Joe Rogan Experience #2547 - Daniel Everett

The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing my day, Joe Rogan podcast my night, all day. Rolling. Good to see you, sir. Good to be here. Thank you very much for doing this. I'm really excited to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this a lot. Thanks very much for having me. You have a very, very unique life story. I want to start with, how did you become... Let's lay it out for people. What got me interested in you is you became a Christian missionary and then went to the jungle and met these people. Let me say this right. The Piraha? Piraha. Piraha. Piraha. And stopped being a missionary and lived with them for how long? Well, the total time that I lived with them is about eight years in the jungle with them over a period. But I've been working with them for 40 years. I go back a lot. Wow. But you lived with them for eight years, and during that eight-year time period, you kind of... Is it safe to say you're an atheist? Yes, it's safe to say that. Let's take it back to the beginning. How did you become a missionary? Did you come from a religious family? No, I came from a very unreligious family. In fact, I was standing out in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968 trying to sell LSD to get in. And this guy that I knew from high school that was really straight-laced came up with his sister, and she was very cute. So I went up to try to sell them some LSD. They didn't use drugs. And so I said, well, you got any change? I need to get some money to get into the concert. And I saw that she went to the same high school that I did. So after the concert, which she didn't like but I loved, I went to see her in high school. I sat by her during lunchtime and found out that she was a missionary and had been raised in Brazil. And that really intrigued me because it was the 60s, and I didn't want to have just the typical U.S. life, and living in the Amazon sounded really cool. But then I became a genuine, strong, believing Christian. I went to Bible school. I did my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology, and I was an ordained minister in the Wesleyan church and very active in church and was preached on street corners and did all that kind of thing. How did you make this transition from being a guy with a bag of acid in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert to? Well, her father, who had been a missionary now for 20 years, was the most influential person outside my family in my life, and he and I would sit up late at night talking. And, you know, I was 17, and I found everything he said to be very convincing and very interesting. But mainly I loved his stories of the jungle and what it was like to live in the jungle, and I wanted to do that. And I became a believer. It was a gradual process. Actually, no, it wasn't that gradual. My father was just astounded. He said, you know, from one minute I'm worrying about you getting arrested, and now you're going to church every Sunday with these people I don't even know. He wasn't that happy about it. He'd rather you just get loaded in front of the Hendrix concert? Yeah, he would have, actually, because he was a heavy drinker and a construction worker, and he considered that to be part of the masculine experience. But acid? Was acid okay with him? I don't think he knew I was doing acid. But he knew I was doing, you know, weed and things like that. And he didn't mind that? No. He didn't want me doing it in the house, which I did. So your rebellion was to become an outstanding citizen and a Christian missionary? Right. That was my greatest form of rebellion against the life I had been leading, yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that's what happens when parents push their kids into a certain direction. Little people don't like being told what to do. So you immediately, it seems like, go become a Christian, and then how long before you were actually doing missionary work in the jungle? Well, there's a lot of training you have to do. So first I had to do four years of college, Bible and theology, and then I had to do some linguistics training, and then not a graduate degree or anything like that, just some linguistics training from the missionary organization, because I wanted to be a Bible translator. And then we did jungle training in southern Mexico, so we went to the jungles of Chiapas and had to do survival training and all of this. Whoa. What do you have to do there? Well, there are several phases to it. The family goes, and the family's part of it. But the hardest thing is to really see how much you've learned. They take you on what's called survival hike, and they leave you alone for about a week in the jungle. You're not allowed to take any food or any supplies of any kind. For a week? Yeah, for a week or more. You don't know. It's going to be at least a week. In my case, it was about 10 days. And you've got to set up your camp how best you can, figure out how to get a fire going. Do they teach you how to do all this stuff? They don't just, like, figure it out. This is like the final exam. Oh. So you've had almost four months of training before they finally take you out on this survival. Do you have water? You have maybe a quart of water when you leave, but you're going to be out there for 10 days. So you've got to find water. So we learned which vines have water and how to cut the vines. We did have a machete, so I was able to jump up and cut a vine at the top first and then at the bottom. And no one's monitoring you? They're just leaving you out there and making sure you're okay? No, they just come along when the time's up, and if you're there, you're there. Oh, boy. And if you're not, you're dead? You could be. That's insane. Well, this is what happens when you live by faith. You're out there, and God's supposed to be supervising your training, but it's really rigorous training. So by the time I actually got to the Amazon, which was eight years after I converted, it took that long, it felt like I was coming home. I wasn't surprised by things. Well, the training was good then. I would imagine if you really want someone to be able to survive alone in the jungle, the best way to do it is to test them by making them survive alone in the jungle so that you get an actual version of the experience. It's not simulated. You actually are getting water from vines. What were you eating? Well, I learned different kinds of plants that you could eat. And then I learned how to make a stick the size of a toothpick, sharpened on both ends, and I did have some fishing line. I would attach that to that. And I was so proud of myself because I brought up two fish that were about three inches long, and I ate those. Most of the time I ate plants and went hungry. So when I see programs like Alone, that wouldn't bother me. That's the kind of stuff we had to do. They didn't even give you fish hooks? No. You can't have that kind of stuff. You have to learn to cope on your own. You've got to make your own. You've got to be able to recognize the plants, which ones are poisonous, which ones are not poisonous. Did you try to make like a bow and arrow or anything? Yeah. You did? I did. I made a bow and arrow. How did you do that? Well, I had a machete, and that's what I had. It's crazy they give you a machete. They won't give you fish hooks. Like, come on, guys. Fish hooks are so much easier to carry. Right. But the machete you need for firewood, you need for lots of things. When I got to the Amazon— Did you have a lighter? What? Did you have a lighter? No. How are you making fires? Well, I had—they let me take just a few matches. Oh, Lord. And so no lighter, but a few matches, which you kept in a 35-millimeter film. People don't know about those things, those little containers. Yeah. How many matches did they give you for 10 days? Well, you had one of those little containers with about 10, 15 matches in it at the most. Oh, boy. So you got to match a day. You got to keep your fire going all the time. You always have to keep that fire going. So before you start it, you spend half the day just cutting firewood. And I would imagine it's very wet. It's all wet. So you've got to find something dry to get it going. And as they told us— You've got to keep it going. They said once it's hot enough, it'll burn anything. But until it gets hot, you can't just throw that wet wood on there. It'll put it out. So, you know, you have to spend a lot of time exploring, trying to find dry crackly wood and leaves and things and get it going and then slowly introduce the thinner pieces of wet wood until finally you can throw on a sopping log onto it. So a big part of your day essentially is making sure that fire stays lit. Yeah. That's a big part of your day, and you can't get too far from it. This episode is presented by Paramount+. 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So I remember one night waking up and hearing heavy steps around my camp, and I was up immediately blowing on that fire for everything I was worth to get that thing up. Yeah. Was it jaguars? I suspect that it could have been, although I didn't see it. I had my machete, which when I got to the Amazon and actually saw jaguars, I realized that would have been a pretty pathetic thing to try to go against a jaguar with a machete. They would rip your head off before you— Everybody likes to think they have a chance, though. Yeah, yeah. But what I found out is jaguars, you know, they get up to 400 pounds, and they're the third biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger, and they often hunt in pairs. Oh, yeah. And so you wouldn't have a chance against a jaguar unless you were one of the pitaja. I know that guys alone by themselves have killed jaguars, but— Really? Yeah. What are they using to kill a jaguar? Well, they're always with their bows and arrows. It's a bow and arrow range for a jaguar. That's crazy. Well, you better have it ready because it sneaks up on you. There's another group that I worked with for quite a while, several months, called the Bonnois, and they use poison darts and poisoned arrows. So there's a story of this guy who went out hunting, and he reached a clearing in the jungle, and he saw a deer come out running straight for him. And at first he was happy, and he was going to kill the deer, and then he realized deers don't just come running out of the jungle towards people. And then right behind the deer came a jaguar, and the jaguar saw him, the guy, and he was bigger than the deer, so the jaguar just took off straight for him and jumped up. And the guy got his blowgun out in front of him. They're about seven or eight feet long, these big blowguns, and they're very sturdy. And the jaguar, he holds it away. The jaguar's back legs are tearing the meat off of his legs, and the jaguar's head just keeps snapping at his face, trying to get his face. And what saved his life was the jaguar jumped off to go around the back and tried to get him from the back, but he had a poisoned arrow, and he stabbed the jaguar with it, and that hurts. And the jaguar started to run off, and then he shot it with a poisoned arrow. But he passed out, and his family found him a couple of days later with his legs just infected and torn to pieces, but he survived. And so these pitahad, would they go hunt the jaguars? If they saw that it was a danger, if a woman went out and a jaguar or a mountain lion scared her, the men would go out to kill it. So I've eaten jaguar. What does it taste like? Well, this one was sort of, this was a sick jaguar, but it's stringy meat, I mean it's very muscly meat. Is it a sick one? Yeah, that's how they wound up killing it, I found out later. I was really impressed, you know, they killed a jaguar. And they have killed many jaguars, but this one turned out to be a sick jaguar, which is why he attacked the woman. Like he was starving to death or something? Yeah, he was starving. So the men killed it and ate it. But I did, my children were with me this whole time, so I told my children, I said, just remember who's eating whom out here. So do you remember what it tastes like? Well, it's a stringy meat. It's really hard to describe all the taste. Like very sinewy? Yeah, sinewy and very tough. And my general rule of thumb, I eat anything that they kill, but my general rule of thumb is I usually have a bottle of Tabasco sauce. And if you put Tabasco sauce on it, it's okay. Pedaha, am I saying it right? Pedaha? That's right. They don't preserve anything, right? No. They just kill things and cook them. Yeah, they don't, you know, many, many different groups smoke the meat or salt the meat if they have salt or dry it and the pedahas know how to do that. I don't know where they learn how to do it because they never do it except if they want to trade the meat with Brazilian boats who come up, but among themselves they don't preserve any meat. You know, I was talking to a guy one time and, you know, why don't you preserve your meat? And he says, oh I preserve it in the belly of my brother. So they share it and if I get meat I give you some and if you get meat you give me some, so why would I? Right, so there's no need to store and also I guess it's very abundant. There's a lot of life where they live, like in terms of fish and game. There have been. Yeah, I mean they live on this river, the Maise River, and they're the only humans that live along the river for almost 300 miles of the curvy river and it's a relatively large river by US standards. In Brazil it doesn't even make many of the maps, but it's a couple of hundred yards across and in the rainy season it can be as much as 75 feet deep, 100 feet deep, so there's plenty of fish for them. In recent years that's changed because the Brazilian government has allowed the construction of dams across various rivers, not their river, but they affect the water level so much that it's taken all the fish, most of the fish out of their river, so now they're starving and this has led to conflict with Brazilians who live not too far away and they've killed a few people stealing food from their farms and things. Oh man, you imagine you just have this kind of harmonious existence with nature and someone just decides to make a dam, like you've got it so dialed in that you don't need to preserve your food, right, because everyone's just like happy and eating fish right out of the river. Right, and you know that's, they don't know where the dam is, they've never seen the dam. I told them that they built something that crosses the river like a wall and they say why do they do that and I said well they want electricity, which they barely understand. They've seen, I have a generator, I never had one for the first 20 years I was working with them, but I eventually got a generator and they could see what electricity was and I said so that's where they get the lights, but they don't understand it and it's affect, you know, it's for the first time in their history and they've been living there as far as I can tell for almost 300 years on this one river, for the first time in their history they can't be self-sufficient in protein. That's crazy and how long ago did they build this dam? I think it was about 10 years ago, but they didn't, when it first went into operation then it flooded the entire, lots of