#2547 - Daniel Everett

Daniel Everett, PhD, is a linguist and college professor. He is the author of several books, including “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle” and “How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention.”https://daneverettbooks.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at drinkag1.com/joerogan Use code ROGAN at https://BlueChew.com to get 10% OFF + Free Overnight Shipping on your first order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Good to see you, sir.

• 0:14Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for doing this. I'm really excited to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this a lot.

• 0:19Speaker 02

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  You have a very, very unique life story. So I want to start with, how did you, you became, let's lay it out for people. What got me interested in you is you became a Christian missionary and then went to the jungle and met these people, let me say this right, the Pedahai?

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Pedahai.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Pedahai. And stopped being a missionary and lived with them for how long?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Well, the total time that I lived with him is about eight years in the jungle with him over a period, but I've been working with him for 40 years. I go back a lot.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Wow. But you lived with them for eight years and during that eight-year time period, you kind of, would you, is it safe to say you're an atheist?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yes, it's safe to say that.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  And so, let's take it back to the beginning. How'd you become a missionary? Did you come from a religious family?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  No, I came from a very unreligious family. I was, in fact, I was standing out in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968 trying to sell LSD to get in. And this guy that I knew from high school that was really straight-laced came up with his sister, and she was very cute. And so I went up to try to sell them some LSD. They didn't use drugs. And so I said, "Well, you got any change? I need to get some money to get into the concert." And I saw that she went to the same high school that I did. So after the concert, which she didn't like, but I loved, I went to see her in high school. I went to set by her during lunchtime and found out that she was a missionary and had been raised in Brazil.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  And that really intrigued me because it was the 60s and I was, you know, didn't want to have just the typical US life and living in the Amazon sounded really cool. But then I became, you know, a genuine, strong, believing Christian. Went to Bible school. I did my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology and I was an ordained minister in the Wesleyan Church and very active in church and was preached on street corners and did all that kind of thing.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  How did you make this transition from being a guy with a bag of acid in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert to?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Well, her father, who had been a missionary now for 20 years, was the most influential person outside my family in my life. And he and I would sit up late at night talking and, you know, I was 17 and I found everything he said to be very convincing and very interesting. But mainly, I loved his stories of the jungle and what it was like to live in the jungle. And I wanted to do that. And I became a believer. It was a gradual process. Well, actually, no, it wasn't that gradual. It was, my father was just astounded. He said, you know, "From one minute, I'm worrying about you getting arrested. And now you're going to church every Sunday with these people I don't even know." He wasn't that happy about it.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  He'd rather you just get loaded in front of the Hendrix concert?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, he would have, actually, because he was a heavy drinker and a construction worker and he considered that to be part of the masculine experience, you know?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  But acid? Was acid okay with him?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I don't think he knew I was doing acid.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  But he knew I was doing, you know, weed and things like that.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  And he didn't mind that?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  No, that was, he didn't want me doing it in the house, which I did, but...

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So your rebellion was to become an outstanding citizen and a Christian missionary?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Right. That was my greatest form of rebellion against the life I had been leading, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah, that's what happens when parents push their kids into a certain direction.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Little people don't like being told what to do.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  So you immediately, it seems like, go become a Christian? And then how long before you were actually doing missionary work in the jungle?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot of training you have to do. So first, I had to do four years of college, Bible and theology, and then I had to do some linguistics training. And then, not a graduate degree or anything like that, just some linguistics training from the missionary organization because I wanted to be a Bible translator. And then we did jungle training in southern Mexico. So we went to the jungles of Chiapas and had to do survival training and all of this.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Whoa. What did you have to do there?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Well, there are several phases to it. The family goes and the family's part of it. But the hardest thing is to really see how much you've learned. They take you on what's called survival hike and they leave you alone for about a week in the jungle. You're not allowed to take any food or any supplies of any kind.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  For a week?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, for a week or more. You don't know, it's going to be at least a week. In my case, it was about 10 days. And you've got to set up your camp how best you can, figure out how to get a fire going.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Do they teach you how to do all this stuff? They don't just like figure it out?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  This is like the final exam.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  So you've had, you've had almost four months of training before they finally take you out on this survival.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Do you have water?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  You have maybe a quart of water when you leave, but you're going to be out there for 10 days, so you've got to find water. So we learned which vines have water and how to cut the vines. We did have a machete, so I was able to jump up and cut a vine at the top first and then at the bottom and...

• 5:41Speaker 01

  And no one's monitoring you? They're just leaving you out there and they're not making sure you're okay?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  No, they just come along when the time's up and if you're there, you're there, you know?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. And if you're not, you're dead?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  You could be.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  So they're not even, that's insane.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, this is what happens when you live by faith. You know, you're out there and God's supposed to be supervising your training, but it's really rigorous training. So by the time I actually got to the Amazon, which was eight years after I converted, took that long, it felt like I was coming home. I wasn't surprised by things.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Well, the training was good then. I mean, I would imagine if you really want someone to be able to survive alone in the jungle, best way to do it is to test them by making them survive alone in the jungle so that you get an actual version of the experience. It's not simulated. You're actually, you actually are getting water from vines. What were you eating?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Well, I learned different kinds of plants that you could eat. And then I learned how to make with a stick, you know, with like, you know, make a stick the size of a toothpick sharpened on both ends. And I did have some fishing line. I would attach that to that. And I was so proud of myself because I brought up two fish that were about three inches long and I ate those. Most of the time, I ate plants and went hungry. So when I see the programs like Alone, that wouldn't bother me. That's the kind of stuff we had to do.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  They didn't even give you fish hooks?

• 7:13Speaker 02

  No, you're not, you can't have that kind of stuff. You have to learn to cope on your own. You've got to make your own. You've got to be able to recognize the plants, which ones are poisonous, which ones are not poisonous and...

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Did you try to make like a bow and arrow or anything?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  You did?

• 7:27Speaker 02

  I did. I made a bow and arrow.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  How'd you do that?

• 7:30Speaker 02

  Well, I had a machete and that's what I had.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  It's crazy to give you a machete, they won't give you a fish hooks. Like, come on, guys.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Fish hooks are so much easier to carry.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Right. But the machete, you need for firewood, you need for lots of things. You know, when I got to the Amazon...

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Did you have a lighter?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  What?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  Did you have a lighter?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Uh, no.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  How are you making fires?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Well, I had, just, they let me take just a few matches.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Oh, Lord.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  And so no lighter, but a few matches, which you kept in a 35-millimeter film cartridge.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Those little, yeah, people don't know about those things, those little containers.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  How many matches they give you for 10 days?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Well, you had one of those little containers with about 10, 15 matches in it at the most.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. So you got a match a day?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  You got to keep your fire going all the time. You always have to keep that fire going. So before you start it, you spend half the day just cutting firewood.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  And I would imagine it's very wet.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  It's all wet. So you've got to find something dry to get it going. And as they told us...

• 8:31Speaker 01

  You better keep it going.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they said, "Once it's hot enough, it'll burn anything." But until it gets hot, you can't just throw that wet wood on there, it'll put it out. So, you know, you have to spend a lot of time exploring, trying to find dry, crackly wood and leaves and things and get it going. And then slowly introduce the thinner pieces of wet wood until finally you can throw on a sopping log onto it.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  So a big part of your day essentially is making sure that fire stays lit?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

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• 11:29Speaker 02

  No, you have to stay fairly close to it and at night you definitely want to keep it going. So I remember one night waking up and hearing heavy steps around my camp.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  And I was up immediately blowing on that fire for everything I was worth to get that thing up.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Was it Jaguars?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  I suspect that it could have been, although I didn't see it. I had my Machete, which when I got to the Amazon and actually saw Jaguars, I realized that would have been a pretty pathetic thing to try. Go against a Jaguar with a Machete. They would rip your head off before you-

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Everybody likes to think they have a chance, though.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But what I found out is Jaguars, you know, they get up to 400 pounds and they're the third biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger. And they often hunt in pairs. And so you don't, you wouldn't have a chance against a Jaguar unless you were one of the Pihah. I've, I know that guys alone by themselves have killed Jaguars, but-

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Really?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  What are they using to kill a Jaguar?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Well, they're always with their bows and arrows.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  A bow and arrow range for a Jaguar? That's crazy.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Well, you better have it ready because if it sneaks up on you. There's another group that I worked with for quite, quite a while, several months called the Banaoah, and they use poison darts and poisoned arrows. So there's this story of this guy, he went out hunting and he, he reached a clearing in the jungle and he saw a deer come out running straight for him. And at first he was happy and he was going to kill the deer. Then he realized deers don't just come running out of the jungle towards people. And then right behind the deer came a Jaguar. And the Jaguar saw him, the guy, and he was bigger than the deer. So the Jaguar just took off straight for him and jumped up. And the guy got his bow, his blowgun out in front of him. They're about seven or eight feet long,

• 13:21Speaker 02

  these big blowguns. And it's, they're very sturdy. And the Jaguar, he holds it away. The Jaguar's back legs are tearing this meat off of his legs and the Jaguar's head just keeps snapping at his face, trying to get his face. And what saved his life was the Jaguar jumped off to go around the back and try to get him from the back. But he had a poisoned arrow and he stabbed the Jaguar with it and that hurts. And the Jaguar started to run off and then he shot it with a poisoned arrow. And-

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Phew.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  But he, it took, he fell, he passed out and the fam, his family found him a couple of days later with his legs just infected and torn to pieces. But he survived.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And so these Pihah, would they go hunt the Jaguars?

• 14:07Speaker 02

  If they saw that it was a danger, if, if a woman went out and a Jaguar or a mountain lion scared her, the men would go out to kill it. So I've eaten Jaguar.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  What does it taste like?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Well, this one was sort of, this was a sick Jaguar. But it's stringy meat. I mean, it's very muscly meat. It's not tender.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  You ate a sick one?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, that's how they wound up killing it. I, I found out later. I was really impressed, you know, they killed a Jaguar. But, and they have killed many Jaguars, but this one turned out to be a sick Jaguar, which is why he attacked the woman.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Like he was starving to death or something?

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He was starving. So the men killed it and ate it. But I did, my children were with me this whole time. So I told my children, I said, just remember who's eating whom out here.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  What, so do you remember what it tastes like?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Well, it's a, it's a stringy meat. It's really hard to describe all the, all the taste. Monkey-

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Stringy, like very sinewy?

• 15:03Speaker 02

  It's tough. Yeah, sinewy and very tough. And my general rule of thumb, I, I eat anything that they kill, but my general rule of thumb is I usually have a bottle of Tabasco sauce. And if you put Tabasco sauce on it, it's okay.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  And so these Pihah, am I saying it right?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Pihah, they don't preserve anything, right?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  They just kill things and cook them?

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they don't, you know, many, many different groups smoke the meat or salt the meat if they have salt or dry it. And the Pihahs know how to do that. I don't know where they learn how to do it because they never do it, except if they want to trade the meat with Brazilian boats who come up. But among themselves, they don't preserve any meat. You know, I was talking to a guy one time and, you know, why don't you preserve your meat? And he says, oh, I preserve it in the belly of my brother. So they, they share it and if I get meat, I give you some. And if you get meat, you give me some. So why would I-

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Right. So there's no need to store and also I guess it's very abundant. There's a lot of life where they live, like in terms of fish and game?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  There have been, yeah. I mean, they live on this river, the Micei River, and they're the only humans that live along the river for almost 300 miles of the curvy river. And it's a relatively large river by US standards. In Brazil, it doesn't even make many of the maps, but it's a couple of hundred yards across. And in the rainy season, it can be as much as 75 feet deep, 100 feet deep. So there's plenty of fish for them. In recent years, that's changed because the Brazilian government has allowed the construction of dams across various rivers. Not their river, but they affect the water level so much that it's taken all the fish, most of the fish out of their river. So now they're starving.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And this has led to conflict with Brazilians who live not too far away and they've killed a few people stealing food from their farms and things.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Can you imagine? You just have this kind of harmonious existence with nature and someone just decides to make a dam? Like you've got it so dialed in that you don't need to preserve your food.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Because everyone's just like happy and eating fish right out of the river.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, that's, they don't know where the dam is. They've never seen the dam. I told them that they built something that crosses the river, like a wall. And they say, why do they do that? And I said, well, they want electricity, which they barely understand. They've seen, I have a generator. I, I never had one for the first 20 years I was working with them, but I eventually got a generator and they could see what electricity was. And I said, so that's where they get the lights. But they don't understand it and it's affect, you know, it's for the first time in their history, and they've been living there as far as I can tell for almost 300 years on this one river. For the first time

• 18:00Speaker 02

  in their history, they can't be self-sufficient in protein.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  That's crazy. And how long ago did they build this dam?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I think it was about 10 years ago. But they didn't, when it first went into operation, then it flooded the entire, lots of farmland, lots of settlements and things up on the Madeira. But what was shocking was that way down river from the dam, it affected the water level so much that the, when their river, the Micei, goes to its lowest point in the dry season, there's still only a few places where you can see the bottom of the river. Most of the places, even when it's at its lowest, you can't see the bottom of the river. But in the last couple of years, it's gotten so low you can walk across.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  So, and the fish don't stay there.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  So what are these people eating?

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Well, they go hunting, which they don't like to do. But of course, when the, when the fish are gone and when the river's gone, you lose a lot of the game from the jungle. So they have to go, instead of going a mile into the jungle, they have to go many miles into the jungle. And they're still not successful. So it's busting up communities. Some people are moving out of their normal area to other areas to try to, you know, back on the, on bigger rivers. But then that means they're surrounded by Brazilians and they're no longer leading the life that they used to lead.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  So when they move into these civilization areas, are they integrating or are they trying to like stay as a tribe removed from urban society? Like, how are they doing it?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Well, up until about five years ago, they would never have thought about integrating. They would live in like ghettos. If they, if they were out near some town, they would live in the jungle away from the town because that whole part of Brazil is covered in jungle. Even the cities are bordered by jungle. But nowadays, because there's no food anywhere, they're trying to integrate more and they're trying to learn Portuguese. And it's, it's a very unfortunate situation for them right now.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  God, it's such a bummer.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  That sucks so hard. So when you first got there, your aim was to try to convert them to Christianity?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  That's right. I went there to translate the Bible and plant a church and get everybody believing.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  And why Pirahá? Why did you go to those people?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Well, we were in our training and the missionary organization, the Wickliffe Bible Translators, offered us three areas. They said you can go to New Guinea, we need people in New Guinea, you can go to Mexico, or you can go to Brazil. And in Brazil, there's this tribe called the Pirahá that we've had two teams assigned to, and nobody's been able to figure out the language because it's not related to any other known living language. And so they said, if you're up for that challenge, and we know you did well in linguistics, we'd be happy to have you take that group. So I thought, well, sure, I'm up for a challenge. So we took that.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And so this is 1970?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Seven.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  1977?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  We were assigned there in 76, and I made my first trip in, in December of 1977.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And so how much of the language did you know before you got there?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Nothing?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:29Speaker 01

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• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, in 1784, Portuguese explorers made contact, and they didn't take lists of words. They wrote a few descriptive things about the language and about the people. And those things still fit them today. And then in 1821, a German explorer went there and he took a long list of words, which was amazing because he didn't have linguistics or anything like that. And his list of words is pretty good. And then in 1920, another German who naturalized Brazilian, the founder of Brazilian anthropology, went there and

• 23:14Speaker 02

  took a much larger word list. And that one is very good. And so I had those little word lists. They're not much, and there's no, how does the grammar work or anything like that. It's just a list of words. So I had looked at those, but it's a tone language. And so they hadn't written the tone, so I had no idea how to pronounce the words. To give you an example of what a tone language is, so if I want to say friend, I say magi ai. And if I want to say enemy, it's magi ai. And-

• 23:47Speaker 01

  What's the difference?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  So if I whistle it, friend is, and if I whistle enemy, it's, if you can't hear the tones, you don't know what's going on. So the word for me is cheh, and the word for shit is cheh. So you can be talking about yourself and everybody starts laughing because you've called yourself-

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Shit.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Shit.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Because you have the wrong tone.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Because you have the wrong tone. So there are a lot of tone languages in the world. Mandarin's tonal, Korean somewhat tonal, and many languages of Africa are tonal. But for those of us who speak European languages, this is just really weird, and it's hard to hear.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  A complete mind shift.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you've got to be able to pay attention to those tones. And so, but the first thing you have to do is start just collecting words. So I would point at things my first day, my first hour. I was pointing at things and writing down what they said. And that was the basic linguistics I had had, phonetics, how to write down sounds of the world's languages.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  And when you got there, so on day one, how do you make a connection? Do you just show up, hey, brought you the Bible, everyone have a seat? How do you do this?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Well, I got off and I started handing candy to the kids.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Good move.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  That works. And the people were very curious because I'm this white guy with red hair. At that time, I had bright red hair. And they found me curious to look at. And so they came around, they could tell, you know, at least I think they thought they could tell that I was no danger to them. They know how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger. But, so then I would just start pointing at things. I had my pen and paper, and I would get a stick, and I would say, in English, you know, stick. And they know that I'm trying to communicate something, so they would say back, eh. And I thought, it probably means stick. And I would write that down. And then I would take

• 25:51Speaker 02

  the stick and drop it. And they would say, eh, and that means stick fell to the ground. And that's what I thought it meant. So that's how I started.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That's what you thought it meant. What is the reaction to this person coming in and demanding that they teach the language?

