well, right?

• 2:46:30Speaker 03

  Well, they are from that kind of thing. But when you start affecting the water, when you build dams that cause the river to change its cycles almost entirely and it gets so low that what used to be 20 feet deep, you can now walk across, the fish leave and the fish that they eat most go down to other rivers.

• 2:46:50Danny Jones?

  Because that's where they rely on the most for food is fish.

• 2:46:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, 70% of their diet is fish, so now they're going hungry. And also the animals leave because the streams in the jungle flow into the river, but the river goes so low, the streams are empty, so the animals migrate. And so now they don't have hunting or fishing and for the first time in their history, they're starting to starve. So the government, I believe, is helping them. Since I can't go, I can't say. But, but they're, you know, if it comes to letting my family starve or stealing a cow, I'm going to steal the cow.

• 2:47:22Danny Jones?

  What about people? Have they ever hunted actual humans from other tribes or like outsiders?

• 2:47:26Speaker 03

  No. They, if somebody tried to come in, they would hurt them because they go into this defensive mode. But they're very, by and large, are extremely peaceful people.

• 2:47:39Danny Jones?

  Is there any cannibalism in those tribes?

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

  No, I did work with a group called the Wadi on the border with Bolivia. And I wrote a large grammar of their language and up until about 1962, they were cannibals. And so I have a lot of stories about them eating their own dead and eating the dead that they killed in battle.

• 2:47:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 2:48:00Speaker 03

  Part of a funeral before 1962, if somebody died in the village, you ate them. You know, the whole family would gather around and cook them and eat them. All of it.

• 2:48:13Speaker 03

  And if it was an enemy, they would just chunk them up and eat them like some sort of wild animal they killed.

• 2:48:19Danny Jones?

  But they stopped doing that?

• 2:48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, they stopped in 62 because of missionaries and the government.

• 2:48:24Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:25Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 2:48:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:27Danny Jones?

  Well, again, I appreciate you doing this. And where can people find all your books and do you have like a website or anything like that?

• 2:48:34Speaker 03

  I have dan everettbooks.com is my book site. And, and most of my books are listed there. But if you just go to Amazon and type in my name, you will find most of my books, all of my books there.

• 2:48:46Danny Jones?

  Fantastic.

• 2:48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:48:47Danny Jones?

  Well, we'll make sure we link it all below for folks. And thanks again. This was fun.

• 2:48:50Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk.

• 2:48:52Danny Jones?

  Good night, everybody.