farmland, lots of settlements and things up on the Medina, but what was shocking was that way down river from the dam, it affected the water levels so much that when their river, the Mysee, goes to its lowest point in the dry season, there's still only a few places where you can see the bottom of the river. Most of the places, even when it's at its lowest, you can't see the bottom of the river, but in the last couple of years it's gotten so low you can walk across. Oh wow. So and the fish don't stay there. So what are these people eating? Well they go hunting, which they don't like to do, but of course when the fish are gone and when the river is gone, you lose a lot of the game from the jungle, so they have to go, instead of going a mile into the jungle, they have to go many miles into the jungle and they're still not successful, so it's busting up communities. Some people are moving out of their normal area to other areas to try to, you know, back on the on bigger rivers, but then that means they're surrounded by Brazilians and they're no longer leading the life that they used to lead. Hmm. So when they move into these civilization areas, are they integrating or are they trying to like stay as a tribe removed from urban society? Like how are they doing it? Well up until about five years ago, they would never have thought about integrating. They would live in like ghettos. If they were out near some town, they would live in the jungle away from the town because that whole part of Brazil is covered in jungle. Even the cities are bordered by jungle. But nowadays, because there's no food anywhere, they're trying to integrate more and they're trying to learn Portuguese and it's a very unfortunate situation for them right now. God, it's such a bummer. That sucks so hard. So when you first got there, your aim was to try to convert them to Christianity. That's right. I went there to translate the Bible and plant a church and get everybody believing. And why Pitahah? Why did you go to those people? Well, we were in our training and the missionary organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, offered us three areas. They said you can go to New Guinea. We need people in New Guinea. You can go to Mexico or you can go to Brazil. And in Brazil, there's this tribe called the Pitahah that we've had two teams assigned to and nobody's been able to figure out the language because it's not related to any other known living language. And so they said if you're up for that challenge, and we know you did well in linguistics, we'd be happy to have you take that group. So I thought, well, sure, I'm up for a challenge. So we took that. And so this was 1977? We were assigned there in 76 and I made my first trip in in December of 1977. And so how much of the language did you know before you got there? Nothing. Nothing? No. What do we know in terms of like before you got there? Was it recorded? Was it something that people understood? Take your training to the next level with AG1's new product, AG1 Pro. It's back and it's already sold out once, so get it now. AG1 Pro takes the original next-gen formula, the vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, pre and probiotics and more, and packs in even more support for physical performance. It adds five grams of creovitalis, creatine monohydrate and HMB to reduce protein breakdown and support recovery. They've also added zinc carnosine for even more gut support. It's one drink, more effective, and it's NSF certified for sports so you know exactly what's in it. The training's only half of it. Recovery is where the gains actually compound. AG1 Pro is built for both. Go to drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan to get a free AG1 Pro shaker in your Pro Welcome Kit. That's drinkag1.com slash Joe Rogan. Yeah, in 1784, Portuguese explorers made contact, and they didn't take lists of words. They wrote a few descriptive things about the language and about the people, and those things still fit them today. And then in 1821, a German explorer went there and he took a long list of words, which was amazing because he didn't have linguistics or anything like that, and his list of words is pretty good. And then in 1920, another German who naturalized Brazilian, the founder of Brazilian anthropology, went there and took a much larger word list, and that one is very good. And so I had those little word lists. They're not much, and there's no how does the grammar work or anything like that. It's just a list of words. So I had looked at those, but it's a tone language, and so they hadn't written the tone, so I had no idea how to pronounce the words. And to give you an example of what a tone language is, so if I want to say friend, I say magiai, and if I want to say enemy, it's magiai. And what's the difference? So if I whistle it, friend is whistling, and if I whistle enemy, it's whistling. If you can't hear the tones, you don't know what's going on. So the word for me is che, and the word for shit is che. So, you know, you can be talking about yourself and everybody starts laughing because you've called yourself shit. Because you have the wrong tone. Because you have the wrong tone. So, you know, there are a lot of tone languages in the world, Mandarin's tonal, Korean somewhat tonal, and many languages of Africa are tonal, but for those of us who speak European languages, this is just really weird, and it's hard to hear. A complete mind shift. Yeah. So you've got to be able to pay attention to those tones. But the first thing you have to do is start just collecting words. So I would point at things my first day, my first hour, I was pointing at things and writing down what they said, and that was the basic linguistics I had had, phonetics, how to write down sounds of the world's languages. And when you got there, so on day one, how do you make a connection? Do you just show up? Hey, brought you the Bible, everyone have a seat. How do you do this? Well, I got off and I started handing candy to the kids. Good move. That works. And the people were very curious because I'm this white guy with red hair, at that time I had bright red hair, and they found me curious to look at. And so they came around, they could tell, you know, at least I think they thought they could tell that I was no danger to them. They know how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger. So then I would just start pointing at things. I had my pen and paper and I would get a stick and I would say in English, you know, stick. And they know that I'm trying to communicate something, so they would say back, and I thought it probably means stick, and I would write that down. And then I would take the stick and drop it and they would say, and that means stick fell to the ground. And that's what I thought it meant. So that's how I started. That's what you thought it meant. What is the reaction to this person coming in and demanding that they teach the language? Well, I didn't demand. Well, you know, you have a requirement. You can't communicate, but you're there. So they're kind enough to welcome you. Yes. Are you in the actual camp with all these people? Yeah, I'm in the middle of their village. The plane let me off on, you know, landed on the river. I got out. You don't even ask? You just, like, wander into their camp? There's no way to contact them ahead of time. This is crazy. Yeah. And you're just assuming they're not going to kill you. Is this you? This is the Pidaha. This is the Pidaha village, yep. And so this is what it looked like when you showed up. You're like, hi, what's a stick? Yeah, yeah. You land on the river and you get there. And that is, that's the Pidaha. Wow. And so they're very friendly and they start talking. But of course, I don't know what they say. They just see me as a very... Guy's got a Ferrari t-shirt on. What's up? Yeah, river boats go in and give clothes. If a river boat hasn't been there in a long time, they'll all be naked. Oh, wow. And so, like, day one, they just accept the fact that this redheaded dude just showed up and is hanging out with us now? Yeah, there were a couple of things that counted in my favor. I was all by myself. And so giving out candy was a big factor. They like to chew tobacco. And I had been told this by somebody who had been there. So I took in a big, long horn of tobacco. I don't know if you've ever... It's a really old-fashioned way to... A horn? Like an animal horn? No, it looks like an animal horn, but it's probably eight feet, nine feet long, just rolled up tight, tobacco wrapped in latex. Really? Yeah. And you just cut it off for them and they chew it and they like it. So I would, you know, the ones who would help me, I would give them a little bit of tobacco or candy. And I also brought canned food for me. And I would trade that to them for fish and other things that they got. And they liked that. How long did you stay initially? The first time was just to see what it was like before I brought my family. So I stayed 10 days. And then I came back with my family and we stayed a year at that time. We just stayed there the whole year. When you say your family, so your wife and how many kids? Three kids. There they are. How old were the kids when you got there? My oldest daughter, who there is about 12, was nine and the middle daughter was six. And then my son was three years old. So this is around that time. And so my kids grew up among the Pidahan. Both my older daughters learned to speak the language fairly quickly. Wow. That's a risky move. You brought your little kids to the jungle. Yeah. So my son got- What is that decision like? Was that a difficult decision? Well, today it would be. But I was a Christian and I believed in miracles and I believed God would take care of us. And so I went there and figured he was in charge, he would take care of us. So my son got meningitis. My two daughters got malaria. I got malaria. In fact, after a few years, I went to San Diego and I came down with malaria. And in University Hospital San Diego, they were thrilled because I was the only person that had ever seen with all three strains of South American malaria at the same time. Did you have a relapse of malaria? Because I have a friend who got malaria in the Congo and it came back. It can come back. And I've had relapses, but it's been a long time now that I haven't had relapses. I've taken so much medicine that supposedly it won't come back anymore. But I can never give blood because it's always in my blood. What do they give you? Like what medicine they give you? Well, daraprim, primaquine, straight quinine. When my wife almost died, she weighed 115 pounds and then she got malaria and almost died. She got down to 76 pounds. And the doctor told me she's going to die tonight. We don't have any. way to keep her alive. Oh my God. And they put her on blood transfusions because you lose a lot of blood. It kills the blood cells. And they put her on blood transfusions and also straight quinine, which caused her to be in agony for several days of just constant retching. And quinine's a really bad experience. But at the end of it, she pulled through. She pulled through. Oh my God. Yeah. We all pulled through. You had to be like questioning your decisions. I mean, this has to be a trialing, you know, very difficult time because you chose to be there. Yeah. And so we were leaving the village to find help because my wife and daughter were dying of malaria at this time where she got down to 76 pounds. And my daughter lost a lot of weight too. She was just skin and bones. And I'm getting my boat out of there. And I had never been out by boat. In fact, I didn't have a boat. I had no idea how to get out of there. So this Catholic priest came up to see what the Protestant missionaries were doing. And I said, can I borrow your boat? I got to get my family out of here. He had this very narrow aluminum canoe with a six horsepower Johnson. And I got my whole family in there and he just stayed there in the jungle and let my family take off in his boat. And I didn't know where we were, but I was thinking, you know, I've read all these books about missionaries and now I'm having a missionary experience. It wasn't fun. It was really a horrific, it was horrific experience. And I just didn't know what was going to happen. So your goal was to convert these people. And how long were you there for? Well, I was there in 1980. I spent the whole year there. And in all the other years from 1977 to 2013, I was there for three to six months every year. So I was there a lot and got sick every time I went. I had typhoid fever and all this stuff, but attacked by snakes and stuff like that. But it was just a mind altering experience. Things didn't go the way I thought. And the people started questioning me, you know, they started asking me about, why do you believe in this Jesus you keep telling us about? What's he like? And you're doing this also, you're translating these concepts from English to Pidahah. From Greek to Pidahah. Going from the Greek New Testament, because I was translating the New Testament. So going from Greek to Pidahah, but I'm referencing English and Portuguese at the same time. Oh my goodness. I'm staying in there. And you expect these people to understand what you're saying? Yeah. So, you know, if you're in the middle of the jungle and Jesus does something out in a desert, how do you describe desert? Isn't their language a completely different language than ours? Like in terms of like, they have no words for color. Right. They have no words for direction. They don't have a left or right. Right. So, and this all takes time to find out because when I went there, I thought everybody had words for colors. Everybody had words for numbers. Everybody had a concept of God. Right. They don't have words for numbers. That's so crazy. Yeah. Do they have numbers? No. No numbers. So how many fish did you catch today, Mike? A lot. That's it. That's it. A lot or a little. A lot or a little. Or a good amount. Yeah. Yeah. So, in fact, that claim was really controversial. I've had psycholinguists and cognitive scientists come down with me to do experiments. Didn't you get into it with Chomsky about that? Well, I got into it with Chomsky about their grammar. Yes. Oh, that's right. Chomsky made this claim. I've gotten other people. There are people who find every claim controversial. So there's some people can't believe they don't have numbers. Some people who don't believe they don't have a concept of God. Other people who don't believe they don't have colors. But Chomsky claimed that all languages are built on a common property called recursion. And recursion is this English has it all over the place. So it's the ability to put one unit inside another unit of the same type. So take a noun. If I take the noun truck and the noun driver and I put them together, I can form a third word truck driver. And so that's recursion. I put one noun inside another and I get a third noun or with a sentence I can say John spoke. There's no recursion there. I can say John said that Bill spoke. And now that's got recursion because Bill spoke is a sentence inside John said that. And so Chomsky claimed and in my opinion, without doing a lot of homework on this, I mean, he just was basing it on languages that he happened to know, which aren't many, that all languages were built on this. It made sense. And he had principles built into his theory that required this. So when I came along and said, they don't have it. And now I know there are other languages that don't have it. This was like saying you're wrong. And for me, a relative nobody to tell the most famous linguist in history, somebody that Chomsky was called by the New York Times, the most important intellectual alive, to tell him that he's wrong. A lot of people found that very weird, you know, problematic, problematic, but facts are facts. Yeah. I mean, it should be exciting for a linguist to look at something that violates all the laws of other known languages. It was exciting for some linguists and really off pissing for a lot of other linguists. Isn't that gross? That's so gross. That is one of the grossest things about intellectuals. This gatekeeping of information and this appeal to authority that they're the only person who could possibly know. Especially when you're talking about languages, like how many languages are there? There are about 8,000 separate languages in the world. Okay. How the fuck could you know all the rules to 8,000 languages? We don't have data on more than about 1,200 or so. Well, isn't there also an issue with the Aboriginal tribes of Australia? My good friend, Adam Greentree, he's from Australia and he was running a mine there for a while and worked with a lot of Aboriginal people and really learned a lot about their cultures. And they're called mobs, like their tribe is called a mob. And there could be a mob that's just like 30 kilometers over that way. They have no idea what they're saying. They don't know the language and it's not written anywhere. And there's hundreds of these. They're all over the place. Right. And the bit of fieldwork that has been done, there are some really good Australian linguists trying to figure out these things. But the fieldwork that has been done has found properties that aren't like anything else we know about. So languages can vary so much that it's really premature, in my opinion, to be writing laws that languages are supposed to follow, all 8,000 of these languages. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Have you listened to the radio lately? Or maybe you've been catching up on your favorite sports podcasts, or even this podcast. Chances are you've heard a lot of ZipRecruiter ads. ZipRecruiter is everywhere because great candidates for your role are also everywhere. And they know to take their job search to ZipRecruiter. Meet them there with ZipRecruiter.com slash Rogan to try it for free. 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That's code Rogan in partnership with DraftKings. The crown is yours. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-BETS-OFF. 21 and over. Iowa only. Eligibility restrictions apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click-to-claim for 14 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com slash promos. Limited time offer. Well, all you would have to do is say, as far as we've observed, and then you're okay. Right. But as soon as you say it has to have this, and if someone says actually a language that doesn't have this, and then there's a controversy, you're a bad guy for pointing this out. Right. And you're, you know, you're a heretic. Well, I had one of Chomsky's followers who was Brazilian write to the Brazilian Indian Agency, which is where I get my authorization to visit these tribes, and say, this Dan Everett guy, he's a racist. That's what they always say. Yeah. Isn't that the fun one? Yeah. The moment they want to get rid of you, you're a racist. Yeah. Well, she was silly because she said, he's trying to reduce the pitahas to primates. And I said, well, in fact, I am because we're all primates. I'm a primate, you're a primate. But it's the thing, if Chomsky says that all languages have X, and I say, here's a language that doesn't have X, then either A, Chomsky's wrong, or B, these aren't humans. And so the only person who would claim they're not humans is a racist. That's such a crazy way to put it. Yeah. It's so stupid. Yeah. God. This is typical in science. As I got more and more into science, it's very unfortunate. It's men. It's men and their egos. That's what it is. And I'm sure women as well, but primarily men. Well, you know, you don't get a lot of money when you're a scientist. It's not a money-making profession. You go into what is the biggest rate of exchange among scientists? It's ego. Right. But it's just so crazy to think that if it doesn't have this one characteristic of language that you're calling them primates, there's not a value judgment. You're saying it's a different kind of language. And this is fascinating. Exactly. That's my take. And many anthropologists took that. So for example, they originally said that Homo erectus had no capability for human speech. And I thought that was kind of a questionable statement since, you know, I've read a lot on Homo erectus, read a book about it. And they don't. They all their accomplishments, they had to have pretty advanced language to account for the fact that the ocean was never a barrier for them. And so I said that Homo erectus had language. And I think the evidence supports that. But they don't have the kind of language Chomsky says necessarily. And so an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool wrote me and he says, my specialty is Homo erectus. And I think you're right. So we wrote a paper together. And then after we wrote the paper, he discovered last year, the oldest wooden structure known in all of human history, 500,000 year old structure built by Homo erectus in Zambia. And he showed that it has interlocking pieces and parts that nobody ever expected Homo erectus to be able to do. And their brains weren't that much smaller than ours. You know, the average size of a modern human's brain is about 1200 cc's for men, and about 950 to 1100 cc's for women. And since we know that men aren't more intelligent than women, the size of the brain can't be what's determining that. Homo erectus had brains of 950 to 1000 cc's, you know, cubic centimeters, you measure that by taking the skull and filling it full of sand and seeing how much sand fits in there. And so they were able to make these complex structures and they were able to make boats and they were able to do all these things. Yeah, that's that's what Larry Barham from the University of Liverpool discovered this structure, you see the cross piece. And he recently gave a talk to an association, a World Association of archaeologists, to get their judgment on what this could be, not archaeologists, but architects, to get their professional judgment. And they were really impressed by this. They said, that's actually a pretty advanced structure for building, you know, a walkway or a house. We actually discussed this yesterday. I had a guy named Michael Button. He's got a fantastic YouTube channel. It's all about like sort of the mysteries of human history. And we talked about the seafaring aspect and how much evidence there is that these people were seafaring as much as a million years ago. Yeah, yeah. And in my book, How Language Began, I have had to be communicated. Yeah, you can't. There's an archaeologist in Australia, Bednarik is his name. And he showed by he did experiments. And, and they're not exact, because you can't find humans today that don't have any language, normal humans. But he got humans from different languages who didn't couldn't communicate with each other that well, to see if they could build a boat. And, and then another linguist wrote a paper based on some of this called how much language does it take to build a boat. And it turns out, you've got to have language to build a boat. And so if they were building these boats, that could carry water and could carry as many as 20 people, because you've got to have enough to if you find a colony of Homo erectus on an island, that was always an island, it was never connected by land. There had to be more than one person that washed up there on some vegetation, there has to have been a community. Yeah, Michael brought up that the what was it the what organization that did it? It wasn't NASA. NASA did a study because they were trying to figure out how many people you need to colonize another planet. And they came up with the number 500, you need a minimum of 500 to begin a colony. Right? In order to have genetic diversity, make sure you're not having sex with your cousin, that kind of jazz. Yeah. So you can't just send a couple over there, Adam and Eve. Right and expect this to happen. Yeah, how did you feel about that story when you first heard it Adam and Eve? Yeah, when you when you were converting you're suddenly never do an acid I mean, I was one of these guys who I believe the Bible cover to cover and even the covers So we'll get to that in a minute. Yeah, so but go back to how this is all going down With the controversy. Yes, so I started getting hate mail and then The The article came out when I first proposed this in the major Journal of anthropology current anthropology I was in Germany at the time at the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology and right down the hall from me was Fante Pablo who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding the genome of Neanderthals and There was a reporter a German reporter from Der Spiegel to talk to him and She found out about my article So she walked down the hall if she interviewed him and interviewed me and this came out and it started to get picked up In the press in a lot of places and so the New Yorker did a big profile But then the reaction came and it wasn't what I expected. I expected that if you make a proposal that other scientists if they're skeptical which they have every right to be are going to propose experiments to test what you're saying and They're going to say well if they don't have recursion you should find this and you should not find that you should get This and this and this and I tried to anticipate that but that's the kind of exact objection I expected But instead they said I'm a liar. I'm trying to get publicity You know, I had a New York Times reporter. She called me and she said I do you try to get publicity? I said did I ask you to call me? I said, um, you know, you called me I said, you know, I it's an interesting story if people want to talk to me I'm here to talk to them But I'm not I said if I wrote you at the New York Times and said I'm an interesting person interview me Would you would that make a difference? That's not they're not mutually exclusive Like you could be trying to get attention and publicity because you've discovered something that's very important The idea that you're just trying to get attention. Are you trying to get attention? What are you talking about? Yeah that's such a it's so weird that the Intellectuals the people who are literally professional thinkers would fall into these like common human traps of ego. Yeah Well, it was it was a mind-blowing mind expanding experience for me to see that Intellectuals that I otherwise admired as deep thinkers about their subject Would not think otherwise and you know, I mean Intellectuals, it's never gauge you on the actual information Yeah, I had I had People from MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences from Stanford Department of Psychology from Columbia University came down at separate times to run experiments and they were well-designed experiments to test what I said and They all came away saying, you know, it looks like Dan's right So where's the reaction then and what is the what did they say? About that like the people that are negative about this and the people that are calling you a racist and all this Saying you're trying to get attention. What did what are they saying about these results? They don't refer to them Directly, but if asked they often say that these people don't like Chomsky So all of them. Yeah, all of those individual scientists that are running these studies for you don't like Chomsky And that's why they have these skewed results. That is one of the many objections that people raise By and large they ignore what they ignore it. Yeah, so they ignore the studies Yeah, I had Chomsky write me some really nasty emails. You got him. Do you got him still? I have one Yeah, I do have one and I I I Asked him I said, why don't we debate at the Linguistic Society of America? I said you think I'm an idiot So here's your chance. You can show that I'm an idiot Just we'll debate and you'll make a fool of me in five minutes. He's saying he thinks you're an idiot Yeah, and you're explaining a language that he doesn't know I'm an idiot or I'm a liar. Oh my god he gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper who that and he said Dan used to be a fairly good linguist, but He is charlatan He's just a 100% charlatan and he was interviewed on a Spanish station and they said what do you think of the contributions of Dan? Everett and he said they're nothing nothing nothing and he's really popular, you know, so I used to really admire him Yeah, I used to really admire him then I found I was close homies with Jeffrey Epstein that kind of yeah Yeah, a lot of water on that like what? Yeah But then there was the stance during the vaccines when he was like people that weren't vaccinated should be round up and put into camp So he had some crazy positions. Yeah on the unvaccinated people and very just misinformed just completely misinformed about Whether it was natural immunity or there was other medications that were treat that you could use to treat Kovat 19 or even though the efficacy of the vaccine it was crazy, right? That was just one thing about him There's just like his earlier debates like he's got these fantastic debates. I think it's him and William F Buckley Yeah, you ever seen those? Yes. I know so good in those. Yeah, he's so brilliant in those it was a young Chomsky and like his Intellect and his reason it was like a breath of fresh air. It was like super well-informed it every time Buckley tried to catch him on something he judoed him. It was amazing. Yeah. Well the first two books of Chomsky I read when I started Stud you know doing graduate work in linguistics. I read the medium one what is it Oh a Manufacturer of consent, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, but he had The first book of his I read it was in linguistics Aspects of the theory of syntax and if you're a linguist and you're studying linguistics, that's just genius It is just brilliant. And then the next book could she published the same year was American power and the new mandarins which was about Vietnam and that was also brilliant And you know for one person to publish two books like that in one year Wow, I mean that's just first-order genius. So I admired him what goes wrong with a guy like that though If a guy could be that smart, how could he not be curious? How could it be not like when you say something that flies in the face of everything that he's taught? How could he not be curious and want to talk to you? And if you're right, why would he not want to like do something with you? like if I found something like you and I was I mean I would have hoped that that would be the same way as I am now and I had an opportunity. I