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't demand-

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you have a requirement. You can't communicate, but you're there. So they're kind enough to welcome you.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Are you in the actual camp with all these people?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm in the middle of their village. The plane let me off on, you know, landed on the river. I got out-

• 26:26Speaker 01

  And you don't even ask? You just like wander into their camp?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  There's no way to contact them ahead of time.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  This is crazy.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And you're just assuming they're not going to kill you? Is this you?

• 26:35Speaker 02

  This is the Pirahá. This is a Pirahá village, yep.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  And so this is what it looked like when you showed up? You're like, hi, what's the stick?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You land on the river, and you get there, and that is, that's the Pirahá.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And so they're very friendly, and they start talking. But of course, I don't know what they say. They just see me as a very-

• 26:57Speaker 01

  You guys got a Ferrari t-shirt on. What's up?

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, riverboats go in and give clothes. If a riverboat hasn't been there in a long time, they'll all be naked.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  So-

• 27:09Speaker 01

  And so, like, day one, they just accept the fact that this redheaded dude just showed up and is hanging out with us now?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were a couple of things that counted in my favor. I was all by myself. And so giving out candy was a big factor. They like to chew tobacco, and I had been told this by somebody who had been there. So I took in a big, long horn of tobacco. I don't know if you've ever, this is a really old-fashioned way to-

• 27:38Speaker 01

  A horn?

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Like an animal horn?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  No, it looks like an animal horn, but it's probably eight feet, nine feet long, just rolled up tight, tobacco wrapped in latex. And-

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Really?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you just cut it off for them, and they chew it, and they like it. So I would, you know, the ones who would help me, I would give them a little bit of tobacco or candy. And I also brought canned food for me. And I would trade that to them for fish and other things that they got. And they liked it.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  How long did you stay initially?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  The first time was just to see what it was like before I brought my family. So I stayed 10 days. And then I came back with my family, and we stayed a year at that time. We just stayed there the whole year.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  When you say your family, so your wife and how many kids?

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Three kids. There they are.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  How old were the kids when you got there?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Well, my oldest daughter, who there is about 12, was nine, and the middle daughter was six, and then my son was one year, three years old. So this is around that time. And so my kids grew up among the Pirahá, and both my older daughters learned to speak the language fairly quickly.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a risky move.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  It was.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  You brought your little kids to the jungle.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my son got-

• 28:58Speaker 01

  What is that decision like? Was that a difficult decision?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Well, today it would be, but I was a Christian and I believed in miracles and I believe God would take care of us. And so I went there and figured he was in charge, he would take care of us. So my son got meningitis. Uh, my, uh, my two daughters got malaria. Um, I got malaria. In fact, after a few years, I went to San Diego and I, I came down with malaria and in University Hospital, San Diego, they were thrilled because I was the only person that ever seen with all three strains of South American malaria at the same time.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Did you have a relapse of malaria? Or was that, cause I have a friend who got malaria in the Congo and it came back.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  It can come back and I've had relapses, but it's been a long time now that I haven't had relapses. I've taken so much medicine that supposedly it won't come back anymore, but I can never give blood because it's always in my blood.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Ugh, what do they give you? Like what medicine they give you?

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Well, Daraprim, Primiquin, um, straight quinine. Uh, when my wife almost died, uh, she, she weighed a hundred and, uh, fifteen pounds and then she got malaria and almost died. She got down to seventy-six pounds.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  And, uh, and the doctor told me she's gonna die tonight. We don't have any way to keep her alive.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  And, uh, they had, they put her on blood transfusions because you lose a lot of blood. It kills the blood cells and, uh, they put her on, uh, you know, blood transfusions and also straight quinine, which caused her to be in agony for several days of just constant retching and it's just, quinine's a really bad experience.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  But at the end of it, she pulled through?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  She pulled through.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we all pulled through.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  You had to be like questioning your decisions. I mean, this has to be a trialing, uh, you know, very difficult time because you're, you chose to be there.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and so we were leaving the village to find help because my wife and daughter were dying of malaria at this time, where she got down to seventy-six pounds and my daughter lost a lot of weight too. She was just skin and bones.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  And, uh, I'm, I'm getting my boat out of there and I had never been out by boat. In fact, I didn't have a boat. We were, I had no idea how to get out of there. So this Catholic priest came up to see what the Protestant missionaries were doing. And I said, can I borrow your boat? I gotta get my family out of here. He had this very narrow aluminum canoe with a six horsepower Johnson. And, uh, I got my whole family in there and he just stayed there in the jungle and let my family take off in his boat. And, uh, I didn't know where we were, but I was thinking, you know, I've read all these books about missionaries and, uh, now I'm having a missionary experience, but it wasn't fun. It was really-

• 31:46Speaker 01

  That sounds horrific.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  It was horrific experience and I just didn't know what was gonna happen.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  So your, your goal was to convert these people and how long were you there for?

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Well, I was there, um, in nineteen eighty, I spent the whole year there. In nine, in all the other years, from nineteen seventy-seven to two thousand thirteen, I was there for three to six months every year. So I was there a lot and, um, got sick every time I went. Went, I had typhoid fever and all this stuff. But, um, uh, attacked by snakes and stuff like that. But, um, it was, um, it was just a mind altering experience. Things didn't go the way I thought, uh, and, uh, the people started questioning me, you know, they, you know, they were, started asking me about, why do you believe in this Jesus? You keep telling us about, what's he like?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And you're doing this also, you're translating these concepts from English to Pirahá.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  From Greek to Pirahá, uh, going from the Greek New Testament, cause I was translating the New Testament. So going from Greek, uh, to Pirahá, but I'm referencing English and Portuguese at the same time.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  I'm staying in there.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  And you expect these people to understand what you're saying?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, if you're in the middle of the jungle and, and Jesus does something out in a desert, um, how do you describe desert?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Isn't their language a completely different language than ours? Like in terms of like, they, they have no words for color.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  They have no words for direction. They don't have a left or a right.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Right. So, and this all takes time to find out because when I went there, I thought everybody had words for colors. Everybody had words for numbers. Everybody had a concept of God.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Right, they don't have words for numbers. That's so crazy.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't have and-

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Do they have numbers?

• 33:36Speaker 02

  No, no numbers. They don't count.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  How many fish did you catch today, Mike?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  A lot.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  That's it?

• 33:43Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  A lot or a little?

• 33:44Speaker 02

  A lot or a little.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Hmm, or a good amount?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, in fact, that claim was really controversial. I've had s- s- psycholinguists and cognitive scientists come down with me to do experiments.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Didn't you get into it with Chomsky about that?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Well, I got into it with Chomsky about their grammar.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yes, oh, that's right.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Chomsky made this claim. I've gotten other people, there are people who find every claim controversial. So there's some people can't believe they don't have numbers. Some people who don't believe they don't have a concept of God. Other people who believe they don't, who don't believe they don't have colors. Um, but, um, Chomsky claimed that all languages are built on a common property called recursion. And recursion is this, English has it all over the place. So it's the ability to put one unit inside another unit of the same type. So take a noun. If I take the noun truck and the noun driver and I put them together, I can form a third word, truck driver. And, and so that's recursion.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  I put one noun inside another and I get a third noun. Or with a sentence, I can say, John spoke. There's no recursion there. I can say, John said that Bill spoke. And now that's got recursion because Bill spoke is a sentence inside John said that.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  And so Chomsky, um, claimed, and in my opinion, without doing a lot of homework on this, I mean, he just was basing it on languages that he happened to know, uh, which aren't many. Um, that all languages were built on this. It made sense and he had a principles built into his theory that required this. So when I came along and said, they don't have it, and now I, I know there are other languages that don't have it. Um, this was like saying you're wrong. And for me, a relative nobody, to tell the most famous linguist in history, somebody that, Chomsky was called by the New York Times, the most important intellectual alive, um, to tell him that he's wrong.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  A lot of people found that very weird, you know, unbelievable. Yeah, problematic.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  But facts are facts.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I mean, it should be exciting for a linguist to look at something that violates all the laws of other known languages.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  It was exciting for some linguists and really off pissing for a lot of other linguists.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Isn't that gross? That's so gross.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  That is one of the grossest things about intellectuals. The, the, this gatekeeping of information and this, the appeal to authority that they're the only person who could possibly know. Especially when you're talking about languages, like how many languages are there?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  There are about eight thousand separate languages in the world.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Okay. How the fuck could you know all the rules to eight thousand languages?

• 36:33Speaker 02

  We don't have data on more than about one thousand two hundred or so.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Well, isn't there also an issue with the Aboriginal tribes of Australia? Um, my good friend, Adam Green Tree, uh, he's from Australia and he was running a mine there for a while and worked with a lot of Aboriginal people and really learned a lot about their cultures and they, they're called mobs. Like their tribe is called, they're called a mob. And there could be a mob that's just like thirty kilometers over that way. They have no idea what they're saying. They don't know the language and it's not written anywhere. And there's hundreds of these, they're all over the place.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Right, and the, and the bit of fieldwork that has been done, there are some really good Australian linguists trying to figure out these things. But the fieldwork that has been done has found properties that aren't like anything else we know about. Um, so languages can vary so much that it's really premature, in my opinion, to be writing laws that languages are supposed to follow.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  All eight thousand of these languages.

• 37:33Speaker 01

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• 38:58Speaker 01

  If you like food that tastes like it came off a real fire without all the work, check out Traeger grills. Well, all you'd have to do is say, as far as we've observed, and then you're okay.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  But as soon as you say it has to have this, and if someone says, actually a language that doesn't have this, and then there's a controversy, you're a bad guy for pointing this out and you're, you know-

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Well, I had a-

• 39:22Speaker 01

  You're a heretic.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I had one of Chomsky's followers, who was Brazilian, write to the Brazilian Indian Agency, which is where I get my authorization to visit these tribes, and say, "This Dan Everett guy, he's a racist."

• 39:35Speaker 01

  That's what they always say.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Isn't that the fun one?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  They always, the moment they want to get rid of you, you're a racist.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, she was silly because she said, "He's trying to reduce the pitahas to primates." And I said, "Well, in fact, I am, because we're all primates." I'm a primate, you're a primate.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Duh.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  But it's the thing, if Chomsky says that all languages have X-

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  And I say, "Here's a language that doesn't have X," then either A, Chomsky's wrong, or B, these aren't humans, and so the only person who would-

• 40:03Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  -claim they're not humans is a racist.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  That's such a crazy way to put it.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  It's so stupid.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  God.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  But this is typical in science. As I got more and more into science, it's very unfortunate.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  It's men. It's men and their egos.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  That's what it is. It's, and I'm sure women as well, but it primarily men.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you don't get a lot of money when you're a scientist.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  It's not a money-making profession. You go into the, what is the biggest rate of exchange among scientists? It's ego.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Right, but it's just so crazy to think that if it doesn't have this one characteristic of language, that you're calling them primates. It's not a value judgment. You're saying it's a different kind of language, and this is fascinating.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Exactly, that's my take, and many anthropologists took that. This, you know, so for example, they originally said that Homo erectus had no capability for human speech, and I thought that was kind of a questionable statement, since, you know, I've read a lot on Homo erectus, read a book about it, and they don't, they, all their accomplishments, they had to have pretty advanced language to account for the fact that the ocean was never a barrier for them. And so, I said that Homo erectus had language, and I think the evidence supports that, but they don't have the kind of language Chomsky says necessarily.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  And so, an archaeologist in, at the University of Liverpool, wrote me, and he says, "My specialty is Homo erectus, and I think you're right." So, we wrote a paper together.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  And then after we wrote the paper, he discovered, last year, the oldest wooden structure known in all of human history, 500,000-year-old structure built by Homo erectus in Zambia. And he showed that it has interlocking pieces and parts that nobody ever expected Homo erectus to be able to do, and their brains weren't that much smaller than ours. You know, the average size of a modern human's brain is about 1,200 cc's for men, and about 950 to 1,100 cc's for women. And since we know that men aren't more intelligent than women, the size of the brain can't be what's determining that. Homo erectus had brains

• 42:19Speaker 02

  of 950 to 1,000 cc's, you know, cubic centimeters. You measure that by taking the skull and filling it full of sand and seeing how much sand fits in there. And so, they were able to make these complex structures, and they were able to make boats, and they were able to do all these things. Yeah, that's what Larry Barham, from the University of Liverpool, discovered, this structure. You see the crosspiece?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  And he recently gave a talk to an association, a World Association of Archaeologists, to get their judgment on what this could be, and not archaeologists, but architects, to get their professional judgment, and they were really impressed by this. They said, "That's actually a pretty advanced structure for building, you know, a walkway or a house."

• 43:05Speaker 01

  We actually discussed this yesterday. I had a guy on named Michael Button. He's got a fantastic YouTube channel. It's all about like, sort of, the mysteries of human history. And we talked about the seafaring aspect, and how much evidence there is that these people were seafaring as much as a million years ago.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And in my book, How Language Began, I have a-

• 43:26Speaker 01

  They had to be communicating.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't, there's an archaeologist in Australia, Bedneric is his name, and he showed, by, he did experiments, and they're not exact, because you can't find humans today that don't have any language, normal humans, but he got humans from different languages who couldn't communicate with each other that well, to see if they could build a boat. And then, another linguist wrote a paper based on some of this called, "How Much Language Does It Take to Build a Boat?" And it turns out, you've got to have language to build a boat. And so, if they were building these boats that could carry water and could carry as many as 20 people, because you've got to have enough to, if you find a colony

• 44:09Speaker 02

  of Homo erectus on an island, that was always an island, it was never connected by land, there had to be more than one person that washed up there on some vegetation. There has to have been a community.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, Michael brought up that the, what was it, the, what organization did it? Was it NASA? NASA did a study, because they were trying to figure out how many people you need to colonize another planet. And they came up with the number 500. You need a minimum of 500 to begin a colony.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  In order to have genetic diversity, make sure you're not having sex with your cousin, that kind of jazz.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can't just send a couple over there, Adam and Eve-

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  And expect this to happen.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, how did you feel about that story when you first heard it?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Adam and Eve?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you were converting, you're 17, you're doing acid.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Well, I believed everything. I mean, I was one of these guys who, I believe the Bible covered a cover, and even the covers.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  We'll get to that in a minute.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  So, but go back to how this is all going down.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  With the controversy?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  So, I started getting hate mail, and then, the article came out, when I first proposed this, in the major journal of anthropology, Current Anthropology. I was in Germany at the time, at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and right down the hall from me was Vinte Paebe, who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding the genome of Neanderthals. And there was a reporter, a German reporter from Der Spiegel, to talk to him. And she found out about my article, so she walked down the hall after she interviewed him, and interviewed me, and this came out, and it started to get picked up in the press in a lot of places, and so, The New Yorker did a big profile. But then, the reaction

• 45:57Speaker 02

  came, and it wasn't what I expected. I expected that if you make a proposal, that other scientists, if they're skeptical, which they have every right to be, are going to propose experiments to test what you're saying. And they're going to say, "Well, if they don't have recursion, you should find this, and you should not find that, and you should get this, and this, and this." And I tried to anticipate that, but that's the kind of objection I expected. But instead, they said, "I'm a liar, I'm trying to get publicity." You know, I had a New York Times reporter, she called me, and she said, "Do you try to get publicity?" I said, "Did I ask you to call me?" I said, "You know, you called me." I said, "You know, it's an interesting story. If people want to talk to me, I'm here to talk to them, but I'm not..." I said, "If I wrote you at the New York Times and said,

• 46:40Speaker 02

  'I'm an interesting person, interview me,' would you, would that make any difference?"

