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