said we should do a podcast together. We could explain this. This is crazy, right? I invited him to the PETA ha he was coming to Brazil and I said, hey Why don't you come with me to the PETA ha and I'll ask them any question you want me to ask them? We can talk about it there and he said I don't do that kind of thing. I don't go I don't do fieldwork So he didn't come good move. You don't want type way fever and fucking malaria bit by snakes by Jack. That's all true You know see he's smart. Yeah It's just very disappointing when people are really brilliant He's a brilliant guy and essentially I mean, especially rather was really brilliant when he was young It's just so sad when you see someone like that just behaving with ego because he was the the expert He was the foremost linguist on planet Earth when the New York Times is saying things like you're the most important Intellectual alive and you have people hanging off every word as though it comes from, you know, the Oracle of Apollo. Yeah, I Assume that it affects your ego to some degree 100% most people especially back then when there's no internet to check you You know, you can get a really distorted perception of how you stand Also, everyone's kissing your ass I'm surrounded by other people that are trying to climb the same ladder you're on you're in a very lofty position of authority and power You know, he wrote letters of recommendation for me for my first job in the u.s Really and he wrote a letter of recommendation when I came up for promotion to tenure at the University of Pittsburgh Why would you do that? If you're an idiot, but I hadn't been in I wasn't yet an idiot. I Became an idiot you became an idiot when you disagreed with him. Yeah. Meanwhile, haha. You're right. That's what's funny in the end You're right. Yeah. Well he You know, I've I've had so many exchanges in journals and magazines and things with his followers over the years and with him That you know, I go give a talk somewhere and people say, you know I hope you're ready because there's a lot of skeptic a lot of skeptics in this audience and I say I don't think they're going to ask me any new questions. I've done this so much now that they're going to ask me I Said I'll be surprised if anybody asked me a question that I haven't heard from Chomsky And when you have these conversations with Chomsky and you lay out how the Peter ha Use their language and what they say and how it works. What was his reaction to that? You're just incorrect Well the first time I talked to him about it. He had not made this claim about recursion. This was in 1984 Oh, I was a visitor at MIT linguistics and my office was next to his and so I talked to him several times that year and I said I Don't think their language has this property and he said, you know He was drinking coffee and looking at the board He had a blackboard right by his desk and he said hmm Wonder what the consequences of that are and in one of his PhD students told me. Oh, you really got known thinking What is this? He found that very intriguing but then when he came out with the proclamation that all languages had to have it Then I became an idiot. Oh god, that's so disappointing Oh Fucking people. Yeah fucking people The brightest minds. They're just egos such a motherfucker. Yeah Well, it's it's really disappointing because you know He was like my idol for the first part of my linguistic career And I wasn't did you try to have a conversation with him after he denounced you? Did you try to like one-on-one get together with him? Well, we exchanged emails so for example in his face like right in front of him, did you try to do that? He never had I had always told him when I was going through Cambridge that I was coming and maybe he and I could talk and he always made time and we talked, you know I would be living somewhere else and I'd come to MIT and he had talked to me and my first PhD student Is a full professor at MIT and he started off in linguistics He's in he's in brain and cognitive sciences now, but so I had a good relationship with Chomsky But then suddenly he never had time to meet with me. So after his proclamation, right? Okay, he had no time to meet with me. His wife died and I wrote him a letter saying I'm so sorry that Carol died This is really terrible I know you guys have been together for so long and he wrote back and said Thank you so much. That means a great deal to me And then I saw this article in a San Paolo paper where he called me a charlatan So I wrote him right back and I said, did you call me a charlatan? He said yeah, you are Charlotte. I said you should be ashamed of yourself He said no, you should be ashamed of yourself for saying things, you know, that can't be right So that was the last exchange we had silly no, of course you should have had that in front of them I mean just I think people say things in emails that I think it's a terrible way to communicate. I agree completely You know, that's especially with insults, it's just it's such a Waiting in you're waiting on the other person's insult in return like God stop it. Are you fucking 12 years old? Yeah, stop so the author Tom Wolfe The last book he wrote was called kingdom of speech and he talked about two controversies Darwin versus Alfred Russell Wallace and me versus Chomsky Wow, and so he has a very he has some bizarre absolutely wrong ideas about where language came from he's not a linguist, but he did cover that controversy extremely well and You know Tom used to call me every week when he was writing the book I didn't even know what it was about to ask to get the details right, but he was just shocked how this happened Yeah Again, it's disappointing but even the most brilliant humans are just human, right? And they're subject to all the flaws and all the traps that the human mind could fall into Yeah, I've often said after a long experience that intelligence is no antidote for stupidity Right, you can be both Oh a hundred percent. Absolutely, especially when egos involved. Yeah, so How many people how many of the Peter ha did you convert? 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They don't say they're spiritual or anything like that But they you see something like you see Maybe there's another Indian hunting, you know from a different tribe hunting in your jungle because there are some that are close enough to be Hunting in the same area you see them, but you don't see them. Well, they go behind a tree or something So you say oh that's one of these things. I just saw one of these things They don't put it to the test necessarily, but when they see it these things so they have three major types of Entities besides humans and they have different types of humans. I'm one type and they're another type And so they have things how do they make the distinction? Is it the parents for for humans? Yes, it's it's appearance. Well actually for the other entities its appearance too. So for me, I'm white and White Means you don't have blood. So they've asked me they said so you do you have blood and They they asked me one time after I've been there for years. They said do Americans die and I said, yeah we die But you're really old and you haven't died yet, you know, and and so I cut how old were you at the time? Probably 45 and they thought you were a goner. Yeah, because we aged differently I was already had gray hair, you know, not all over right. They look a lot different when they're 45 Yeah, they're all still 100% black hair. And well, they thought you were a goner. Yeah the white hair So they have an expression make it go. Bye-bye almost about to fall to the ground and that's the way they described me Wow, but so Americans are one way Brazilians are another way but then there are these things some of them are called fast mouths and so they they talk in a high-pitched voice and at night you hear somebody, you know a creature talking in a high falsetto voice into the village and I say what's that? They said? Oh, that's a fast mouth. They I said, but I'm seeing it and it looks like a pita huh? Oh, yeah, they look just like us, but they're not they're not us and so this is where we come to the border of fact and fiction and we draw a fairly we try to draw a fairly rigid line between fact and fiction in Our society and in most European societies, but to them They don't have to Have the full range of experience with this To describe it and so a fast mouth is just a fast mouth and they talk in it And you know who they are because they talk in a high falsetto voice and they go naked Whereas pita has if often go naked, but if they have clothes they'll wear them and the fast mouths will never wear clothes And the fast mouths are also Sexually promiscuous so I had a reporter with me in the jungle from Geo magazine in Germany And he said can I see one of these fast mouths? And I told I told one guy I said he wants to see a fast mouth and he said well I'll go get one and he walks off into the jungle and then he the same guy comes back in naked Talking in this falsetto voice and starts trying to hump the reporter And the reporter says oh I'm feeling very uncomfortable I don't I said you asked for it I mean, you know, I mean, that's the way they are. And so I finally told the guy I said, you know He doesn't he doesn't want this. He doesn't want to see the fast mouth anymore so he talks to me in a high falsetto and he walks off and he comes back on with his clothes on and I Said did you see the fast mouth? He said was there a fast mouth here? I was gone, you know, but it's the same guy What did you take of that? Like what? Did you think that they were playing a prank on you? Did you think this is like? Some sort of a psychotic state that they fall into It is a liminal area between being say theater and being reality And I don't know if they feel possessed. I don't think they have a concept of possession I've I've asked them and I've investigated this and I've never seen that but they definitely believe that They're gone and this other creature is there in their place? Do they have memory of when they become a fast mouth they deny it I've tried to get them to talk about it I don't know. I wasn't here. Everyone denies it. Everybody denies it Wow Do you think that being a fast mouth is like? Almost like a license to go and do stuff. You're not supposed to do go fuck everybody And yeah, you think that's what yeah, because they change they also change names very frequently So if I go back there now, all my old friends will have different names and anything done under the old name is you know You'll say you remember when you did this? Oh, I didn't do that. That was the guy with this name So they don't even claim so the concept of constancy of identity throughout time They deny this. So when do they choose to make a new name or do do they get a new name assigned to them? They can Children often get new names for different phases of life But adults if you if you're out in the jungle and you think you saw something and you can't explain it You might take a new name Not a bad idea, right? This is a way of coping with things Yeah I mean it kind of makes sense something really traumatic happens to you and you want to like reclaim your life You change your name start over from scratch, right and some of us do it in American culture But it's a lot harder legal process to change your name. How often do they get killed by Jaguars? Never nobody's ever been killed in my almost 50 years coming and going but they've many of them have been attacked. Really? yeah, like one guy was coming back and from getting Brazil nuts and we had a big basket and so his heads down a bit with the tump line and the basket probably weighs, you know, 60 pounds and Suddenly a Jaguar jumps out of the tree right on his back but it got the basket and not him and it pulled the basket off his head and He shot it with an arrow But they tell me that when you shoot a Jaguar with an arrow the Jaguar forgets about you and keeps trying to get the arrow out And by that time you've got three or four more arrows in it So these guys are deadly accurate with with bows and arrows so if they did that and like maybe They got attacked would they change their name after that? They could and I so I don't completely have it down to a formula Oh, okay. So it's not it's not like when they're uncomfortable. Sometimes it's just like it's time. It's time that Bobbie It's a subjective reaction to objective experience that causes them to do this and they do they announce it to the village? They announce it to their like their spouse or their kids and then the word spreads And so I'll come back and I came back in after six months and my buddy my main language teacher His his name was when I left it was kohoi bear. Yeah, which means blood eater and When I got back I said, you know, and the nickname is cool. Hey go, you know, I asked how you doing and nobody responds He didn't turn and look at me or anything and I called him again. And again, he said you talking to me I said yeah, he said that's not my name. And so I had to learn his new name was cop Bobby, you know, which And he was serious about it. He wouldn't respond anymore to that old name How the first time that happened were you like, oh my god, these people are fucking crazy. No, I thought I'm pretty stupid I did can't remember their names. Wow. That was my first real quickly. Did this happen from you first like encountering these people? well, I I would be gone for three or four months at a time and then come back because I was I was doing linguistic Oh, so you never experienced it like as it was happening You really need to spend at least a full year there so you can see all the seasons and all the changes then I saw Some of the stuff but many of the name changes happened when I was out of the village Some of them happened when I was in the village But my best friends their name changes seemed to happen when I was out of the village And they were very serious about enforcing those new name changes So if you ask them to tell you what they were doing Name changes So if you ask them to tell stories about their childhood you get these very vague stories And they'll say, you know, but i'm talking about this person, you know Or they'll tell me, you know, they changed my name twice, you know and so they named me and they so the guy comes up to me and he says That name is rotten, which is the same word you use for spoiled food, you know, your name is spoiled Um, so i'm going to give you this name And then I got it then one time I was in there and was staying with this guy. He's just wearing a loincloth and The other pita half fearing because he's this fierce guy and He says you're really old. I you know, they always tell me that he said you're really old and I said I'm, not that old. He said yeah, you are my dad's dead and you're about the same age as he was, you know They don't know what the age is He said i'm gonna give you my dad's name and Which is just the name of his dad So that's been my name ever since i've had that name now for about 15 years And when you go back what happens if they want to switch it up again, you have to learn a new name Yeah, yeah, and they want to easily happen, right? Yeah, it could easily happen It just depends on which village you go to and which person you're talking to how what was what is the population