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's not, they're not mutually exclusive. Like, you could be trying to get attention and publicity because you've discovered something that's very important. The idea that you're just trying to get attention, "Are you trying to get attention? What are you talking about?"

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Did, that's such, it's so weird that the intellectuals, the people who are literally professional thinkers, would fall into these like, common human traps of ego.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it was a, it was a mind-blowing, mind-expanding experience for me to see that intellectuals that I otherwise admired as deep thinkers about their subject would not think otherwise. And, you know, I mean, intellectuals, it turns out-

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Did they ever gauge you on the actual information?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had, I had people from MIT, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, from Stanford, Department of Psychology, from Columbia University, came down at separate times to run experiments, and they were well-designed experiments to test what I said. And they all came away saying, "You know, it looks like Dan's right."

• 47:54Speaker 01

  So, where's the reaction then? And what is, what did they say about that? Like, the people that are negative about this, and the people that are calling you a racist, and all this, saying you're trying to get attention, what are they saying about these results?

• 48:09Speaker 02

  They don't refer to them directly, but if asked, they often say that these people don't like Chomsky. So-

• 48:18Speaker 01

  All of them?

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  All of those individual scientists that are running these studies for you don't like Chomsky, and that's why they have these skewed results?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  That is one of the many objections that people raise.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  But by and large, they ignore it.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  They ignore it?

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  So, they ignore the studies?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had Chomsky write me some really nasty emails.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  You got them? Do you have them still?

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I have them.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Put them online.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do have them. And I, I asked him, I said, "Why don't we debate at the Linguistics Society of America?" I said, "You think I'm an idiot, so here's your chance. You can show that I'm an idiot. Just we'll debate, and you'll make a fool of me in five minutes."

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Is he saying he thinks you're an idiot?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  When you're explaining a language that he doesn't know?

• 48:57Speaker 02

  "I'm an idiot, or I'm a liar."

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  He gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper, and he said, "Dan used to be a fairly good linguist, but he is a charlatan. He's just a 100% charlatan." And he was interviewed on a Spanish station, and they said, "What do you think of the contributions of Dan Everett?" And he said, "They're nothing, nothing, nothing."

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  And he's really popular, you know, so-

• 49:22Speaker 01

  I used to really admire him.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  I used to really admire him. Then I found I was close homies with Jeffrey Epstein. That kind of-

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  -put a lot of water on that. I'm like, "What?"

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  But then, there was the stance during the vaccines, when it was like, people that weren't vaccinated should be rounded up and put into camps. Like, he had some crazy positions-

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  -on the unvaccinated people, and very, just misinformed, just completely misinformed about whether it was natural immunity, or there was other medications that were, that you could use to treat COVID-19, or even the efficacy of the vaccine. It was crazy.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  That was just one thing about him. There's just like, his earlier debates, like, he's got these fantastic debates. I think it's him and William F. Buckley.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Have you ever seen those?

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yes, I have.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  He's so good in those.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  He's so brilliant in those. It was a young Chomsky, and like, his intellect and his reason, it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like, super well-informed, and every time Buckley tried to catch him on something, he judo'd him. It was amazing.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the first two books of Chomsky I read when I started, you know, doing graduate work in linguistics-

• 50:35Speaker 01

  I read the medium one. What is it?

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Oh-

• 50:40Speaker 02

  A manufacturer of consent.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  But he had, the first book of his I read, it was in linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. And if you're a linguist and you're studying linguistics, that's just genius. It is just brilliant. And then, the next book, which he published the same year, was American Power and the New Mandarin's, which was about Vietnam. And that was also brilliant. And you know, for one person to publish two books like that in one year.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  I mean, that's just first order genius. So, I admired him.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  What goes wrong with a guy like that, though? If a guy can be that smart, how could he not be curious? How could he not, like, when you say something that flies in the face of everything that he's taught, how could he not be curious and want to talk to you? And if you're right, why would he not want to, like, do something with you? Like, if I found someone like you, and I was, I mean, I would have hoped that that would be the same way as I am now. And I had an opportunity, I'd say, "We should do a podcast together, we could explain this. This is crazy."

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Right. I invited him to the Pirahá, he was coming to Brazil. And I said, "Hey, why don't you come with me to the Pirahá? And I'll ask them any question you want me to ask them, we can talk about it there." And he said, "I don't do that kind of thing, I don't go, I don't do fieldwork." Uh, so he didn't come.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Good move. You don't want typhoid fever and fucking malaria and bit by snakes and stalked by jaguars.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  That's all true, you know.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  See, he's smart.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  It's just very disappointing when people are really brilliant. He's a brilliant guy. And essentially, I mean, especially rather, was really brilliant when he was young. It's just so sad when you see someone like that just behaving with ego. Because he was the, the expert. He was the foremost linguist on planet Earth.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  When the New York Times is saying things like, "You're the most important intellectual alive", and you have people hanging off every word as though it comes from, you know, the oracle of Apollo.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I, I assume that it affects your ego to some degree.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  100%. Most people. Especially back then, when there's no internet to check you. You know, you can get a really distorted perception of how you stand. Also, everyone's kissing your ass. You're surrounded by other people that are trying to climb the same ladder you're on. You're in a very lofty position of authority and power.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  You know, he wrote letters of recommendation for me, for my first job in the US.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Really?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  And he wrote a letter of recommendation when I came up for promotion to tenure at the University of Pittsburgh.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Why would he do that if you're an idiot?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  But I hadn't been in, I wasn't yet an idiot.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  I became an idiot.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  You became an idiot when you disagreed with him.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, "Ha ha, you're right." That's what's funny. In the end, you're right.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, he, um, you know, I've, I've had so many exchanges in journals and magazines and things with his followers over the years, and with him, um, that, um, you know, I go give a talk somewhere and people say, you know, "I hope you're ready, because there's a lot of skeptic, a lot of skeptics in this audience." And I say, "Yeah, I don't think they're going to ask me any new questions. I've done this so much now that they're going to ask me..." I said, "I'll be surprised if anybody asks me a question that I haven't heard from Chomsky."

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And when you have these conversations with Chomsky and you lay out how the Pirahá use their language and what they, and how it works, what was his reaction to that? That you're just incorrect?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Well, the first time I talked to him about it, he had not made this claim about recursion. This was in 1984.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  I was a visitor at MIT Linguistics, and my office was next to his. And so, I talked to him several times that year. And I said, "Um, I don't think their language has this property." And he said, you know, he was drinking coffee and looking at the board, he had a blackboard right by his desk. And he said, "Hmm, wonder what the consequences of that are." And then, one of his PhD students told me, "Oh, you really got no thinking, what is this..." He, he found that very intriguing. But then, when he came out with the proclamation that all languages had to have it, then I became an idiot.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Oh, God, that's so disappointing. Oh, fucking people.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Fucking people. Even the brightest minds, they're just, ego's such a motherfucker.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's really disappointing because, you know, he was like my idol for the first part of my linguistic career. And I wasn't...

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Did you try to have a conversation with him after he denounced you? Did you try to, like, one-on-one, get together with him?

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Well, we exchanged emails, so if I...

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but in, in his face, like, right in front of him. Did you try to do that?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Uh, he never had, I had always told him when I was going through Cambridge, that I was coming and maybe he and I could talk. And he always made time. And we talked, you know, I, I'd be living somewhere else and I'd come to MIT and he'd talk to me. And my first PhD student, uh, is a full professor at MIT. And he started off in linguistics, uh, he's in, he's in brain and cognitive sciences now. But, so I had a good relationship with Chomsky. But then, suddenly, he never had time to meet with me.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  So, after his proclamation?

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  He had no time to meet with me. His wife died, and I wrote him a letter saying, "I'm so sorry that Carol died, this is really terrible. I know you guys have been together for so long." And he wrote back and said, "Thank you so much, that means a great deal to me." And then, I saw this article in a Sao Paulo paper where he called me a charlatan. So, I wrote him right back and I said, "Did you call me a charlatan?" And he said, "Yeah, you are a charlatan." I said, "You should be ashamed of yourself." He said, "No, you should be ashamed of yourself for saying things you know that can't be right."

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  So, that was the last exchange we had.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Silly, silly gnome.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Of course...

• 56:19Speaker 01

  You should have had that in front of him. I mean, just, I think people say things in emails that, I think it's a terrible way to communicate.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  I agree, completely. You know, that's...

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Especially with insults. It's just, it's such a, and then you're waiting on the other person's insult in return, like, "God, stop it." Are you fucking 12 years old?

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Stop.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  So, the, the author, Tom Wolfe, um, the last book he wrote was called Kingdom of Speech. And he talked about two controversies. Darwin versus Alfred Russell Wallace, and me versus Chomsky.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  And so, he has a very, he has some bizarre, absolutely wrong ideas about where language came from. He's not a linguist. But, he did cover that controversy extremely well. And, um, you know, Tom used to call me every week when he was writing the book. I didn't even know what it was about, to ask to get the details, right? But he was just shocked how this happened.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, it's disappointing. But, even the most brilliant humans are just human.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  And they're subject to all the flaws and all the traps that the human mind could fall into.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've, I've often said, uh, after long experience, that intelligence is no antidote for stupidity.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  You can be both.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%. Absolutely. Especially when ego's involved.

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  So, how many people, how many of the Pirahá did you convert?

• 57:46Speaker 02

  Nobody.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  In, in decades, they weren't interested. They were, they were so totally, because my claims did not meet their standard of evidence. They have a high standard of evidence, and I didn't meet that standard.

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• 59:14Speaker 02

  They do. And when I first got there, as a Christian, I called these things spirits. Because that's all I knew how to characterize them.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  How do they describe them?

• 59:24Speaker 02

  They describe them as distinct beings. They don't say they're spiritual or anything like that. But they, you see something, like, you see, maybe there's another Indian hunting, you know, from a different tribe, hunting in your jungle, because there are some that are close enough to be hunting in the same area. You see them, but you don't see them well. They go behind a tree or something. So, you say, "Oh, that's one of these things. I just saw one of these things." They don't put it to the test necessarily, but they did see it.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  When they say, "These things..."

• 59:55Speaker 02

  So, they have three major types of entities besides humans. Uh, and they have different types of humans. I'm one type, and they're another type. And so, they have things that are...

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  How do they make the distinction? Is it the appearance?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  For, for humans, yes, it's, it's appearance. Uh, well, actually, for the other entities, it's appearance too. So, for me, I'm white. And white means you don't have blood. So, they've asked me, they said, "So, you, do you have blood?" And they, they asked me one time after I'd been there for years. They said, "Do Americans die?" And I said, "Yeah, we die. But you're really old and you haven't died yet, you know?" And, and so, I cut myself once.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  How old were you at the time?

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  Probably 45.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  And they thought you were a goner?

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we age differently. I was already had gray hair, you know, not all over.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Right, they look a lot different when they're 45.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they're all still 100% black hair and...

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Oh, they thought you were a goner with the white hair.

• 1:00:51Speaker 02

  So, uh, they have an expression, "Migekau babai", "Almost about to fall to the ground." And that's the way they described me.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  But, um, so, Americans are one way, Brazilians are another way. But then, there are these things, some of them are called fast mouths. And so, they, they talk in a high-pitched voice. And at night, you hear somebody, you know, a creature talking in a high falsetto voice into the village. And I say, "What's that?" And they said, "Oh, that's a fast mouth." They, they, I said, "But I, I'm seeing it, and it looks like a Pirahá." "Oh, yeah, they look just like us." But they're not, they're not us. And, um, so, this is where we come to the border of fact and fiction. And we draw fairly, we try to draw a fairly rigid line between fact and fiction in our society, and in most European societies. But to them, um, they don't have to, um...

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Have the full range of experience with this to describe it. And so a fast mouth is just a fast mouth and they talk and you know who they are because they talk in a high falsetto voice and they go naked. Whereas Pirahaws often go naked, but if they have clothes, they'll wear them and the fast mouths will never wear clothes. And the fast mouths are also sexually promiscuous. So I had a reporter with me in the jungle from Gyo Magazine in Germany. And he said, can I see one of these fast mouths? And I told, I told one guy, I said, he wants to see a fast mouth. And he said, well, I'll go get one. And he walks off into the jungle and then he, the same guy comes back in naked, talking in this falsetto voice and starts trying to hump the reporter.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  And the reporter says, oh, I'm feeling very uncomfortable. I don't, I said, you asked for it. I mean, you know, I mean, that's the way they are. And so I finally told the guy, I said, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't want this. He doesn't want to see the fast mouth anymore. So he talks to me in a high falsetto and he walks off and he comes back on with his clothes on. And I said, uh, did you see the fast mouth? He said, was there a fast mouth here? I was gone, you know?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  But it's the same guy.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  What did you take of that? Like, what, did you think that they were playing a prank on you? Did you think this is like some sort of a psychotic state that they fall into?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  It is a liminal area between being, say, theater and being reality. And I don't know if they feel possessed. I don't think they have a concept of possession. I've asked them and I've investigated this and I've never seen that. But they definitely believe that they're gone and this other creature is there in their place.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Do they have memory of when they become a fast mouth?

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  They deny it. I've tried to get them to talk about it. I don't know, I wasn't here.

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  Everyone denies it?

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Everybody denies it.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Wow. Do you think that being a fast mouth is like, almost like a license to go and do stuff you're not supposed to do? Go fuck everybody and?

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  You think that's what it is?

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they change, they also change names very frequently. So if I go back there now, all my old friends will have different names. And anything done under the old name is, you know, you'll say, you remember when you did this? Well, I didn't do that. That was the guy with this name. So they don't even claim, so the concept of constancy of identity throughout time, they deny this.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  So when do they choose to make a new name? Or do, do they get a new name assigned to them?

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  They can. Children often get new names for different phases of life. But adults, if you, if you're out in the jungle and you think you saw something and you can't explain it, you might take a new name.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Not a bad idea, right?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  This is a way of coping with things.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense. Something really traumatic happens to you and you want to like reclaim your life, you change your name, start over from scratch.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Right. And some of us do it in American culture, but it's a lot harder legal process to change your name.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  How often do they get killed by jaguars?

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Uh, nobody's ever been killed in my almost 50 years coming and going, but they've, many of them have been attacked.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, like one guy was coming back and, um, from getting Brazil nuts and he had a big basket. And so his head's down a bit with the tump line and the basket probably weighs, you know, 60 pounds. And suddenly a jaguar jumps out of the tree right on his back, but it got the basket and not him. And it pulled the basket off his head and, um, he shot it with an arrow.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  But they tell me that when you shoot a jaguar with an arrow, the jaguar forgets about you and keeps trying to get the arrow out. And by that time, you've got three or four more arrows in it. So these guys are deadly accurate with, with bows and arrows.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  So if they did that and like maybe they got attacked, would they change their name after that?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  They could. And I, so I don't completely have it down to a formula.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's not, it's not like when they're uncomfortable. Sometimes it's just like, it's time, it's time that Bob becomes Mike.

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  It's a subjective reaction to objective experience that causes them to do this.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  And they, do they announce it to the village?

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Um, they announce it to their, like their spouse or their kids and then the word spreads. And so I'll come back in, I came back in after six months and my buddy, my main language teacher, um, his, his name was, when I left, it was Kohoi Be, which means blood eater. And when I got back, I said, you know, and the nickname is Koh, hey Koh. You know, I asked her, how you doing? And nobody responds. He didn't turn and look at me or anything. And I called him again and again. He said, you talking to me? I said, yeah. He said, that's not my name. And so I had to learn his new name was Kapalbe, uh, you know, which, uh, and he was serious about it. He wouldn't respond anymore to that old name.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Wow. How odd. The first time that happened, were you like, oh my God, these people are fucking crazy?

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  No, I thought, I'm pretty stupid. I did, can't even remember their names.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  That was my first reaction.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  How, how quickly did this happen from you first, like encountering these people?

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  Well, I, um, I would be gone for three or four months at a time and then come back because I was, I was doing linguistic.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Oh, so you never experienced it like as it was happening? You only experienced it?

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  One time, one time there was, you, you really need to spend at least a full year there so you can see all the seasons and all the changes. Then I saw some of the stuff, but many of the name changes happened when I was out of the village. Some of them happened when I was in the village, but my best friends, their name changes seemed to happen when I was out of the village. And they were very serious about enforcing those new name changes. So if you ask them to tell stories about their childhood, you get these very vague stories. And they'll say, you know, but I'm talking about this person, you know? Or they'll tell me, you know, they changed my name twice, you know? And so they name me and they, so a guy comes up to me and he says, that name is rotten,

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  which is the same word you use for spoiled food. You know, your name is spoiled. So I'm going to give you this name. And then I got, then one time I was in there and was staying with this guy, he's just wearing a loin cloth and the other Pirahaw fearing because he's this fierce guy. And, uh, he says, you're really old. I, you know, they always tell me that. He said, you're really old. And I said, I'm not that old. He said, yeah, you are. My dad's dead and you're about the same age as he was, you know? They don't know what the age is. Um, he said, I'm going to give you my dad's name. And Bow Icy, which is just the name of his dad. So that's been my name ever since. I've had that name now for about 15 years.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  And when you go back, what happens if they want to switch it up again? You have to learn a new name?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  And that could easily happen, right?

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could easily happen. It just depends on which village you go to and which person you're talking to.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  How, what was, what is the population of these people?

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  When I first got there, it was under 200. Uh, and now it's around 700 to 800. Uh, they've grown because they've had more medical assistance. I gave them medical assistance, my wife and I, for, you know, 20 years.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  And so your goal was to convert them to Christianity?

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  And when it's, so no one's buying it. So what are you doing? What is, what do your days consist of while you're there?

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  Well, my days consist of, um, linguistic analysis and, uh, translation effort. So I'll work with somebody and so I, so I worked with this guy, for example, and, uh, we went through the story of Jesus. I had translated a large part of the Gospel of Luke and I tell him this story. And then I showed film strips, you know, made by, you know, where Jesus looks like an American and has a beard and all this stuff. And I, and I explained it. They don't make a difference between drawings and photographs, so they figured it, well, it must be Jesus, he saw Jesus. So that night after I had told him all this and we'd seen the film strips, uh, his village was across the river. I lived in one village and across the river was another village and they went across the river.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  And all night long I heard screaming and yelling and people running around and women laughing and then women screaming. And the next morning he comes back to work with me and I said, so what was going on all night? He said, oh, Jesus came to our village. I said, what? He said, yeah, he came to our village, you know, and he had a penis three feet long. They don't have words for feet, so he just, I'm just going by his hand thing. He said, and he was trying to stick it in all the women. And so, uh, you know, the women don't want to know anymore about Jesus.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  So this is their way of rejecting it. So I never expected that. When I, in all my Bible training and things.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Did they say, so they wouldn't admit if one of them became like they become a fast talker, if they just became Jesus?

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  But that could have been what happened.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  I'm sure that's what happened.

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  So one guy just decided I'm Jesus.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. But everybody took him, you're Jesus.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  And this is what Jesus is trying to do.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Whoo, boy.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  But they, they would ask questions like, um, you know, hey, Dan, uh, what does Jesus look like? Is he brown like us or is he white like you? And I said, well, you know, some people say he was brown like you and some people say he was white like me. And they said, yeah, yeah, but you've seen him. What did he look like? And I said, well, I never saw him. Well, your dad saw him. No, my dad never saw him. He lived a long time ago. I don't know anyone who's ever seen Jesus. And they said, you don't know anyone who's ever seen him and you're just talking about him the whole time, telling us about him? They said, we don't want to hear about this anymore.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  And that was like-

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  But you, at the time, were a believer. You're a true believer.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  So, when did that start to slip away?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  It started to slip away from two sides. One, I was spending a lot of my time in the intellectual world and trying to do serious linguistic science. And it slipped away mainly, however, by constant interaction with the Pita Ha. Because as I'd gotten to know these people over the years, these are really smart people. They're very intelligent people. They had me figured out before I had them figured out. And they can predict my behavior better than I can predict theirs, even today. And so, they would come to me and they would say this, you know, they'd say, "Dan, you keep telling us about Jesus, but it seems that only Americans believe in Jesus, because we don't know any Brazilians that we've ever

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  met that believe in Jesus. And so, this seems like an American thing, but we're not Americans." And then they would say, you know, "Where did you get your evidence?" And I began to think, you know, "These are good questions. I can't just throw these questions off. What is my evidence?" You know, "I went to Bible school. I've been surrounded by Christians. I've surrounded myself by people who believe." And this is what happens in linguistic theory or other scientific theories. You surround yourself with a community that believes the same thing, and pretty soon, it's hard for you to consider alternatives.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  And so, I started considering the alternative, and I realized, you know, I was an atheist back when I, you know, met my first wife in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert. I was an atheist, and then I became a Christian, and then I thought, you know, maybe I was right to begin with. And so, eventually, I told them, I said, "You know, I don't believe this stuff anymore either." And they started laughing. All the guys started laughing. I said, "Why are you-"

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  And they said, "Oh, now you're like us," you know. But then, they told me one time, they said, "You know, from what we understand, Christians don't drink, and they don't sleep with other women, and, you know, we like to do those things."

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  So, we're not interested.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  What was convincing for you, though? If you're a true believer, you think your path is the right way. When you're hanging out with these people, what is making you question it?

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Well, several things. One of the most important things was that, having spent so many years as a Christian, and knowing Christians, both in the US and missionaries, who are the cream of the crop supposedly, I didn't know anyone in the Christian faith who was as well-adjusted, who could cope with life as well, who was as satisfied and content with their lives as the Pita Ha. They were like the ultimate Zen masters and the ultimate, you know, if you thought, "What is Jesus supposed to do for your life?" They already had it. And I didn't know many Christians who did. So, first, it was quality of the spiritual life. They seemed to me to have the highest quality of spiritual life. So, one MIT guy who came down, an MIT PhD student, said, "These look like the happiest

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  people in the world." And I said, "Well, what kind of statement is that? How would you measure who's happiest?" He said, "Well, I would spend time, I would see how long they smile and laugh every day and compare it to others, and how much time they spend laughing and smiling. And I'll guarantee you," he said, "I've never seen a Pita Ha here who's not smiling or laughing it frequently."

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  So, it was that quality of character, and it was also just the fact that I began to realize that the scientific principles that I've been learning and that I'm applying in linguistics almost have to be suspended to apply them to the faith. Because, you know, for example, I've heard a lot of stories of people being healed. And, but this is anecdotal evidence, and I'm not going to deny anybody's experience. If you tell me you had inoperable cancer, or, but now you don't, something happened, and I can't tell you what it was. But at the same time, there's no statistical relevance to that. It's also

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  the case that even when I was in Bible school, one of my teachers said, "I wonder why healers, faith healers, never start with amputees." You know, they always start with diseases you can't see, like cancer, and explain how it went away. But I said, they said also, "In the Bible," and the Bible itself, you know, says this, "Jesus not only healed people, he raised them from the dead." So, if somebody claims to be a healer in the same vein as Jesus, I'd like to see them start at cemeteries and start raising people from the dead. We're not seeing that, and we don't see amputees healed. We see things that are sort of subjective experiences. So, that, and I'm not claiming that nobody has a right to believe what they believe, or that I'm right about all these things. But these are the reason, this is

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  part of the reasoning process that went through my mind, and I thought, "Yeah, I just can't, I just can't do this anymore. I cannot tell these people to believe something that they have reasonable objections against, and I don't have reasonable answers for." So, to me, they made more sense than I did.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

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  Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. Well, there's so many of these ancient religions that have very similar stories to the Jesus story.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  It seems like a very old story. And I'm of the opinion that what you're getting with all of these religious texts is, there were some events, and there's some sort of a documentation of this events, but it's very hard to figure out what exactly happened.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Like, for instance, Paul never met Jesus.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  When most people find that out, they go, "Wait, what? So, all that stuff that Jesus said, Paul's writing down, and, well, how does Paul know this?" And then you go, "Oh, well, Paul met Jesus in a dream." Like, hold the fuck on.

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Right, right. See, ironically, the Pita Ha's might actually take that as evidence.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  But-

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Maybe Jesus came back to their camp as a fast walker.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  But we said, you know, I learned in Bible school that all the apostles had to have met Jesus. And Paul was an apostle, therefore, he had to meet Jesus. And so, I said, "Well, when did he meet Jesus?" And they said, "On the road to Damascus. He had the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus, so he met him." But-

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  It's tricky.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  It's tricky.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  It's tricky. It's also, again, when you get, especially to the Old Testament, like, what were they documenting? What are these events? What happened there? You know, there's some, there's some stories that you say, okay, the flood story, for example. Boy, there's a lot of those. There's a lot of those in all sorts of ancient religions. It seems to be some sort of a historical record of some sort of a catastrophe.

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:20:43Speaker 01

  All the other stuff that's attached to it, you've just got to go, "I'm not sure what this means."

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Right, you know, when I was a little boy, you know, my mother died when I was very young. But when I was a little boy, we would drive up from Imperial Valley, California to San Diego. And you've got to go through the mountains. And there's this line of white stones that I noticed near the top of the mountains. And I said, you know, what caused that? And my mother said, "The flood." And I thought, "Well, that makes sense. Must be the flood." I'm like seven, you know? And so, this is the, some of this stuff gets started this way, and it becomes truth.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's certainly when you're talking about a time, thousands of years ago, where just the ability to read was very limited. And then you're translating things from languages that we don't even speak anymore. It gets real squirrely when you try to figure out what these events actually were that they were documenting. It's, it's, having a belief system, I think there's a lot of value to it. I think it gives you a moral scaffolding, gives you structure in your life, and that alone is like, super beneficial to people. And the people that I know that are like, true Christians, really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  I think there's really great benefit to that. The problem is like, what, what are we saying? You know, what, what exactly, like, do you, the Adam and Eve one, it's like, okay, what do you think happened?

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Do you think there's two people? That's the only two people on earth? And then, where do the other people come from? The brothers and sisters just have sex with each other?

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, evolution explains that obviously very well. But Adam and Eve, you know, I remember when my mother told me the story of eating the apple and betraying God. And Adam is hiding out, and God says, "Where are you?" And I told, I asked my mother, I said, "I thought God knew everything. Why is he asking him where he is? I don't understand that." And she said, "Well, he wants him to confess it." Well, there's always that kind of answer. You can always give that kind of answer. But we, you know, you don't have to focus on religion. You can even go to paleoanthropology, and you can look at, are there 20 species of Homo that used to exist in the past, or more?

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Or are there just three, erectus, Neanderthal, and sapiens? And what does it mean to be a species? And how can we really prove some of that stuff? Before the work of Svante Peabo and the decoding the DNA, the genome, of, of ancient creatures doing this thing that people thought was impossible, that was speculation. That was, it was really hard to tell. And, and there were a lot of controversies. And now, we can look at the genetic record, and we can look at the genome, but that still doesn't tell us everything. So, a lot of straight history, and a lot of paleoanthropology, and paleoarchaeology, all of these things always involve, as any theory does, speculation.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  You're in, you're guessing, and then trying to test your guess. And some things are easier to test than other things. And so, science is a community of people who believe they can work towards the truth, but the only way to do that is to have good guesses and know how to test them. And be willing to admit that you're wrong, and then move on to the next best guess.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  And, and every scientist recognizes this, but in practice, it's really hard.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Well, it's certainly hard if you're also a fundamentalist Christian.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that makes it much harder.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Because then you, you're living in conflict all the time.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  You believe a guy came back from the dead, but show me proof for everything else.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you believe in miracles, but you can't, they certainly can't be produced on demand anymore.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  You also believe that people tell the truth. That's, that's part of the problem. Part of the problem with all this stuff is like, look, the Bible condones slavery. Talks about slavery in multiple passages.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  That's a person thing. That's a people thing.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  Right. And the Bible talks about all sorts of things that, you know, we don't agree with today, but we try to interpret it in such a way that we can live with it.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  You know, so, God, I mean, if you read anything by Mark Twain about God, which is not only brilliant, but funny, you know, he, he just makes fun of the whole notion that...

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Says religion started when the first con man made the first sucker.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, how many germs, he, he has this story about Noah's ark, about how Noah's family had to be so infested with germs so they could survive. The flood, you know? When you stop and think about, I mean, like, you know, the, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, and then, all these creatures had to boogie on down to Australia almost immediately. And, so, you get these stories, and people don't want to talk about those things. They're like, "Well, I don't know how God did it."

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  I think there was an event. And I think this, this version of it, this doctrine that you're supposed to adhere to, is woefully uninformed about the actual, like, real facts of the event. I don't think anybody could possibly know. But I think, when you have the Epic of Gilgamesh, which mirrors the story of Noah's ark, which mirrors the story of other religions that have similar flood myths, or flood stories, there's probably something happened.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's probably one of the things that happened.

• 1:26:20Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, you can, you can tell people, it would be intellectually dishonest to tell people that all the claims of their religion are false. How do you know that? You don't know that. And I used to tell Christians, I said, you know, when I was a Christian, "The best evidence for God is what he's done in your life. And are you living a better life? And if you're not living a better life, then why are you saying that he saved you?"

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  And if you can't live a more, more moral life than people who don't know Christ, then what are you saying? You've claimed that he changed your life for the good, but you're not living a life for the good. You know, I, I worked, I went to work in construction when I was still in high school for a Christian contractor. And I was in the union. I joined the laborers' union, which meant that as a hod carrier, that's the hardest job I ever did, that you got paid $8.25 an hour. And this is 1968. And that was a lot of money in 1968. And the guy told me, when I got hired, he said, "The union says I got to pay $8.25 an hour, but I'm not going to pay you that. I'm going to write you down as only working four hours a day, but you're going to work eight." And that's how he got around it.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  And I thought, "This guy's a Christian, and he's lying on these forms and on his taxes. And he's going to church." And I got the job through my Christian missionary father-in-law, who knew this guy. And, and I saw that happening time and time again. So, very often, unfortunately, people who claim to be religious and follow the commandments of Jesus, which are much more difficult to follow than the commandments of the Old Testament, because they affect your thoughts, and not just your overt action. When you don't see consistency, the answer could be, "Well, we're just humans. We can't, we're not perfect." And that's true. But why doesn't the Holy Spirit that you say you believe in make a bigger difference

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  in your life than he does in Joe Schmo down the street, who doesn't claim anything, and he's leading a more moral life than you are?

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  Especially if you're robbing laborers.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, you know?

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  And lying on your taxes.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  And so, when you're with the Pirahha, they live a subsistence lifestyle.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  And there's been a lot of evidence that subsistence lifestyles are some of the most compatible lifestyles in terms of like, people's happiness, and peace, and, and having like, a sense of, a sense of meaning. Like, your, your life is wrapped around the gathering of food in community, and spending time together. And they're the happiest people in the world.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Right. You know, I, I monitored them for a while. How many hours a week does a hunter work? And I came up with about 15 or 20 hours a week.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Unless it's not going well.

• 1:29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then, yeah, like now, they're doing, they're doing it all the time. But when the fish are jumping, it's, it's that. And then, so what do you do with the rest of your time? You lay around the fire, and tell jokes, and talk to people, and play with your kids. You know, the men love to play with their, everybody...

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  They're in pure subsistence, too, because they're not even preserving food.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  Right. If they don't find food today, they go hungry today.

• 1:29:31Speaker 01

  Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People?

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  I haven't seen that. I did meet him once, but I haven't, I haven't seen that documentary. He's really big into these kinds of societies, I know that.