of these people? When I first got there, it was under 200 And now it's around 700 to 800 They've grown because they've had more medical assistance. I gave them medical assistance my wife and I for You know 20 years and so Your goal was to convert them to christianity, right? And when it's So no one's buying it. So what are you doing? What is what do your days consist of while you're there? Well, my days consist of linguistic analysis and uh translation effort So i'll work with somebody and so I so I worked with this guy for example And we went through the story of jesus. I had translated a large part of the gospel of luke and I tell him this story And then I showed film strips You know made by you know where jesus looks like an american and has a beard and all this stuff And I and I explained it they don't make a difference between drawings and photographs So they figured it must be jesus. He saw jesus. So that night after I told him all this and we'd seen the film strips Uh, his village was across the river I lived in one village and across the river was another village and they went across the river And all night long I heard screaming and yelling and people running around and women laughing and then women screaming And the next morning he comes back to work with me and I said, so what was going on all night? He said oh jesus came to our village I said what he said. Yeah, he came to our village, you know, and he had a penis three feet long They don't have words for feet. So he just i'm just going by his hand thing He said and he was trying to stick it in all the women and so, uh, You know, the women don't want to know any more about jesus So this is their way of rejecting it So I never expected that when I in all my bible training and things Did they say so they wouldn't admit if one of them became Like they become a fast talker if they just became jesus, right? But that could have been what happened. Well, i'm sure that's what happened. So one guy just decided i'm jesus. Yeah But everybody took him you're jesus. Yeah, and this is what jesus is trying to do. Oh boy, but they would ask questions like, um, You know, hey dan What does jesus look like is he brown like us or is he white like you and I say well, you know Some people say he was brown like you and some people say he was white like me and they said yeah Yeah, but you've seen him. What did he look like? And I said, well, I never saw him. Well, your dad saw him No, my dad never saw him. He lived a long time ago I don't know anyone who's ever seen jesus and they said You don't know anyone who's ever seen him and you're just talking about him the whole time telling us about him They said we don't want to hear about this anymore And and that was like but you at the time were a believer you're a true believer Yeah, so when did that start to slip away it started to slip away From two sides one. I was spending a lot of my time in the intellectual world and trying to do serious linguistic science And it slipped away mainly however by constant interaction with the pita ha because as I've gotten to know these people over the years These are really smart people. They're very intelligent people They they had me figured out before I had them figured out and they can predict my behavior better than I can predict theirs even today and so Um, they would come to me and they would say this, you know, they say dan you keep telling us about jesus Uh, but it seems that only americans believe in jesus because we don't know any brazilians that we've ever met that believe in jesus And so this seems like an american thing, but we're not americans And then they would say, you know, where did you get your evidence? And I began to think you know, these are good questions. I can't just throw these questions off. What is my evidence? You know, I went to bible school. I've been surrounded by christians I've been i've surrounded myself by people who believe and this is what happens in linguistic theory or other scientific theories You surround yourself with a community that believes the same thing and pretty soon. It's hard for you to consider alternatives And and so I started considering the alternative and I realized You know, I was I was an atheist back when I you know met my First wife in front of a jimmy hendrix concert. I was an atheist and then I became a christian and then I thought You know, maybe I was right to begin with. Um and So eventually I told them I said, you know I don't believe this stuff anymore either and they started laughing all the guys started laughing. I said, why are you? They said oh now you're like us, you know, but um, but then they told me one time they said, you know From what we understand christians don't drink and they don't sleep with other women and you know, we like to do those things So we're not interested What was convincing for you though if you're a true believer You think your path is the right way when you're hanging out with these people? What what is making you question it? well several things, uh, one of the most important things was that Having spent so many years as a christian and knowing christians both in the u.s And missionaries who are the cream of the crop supposedly um I didn't know anyone in the christian faith It was as well adjusted who could cope with life as well who was as satisfied and content with their lives as the pitaha They were like the ultimate Zen masters and the ultimate, you know, if you if you thought what is jesus supposed to do for your life? They already had it And I didn't know many christians who did so first it was Quality of the spiritual life. They seemed to me to have the highest quality of spiritual life So one mit guy who came down an mit phd student said these look like the happiest people in the world and I said Well, what kind of statement is that? How would you measure who's happiest? He said Well, I would spend time I would see how long they smile and laugh every day and compare it to others and how much time they spend laughing and Smiling and i'll guarantee you i've he said i've never seen a pita here who's not smiling or laughing it Frequently. Yeah So it was that of character, and it was also just the fact that I began to realize that the scientific principles that I've been learning and that I'm applying in linguistics almost have to be suspended to apply them to the faith. Because for example, I've heard a lot of stories of people being healed, but this is anecdotal evidence, and I'm not going to deny anybody's experience. If you tell me you had inoperable cancer, but now you don't, something happened, and I can't tell you what it was. But at the same time, there's no statistical relevance to that. It's also the case that even when I was in Bible school, one of my teachers said, I wonder why healers, faith healers, never start with amputees. They always start with diseases you can't see, like cancer, and explain how it went away. But they said also in the Bible, and the Bible itself says this, Jesus not only healed people, he raised them from the dead. So if somebody claims to be a healer in the same vein as Jesus, I'd like to see them start at cemeteries and start raising people from the dead. We're not seeing that, and we don't see amputees healed. We see things that are sort of subjective experiences. And I'm not claiming that nobody has a right to believe what they believe, or that I'm right about all these things, but this is part of the reasoning process that went through my mind, and I thought, yeah, I just can't do this anymore. I cannot tell these people to believe something that they have reasonable objections against, and I don't have reasonable answers for. So to me, they made more sense than I did. This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. 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It seems like a very old story, and I'm of the opinion that what you're getting with all of these religious texts is there were some events, and there's some sort of a documentation of these events, but it's very hard to figure out what exactly happened. Like, for instance, Paul never met Jesus. No. And most people find that out. They go, wait, what? So all that stuff that Jesus said, Paul's writing down, and, well, how does Paul know this? And then you go, oh, well, Paul met Jesus in a dream. Like, hold the fuck on. Right, right. See, ironically, the pedoha's might actually take that as evidence. Right. But, I mean, Jesus came back to their camp, as a fast forward. But we said, you know, I learned in Bible school that all the apostles had to have met Jesus. And Paul was an apostle, therefore he had to have met Jesus. And so I said, well, when did he meet Jesus? And they said, on the road to Damascus. He had the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus, so he met him. But it's tricky. It's tricky. It's tricky. It's also, again, when you get especially to the Old Testament, like, what were they documenting? What are these events? What happened there? You know, there's some stories that you say, like the flood story, for example. Boy, there's a lot of those. There's a lot of those in all sorts of ancient religions. It seems to be some sort of a historical record of some sort of a catastrophe. Right. All the other stuff that's attached to it, you've just got to go, I'm not sure what this means. Right. You know, when I was a little boy, you know, my mother died when I was very young. But when I was a little boy, we would drive up from Imperial Valley, California to San Diego. And we would drive up through the mountains. And there's this line of white stones that I noticed near the top of the mountains. And I said, you know, what caused that? And my mother said, the flood. And I thought, well, that makes sense, must be the flood. I'm like seven, you know. And so this is the, some of this stuff gets started this way and it becomes truth. Well, I mean, it's certainly when you're talking about a time, thousands of years ago, where just the ability to read was very limited. And then you're translating things from languages that we don't even speak anymore. It gets real squirrely when you try to figure out what these events actually were that they were documenting. Having a belief system, I think there's a lot of value to it. I think it gives you a moral scaffolding, gives you structure in your life. And that alone is like super beneficial to people. The people that I know that are like true Christians, really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. I think there's a really great benefit to that. The problem is like, what are we saying? You know, what exactly, like do you, the Adam and Eve one, it's like, okay, what do you think happened? Do you think there's two people? That's the only two people on earth? And then where did the other people come from? The brothers and sisters just have sex with each other? Right. What? Evolution explains that obviously very well, but Adam and Eve, you know, I remember when my mother told me the story of eating the apple and betraying God and Adam is hiding out and God says, where are you? And I told, I asked my mother, I said, I thought God knew everything. Why is he asking him where he is? I don't understand that. And she said, well, he wants him to confess it. Well, there's always that kind of answer. You can always give that kind of answer. But we, you know, you don't have to focus on religion. You can even go to paleoanthropology and you can look at, are there 20 species of Homo that used to exist in the past or more, or were there just three, Erectus, Neanderthal and Sapiens? And what does it mean to be a species? And how can we really prove some of that stuff before the work of Svante Paabo and the decoding the DNA, the genome of, of ancient creatures doing this thing that people thought was impossible. That was speculation. That was, it was really hard to tell. And there were a lot of controversies. And now we can look at the genetic record and we can look at the genome, but that still doesn't tell us everything. So a lot of straight history and a lot of paleoanthropology and paleoarchaeology, all of these things always involve, as any theory does, speculation. You're guessing and then trying to test your guess. And some things are easier to test than other things. And so science is a community of people who believe they can work towards the truth. But the only way to do that is to have good guesses and know how to test them and be willing to admit that you're wrong and then move on to the next best guess. And every scientist recognizes this, but in practice, it's really hard. Well, it's certainly hard if you're also a fundamentalist Christian. Oh, yeah. That makes it much harder. Because then you, you're living in conflict all the time, right? Believe a guy came back from the dead, but show me proof for everything else. Yeah. Yeah. You believe in miracles, but you can't, they certainly can't be produced on demand. You also believe that people tell the truth. That's part of the problem. Part of the problem with all this stuff is like, look, the Bible condones slavery. Talks about slavery in multiple passages. That's a person thing. That's a people thing. Right. That's... And the Bible talks about all sorts of things that, you know, we don't agree with today, but we try to interpret it in such a way that we can live with it. Right. Exactly. And God, I mean, if you read anything by Mark Twain about God, which is not only brilliant, but funny, you know, he just makes fun of the whole notion that... Says religion started when the first con man made the first sucker. Yeah. And, you know, how many germs, he has this story about Noah's Ark, about how Noah's family had to be so infested with germs so they could survive the flood, you know. And you stop and think about, I mean, like, you know, the Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat and then all these creatures had to boogie on down to Australia almost immediately. And so you get these stories and people don't want to talk about those things as well. I don't know how God did it. I think there was an event. And I think this version of it, this doctrine that you're supposed to adhere to, is woefully uninformed about the actual, like, real facts of the event. I don't think anybody could possibly know. But I think when you have the Epic of Gilgamesh, which mirrors the story of Noah's Ark, which mirrors the story of other religions that have similar flood myths or flood stories, it's probably something happened. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably one of the things that happened. Right. I mean, you can tell people, it would be intellectually dishonest to tell people that all the claims of their religion are false. How do you know that? You don't know that. And I used to tell Christians, I said, you know, when I was a Christian, the best evidence for God is what he's done in your life. And are you living a better life? And if you're not living a better life, then why are you saying that he saved you? And if you can't live a more moral life than people who don't know Christ, then what are you saying? You've claimed that he changed your life for the good, but you're not living a life for the good. You know, I went to work in construction when I was still in high school for a Christian contractor, and I was in the union. I joined the laborers' union, which meant that as a hod carrier, that's the hardest job I ever did, that you got paid $8.25 an hour. And this is 1968, and that was a lot of money in 1968. And the guy told me when I got hired, he said, the union says I got to pay $8.25 an hour, but I'm not going to pay you that. I'm going to write you down as only working four hours a day, but you're going to work eight. And that's how he got around it. And I thought, this guy's a Christian and he's lying on these forms and on his taxes. And he's going to church. And I got the job through my Christian missionary father-in-law who knew this guy. And I saw that happening time and time again. So very often, unfortunately, people who claim to be religious and follow the commandments of Jesus, which are much more difficult to follow than the commandments of the Old Testament, because they affect your thoughts and not just your overt action. When you don't see consistency, the answer could be, well, we're just humans. We're not perfect. And that's true. But why doesn't the Holy Spirit that you say you believe in make a bigger difference in your life than he does in Joe Schmoe down the street, who doesn't claim anything and he's leading a more moral life than you are? Especially if you're robbing laborers and lying on your taxes. And so when you're with a pedaha, they live a subsistence lifestyle. And there's been a lot of evidence that subsistence lifestyles are some of the most compatible lifestyles in terms of people's happiness and peace and having a sense of meaning. Your life is wrapped around the gathering of food and community and spending time together. And they're the happiest people in the world. Right. I monitor them for a while. How many hours a week does a hunter work? And I came up with about 15 or 20 hours a week. Yeah. Unless it's not going well. Yeah. And then, yeah, like now they're doing it all the time, but when the fish are jumping, it's that. And then, so what do you do with the rest of your time? You lay around the fire and tell jokes and talk to people and play with your kids. You know, the men love to play with everybody. They're in pure subsistence too, because they're not even preserving food. Right. If they don't find food today, they go hungry today. Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People? I haven't seen that. I did meet him once, but I haven't seen that documentary. He's really big into these kinds of societies. I know that. That's what Happy People is about. It's about these people that live in Siberia. Right. They're hunters and trappers that live in Siberia, and they're all happy. Right. Yeah. And they basically just spend most of their time gathering food. Gathering food and then spending time with the communities. Yeah. Right. Right. A documentary that was made about the pithaha by the Smithsonian and a couple of other institutions, it's called The Grammar of Happiness because the film crew that went with me was very small, like three people, but they were deeply impressed by what they saw and the level of happiness. And all the psychologists that I've taken and linguists have also been very impressed by the level. If they get past the heat and they get past the confrontation with your body and, you know, the pithaha don't have outhouses. They don't have, you know, I mean, if somebody needs to take a dump, they walk off 10 feet into the bush and do it. And so we have to have toilet paper. No. What do they do? A stick or leaves? Oh, sticks. Yeah. Hey, or if you have corn cobs, that's great. But they don't have corn cobs. Good Lord. Yeah. So, so, yeah, but it's just not a big deal. They grow up that way. It's just a function, you know, and so you ask them things about life. What happens to you after you die? What do you mean? Well, when you're dead, what happens? Well, you're dead. And so there's like a dead monkey that somebody just brought back and they're going to eat. And he says, he's dead. What else is there? What? Why are you asking this question? We die. We die. And they don't fear death. They don't have to. They don't make up a story to make themselves not fear death. They just were there. A lot of them injured. Oh, yeah. They get. They live a violent life. They get. I have people who, you know, people bitten by snakes. I have had people who split their hand almost in two with a machete, run arrows all the way up their arm, step on sticks that go all the way through their foot. I mean, these are people who are naked running through the jungle and they get scratches. And, you know, you know, if you get bitten by a by a snake that's hemotoxic like this is. I don't know what it is. And it's a Bushmaster. When you get bit by one of those things, even if you survive, a lot of the flesh is going to come off whatever they bit. So you see people with one leg normal and one leg that looks like bone because it's basically bone with a little bit of muscle covered in skin because the flesh all fell off after the snake bite. So they they know what it is to suffer and they're tough. You know, if you get a toothache, how do you fix it? Well, if I'm there, I have some things that can help with the pain or I can pull the tooth. But most of the time it rots out. That's how they deal with it. So they learn. You know, I was talking to a woman one time, you know, really for, you know, Pitaha looking very feminine looking woman. And she gets bit by a wasp on the face while I'm talking to her and she pulls the stinger out and she doesn't it doesn't stop her conversation. And I've been stung by those wasps and I know they hurt like hell. And I said, didn't that hurt? Yeah. You didn't say anything. She says, I'm not a baby, you know. So this is the way they are. From the time they're children, they learn to deal with pain. They learn to be tough. In fact, they have an expression for that. He wants to be hard. And that means you deliberately sleep sometimes less than you need. You go hungry on purpose and you put yourself in hard situations because you want to be tough because that's what the environment demands. So they build their resilience on purpose. Yes. Voluntarily. I would imagine that's like the most important thing to have if you're running around naked in the jungle. You have to be tough. Right. You have to be. And, you know, like I was I go barefoot sometimes in the village. I'm you know, I get you can get parasites that way, but, you know, I do it anyway. And but when I go to the jungle, I always put on shoes because my feet can't take all the thorns and everything. And theirs are covered with like a whole layer of callus all around their foot. They have those crazy splayed out toes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the way feet are supposed to look, really. Right. You know, ours don't look that way because we protect them. But their feet are tough. You know, their hands are tough. Their skin is tough. It's like leather. Even a little kid. They they're little kids. Rather than crawl, they scoot around on their butt. And so you pick a little kid up and you look at their butt and it's just callus. It's just solid callus. And these kids are tough. But they by their standards, they're very gentle to their kids. I had a guy with me one time and he was trying to sleep at night and a baby was screaming all night. And he said, why don't they tell that baby to shut up? And I said, why? I said, they don't need to tell it to shut up. That's just part of life. You know, they don't have a schedule to keep tomorrow. He said, what would happen if I went over and swatted it on the behind? I said, they'd kill you. They'd kill me. I said, yeah, you don't hit kids. They don't believe in hitting kids. Does he want a baby to get it to? Does he think that's how babies stop screaming? I don't know. I mean, does he have any kids? I don't think this guy did. But Christians often believe, really believe, spare the rod and spoil the child. And they believe very much in corporal. Back then at least, right? Yeah. Back then. I don't know today. But, you know, so the pedahab never believed this. They don't accept it. Well, I think they're probably correct. It is interesting how those people are happier. Like, we've done something to ourselves by forcing ourselves into cities and jobs and constant stress and bills and taxes and all these external things that we've attached to our lives that we think are 100% necessary. Don't bring anybody any happier. Don't bring anybody any more happiness. In fact, make you way more miserable, make you susceptible to a bunch of stress-related illnesses. I've had friends visit me in the jungle, I mean, researchers who are friends, and they'll say things like, I've never seen you so relaxed. You know, you seem tense when you're at the university, but down here you just seem totally laid back. And I said, well, I didn't notice it, but that makes perfect sense to me because all these people are laid back. There's pedahab that I go to talk to the guy and I find myself nodding off. And I'm not even sleepy when I go over there, but he's just so laid back and talks so calmly and softly and telling jokes and things that it just puts me to sleep. God, it's such a bummer that those people have to struggle now. Yeah, it's terrible. Hooey. It's, um. What do they hunt? What do they eat? This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change, your phone. 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They don't grow vegetables, so they're never going to get that kind of thing. They don't get that in naturally occurring things out in the jungle. Their diets are healthier. They're eating protein. I know, for example, that I could take any Peterhoff man out of the jungle at random and if I weigh him, he's going to be 155 pounds. He's going to have about a 25 inch waist, 26. He's going to have about 4% body fat and he's just going to be lean, mean machine. They do try to harden themselves, but that's just what the life does to you. But they're not overweight. They're not dealing with obesity, no diabetes. Only when outsiders, representatives of the Brazilian government thought it would be good to give them something to rely on, so they brought in a lot of rice and they started letting the people feed. The people don't grow rice, but the government would supply it. So now all of a sudden you see people overweight because they're eating starch, which they never used to eat that much of. Or I took a dentist in once about 25 years ago and we inspected the mouth of every living Peterhoff and not one cavity. He was disappointed. He said, I thought I was going to be able to do some free dental work here and nobody has a cavity. Well then somebody introduced sugarcane into their fields from the outside world and now it's almost 100% cavities. Everybody has cavities because they eat sugarcane. Wow. So you keep away the sweets, you keep away the starch and you get healthier people. This is just living proof of what we often read about diets, but that we're so tempted by that we don't normally follow. I heard another issue with them is when they get introduced to soda. Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. Also whiskey, but that's a different matter. Sure. Because soda is, yeah, I mean they love it. They call it, you know, sweet water and they will drink the hell out of that. If they got, you know, five gallons, they'll drink it all. I had a guy once who wove a basket for me and I said, you know, what, what do you want for it? And he's, and he knew that I had some canned fruit that I used on Sundays for my kids when we were all living there. And he said, I want a can of those. I want a can of this stuff, which is peaches and sweet syrup. And it was a big can. And he ate that whole thing, you know, and the kids came around and I've seen guys trade with a boat and they'll get like a kilo of sugar, two and a half pounds of sugar. And they just sit down with a spoon and eat it. Oh boy. And so if they have it, they eat it. And if they don't have it, they don't eat it. And they have no idea that it's bad for them because it tastes good. Why would it be bad? Right. You can eat anything you find as a hunter gatherer and you're not going to have enough of it to be bad for you. Right. Because you're going to get something else the next day or like tobacco. I can take in tobacco, but they're not going to get addicted to it. They're not going to, you know, they, even when they roll cigarettes, they like them, but they don't, they only have it like once or twice a year. So you don't have to worry about it. You know, if they had it all the time, they would have serious issues. So they've only developed addictions based on what they've been introduced from the Western world. Right. 100%. Yeah. So tell me about this conversion that you have. Tell me about how you, like what are the steps to go from being a true believer, living with the pita ha and then changing your opinions? How many steps did it take? It took some practical steps and it took a lot of mental steps. How much time? I would say that I started seriously doubting my faith about five or six years into my time. It was about 1982, 1983. And I did not announce that I was not a Christian until 2000. And because Christians were saying things about, actually it was 2001, Christians were saying things about the war in Iraq, about how the soldiers that we send over there are the blessed peacemakers of the gospel. And I didn't like that. And so the first step is you start to doubt, then you pray so that you won't doubt because the Apostle Thomas said, Lord, I believe, help mine unbelief. But then after a certain point, that doesn't work so well. So you start to read literature from apologetics, trying to defend these, you know, defend your mind against these things that you're thinking. And then you realize, I'm not satisfied with those answers either. So finally, one day you reach the conclusion that I just, I just can't do it anymore. I can't sustain this belief. I can't pretend that I have something that I'm not. And so then eventually I told my wife, I said, I just don't believe this stuff anymore. I can't believe it. And pretty much instantaneously, she walked out of the house and we got a divorce. That was the end of that. Also, if you're a Christian missionary and you're getting your income from being a missionary and then you tell people, oh, I don't believe anymore, then you're unemployed. Did you have any other issues in the marriage other than that? Yeah, it wasn't. That wasn't the only issue. But she tracked up all the issues we had to what she perceived as my declining faith. Because of course, you know, I, I loved rock music before we met. We met at a Jimi Hendrix concert and I went many years without listening to rock music. And I love rock music. And so I finally started listening to it again. And she got upset. That was a sign that I was starting to fade away. And you know, so, and I'm not a perfect person, you know, I would go out with Brazilian friends drinking and that's definitely a no, no. And any religion that tries to keep you from Hendrix. Yeah, yeah. Can't be, can't be a real religion. My dad said to me when I first became a Christian, you know, he was the epitome of an atheist, you know, and he, he said. And one thing about