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  That's what Happy People's about. It's about these people that live in Siberia.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  There are hunters and trappers that live in Siberia, and they're all happy.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they, they basically just spend most of their time gathering food. Gathering food, and then spending time with the communities.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, the documentary that was made about the Pirahha by the Smithsonian and a couple of other institutions, it's called The Grammar of Happiness. Because the film crew that went with me, it was very small, like, three people, but they were deeply impressed by what they saw in the level of happiness. And all the psychologists that I've taken, and linguists, have also been very impressed by the level. If they get past the heat, and they get past the confrontation with your body, and, you know, the Pirahha don't have outhouses, they don't have, you know, I mean, if somebody needs to take a dump, they walk off 10 feet into the bush and do it. And so, we have to have...

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Do they have toilet paper?

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  What do they do?

• 1:30:43Speaker 02

  A stick, or leaves.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Oh, sticks?

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Hey!

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  Or, if you have corn cobs, that's great, but they don't have corn...

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Corn cobs? Good lord!

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, yeah, but it's just not a big deal. They grow up that way, it's just a function, you know? And so, you ask them things about life. "What happens to you after you die?" "What do you mean?" "Well, when you're dead, what happens?" "Well, you're dead." And so, there's like, a dead monkey that somebody just brought back, and they're going to eat. And he says, "He's dead. What, what do you, what else is there? What, why are you asking this question? We die, we die." And they don't fear death. They don't have to, they don't make up a story to make themselves not fear death. They just know...

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Were there a lot of them injured?

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they get, they, they live a violent life. They get, I have people who, you know, people bitten by snakes, cut, I had, had people who split their hand almost in two with a machete, run arrows all the way up their arm, step on sticks that go all the way through their foot. I mean, these are people who are naked, running through the jungle. And they get scratches, and, you know, you know, if you get bitten by a, by a snake that's hemotoxic, like, this is Zhararak, I don't know what it is, and, and it's a bushmaster. When you get bit by one of those things, even if you survive, a lot of the flesh is going to come off, whatever they bit. So, you see people with one leg normal, and one leg that looks like bone, because it's

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  basically bone with a little bit of muscle covered in skin.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  Because the flesh all fell off after the snake bite.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  So, they know what it is to suffer and they're tough. You know, if you get a toothache, how do you fix it? Well, if I'm there, I have some things that can help with the pain, or I can pull the tooth. But, most of the time, it rots out. That's how they deal with it. So, they learn, you know, I was talking to a woman one time, you know, really, for, you know, Pirahá, looking, very feminine looking woman, and she gets bit by a wasp on the face while I'm talking to her. And she pulls the stinger out, and she doesn't, it doesn't stop her conversation. And I've been stung by those wasps, and I know they hurt like hell. And I said, "Didn't that hurt?" "Yeah." "Well, you didn't say anything." She says, "I'm not a baby." You know, so, this is the way they are.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:32:58Speaker 02

  From the time they're children, they learn to deal with pain, they learn to be tough. In fact, they have an expression for that. "He wants to be hard." And that means, you deliberately sleep sometimes less than you need, you go hungry on purpose, and you put yourself in hard situations because you want to be tough. Because that's what the environment demands.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  So, they build their resilience on purpose?

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Voluntarily? Well, I would imagine that's like, the most important thing to have. If you're running around naked in the jungle, you have to be tough.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  Right. You have to be. And, you know, like, I was, I go barefoot sometimes in the village. I'm, you know, I get, you can get parasites that way, but, you know, I do it anyway. And, but when I go to the jungle, I always put on shoes because my feet can't take all the thorns and everything. And theirs are covered with like, a whole layer of callus, all around their foot.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  They have those crazy splayed out toes as well?

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the way feet are supposed to look, really.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  You know, ours don't look that way because we protect them, but their feet are tough. You know, their hands are tough, their skin is tough. It's like leather, even a little kid, they, they're little kids, rather than crawl, they scoot around on their butt. And, so you pick a little kid up and you look at their butt, and it's just callus.

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  Oh!

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  It's just solid callus. And these kids are tough.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  But, they, they, by their standards, they're very gentle to their kids. I had a guy with me one time, and he was trying to sleep at night, and a baby was screaming all night. And he said, "Why don't they tell that baby to shut up?" And I said, "Why?" I said, "They don't need to tell it to shut up, that's just part of life, you know? They don't have a schedule to keep tomorrow." He said, "Well, what would happen if I went over and swatted it on the behind?" I said, "They'd kill you." "They'd kill me?" I said, "Yeah, you don't hit kids." They don't believe in hitting kids.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Swat a baby to get it to, does he think that's how babies stop screaming?

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  I don't know, I mean...

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Does he have any kids?

• 1:34:56Speaker 02

  I don't think this guy did, but Christians often believes, really believe, spare the rod and spoil the child. And they believe very much in corporal...

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Back then, at least, right?

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, back then, I don't know today, but, you know, so, so the Pirahá never believed this. They don't accept it.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think they're probably correct. It's, it is interesting how those people are happier. Like, we've done something to ourselves by forcing ourselves into cities, and jobs, and constant stress, and bills, and taxes, and all these external things that we've attached to our lives that we think are 100% necessary, don't bring anybody any happier. Not, don't bring anybody any more happiness, in fact, make you way more miserable, make you susceptible to a bunch of stress-related illnesses.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I've had friends visit me in the jungle, I mean, researchers who are friends, and they'll say things like, "I've never seen you so relaxed." You know, "You've seemed tense when you were at the university, but down here, you just seem totally laid back." And I said, "Well, I didn't notice it, but that makes perfect sense to me, because all these people are laid back." There's Pirahá, that I go to talk to the guy, and I find myself nodding off. And I'm not even sleepy when I go over there, but he's just so laid back and talks so calmly and softly, and telling jokes and things, that it just puts me to sleep.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  God, it's such a bummer that those people have to struggle now.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's terrible.

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  Whew!

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  It's, um...

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

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• 1:37:11Speaker 01

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• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  70% of their diet before they started having river problems was fish. So, the average diet of a Pirahá family is fish, and water, and jungle nuts, and things you get from the jungle. Hunter-gatherers, which they are, have healthier diets than agriculturalists. Because, you know, we had this, this outbreak of disease from lettuce recently in this country. They don't grow vegetables, so they're never going to get that kind of thing. They don't get that in naturally occurring things out in the jungle.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  So, their diets are healthier, they're eating protein. I know, for example, that I could take any Pirahá man out of the jungle at random, and if I weigh him, he's going to be 155 pounds. He's going to have about a 25-inch waist, 26. He's going to have about 4% body fat, and he's just going to be lean, mean machine. And, they don't, they do try to harden themselves, but that's just what the life does to you.

• 1:39:31Speaker 01

  But they're not overweight, they're not dealing with obesity?

• 1:39:34Speaker 02

  No, you never...

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  No diabetes?

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Only when outsiders, you know, representatives of the Brazilian government, thought it would be good to give them something to rely on, so they brought in a lot of rice. And they started letting the people feed. The people don't grow rice, but the government would supply it. So now, all of a sudden, you see people overweight. Because they're eating starch, which they never used to eat that much of. Or, I took a dentist in once, about 25 years ago, and we inspected the mouth of every living Pirahá, and not one cavity. He was disappointed. He said, "I thought I was going to be able to do some free dental work here, and nobody has a cavity." Well, then, somebody introduced sugarcane into their fields from the outside world, and now it's almost 100% cavities.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Everybody has cavities, because they eat sugarcane.

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  So you keep away the sweets, you keep away the starch, and you get healthier people. This is just living proof of what we often read about diets, but that we're so tempted by, that we don't normally follow.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  I heard another issue with them is when they get introduced to soda.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Also whiskey, but that's a different matter.

• 1:40:47Speaker 01

  Sure. They're both bad.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Soda is, yeah, I mean, they love it, they call it, you know, sweet water, and they will drink the hell out of that. If they got, you know, five gallons, they'll drink it all. I had a guy once who wove a basket for me, and I said, you know, "What, what do you want for it?" And he's, and he knew that I had some canned fruit that I used on Sundays for my kids when we were all living there. And he said, "I want a can of, I want a can of this stuff, which is peaches, in sweet syrup." And, it was a big can, and he ate that whole thing, you know? And the kids came around. And I've seen guys trade with a boat, and they'll get like, a kilo of sugar, two and a half pounds of sugar. And they just sit down with a spoon and eat it.

• 1:41:27Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  And, so if they have it, they eat it, and if they don't have it, they don't eat it.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  And they have no idea that it's bad for them, because it tastes good. Why would it be bad?

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Right. You can eat anything you find as a hunter-gatherer, and you're not going to have enough of it to be bad for you.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  Because you're going to get something else the next day. Or like tobacco, I can take in tobacco, but they're not going to get addicted to it. They're not going to, you know, they, even when they roll cigarettes, they like them, but they don't, they only have it like, once or twice a year, so you don't have to worry about it.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  You know, if they had it all the time, they would have serious issues.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  So, they've only developed addictions based on what they've been introduced from the Western world?

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Right. 100%.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  So, tell me about this conversion that you have. Tell me about how you, like, what are the steps to go from being a true believer, living with the Pirahá, and then changing your opinions? How many steps did it take?

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  It took some practical steps, and it took a lot of mental steps.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  How much time?

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  I would say that I started seriously doubting my faith about five or six years into my time. So about 1982, 1983. And I did not announce that I was not a Christian until 2000. And...

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Because Christians were saying things about, actually it was 2001, Christians were saying things about the war in Iraq, about how the soldiers that we send over there are the blessed peacemakers of the gospel. And I didn't like that. And so, the first step is you start to doubt. Then you pray so that you won't doubt, because the Apostle Thomas said, "Lord, I believe, help mine unbelief." But then after a certain point, that doesn't work so well. So you start to read literature from apologetics, trying to defend these, you know, defend your mind against these things that you're thinking, and then you realize, eh, I'm not satisfied with those answers either.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  So finally, one day, you reach the conclusion that, I just, I just can't do it anymore. I can't sustain this belief. I can't pretend that I have something that I'm not. And so, then eventually, I told my wife, I said, "I just don't believe this stuff anymore. I can't believe it." And, pretty much instantaneously, she walked out of the house, and we got a divorce.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  That was the end of that. Also, if you're a Christian missionary, and you're getting your income from being a missionary, and then you tell people, "Oh, I don't believe anymore," then you're unemployed.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Did you have any other issues in the marriage, other than that?

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wasn't, that wasn't the only issue.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Wasn't good, okay.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  But she tracked up all the issues we had, to what she perceived as my declining faith.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  Because...

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  You know, I, I loved rock music before we met. We met at a Jimi Hendrix concert, and I went many years without listening to rock music. And I love rock music. And so, I finally started listening to it again, and...

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  She got upset.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  That was a sign that I was starting to fade away, in my faith.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Ah-huh.

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  And, you know, so, and I'm not a perfect person, you know, I would go out with Brazilian friends, drinking, and that's definitely a no-no.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  And...

• 1:44:46Speaker 01

  Any religion that tries to keep you from Hendrix...

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 01

  Can't be, can't be a real religion.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  My dad said to me, when I first became a Christian, you know, he was the epitome of an atheist, you know, and he's, he said, "And one thing about religions is, they're always trying to beat their own system. They're always trying to find an exception, so they don't have to do the unpleasant things the religion tells them they need to do."

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  And I thought, "Oh, you don't know anything, you know, you're, you don't know anything about religion, you've never been in part of a church," but, it's not entirely false. People are always trying to make, you know, it's like, another expression that comes to mind when you're, if you see somebody who says they're a believer, and now they start doing things you don't think they should do, there's one, there are two reactions you could have. One is justice, and one is mercy. And everybody wants to give justice and get mercy, for their beliefs, and for their transgressions. And so, I was giving myself mercy, and my wife was giving me justice. But, in the end, I realized, I'm not gonna be bound by these rules anymore. I'm just gonna live my life according to my best lights, and according to the best

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  decisions, and I'm not gonna let this book tell me anymore. The ironic thing is, you know, I graduated number one in my class at a Bible school, so I know the Bible really well. And, and when people try to re-convert me, I've had many Christians try to re-convert me, I said, "That's not gonna work," you know, "'cause I know the Bible probably better than you do, so you're not gonna give me a verse I don't know." I said, "I'm not telling you you're wrong, and I'm not even telling you your interpretation is wrong, I'm just saying it doesn't work for me, and I can't, I can't pretend that it does."

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  Right. It's, it's gotta be weird, to have your beliefs confronted by a group of people, where, as you're learning their language, you're realizing that, this moral framework and this scaffolding that you've only attributed to Christianity, and you think that, it's just Christianity and religion that makes people good people. And then, here's people that don't have any God.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, so like, you know, you're in a big storm, the Amazon has storms in the rainy season, so somebody's house blows over, 'cause their houses, they're hunter-gatherers, and they're semi-nomadic, so they don't build the best houses. So, it's pouring rain, and somebody's house blows over, and they're just stuck there in the rain. What is their reaction? They start laughing, like it's the funniest thing that ever happened. And they will go off into other people's huts, and sleep on the ground, or get near the fire, or they might come to my house, that's very common, and wanna sleep with me, and then the next day, they'll rebuild it. There's nothing, except for fear of immediate threat from the outside, or from animals, that gets them to lose their cool.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  And when they do lose their cool, it's not really losing their cool, it is calculated defense. They know how to take care of themselves. You know, somebody's, and I mentioned to this guy that they would kill him, and they said, I said, "They kill for a living, don't forget that, that's how they make their living." Every man there, every boy here, could shoot you through the eye at 50 yards, with one of those arrows. They're not gonna miss. If they decide to kill you, or me, we're dead. So, they don't, because they make a difference between killing out of necessity, and killing to murder. But if they think they have to defend their family, you're dead.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  But their culture doesn't encourage squabbles? Like, they just, they're easygoing, they take everything?

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  The biggest, if there's a concept of sin, among the pitahah, it is anger. You don't raise your voice in anger, you don't hit another pitahah in anger. You know, I, I saw a guy get drunk, when they get alcohol, they get drunk, and he took a shotgun that he had gotten from a Brazilian, and he shot a dog that belonged to his brother.

• 1:48:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  And, his brother runs up to the dog, and he's just sobbing, because they love their dogs, and he's just crying that his dog's dead. And I went up to him, and I thought, "Oh, God, there's gonna be some violence here, I gotta get ready for this." And I said, "What are you gonna do?" He said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Are you gonna do anything to your brother? He shot your dog." He said, "I don't do anything to my brother, he's my brother. He shouldn't have shot my dog, but he's drunk, and his head's not working. You know, I miss my dog, I love my dog, but I love my brother, I'm not gonna hurt my brother." So they just don't react that way.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  So, do they have punishment for crimes?

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  They have punishment if it threatens the survival of the village. So there was one young man, a teenager, and I talk about him in, in both my book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, and in the new one that's coming out next year, Born of the River, who was paid in alcohol and a new shotgun to kill somebody who was living up the river, who wasn't a pitahah, living on the same river. And he killed him. And the pitahah saw this as an existential threat to the whole community, because they knew that the police could come up, they knew that soldiers could come up, they knew that many pitahah could be killed if, if this wasn't handled. So, they didn't hurt him, but they kicked him out of the village, he had to live on

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  his own. And he died, about two months later, he was dead. It's hard to live on your own, in the middle of the jungle, with no community, and nobody who has anything to do with you, just shunned.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  So, that's the worst punishment they have.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  Banishment.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Banishment.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Banishment, the jungle's crazy.

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  What did they give him to survive? Was it like you, when you were learning?

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  He got nothing.

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  Nothing?

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, get out. He could take what he had, but then nobody gave him anything else. So he had a bow and arrow, no food, no clothes...

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  How did he die?

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  Well, that I don't know, because I just know that when I came, I would ask about him, and then they said, "Oh, he's dead." So there's two possibilities. He died, naturally death, which I think is probably what happened, or somebody killed him.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  And then changed their name. I didn't do it.

• 1:50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's easily, that could have easily happened, because...

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  The change of the name gag is awesome.

• 1:50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, everybody up there is violent, and you see Brazilians coming up in these boats. Many of them are like pirates, I mean, they don't practice piracy now, some of them do. But you, you go on a boat with these guys, and these are some tough-looking guys, they got scars on their faces, and scars on their, but these are knife fights. These are guys who, you know, like, I, I got really mad at somebody, once, and I mentioned to another Brazilian, I said, "You know, if he keeps doing that, I'm gonna punch him in the face." And he says, "If you punch him in the face, he's gonna kill you. You know, he'll either get a knife, or he'll get a gun. So, if you decide you're gonna hit somebody, you better be armed, because they're gonna come at you with whatever weapon they can get their hands on."

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  You really thought that you were just gonna be able to punch him?

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  I was just talking, but I, you know, obviously didn't have a lot of, you know, my dad liked to fight a lot, but, you know, he liked...

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Were you guys drunk at the time, when you were doing this?

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I wasn't drunk. I, this guy was drunk and he was pushing and he was giving my daughters, who were by that time were pretty little blonde teenagers, a hard time. And I told him to get away. And he wanted to fight. And I got it calmed down, but I thought, you know, if he keeps trying, I'm gonna punch him in the face. And I told this guy that and he said, "You don't do that out here. Unless you're willing to kill him right now, don't do that. Cause he's not gonna fight you fair. He's gonna come at you when you're not expecting it and you're gonna die."

• 1:52:11Speaker 01

  Oy.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  So, this is, it's just a different concept. So, avoiding violence has lots of reasons to be done.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  I agree with that at all times.

• 1:52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  I think people should constantly avoid violence.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I completely agree too. And the Pita House show you that. These are people who are much better at violence than most people in this country without guns.

• 1:52:36Speaker 01

  And they avoid it at all costs.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  And they avoid it at all costs.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, wise.

• 1:52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, very wise.

• 1:52:41Speaker 01

  Um, what did you think when you were just looking at the framework that they live by? That these people don't have a god? That they don't have like someone watching over, making sure they're doing the right thing all the time? Or this punishment of being burning forever in hell? None of that is motivating them?

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  No. And I also thought that they would be afraid of death. They're not. I thought they would be afraid of the unknown. They're not. They're willing to learn. I sit outside on the riverbank with them and they point out satellites going overhead. Because they know the, they know the sky so well that they said, "What's that?" And I look and it's like, "Must be a satellite." I said, "It's like a radio thing." Cause they have radio. I mean, I, they don't have radios, but I have radio. And, um, they said, "Well, who put that up there?" I said, "I don't know." I said, "Americans, um, I think." And they said, "You know how to do that?" I said, "No, I don't know how to do that." So they said, "Some other Americans know how to do that." I said, "Yeah, I, I don't know how to do that."

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  But they're, they're very conscious of their environment.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  And, and they're very curious and they wanna learn these things. But if I told them that God put it up there, they wouldn't pay attention.

• 1:53:53Speaker 01

  Now, they have these spirits that we talked about earlier, where they believe a thing embodies a spirit? Like it could be like a jaguar embodies a spirit?

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  Yes. So, uh, they have some spirits. So that's a spirit we haven't talked about yet. So they have this spirit, Igagai, which they believe, you know, so they might see a man and then they might see a jaguar and then they say, "That must be the same thing." You know, this man became a jaguar or the jaguar became a man. And this is a belief that is in fact, uh, shape shifting is a, not an uncommon belief in the Amazon among even Brazilians that live there. So, one time, uh, I got up in the morning and everybody was yelling and pointing at the beach on the other side. And I said, "What are we looking at?" And they said, "Can't you see it?" I said, "I don't see anything." And they said, "That's Igagai."

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  And I didn't see anything. Then later, um, a few nights later, somebody said, "We've seen Igagai. It's dark. It's night." And the guy wakes me up. He says, "We've seen Igagai. He's not far behind your house. Would you come with us? Cause we know you're not afraid of him." You know, and I fell for that. And, um, so we go out there and then I turn around and they're not by me. Because Igagai can also refer to the jaguar shape. So, there's a jaguar out there. And I just went walking out there with a machete, you know? And then I realized they're not with me and I go back and they said, "Did you see it?" I said, "No, I didn't see anything." Hmm. But, uh, they, if they see a jaguar, they believe that it could be a jaguar or it could be Igagai.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  But when they were seeing this Igagai and you couldn't see anything, they were seeing it?

• 1:55:37Speaker 02

  Yes. And I was looking for a human looking creature. But there's, it's very possible that there was a jaguar just inside the forest that I didn't see.

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  But they could see it and you couldn't?

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, well, yeah, but if you walk around with them in the jungle, you find that they can see a lot of things you can't see. So once, I was walking with a guy down a path and he said, "Oh, don't step on that snake. It's a bushmaster." And I said, "What?" And I'm looking down. I'm looking at the path. I don't see anything. And I said, "What snake?" And he takes his bow and he shoots and the arrow starts flacking around like that. And he pulls it up and there's a bushmaster at the end. He said, "That one. Don't step on that one." And I didn't see it. I was, and I've almost put my hand on snakes. I don't know why I'm still alive because they can, they, they, it's like I'm a special needs person. I, I, you know, they have to watch out for me when I'm in the jungle.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  Cause it takes a lot of skill to be able to see these things. Just like when I take them to the city for like medical work, they get totally lost. They can't, they, it's hard for them to understand how I can find my way around a city. Um, because the cues that I'm using are totally different than the things they're used to.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  So this Igagai, this thing that they said they saw, they could have just been seeing an animal and saying it was Igagai and agreeing that it was a spirit?

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  And, and that's the only-

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  It's not like they're seeing a spirit that you're not seeing? Did you ever take that into consideration?

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

  Oh, I did.

• 1:57:07Speaker 01

  That perhaps like they can see things you can't see?

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  Yes, that is another possibility. And I definitely took that into, in fact, for the first several years, before I had really investigated the different shape shifting of Igagai, I thought that's all it could mean. They were seeing something and I couldn't see it. They were all seeing it. So may-

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  So you took that into consideration that maybe they have a sense that you don't have?

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And I, and, and it's clear that they have senses in the jungle. They're able to sense things that I cannot.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  Like how?

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's, like I say, they, they've grown up learning. So, so let's say that, um, let's say that you see a branch move in a tree. Was that the wind? Was that a monkey? Was that a snake up in the tree? What was it? I don't know. I barely noticed that the branches make moving.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

  But they know not only that it's moving, but exactly what caused it. I can see bubbles coming out of the water, uh, from the river. They're just bubbles to me, but to them, they represent either a rock underneath or a, or an alligator or, or some other creature that's under the water. And they can tell by the bubbles, but I can't. So they've learned to interpret their world in a way that I can't.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  So it's not that they don't have senses that you, that they have senses that you don't have, but that they have pattern recognition?

• 1:58:29Speaker 02

  That's the way I would put it. But again, you would need to do some sort of, um, psychological testing in much more controlled conditions than I've ever been able to do to sort those things out. But my, my view now is that they simply have the ability to recognize and, and perceive things that they've grown up with that I miss entirely.

• 1:58:55Speaker 01

  And this spirit thing, does it always embody a creature that they're, that they're, that's common? Like a jaguar? Or does it sometimes take on another form?

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  It can take these, these, um, entities that I've talked about. So there's another one, um, um, eye, eye, which is, um, has long teeth. And so they see these different creatures. One's naked, talks in a high voice. And, and so they're, they're putting experiences they can't explain into the shapes of these entities that they can explain. So just like us, we see so many things in the world we don't understand. That's what science is all about. So we create theoretical entities to be able to explain those observations that we otherwise have no explanation for.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  So in a sense, these separate entities are a primitive form. I shouldn't even use the word primitive. They're a form of science, given what they have. They're reducing the unexplained to the explainable.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  And their audit of the jungle is limited to the places that they've traveled?

• 2:00:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  So their, their version of the world is entirely limited to the language they possess. Is it written at all?

• 2:00:18Speaker 02

  I developed a writing system for them, yes.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  But before you know?

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  Before you know.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  So, non-written language, verbal language with no historical database to draw from?

• 2:00:28Speaker 02

  Right. But this, they actually get some really good skills out of this. So I took a guy to the nearest town, a big town, Porto Velho. It's the capital of a Brazilian state because he had cirrhosis of the liver, however he got that. And I took him to the hospital. First, we went to my house that I had in that city on the missionary compound. He had never been out of the jungle before in his life. So we go there and we have lunch. And I said, "Now it's time to go to the hospital." So I take him to the hospital and he says, "I don't wanna stay here." I said, "The doctors say you have to stay here so they can make you feel better." And so then I drive off after I spent a couple of hours with him.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  And the next morning about 6:00 AM, there's this knocking on my door. So this is 30 miles away. The hospital's 30 miles away. And he's standing there, wearing a hospital gown with no underwear or anything on. And I said, "How did you find my house?" He said, "Well, I just walked here." I said, "But how did you know how to walk here?" "Well, I saw it yesterday." But all he had to do was get the river where the river is, and then mentally compute where we're at. So many experiments have shown that people who don't have right and left, front and back, but use absolute directions like up river, down river, to the jungle, away from the jungle, are better at finding their way in new places than we are. You know, I can tell you, "Turn north."

• 2:01:52Speaker 02

  And you might know what I'm talking about. For the average person, I say, "Turn north." If your life depends on it, you don't know which way to turn.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:59Speaker 02

  But they would know. And so that gives them a better sense of a map of where they're at.

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  So do they have a word for north?

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  No, they only use up river. So the first thing they have to do, the first thing he did when we got him out to town was, "Where's the river?" And I showed him the river. And now he knew where everything was.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:02:21Speaker 02

  Because he got the river, hence he's got my house. Now he knows where everything is.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  30 miles away?

• 2:02:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, 30 miles away.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  But doesn't the river wind and isn't it?

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

  Yes, but they know how rivers work. And they can tell by the direction which way it's flowing. And when he looks at it, he knows which way is up river and down river, based on the way the water's flowing. And he walked out barefoot with nothing but a hospital gown on, 30 kilometers. And so he must have, he left at night and he got there first thing in the morning.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  And I said, "Well, we have to go back." He said, "I am not going back." I said, "Well, the doctor says you'll die if you don't go back." He says, "Well, I'm gonna die then, because I'm not going back." He said, "I would rather go back and die with my people." And so I took him back, and a few days later, he was dead.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  Was he a drinker?

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  He had been, yeah. There was a time before I helped the Indian agency demarcate their reservation, so it could be controlled, that boats came up and down all the time when the Brazil nuts were falling and when the, um, there were other jungle products like latex and sorba, which is a product used to make chewing gum and all sorts of other things, and copaiba, which is used for suntan lotion. So the Brazilian boats would come up and trade for all these things. And they always traded with whiskey, because that's the, I mean, uh, sugarcane rum, cachaça, which is the cheapest thing, you know, it's 30 cents a bottle. It was a lot easier to give them that, and the Pirahã like it. You know, I told them one time, I said, "This stuff's really cheap." It doesn't cost, he said, "Not for us it isn't. We don't otherwise get it, and we like it."

• 2:03:49Speaker 02

  So, you know, they like to drink.

• 2:03:52Speaker 01

  Did they understand the concept of health? Of the consequences of drinking alcohol?

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  No, because if you're a hunter-gatherer, and you're not used to having something in constant supply, you don't have to worry about it. But once it comes in constant supply, then you do have to worry about it. And when these guys keep coming up, giving, leaving this stuff off, then it becomes a serious health problem. Whereas before, it was like I got drunk six months ago.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:04:16Speaker 02

  You know, it's not a big deal.

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  Right, so once it became commonplace?

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:20Speaker 01

  And do they adjust their behavior? Based on people dying of like liver sclerosis?

• 2:04:26Speaker 02

  Not that I've ever seen. They don't, I can tell them, till I'm blue in the face, that it's the alcohol that's doing this, or the tobacco that's doing this. Why would they believe me? They know a lot of guys who have drunk a lot of whiskey and they don't have it, you know? So these couple of guys got it. How do I know that's what caused it? You know, so they don't take my word on faith.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  It's very childlike.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  It is childlike in the sense that children learn by evidence. And if children don't have evidence for something, I mean, and it takes a while for the evidence to start to sink in. You've got to repeat the experiment.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Right, but you would imagine that if they're intelligent people, you could explain this consumption of alcohol, when done infrequently, it's okay. But the everyday consumption of alcohol, because you have an endless supply of it now, is becoming a real problem.

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  That's a very good point, and I have brought that up with them before. And they say, "Yeah, we know a lot of Brazilians that drink, and they don't get that sickness." You know, so they come right up. It's like, it's like I could tell you that the COVID vaccine is really good for you. And you can say, "Well, I know a lot of people didn't get it, and they didn't get COVID either." You know, they didn't, weren't vaccinated, they didn't get COVID. So you have to look at the statistics. And even there, it's hard, you know, I mean, that was.

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  They just don't seem very concerned with dying, anyway.

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  They're not. They don't want to die right now, but it happens, and they're not worried about it.

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  What do they think? Do they have a purpose for life? Do they have a thing they worship at all?

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  No, they don't worship anything. They, the community is everything. You make a contribution to the community while you're alive. And that's your purpose.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:06:17Speaker 02

  That's it. And it doesn't take any thought. You don't need somebody to give a lesson. This is what our purpose is, folks. You just see everybody living, and that's how you live.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  Isn't it odd that that's not the primary way people live? If that, that makes you so happy? It's interesting, because even me, I'm hearing this, I'm like, "God, it's so appealing." But part of me is like, "I'm not fucking living like that." You know, nobody wants to live like that. It just seems too crazy, too difficult, too daunting. I don't want to get bit by a snake and have my bones exposed.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  Well, I often think this when I talk to people who are extreme ecologists, who think we need to not affect the environment. And I'm thinking, "Yeah, well, go live with the Pirahã." You know, you're not going to last three days there with them.

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  Maybe a few days more, but not much. So it is very appealing. And I lived there and enjoyed it. But while I was living there, I had things they didn't have access to. So I can't fairly say that I lived just like them.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  And you could always leave.

• 2:07:15Speaker 02

  And I can always leave, yeah. I mean, I can get in my motorboat and take off.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  Or, in the worst case, I can get on my two-way radio or satellite phone and call for help.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  Did you ever think about just saying, "Fuck it, stay there forever"?

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the early years, I did think about it. I thought about not pursuing any kind of graduate degree, not worrying about ever coming back to the US or, and I was really loving it there. But then I realized my kids wanted a wider experience. And they, I didn't have the right to deprive them of that.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  So you think if you were single, you would have just integrated?

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  It's very possible, yeah. I mean, that would have been easy to do, although I would have had to get, become much better at outdoor skills than I ever was. I mean, I would not stand up to a Pirahã's standards of hunting and fishing. And no woman would have married me, because they would have starved to death.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  Did you ever get better at those things?

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  Uh, not really.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  No?

• 2:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have, for one thing, you know, I like to hunt. I used, and I started hunting when I was like 10 years old, pheasant hunting, dove hunting. And so I do enjoy that. But I've never given it the time to become really good at it. Now, if I were abandoned in the jungle, I probably would. But it would take me a long time. I mean, these guys are using bows and arrows from the time they're two years old. So by the time they get to be teenagers, they're perfect. They are absolutely unmatchedless in their skill. And I've done little archery contests before to see how good they are, and it's just astounding. So I would have to spend, you know, many years practicing to get as good as they are.

• 2:08:56Speaker 02

  And then in the meantime, I would starve to death, because they're not going to feed me.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  How are they making their bows?

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  There's a couple of different kinds of wood that they use. But there's one that is, it's a bright red wood, and it's called piranha food, piranha food, because it grows near the edge of the river, and it drops flowers off the tree into the river. And the piranhas love to eat those flowers. So if you see a lot of those flowers in the water, probably not good to swim there. But they take a section of the bark, a big section. You know, it might be like four inches by four inches, or six inches. And it's just a hard piece, maybe eight feet long. And they bring that back, and they have a special tool.

• 2:09:48Speaker 02

  And it could be wood or bone, or if they have a machete, they use that. And they just start shaping it. Until finally, they get a bow that's probably two inches wide and an inch and a half thick. And it's taller than they are. It's about seven feet long. And then they get the bark from a tree, a certain kind of tree, and they give that, and they get it off in strands. And so a man, a brother, or a father, or a husband, will give it to their closest woman relative. And she takes those strands, and she makes a bowstring. So the bow represents man and woman working together. A man can make the wood, a woman makes the string.