religions is they're always trying to beat their own system. They're always trying to find an exception so they don't have to do the unpleasant things that religion tells them they need to do. Yeah. And I thought, oh, you don't know anything. You know, you're... You don't know anything about religion. You've never been in part of a church, but it's not entirely false. People are always trying to make... you know, it's like another expression that comes to mind when you're... if you see somebody who says they're a believer and now they start doing things you don't think they should do, there's one... there are two reactions you could have. One is justice, and one is mercy. And everybody wants to give justice and get mercy for their beliefs and for their transgressions. And so I was giving myself mercy and my wife was giving me justice. But in the end, I realized I'm not going to be bound by these rules anymore. I'm just going to live my life according to my best lights and according to the best decisions. And I'm not going to let this book tell me anymore. The ironic thing is, you know, I graduated number one in my class at a Bible school, so I know the Bible really well. And when people try to reconvert me, I've had many Christians try to reconvert me, I said, that's not going to work, you know, because I know the Bible probably better than you do, so you're not going to give me a verse I don't know. I said, I'm not telling you you're wrong, and I'm not even telling you your interpretation is wrong. I'm just saying it doesn't work for me, and I can't pretend that it does. Right. It's got to be weird to have your beliefs confronted by a group of people, where as you're learning their language, you're realizing that this moral framework and the scaffolding that you've only attributed to Christianity, and you think that it's just Christianity and religion that makes people good people. And then here's people that don't have any God. Right. Yeah, so like, you know, you're in a big storm. The Amazon has storms in the rainy season. So somebody's house blows over, because their houses, they're hunter-gatherers, and they're semi-nomadic, so they don't build the best houses. So it's pouring rain, and somebody's house blows over, and they're just stuck there in the rain. What is their reaction? They start laughing, like it's the funniest thing that ever happened, and they will go off into other people's huts and sleep on the ground, or get near the fire, or they might come to my house, that's very common, and want to sleep with me, and then the next day they'll rebuild it. There's nothing except for fear of immediate threat from the outside or from animals that gets them to lose their cool. And when they do lose their cool, it's not really losing their cool. It is calculated defense. They know how to take care of themselves. You know, somebody's, when I mentioned to this guy that they would kill him, they said, I said, they kill for a living. Don't forget that. That's how they make their living. Every man there, every boy here could shoot you through the eye at 50 yards with one of those arrows. They're not going to miss. If they decide to kill you or me, we're dead. So they don't, because they make a difference between killing out of necessity and killing to murder. But if they think they have to defend their family, you're dead. But their culture doesn't encourage squabbles, like they just, they're easygoing, they take everything. The biggest, if there's a concept of sin among the Pita Ha, it is anger. You don't raise your voice in anger. You don't hit another Pita Ha in anger. You know, I saw a guy get drunk when they get alcohol, they get drunk. And he took a shotgun that he had gotten from a Brazilian and he shot a dog that belonged to his brother. And his brother runs up to the dog and he's just sobbing because they love their dogs. And he's just crying that his dog's dead. And I went up to him and I thought, Oh God, there's going to be some violence here. I got to get ready for this. And I said, what are you going to do? He said, what do you mean? I said, are you going to do anything to your brother? He shot your dog. He said, I don't do anything to my brother. He's my brother. He shouldn't have shot my dog, but he's drunk and his head's not working. You know, I miss my dog. I love my dog, but I love my brother. I'm not going to hurt my brother. So they just don't react that way. So do they have punishment for crimes? They have punishment if it threatens the survival of the village. So there was one young man, a teenager, and I talk about him in both my book, Don't Sleep Through Our Snakes, and in the new one that's coming out next year, Born of the River, who was paid in alcohol and a new shotgun to kill somebody who was living up the river, who wasn't a Pidahah, living on the same river. And he killed him. And the Pidahah saw this as an existential threat to the whole community because they knew that the police could come up. They knew that soldiers could come up. They knew that many Pidahah could be killed if this wasn't handled. So they didn't hurt him, but they kicked him out of the village. He had to live on his own. And he died about two months later, he was dead. It's hard to live on your own in the middle of the jungle with no community and nobody who has anything to do with you just shot. So that's the worst punishment they have. Banishment. Banishment in the jungle is crazy. What did they give him to survive? Was it like you when you were learning? He got nothing. Nothing? Yeah, get out. He could take what he had, but nobody gave him anything else. So he had a bow and arrow, no food, no clothes. How did he die? Well, that I don't know, because I just know that when I came, I would ask about him, and then they said, oh, he's dead. So there's two possibilities. He died, naturally death, which I think is probably what happened, or somebody killed him. And then changed their name. I didn't do it. Yeah, yeah, that's easily that could have easily happened. Because the change of the name gag is awesome. Yeah, everybody up there is violent. You see Brazilians coming up in these boats. Many of them are like pirates. I mean, they don't practice piracy. Now some of them do. But you go on a boat with these guys. And these are some tough looking guys. They got scars on their faces and scars on their, these are knife fights. These are guys who, you know, like, I got really mad at somebody once. And I mentioned to another Brazilian, I said, you know, if he keeps doing that, I'm going to punch him in the face. And he says, if you punch him in the face, he's going to kill you. You know, he'll either get a knife or he'll get a gun. So if you decide you're going to hit somebody, you better be armed, because they're going to come at you with whatever weapon they can get their hands on. You really thought that you're just going to be able to punch him? I was just talking, but I, you know, obviously didn't have a lot of, you know, my dad liked to fight a lot. But were you guys drunk at the time when you were doing this? Oh, no, I wasn't drunk. I, this guy was drunk, and he was pushing and he was giving my daughters who were by that time were pretty little blonde teenagers a hard time. And I told him to get away. And he wanted to fight. And I got it calmed down. But I thought, you know, if he keeps trying, I'm going to punch him in the face. And I told this guy that and he said, you don't do that out here. Unless you're willing to kill him right now. Don't do that. Because he's not going to fight you fair. He's going to come at you when you're not expecting it and you're going to die. So this is it's just a different concept. So avoiding violence has lots of reasons to be done. I agree with that at all times. Yeah, I think people should constantly avoid violence. Yeah, I completely agree too. And the Pita House show you that these are people who are much better at violence than most people in this country without guns. And they avoided it. And they avoided it at all costs. Yeah, wise. Yeah, very wise. What did you think when you were just looking at the framework that they live by that these people don't have a God, that they don't have like someone watching over making sure they're doing the right thing all the time, or this punishment of being burning forever in hell, right? None of that is motivating them. No. And I also thought that they would be afraid of death. They're not. I thought they would be afraid of the unknown. They're not. They're willing to learn. I sit outside on the riverbank with them, and they point out satellites going overhead, because they know the sky so well that they said, what's that? And I look and it's like, must be a satellite. I said, it's like a radio thing because they have radio. I mean, they don't have radios, but I have radio. And they said, well, who put that up there? I said, I don't know. I said, Americans, I think. And they said, you know how to do that? I said, no, I don't know how to do that. So they said some other Americans know how to do that. I said, yeah, I don't know how to do that. But they're very conscious of their environment. Right. And they're very curious and they want to learn these things. But if I told them that God put it up there, they wouldn't pay attention. Now, they have these spirits that we talked about earlier, where they believe a thing embodies a spirit, like it could be like a jaguar embodies a spirit. Yes. So they have some spirits. So that's a spirit we haven't talked about yet. So they have this spirit, Igagai, which they believe, you know, so they might see a man and then they might see a jaguar. And then they say, it must be the same thing. You know, this man became a jaguar or the jaguar became a man. And this is a belief that is, in fact, shape shifting is not an uncommon belief in the Amazon among even Brazilians that live there. So one time I got up in the morning and everybody was yelling and pointing at the beach on the other side. And I said, what are we looking at? They said, can't you see it? I said, I don't see anything. And they said, that's Igagai. And I didn't see anything. Then later, a few nights later, somebody said, we've seen Igagai. It's dark. It's night. And the guy wakes me up. He says, we've seen Igagai. He's not far behind your house. Would you come with us? Because we know you're not afraid of him. You know, and I fell for that. And so we go out there and then I turn around and they're not by me. Because Igagai can also refer to the jaguar shape. So there's a jaguar out there. And I just won't go walking out there with a machete, you know, and then I realized they're not with me. And I go back and they said, did you see it? I said, no, I didn't see anything. But they, if they see a jaguar, they believe that it could be a jaguar or it could be Igagai. But when they were seeing this Igagai and you couldn't see anything, they were seeing it. Yes. And I was looking for a human looking creature, but there's, it's very possible that there was a jaguar just inside the forest. And I didn't see it and you couldn't. Yeah, because, well, yeah, but if you walk around with them in the jungle, you find that they can see a lot of things you can't see. So once I was walking with a guy down a path and he said, Oh, don't step on that snake. It's a Bushmaster. And I said, what? And I'm looking down, I'm looking at the path. I don't see anything. And I said, what snake? And he takes his bow and he shoots and the arrow starts flocking around like that. And he pulls it up and there's a Bushmaster at the end. He said, that one don't step on that one. And I didn't see it. I was, and I've almost put my hand on snakes. I don't know why I'm still alive because they can, they, they, it's like, I'm a special needs person. I, I, you know, they have to watch out for me when I'm in the jungle because it takes a lot of skill to be able to see these things. Just like when I take them to the city for like medical work, they get totally lost. They can't, they, it's hard for them to understand how I can find my way around the city because the cues that I'm using are totally different than the things they're used to. So this ego guy, this thing that they said, they saw, they could have just been seeing an animal and saying it was ego guy and agreeing that it was a spirit. And that's not like they're seeing a spirit that you're not seeing. Did you ever take that into consideration that they can see things you can't see? Yes, that is another possibility. And I definitely took that in. In fact, for the first several years before I had really investigated the different shapeshifting of ego guy, I thought that's all it could mean. They were seeing something and I couldn't see it. They were all seeing it. So you took that into consideration that maybe they have a sense that you don't have? Yes. And I, and it's clear that they have senses in the jungle. They're able to sense things that I cannot. Like how? Well, it's like I say, they've grown up learning. So, so let's say that, let's say that you see a branch move in a tree. Was that the wind? Was that a monkey? Was that a snake up in the tree? What was it? I don't know. I barely noticed that the branches make moving, but they know not only that it's moving, but exactly what caused it. I can see bubbles coming out of the water from the river. They're just bubbles to me, but to them, they represent either a rock underneath or a, or an alligator or, or some other creature that's under the water. And they can tell by the bubbles, but I can't. So they've learned to interpret their world in a way that I can't. So it's not that they don't have senses that you, that they have senses that you don't have, but that they have pattern recognition. That's the way I would put it. But again, you would need to do some sort of psychological testing and much more controlled conditions than I've ever been able to do to sort those things out. But my, my view now is that they simply have the ability to recognize and, and perceive things that they've grown up with that I miss entirely. And this spirit thing, does it always embody a creature that they're, that they're, it's common like a jaguar, or does it sometimes take on another form? It can take these, these entities that I've talked about. So there's another one. I, I, which is, has long teeth. And so they see these different creatures, one's naked, talks in a high voice. And, and so they're, they're putting experiences they can't explain into the shapes of these entities that they can explain. So just like us, we see so many things in the world we don't understand. That's what science is all about. So we create theoretical entities to be able to explain those observations that we otherwise have no explanation for. So in a sense, these separate entities are a primitive form. I shouldn't even use the word primitive. They're a form of science. And so they're, they're, they're, they're, given what they have they're reducing the unexplained to the explainable and Their audit of the jungle is limited to the places that they've traveled, right? So their their version of the world is entirely limited to the language. They possess. Is it written at all? I Developed a writing system for them. Yes for you No before, you know non-written language verbal