• 2:10:32Speaker 02

  And they get the arrows, a man gets the feathers, a man gets the shaft. The woman makes the strings that tie everything on. So she's the glue. And once you get that, that thing, yeah, there's, there's one right there. This guy.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  And that's, those are the arrows, really long arrows?

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, those are the arrows. And that, these are fishing arrows, so they're much longer. But actually, they're not both fishing arrows. One of them's just a regular arrow. So their arrows are quite long. And that thing is a very powerful bow. And you can see the thickness of the string there. So.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the bow.

• 2:11:10Speaker 01

  They eat a lot of monkeys?

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, they eat a lot of monkeys.

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  Isn't that weird?

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

  No, I asked him once, I said, um, do, um, do monkeys look like people? And they say, no, why would you ask that? I said, they look like people to me. And he said, no, no, they get, they're covered in hair. You're not covered in hair. You know? So I saw, I, I, I went to the Trans Amazon Road. I was, I was traveling out all by myself hitchhiking. And I stayed with this Brazilian. And I said, you have any cold water? And he had a kerosene refrigerator. And so I went over and I opened it to get this cold water. And at the bottom, it looked like there were like four dead babies. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, what is that? I said, what is this? He said, oh, it's just the monkeys. I skinned them, you know?

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  And a monkey that's been skinned does look a lot more human. And, uh, but nobody thinks twice about it, you know?

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  I said, are the monkeys more like us? Or are they more like dogs? Oh, they're like dogs. They're much more like dogs than they are like us. They just don't see the problem.

• 2:12:16Speaker 01

  It's just food.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just food.

• 2:12:20Speaker 02

  And, uh, so, you know, and they love, the, the favorite part of any animal is the brains. And one reason the brains are so good is because brains have a lot of saturated fat. And it's a great source of saturated fat.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  They eat monkey brains?

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they eat monkey brains. So the favorite thing, I, I was talking to a woman one time and I was, I was making a sandwich. I had brought in some lunch meat and bread. I had just gotten there. It was my first day there. And so I had a little bit, enough to make a sandwich for that night. And I'm squirting mustard. And you know, when you get to the end of the mustard bottle and you're squeezing it, makes a sound like somebody who's got diarrhea. And, um, she says, what is that bird shit stuff you're eating? And I said, well, it's good. It's mustard. You want to try some? Oh, no. And, um, she said, look at this bird shit. He's eating bird shit. And, um, then I look at her and she's eating the brains out of a rat.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  And he's got this rat head and she's sucking the brains out. And, um, they're cooked, of course. But, uh, she's sucking the, and I'm thinking, this is a great example for an introductory class in anthropology.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  You know, how different we perceive things. That's great to her. This is great to me, but it grosses the other one out.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  That's wild. Mustard's disgusting, rat brains, great.

• 2:13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  And isn't there an issue with, uh, eating primate brain tissue? Is that, can you get prion diseases?

• 2:13:48Speaker 02

  Well, there are diseases, uh, that they discovered in New Guinea from cannibals who are eating human brains.

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:13:56Speaker 02

  But I'm not aware of any diseases that are passed by eating monkey brains or, or other kinds of brains. They'll eat any animal's brains.

• 2:14:05Speaker 01

  So the prion diseases that you get are from animals eating the same animal, right? Like mad cow disease is because they serve cows' literal brain and neural tissue from other cows.

• 2:14:15Speaker 02

  Right. So I'm not, not an expert on that, but, um, I do know that I've never seen a case of them getting disease from that. And the, the superficial reading that I've done on it suggests that humans get it from eating human brains.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Interesting. So they can eat deer brains, rat brains, no problem.

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  Right. So the favorite part of any animal is the head. So if they bring me a fish, they'll give me a fish. Um, they like to trade fish for canned meat because canned meat keeps. But, um, I like fish cheeks, but my, my wife hated the fish heads. She didn't want the fish heads around. So they would be happy to keep the fish heads and they just make a big stew of fish heads and they eat the brains and the eyeballs and everything. Those are really tasty bits.

• 2:15:00Speaker 01

  And probably rich in nutrients.

• 2:15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are rich in nutrients. They know what they're doing. They love all the internal organs.

• 2:15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so weird how we've moved away from all that stuff.

• 2:15:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  I mean, that's one of the things that happens with wolves. The alpha in the pack is the one that eats the liver.

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  They, they know something's going on. There's a lot of nutrients in these organ meats and we've moved away from that in a very strange way. So people are disgusted by the idea of liver.

• 2:15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, you go to some, if you go to northern Brazil and you go to one of these churrascarias, Brazilian steak restaurants.

• 2:15:32Speaker 01

  Love those.

• 2:15:33Speaker 02

  If you're in an everyday person's, you're going to get a lot of heart and you're going to get, uh, liver.

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  Kidney.

• 2:15:40Speaker 02

  Kidney, you're going to get all that stuff.

• 2:15:43Speaker 02

  You know, so, um, that is stuff they, they love to eat.

• 2:15:46Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, a lot of cultures, Mexicans, menudo. Menudo's, it's got tripe in it, organ meat and.

• 2:15:54Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, my, my brother-in-law, uh, deceased now, but he was Mexican. And that's the first thing he insisted that my sister learn how to make in terms of true Mexican food was menudo. And, uh, he wanted that every Saturday and she loved to make it for him. So, um, then she made this pozole with cow feet in it.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 2:16:16Speaker 02

  And, you know, got the hooves and everything in the pozole, but, um, cooks all day.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  I remember when I was a kid, pickled pig's feet was a big thing.

• 2:16:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so internal organs are really good. You know, you, you know that a Brazilian churrascaria is authentic if they serve chicken hearts.

• 2:16:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:16:33Speaker 02

  You know?

• 2:16:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:34Speaker 02

  And so if I go to one and they don't have chicken hearts, I'm, I'm quite disappointed.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  It's westernized.

• 2:16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  They're still great, but yeah, I know what you mean.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went to one when I was in Brazil. It was awesome.

• 2:16:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, those are, it's Brazilian fast food.

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is fast and it's amazing food, too. It's like, they know how to eat. If you're in a rush, a churrascaria is the best place to eat.

• 2:16:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Speaker 01

  Cause you sit down, you flip that cart over to green, the food keeps, 20 minutes later, you're stuffed.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. And you, you ate much more nutrition than having a McDonald's Big Mac or something like that.

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Sure, and it's all you can eat.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's awesome.

• 2:17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I used to come out of the village and, uh, go straight to one of those. I've been out of the village for six months and I was really hungry and I was coming out on my motorcycle. And the first one I saw, I pulled over and that's, and I ate till I could barely move.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Did you eat monkey when you were in the jungle?

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I, I didn't eat the brains, but they didn't offer them either. Cause that's the best part. So they would.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Would you have if they offered you some?

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would have, I would have. I've tried a lot of stuff there. And when I was doing my field experience in southern Mexico and Chiapas, I, I spent some time with the Celtales, the Celta people, descendants of the Mayas. And, um, you know, I, I ate this stuff they chew up and spit out and let ferment and.

• 2:17:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I've heard of that. That's, that's a beverage. Is that like an alcoholic beverage?

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I was trying to fit in and so they gave me just a little bit. And they said, what'd you think? And I, I'm trying to be this cool guy. And I said, I loved it. I hated it, but I said, I loved it. And so they bring me a big bowl.

• 2:18:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:18:08Speaker 02

  And so then.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Drink it, people spit.

• 2:18:10Speaker 02

  Uh, that night, I was up, uh, with, um, things coming out of both ends all night long. And the next morning, my blood pressure was 60 over 40 and I had to be, uh, flown out. They had to get me on a mule and get me out to the nearest airstrip and out. And, uh, but I did my bit. I was accepted as a great, great gringo for eating this stuff, you know, for drinking it.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  What happened to you?

• 2:18:35Speaker 02

  I, well, um, whatever it was, my body didn't like it. So it's just.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  So is it just like the bacteria in it, you think?

• 2:18:44Speaker 02

  Uh, probably. I think it had to be that because it didn't gross me out. I didn't like the taste of it, but it wasn't grossing me out. And it was a happy time. We had little ribbons and stuff. We were having a festa and I was sitting with the men at the table and.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  And their gut bacteria just knows how to handle it. You just sit, oh.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  Boy.

• 2:19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:19:03Speaker 01

  So they just, oh, I'm going to throw up.

• 2:19:05Speaker 02

  It says that the human saliva like creates the fermentation. Yeah, that's right.

• 2:19:09Speaker 01

  Come on, people. Isn't there a better way to get drunk? Good Lord.

• 2:19:14Speaker 02

  Well, if you want to get drunk, um, and you want it bad enough, there it is.

• 2:19:18Speaker 01

  Oh, and I bet that stuff, you're not going to drink every day because it's so disgusting.

• 2:19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  It's not going to become a problem.

• 2:19:25Speaker 02

  Once it's fermented, nobody really cares, you know, who's around that culture.

• 2:19:29Speaker 01

  Boy.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  You know, but, um.

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  Boy, what does the monkey taste like?

• 2:19:33Speaker 02

  Well, there again, I don't have a vocabulary to describe all these meats. It's a, it's a tough meat, but I pressure it. Put it, I put the.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  A crock pot?

• 2:19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I put it in a pressure cooker over a fire. I take in a pressure cooker, you know, not an electric pressure cooker, obviously. One of these pressure cookers, you can sit on top of the fire. And after I pressure it, it's falling off the bone and I take the meat off and I throw it in a bowl and I put some manioc meal on top of that. And then I cover it in Tabasco and, uh, it's great. It's very filling and it tastes really good.

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  Wow. Did you feel weird eating a monkey?

• 2:20:08Speaker 02

  When you see the monkey and you put the little monkey body inside the pressure cooker and it looks like a baby, it doesn't look too good. But once you open up the pressure cooker and it's all cooked and the bones are separated from the meat and then it's just meat floating in there, you know? And, and when you're out in the jungle and you've been out there long enough, um, just about any kind of meat sounds pretty good. Uh, I worked with a group, um, called the Wadi. I actually wrote a 540-page grammar of their language, co-wrote it. And, um, they were cannibals up until 1962.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Yo.

• 2:20:41Speaker 02

  And they, they had two, they had endocannibalism and exocannibalism. Exocannibalism was eating their enemies and endocannibalism was eating their people. And so if you die in the village at that time, up until 1962, um, they keep your body. They call all the relatives. Your body might sit there in the Amazon sun for three days and your relatives come from all over. And then they cook you over a grill. And, uh, slowly they roast the body and then they cut it into chunks and they eat them with like little toothpicks. And, um, they eat it till everything's gone. They eat the bones, they eat the brains, they eat everything.

• 2:21:23Speaker 01

  They eat human brains.

• 2:21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the purpose, uh, as best I've been able to figure out, anthropologists have tried to answer this, so my answer might not be theirs, but it's based on interviews with the people, is to give your relatives eternal life. Because they live in you and you're going to live in somebody else, so you just continue living. But exocannibalism, I kill a guy in warfare, I'm going to eat him like an animal. I just chop him up and grill him and eat it and throw the bones off into the forest.

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  Boy.

• 2:21:51Speaker 02

  So that's totally different.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  Some Native Americans practiced that.

• 2:21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

  It's been said.

• 2:21:59Speaker 01

  Eating the brain, though, wouldn't that, what is that disease? What is this called? Jakob Kretzfeld? Is that what it's called?

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that. I should know that, but.

• 2:22:08Speaker 01

  But it's mad cow disease, essentially.

• 2:22:09Speaker 02

  It's like that, yeah. So, but they don't eat people all the time. They eat dead relatives. And if anybody's ever gotten that disease, it's never been registered.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  That's crazy. But, I mean, even if you're eating dead relatives, you eat a dead relative, I would imagine you can get prion disease.

• 2:22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it depends on how many die. There's a whole etiquette about it. You're never allowed to say that this tastes really good, you know? For example, you can't say that.

• 2:22:36Speaker 01

  You can't say delicious.

• 2:22:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can't say that.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  Uncle Tom is yummy.

• 2:22:39Speaker 02

  And I've talked to, I've talked to some of the older men who have eaten their dead, and they say, oh, the babies taste really good, but you can't, you can't say that.

• 2:22:49Speaker 01

  The babies taste really good is rough.

• 2:22:52Speaker 02

  It's like human deal. But the Brazilian government and missionaries put a stop to that in 62.

• 2:23:00Speaker 01

  Good move. Why do they, why do they let it sit for three days before they cook it?

• 2:23:04Speaker 02

  Because it takes that long for the relatives to come, because they might be in other villages. So, they've got to send runners out to bring the whole family together.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  Doesn't the meat start rotting?

• 2:23:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it starts to smell pretty bad. And there are a lot of stories about people puking after every bite.

• 2:23:16Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck. But these are people that could drink that puke beer.

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 2:23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:23:24Speaker 02

  And so, you realize cultural differences aren't that superficial.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's also probably meat is probably extremely valuable to them. And they just probably think, look, there's no reason for this to go to waste when it could sustain us.

• 2:23:38Speaker 02

  It would be very interesting to go back in time and see how the customs started. They could have started out of hunger, and then you dress it up with some religious beliefs. Or the religious beliefs could have come first, and you started doing it. But they do have oral histories about it, but the oral histories never say, we, we were short of meat, so we ate Joe, we ate our buddy. But they do say, we want to help them live in us, and we will live in somebody else. So, that's the explanation you get.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:24:12Speaker 02

  Or that I got.

• 2:24:13Speaker 01

  Wow. Well, when you got there, a few years after it's.

• 2:24:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I didn't start working with them until 1985.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:24:22Speaker 02

  So, it was 20 something years after.

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  But they still had stories about.

• 2:24:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, they still had a lot of stories about it. And, you know, anybody over 30 had, had done it.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  Is there any kind of cannibalism that goes on in the Amazon still?

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  Probably, but none that I know of. But there are still some uncontacted tribes, and there are still tribes that behave one way when foreigners are around and another way when they're not.

• 2:24:46Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:24:46Speaker 02

  I have a friend, she, she died last year, but she was a missionary among those people from the 50s. So, she remembers the cannibalism. And she told me, although some anthropologists deny this, but I think she knows them better than any anthropologist's ever been there, that she said, I think when nobody's around, they still do that.

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:25:08Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  I bet they do, too.

• 2:25:10Speaker 02

  They don't have warfare.

• 2:25:11Speaker 01

  Why would they listen to someone else? They don't have warfare.

• 2:25:13Speaker 02

  Not anymore. They did, but that's been stopped, and they have, they're isolated from other groups that they used to be enemies with. But there are still some who believe the old time religion, you know? And the old time religion says, eat your dead. You know? So, that probably, it's quite possible that it happens. But what you find is that since the 80s, most of the groups that have regular contact with the outside have undergone a very rapid process of enculturation into Brazilian society.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  So, even among the Pirahãs now, in the, in the decades since I was there regularly, I see pictures of them, because my ex-wife still lives right next to them.

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:26:00Speaker 02

  And she, she sends me short videos and pictures of them when they come up to her little wooden shack on the trans-Amazon highway by their river. And they're dressing very differently now, and some of them are speaking some Portuguese, not, not very well, but they're speaking some Portuguese.

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  And your ex-wife is still a missionary?

• 2:26:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's still trying to convert them.

• 2:26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  No, no conversions. They're not going to convert.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Boy, you gotta give it up to her for having, like, stick-tootiveness. I mean, that's, that's really determined.

• 2:26:31Speaker 02

  She is absolutely a New Testament, first-century Christian in terms of her faith.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:26:37Speaker 02

  And she doesn't deviate, and she's not afraid of anything. I mean, she, we've been in many life-threatening situations, and I don't tend to get afraid, and she definitely is not afraid, not ever.

• 2:26:49Speaker 01

  So, is that because of her belief? That she believes that God is looking out for her, and if she dies, she's going to go to heaven anyway?

• 2:26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, the, the constant, a common refrain among Christian missionaries is, I'm immortal until my task is done. God will protect me until he's done with me. And so, if he's not done with me, I don't have to worry about it. And if he is, great.

• 2:27:11Speaker 01

  Wow. There's a lot of power in that, too. I mean, how many people just live in this constant state of existential angst?

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's something she's never had.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:27:21Speaker 02

  She doesn't have that.

• 2:27:22Speaker 01

  There's a lot of value to that.

• 2:27:23Speaker 02

  It's what attracted me to her so much, besides the fact that she was really cute, that, that attracted me to her a lot when we first met.

• 2:27:30Speaker 01

  Were you bummed out when she wanted a divorce because you lost your faith?

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  Well, by that time, we weren't getting along that well, because she's very anti, she's not anti-science per se, but she's anti helicopter science. She feels that too many people who do studies of indigenous groups and languages come in for a short time, go out, and just speak a lot of bullshit that nobody's ever going to test. And so, she hates that. And she's seen it happen with the Pirahã. I've seen it happen with the Pirahã. I've seen, I've seen a couple of anthropologists and linguists go in and do doctoral dissertations on them that are, like, totally ridiculous. But if I say something, I'm a gringo, and I'm jealous because it disagrees with me.

• 2:28:14Speaker 01

  Do you think that they do that because no one's going to check? And so, they just say, I want to just write whatever I want to write?

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  That does happen. That definitely happens. It's also because people realize, it sounds really good to go study an indigenous culture or an indigenous language. When you get there and you find out, this is so damn hard, I had no, I have no words to put in how hard this is.

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  So, they bullshit?

• 2:28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, you know, you, you want to say to a Pirahã, what is this? And so, how do you ask that? Well, the phrase in Pirahã is, he go, o, que se que, I, he? But where do you get that phrase? You can't ask somebody how to ask, what is this?

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  If you don't know the language. So, you have to watch them very carefully, and somebody might get something new. Or you might even give them something new that they've never seen, hoping somebody's going to ask them, what is this? So, you can write it down and then test it. And that's how I got it.

• 2:29:08Speaker 01

  And so, now you're fluent in Pirahã?

• 2:29:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  So, you can go and have a conversation with them, so you can explore some of these more nuanced subjects and do it in their language?

• 2:29:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:29:20Speaker 01

  So, you can kind of translate things in a way that they're going to understand what you're saying?

• 2:29:24Speaker 02

  Yes, and that's what takes the most practice. So, when I first translated the Gospel of Mark into Pirahã, I thought I had done a marvelous job. And I would read bits out to the Pirahã, and they could explain it to me, and it seemed like they were understanding it. But I used a grammar that was largely based on English. So, when, when I read to them large sections, they were totally lost. They couldn't understand it at all. And what does that mean? It means I got it wrong. It means that I haven't figured out the language as well as I thought I did. And that's very humbling when you've spent so many years trying to do it. So, I had to start from the ground up again. And these are all, you know, before you can learn a language, you have to murder it.

• 2:30:05Speaker 02

  And before you can carry on a conversation, you just feel like an idiot for years.

• 2:30:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  And for one thing, people who go in to do a PhDs or dissertation on a language like this are going to take one to two years of their life, and that's it. And that's not enough time. It takes a year to get fluent in the language. And I know many people who've written about many different Amazonian languages who can't speak a word of the language, or speak very little of it. They'll tell people they speak it, but you take, you go with them, and you realize, eh, they don't speak it that well. So, if you don't speak it that well, how can you ask them to distinguish subtle meaning differences? You can't.

• 2:30:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:30:45Speaker 02

  And that means that a lot of, you know, this kind of field work is, which is so vital, is not as reliable as we would like to think it is.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  That's unfortunate.

• 2:30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Especially if a young student is coming along, and they're interested in pursuing it further, and they're starting off with some faulty assumptions.

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  Yes, and the other problem is, people learn a theory in graduate school, and they're, they take it as their job of their dissertation, and this isn't limited to just linguistics and anthropology, but they take it as the job of their dissertation to support that theory. So, you know, it's like Paul Simon says, a man sees what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. When you're, when you're trying to do theoretical research, field research shouldn't be that theoretically motivated. It should be basically descriptive, and then you can do the theory later. But most people bring the theory into it, and you can't totally divorce those two.

• 2:31:48Speaker 02

  But you see a fact, so, for example, I've worked with Pirahã, and I'm asking for a certain kind of data, and they don't give me what I wanted. And I thought.

• 2:31:59Speaker 02

  This guy's not giving me what I want. What's wrong with him? What am I saying wrong? Is he stupid? And then, as I learned to speak the language better, I realized, "Oh, he's giving me exactly what I needed, and I was too stupid to know it." And so, that's hard. You're the one working for the PhD. He's just a hunter-gatherer. And it turns out, he's at least as smart as you are, and often, he's able to know what you need better than you do. And that's another part of the humbling experience of doing field research.

• 2:32:27Speaker 01

  Wow. The amount of commitment that's involved in going as deep as you went with this is really crazy.

• 2:32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I give demonstrations, and you can find some on the internet, where I take a language that I know nothing about, and I switch to Pirahá, which I know they know nothing about, and within 20 or 30 minutes, I'm able to explain to the audience some basic facts about how their grammar works and what their basic vocabulary, you know, a lot of basic vocabulary. And I do this to linguists. I've done it in front of as many as 500 linguists at a time.

• 2:32:59Speaker 02

  And then I tell them, a lot of people think this is magic. This is really cool. I said, "What you've seen here is me working for about an hour. Now, you just do that every day for two years, and you're in." And that's the part. It's intensive. I get a headache when I do these demonstrations because my concentration is so hard. And, you know, you miss obvious things, and you say bad things, and you're just self-correcting all the time. You're just constantly, you start off this wide, and you're trying to get this narrow, get down to this point of what it actually means. And as you work through that, there are no shortcuts. There's no shortcut to doing that. And you need to be well-trained, and you need to be very committed,

• 2:33:44Speaker 02

  and you need to have a little bit of talent, and work really hard. And when people see how easy it looks, and then they try it, they realize they're seeing me at 20 years down the road from when I started.

• 2:33:59Speaker 02

  But yeah, there are methods to use to learn a language where there's no language in common.

• 2:34:04Speaker 01

  But it's gotta be very difficult to achieve a fluent understanding of their language. And the way you did it from the ground, literally, from starting from, "What is this? How do you say that?" And then remembering it, piecing it together. And then you have to write it down? Then you're writing it down?

• 2:34:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. And imagine if a guy like you didn't do that. Like, how many people are willing to do that? Especially how many people that are, you know, you're a linguist. You wanna be a working intellectual. You don't necessarily wanna get into malaria. You don't wanna get eaten by a jaguar. You don't wanna live in the jungle.

• 2:34:45Speaker 02

  But, so there are people who would like to spend that much time, but they don't have the funding. So, you know, the National Science Foundation and the Brazilian National Science Foundation and the British equivalent of the National Science Foundation have all funded my research over the years. But the bulk of my research was funded by being a missionary. And so, I had all these years because churches were supporting me. But today...

• 2:35:12Speaker 01

  But did they ever ask, "How come you haven't converted anybody yet?"

• 2:35:15Speaker 02

  Well, they ask me that all the time. I've had people... I showed slides of the Pirahá to a church here in Texas, in Dallas. And the people started getting up and leaving. And I thought they were interested. They gave me money to work in these people. And I said, "What's the problem?" And they said, "You're no good at all." And I said, "Well, what are you seeing that you don't like?" They said, "These people are naked. And if you're a Christian missionary, why haven't you taught them to wear clothes?" And I said, "Well, they don't wanna wear clothes." I said, "What in the Bible says you have to wear clothes?" They said, "Adam saw Eve's nakedness, and they were ashamed of each other. You must wear clothes. You're not even teaching them the basics of Christianity." And I thought, "Yeah, I guess I'm not."

• 2:35:59Speaker 02

  You know, I didn't realize... That's not part of the basics of Christianity for me. But, you know, how do you tell a guy who wears a loincloth that it's three inches too short?

• 2:36:12Speaker 02

  You know, something's peeking out there. So, it's not... They don't wear it for modesty, you know?

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:18Speaker 02

  They wear it to keep from sticks getting poked in your penis.

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36:22Speaker 02

  And so, modesty has nothing to do with it. Why would you, you know, to the average Pirahá, a woman's breast is about as erotic as an elbow. You know? You know, you see a woman, she's nursing her baby, and then the baby stops nursing, and she's still talking to you, and her tit's hanging out. And it doesn't mean anything to her, and after a while, it doesn't mean anything to you either. You know, what's the big deal? And so, to get across the idea that it may be clothes that's causing this problem instead of going naked, which then eliminates the problem of lust,

• 2:36:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a hard concept for some churches. But churches tend to get very impatient. But then the National Science Foundation, for example, if I say, "I'm gonna go study language X, and I need funding for five years." "Oh, no, we fund those in..." "That's a year's funding." "Yeah, but nobody who goes out for a year really learns it that well. I need to learn it a lot better." "Oh, yeah, well, go somewhere else. We're not giving you the money for that."

• 2:37:18Speaker 01

  Oh, that's ridiculous. Are there really a lot of people that are willing to do that kind of extensive work?

• 2:37:23Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say a lot.

• 2:37:24Speaker 01

  But enough to do it?

• 2:37:26Speaker 02

  Well, there's 8,000 languages, and there's maybe 2,000, 3,000, let's say 5,000 linguists in the whole world. And not... And only a small percentage of them wanna do this kind of work. The rest of them, most of them wanna do Chomsky's kind of work, where you sit at your desk, and you say, "Language has this property, and it must also have this property." And so, the rubber's never meeting the road.

• 2:37:52Speaker 02

  I mean, if you can do your field research on database... I shouldn't say that because that's what my son does. He's also a linguist, and he grew up in an Indian tribe, you know, the Pirahá. And he also did a dissertation on another tribe that he learned to speak the language. But nowadays, he goes through databases and comes up with statistical generalizations. And it's pretty interesting. But he'll tell me flat out. He said, "Yeah, I don't wanna do that fieldwork anymore. That's really demanding," even though he grew up there. So, and that's the way most people are.

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  How many more cultures that have completely different languages and completely different sets of rules and structure are out there that we're not aware of?

• 2:38:33Speaker 02

  Well, there... When I was... Back in the 80s, they used to say there's about 5,000 languages. So, 20 years later, 21 years later, we're saying, or 31 years later, we're saying there are 8,000. Languages die out at the rate of about one every two weeks. So, they're dying. And once they die, we can never recover that information. But also, languages are being born on a regular basis because you talk like who you talk with. So, why are Portuguese and Spanish separate languages? Because you've got the Eber River, and you've got natural divides between, in that part of the Iberian Peninsula. And so, they stop talking to each other, and so, their speech diverges.

• 2:39:16Speaker 02

  That's how Latin became French and Romanian, and Germanic became English. So, they stop talking to each other. So, as soon as people stop talking, their language evolves, and they have different languages. So, British English and American English have evolved apart. And yet, at the same time, we have television and movies and things that keep them sort of together.

• 2:39:41Speaker 02

  But if you don't have media, and you don't have that, then eventually, they're talking... They're not talking with each other at all, and they become different languages. And that's where most languages come from.

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  Wow. And there's gotta be a lot of these tribes that aren't talking to each other. And how many of these tribes have been investigated? And how many people have been embedded in the... Are there tribes out there where there's no one has ever examined a language? No one's ever embedded themselves in their culture?

• 2:40:11Speaker 02

  There are probably over 1,000 where no one's gone there. But there are a couple of thousand where no scientist has gone there to study their language or their culture.

• 2:40:21Speaker 01

  Couple thousand?

• 2:40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, a couple thousand, I would say. If not more.

• 2:40:25Speaker 01

  And they probably have completely different languages.

• 2:40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, we're worried, and we should be, about the disappearance of certain bird species and all these other kinds of species. And we should be concerned about that. But we're not concerned enough about the disappearance of these languages and how the new languages are arising. And why should we be concerned? Well, for one thing, every language is like a library. It's a repository of information that is lost when they switch to Portuguese. Because Portuguese doesn't have all the same knowledge embedded in it. It doesn't have the same way of talking about the world. There's a lot that's missing. Every Pirahá, every child, every woman, every man knows the name of every species, a plant, an animal, in their environment.

• 2:41:12Speaker 02

  They will never just say "tree." Like, I walked with the Pirahá into the jungle, and they said, "This is what we call this." And so, I write it down. "What do you call it?" "Tree." "What do you call that over there?" "Tree." "And what's that over there?" "Tree." They said, "You just have one word for all these things." But they're calling them by the species name. And I'm thinking, well... I told them, I said, "Well, there's some Americans who do know all the different names, but I'm just not one of them." But they find it hard to believe that any American could get by without that knowledge of their environment. So, when that language goes, we've lost the difference. So, a friend of mine did a study on how a group in the Amazon classify birds. And they don't classify them based on their anatomy, like Western science.

• 2:41:56Speaker 02

  They classify them based on what they eat. And so, if you know their classification, you know what all these birds eat. And you know how to deal with those birds, to capture them or to follow them. And when that language is gone, that, all that knowledge is gone. So, it's like, you know, the Library of Congress has been blown up or something when you lose a language. And why do new languages come into being? What are the conditions? And what does all this mean for us being human beings? How do we know ourselves better? How are we to understand our species if we don't study all the different exemplars of our species? And that's the challenge. And that's what keeps the work exciting. But it also is what makes it a challenge

• 2:42:40Speaker 02

  because you tell a really bright 25-year-old or 24-year-old PhD student, "Okay, now you have to take off to the jungle for three years, or four." And they're thinking, "I could get a job without doing that." You know? "I don't need to go spend four years in the jungle to get a job." You know, professor's a pretty cushy job. It doesn't pay well, but it's also, it's not like, you know, it's not like real labor. And I told... People tell me how hard professors work. I said, "Yeah, well, you know, it does take a lot of hours, but I'd rather do this than run a jackhammer because I ran a jackhammer. And I'll tell you, this is a lot easier than running a jackhammer." So...

• 2:43:19Speaker 02

  But you go off to the field and you spend this time. Ironically anthropologists seem more prepared to do this than linguists. And the other ironic thing is I know, this is anecdote, I know more anthropologists who speak the language fluently than I know linguists who speak the language fluently, which I have to put down to the pernicious influence of certain theories and linguistics that makes people think they don't have to learn a language to know how it works.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:43:45Speaker 02

  And I tell people, when you're going off to do fieldwork, I did write a field manual, and I say, the first six months, just work on learning the language. Don't take many notes, you know, take notes of words and stuff. So I had a goal where I wanted to learn ten new words a day. And I kept a little spiral notebook clip in my belt buckle. And I would walk around learning these things, and I want to learn new words and write those down. And then I would spend the evening memorizing those words, and I would try them out again the next day, and I'd try to make sentences with them. And when people start laughing at you, you know that I didn't get that right. And sometimes they like to teach you dirty words, right? They think that's hilarious, you know, the Alaska. So then I, you know, you want, how do you learn the words for genitals, for example? That's kind of an embarrassing thing if you stop and think about it.

• 2:44:30Speaker 02

  So I asked, I started to ask the guy, I said, what do you call that? You know, pointed to his dick, and he said, and he calls, he, you know, he says, I'm not going to tell you, but he calls a little boy over who's naked, and he shows me every part of his body. And he said, you call this this, and this that, and this that. And then he says, but the names change once they start to grow hair. So penis as a boy is different from penis as a man, and vagina as a girl is different from vagina as a woman. And so, you know, how do you get those words? You've got to count on close friendships.

• 2:45:04Speaker 01

  Like I said at the beginning of this, man, you've had a fascinating life. You really have. It's very, very interesting. I really appreciate you sharing everything today. It was really, really fun.

• 2:45:17Speaker 02

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:45:19Speaker 01

  I enjoyed it. Jamie, pull up his book. Um, this one. Well, books, I should say. This one, Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. Phew. The Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle, Amazonian Jungle.

• 2:45:37Speaker 02

  That's what they say to each other each night before they go to bed. I don't sleep, there are snakes.

• 2:45:43Speaker 01

  Amazing. Thank you very much.

• 2:45:48Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:45:49Speaker 01

  It was awesome. Bye, everybody.