language with no historical database to draw from right? But this they actually get some really good skills out of this So I took a guy to the nearest town a big town Porto Velho. It's the capital of a Brazilian state Because he had cirrhosis of the liver However, he got that and I took him to the hospital first We went to my house that I had in that city on the missionary compound He had never been out of the jungle before in his life So we go there and we have lunch and I said now it's time to go to the hospital So I take him to the hospital and he says I don't want to stay here I said the doctors say you have to stay here so they can make you feel better and so then I drive off after I spent a couple of hours with him and The next morning about 6 a.m. There's this knocking on my door So this is 30 miles away The hospital is 30 miles away and he's standing there wearing a hospital gown with no underwear or anything on and I said How did you find my house? He said well, I just walked here. I said, but how did you know how to walk here? well, I saw it yesterday, but all he had to do was get the river where the river is and and then Mentally compute where we're at So he it many experiments have shown that people who don't have right and left front and back but use Absolute directions like up river down river to the jungle away from the jungle Are better at finding their way in new places than we are You know I can tell you turn north and you might know what I'm talking about for the average person I say turn north if your life depends on it. You don't know which way to turn, right? But they would know and so that gives him a better sense of a map of where they're at So do they have a word for north? No, they only use up river that so the first thing they have to do the first thing he did when we got him out to town was where's the river and I showed him the river and now he knew where everything was Oh Because he got the river and she's got my house. He now he knows where everything is 30 miles away. Yeah, 30 miles away is the but doesn't the river wind it isn't yes But they know how rivers work and they can tell by the direction which way it's flowing and when he looks at it He knows which way is up river and down river based on the way the water is flowing And he walked out barefoot with nothing but a hospital gown on 30 kilometers and so he must have he left at night and he got there first thing in the morning And I said, well we have to go back he said I am NOT going back I said, well the doctor says you'll die if you don't go back He says I'm gonna die then because I'm not going back He said I would rather go back and die with my people and so I took him back and a few days later He was dead Did was he a drinker? He had been yeah There was a time before I helped the Indian agency Demarcate their reservation so it could be controlled that boats came up and down all the time when the Brazil nuts were falling and when the There were other jungle products like latex and sorva Which is a product used to make chewing gum and all sorts of other things and copa eva Which is used for suntan lotion So the Brazilian boats would come up and trade for all these things and they always traded with whiskey because that's the I mean Sugar cane rum cachaça, which is the cheapest thing, you know, it's 30 cents a bottle It's a lot easier to give him that and the Pita how like it, you know I told him one time I said this stuff's really cheap. It doesn't cut he said not for us It isn't we don't otherwise get it and we like it. So You know, they like to drink did they understand the concept of health of the the consequences of drinking alcohol? No, because if you're a hunter-gatherer and you're not used to having something in constant supply, you don't have to worry about it But once it comes in constant supply Then you do have to worry about it And when these guys keep coming up giving leaving this stuff off then it becomes a serious health problem Whereas before it was like I got drunk six months ago, right, you know, it's not a big deal, right? so once it became commonplace, yeah, and Do they adjust their behavior based on people dying of like liver sclerosis? Not that I've ever seen they don't I can tell them till I'm blue in the face that it's the alcohol That's doing this or the tobacco that's doing this Why would they believe me? They know a lot of guys who have drunk a lot of whiskey and they don't have it, you know So these couple of guys got it. How how do I know that's what caused it, you know, so They don't take my word on childlike It is childlike in the sense that children learn by evidence and if children don't have evidence for something I Mean and it takes a while for the evidence to start to sink in you've got to repeat the experiment, right? But you would imagine that if they're intelligent people you could explain This consumption of alcohol when done infrequently It's okay, but the everyday consumption of alcohol because you have an endless supply of it now has becoming a real problem That's a very good point. And I have brought that up with them before and they say Yeah, we know a lot of Brazilians that drink and they don't get that sickness. Yeah, so they come right up It's like it's like I could tell you that the kovat vaccine is really good for you And you can say well, I know a lot of people didn't get it and they didn't get kovat either You know, they didn't wear weren't vaccinated and get kovat. So you have to look at the statistics and And even there it's hard, you know, I mean that was they just don't seem very concerned with dying. Anyway, they're not They don't want to die right now, but it happens and they're not worried about it What do they think? Do they have a purpose for life? Do they have a thing they worship at all? No, they don't worship anything they the community is everything You you make a contribution to the community while you're alive and and that's your purpose. That's it That's it. And and it doesn't take any thought you don't need somebody to give a lesson This is what our purpose is folks. You just see everybody living and that's how you listen It odd that that's not the primary way people live if that that makes you so happy It's interesting because even me I'm hearing this my god, it's so appealing but part of me is like I'm not fucking living like that You know, nobody wants to live like that. It just seems too crazy too difficult too daunting I don't want to get bit by a snake and have my bones exposed. Well, I often think this when I talk to people who are Extreme ecologists who think we need to not affect the environment and I'm thinking yeah, we'll go live with the pita Huh, you know, you're not gonna last three days there with them. Yeah Maybe a few days more but not much so It is very appealing and I live there and enjoyed it. But while I was living there I had things they didn't have access to so I I can't fairly say that I live just like them I know you could always leave and I can always leave. Yeah, I mean I can get in my motorboat and take off Yeah, or in the worst case I can get on my two-way radio or satellite phone and call for help Did you ever think about just saying fuck it stay there forever? Yeah and the early years I did think about it I thought about not pursuing any kind of graduate degree not worrying about ever coming back to the u.s Or and I was really loving it there, but then I realized my kids Wanted a wider experience And they it would I didn't have the right to deprive them anything. If you were single you were just integrated. It's very possible Yeah, I mean That would have been easy to do although I would have had to get and become much better at Outdoor skills, right and I ever was I mean, I would not stand up to a pita haas Standards of hunting and fishing and no woman would have married me because they would have starved to death Did you ever get better at those things? Not really. No, you know I have For one thing, you know, I I like to hunt I used I started hunting when I was like 10 years old pheasant hunting Dove hunting and so I do enjoy that but I've never given at the time To become really good at it. Now if I were abandoned in the jungle, I probably would but it would take me a long time I mean these guys are using bows and arrows from the time. They're two years old So by the time they get to be teenagers, they're perfect They are absolutely unmatchless in their skill and I've done little archery contests before to see how good they are and it's just astounding So I would have to spend, you know many years practicing to get as good as they are And then I in the meantime, I would starve to death because they're not going to feed me How are they making their bows? There's a couple of different kinds of wood that they use but there's one that is it's a bright red wood and it's called Pidanya food piranha food because it grows near the Edge of the river and it drops flowers off the tree into the river and the piranhas love to eat those flowers So if you see a lot of those flowers in the water probably not good to swim there but they take a section of the bark a big section, you know, it might be like four inches by Four inches or six inches and and it's just a hard piece maybe Eight feet long and they bring that back and they have a special tool and It could be wood or bone or if they have a machete they use that and they just start shaping it until finally they get a bow that's probably Two inches wide and an inch and a half thick and it's taller than they are it's about seven feet long and And Then they get the bark from a tree a certain kind of tree and They give that and they they get it off in strands and so a man a brother or a father or a husband will give it to their closest woman relative and She takes those strands and she makes a bow string so the bow represents man and woman working together a man can make the wood a woman makes the string and they get the Arrows a man gets the feathers a man gets the shaft. The woman makes the strings that tie everything on so she's the glue and Once you get that that thing, yeah, there's there's one right there. This episode is brought to you by the farmers dog Here's a fun fact Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are Overweight, isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist and trust me. I know I buy one the farmers dog. I use it for both my dogs They love it. They eat it up quick. It smells good to them. 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Those are the arrows and that these are fishing arrows So they're much longer, but actually they're not both fishing arrows Just a regular arrow so their arrows are quite long and that thing is a very powerful bow and you can see the thickness of the string So Yeah, and that's the bow They had a lot of monkeys. Yeah, they eat a lot of monkeys and that weird No, I asked him once I said do Do monkeys look like people and they say no, why would you ask that? I said they look like people to me and he said no. No, they get they're covered in hair You're not covered in hair, you know, so I saw I I went to the trans Amazon Road I was I was traveling out all by myself hitchhiking and I stayed with this Brazilian And I said you have any cold water. He said and he had a kerosene Refrigerator and so I went over and I opened it to get his cold water and at the bottom It looked like there were like four dead babies and I'm thinking. Oh my god. What is that? I said, what is this? He said oh, it's just some monkeys. I skinned him, you know, and a monkey that's been skinned does look a lot more human And but nobody thinks twice about it, you know I said are the monkeys More like us or they more like dogs like dogs. They're much more like dogs and they are like us They just don't see the problem it's just food, yeah, it's just food and So, you know and they love the favorite part of any animal is the brains and one reason the brains are so good is because brains are have a lot of saturated fat and It's a great source of saturated fat if you don't otherwise brains Yeah, they monkey brain. So the favorite thing I was talking to a woman one time and I was I was making a sandwich I had brought in some lunch meat and bread. I had just gotten there. It was my first day there and so I had a little bit enough to make a sandwich for that night. And I'm squirting mustard. And you know when you get to the end of the mustard bottle and you're squeezing it makes a sound like somebody who's got diarrhea. And she says, what is that bird shit stuff you're eating? And I said, well it's good. It's mustard. You want to try some? Oh no. And she said, look at this bird shit. He's eating bird shit. And then I look at her and she's eating the brains out of a rat. And she's got this rat head and she's sucking the brains out. And they're cooked of course. And I'm thinking, this is a great example for an introductory class in anthropology. How different we perceive things. That's great to her, this is great to me, but it grosses the other one out. That's wild. Mustard's disgusting, rat brain's great. And isn't there an issue with eating primate brain tissue? Can you get prion diseases? Well there are diseases that they discover in New Guinea from cannibals who are eating human brains. But I'm not aware of any diseases that are passed by eating monkey brains or other kinds of brains. They'll eat any animal's brains. So the prion diseases that you get are from animals eating the same animal, right? Like mad cow disease is because they serve cows literal brain and neural tissue from other cows. Right. So I'm not an expert on that, but I do know that I've never seen a case of them getting disease from that. The superficial reading that I've done on it suggests that humans get it from eating human brains. Interesting. So they can eat deer brains, rat brains, no problem. Right. So the favorite part of any animal is the head. So if they bring me a fish, they'll give me a fish. They like to trade fish for canned meat because canned meat keeps. But I like fish cheeks, but my my wife hated the fish heads. She didn't want the fish heads around. So they would be happy to keep the fish heads and they just make a big stew of fish heads and they eat the brains and the eyeballs and everything. Those are really tasty bits. And probably rich in nutrients. Yeah, they are rich in nutrients. They know what they're doing. They love all the internal organs. Yeah, it's so weird how we've moved away from all that stuff. I mean, that's one of the things that happens with wolves. The alpha in the pack is the one that eats the liver. They know something's going on. There's a lot of nutrients in these organ meats and we've moved away from that in a very strange way. People are disgusted by the idea of liver. Yeah. So, you know, you go to some... if you go to northern Brazil and you go to one of these churrascarias, Brazilian steak restaurants, if you're in an everyday person's you're going to get a lot of heart and you're going to get liver. Kidney. Kidney. You're going to get all that stuff. You know, so that is stuff they love to eat. Sure. A lot of cultures. Mexicans, menudo. It's got tripe in it and organ meat. Right. And, you know, my brother-in-law deceased now, but he was Mexican and that's the first thing he insisted that my sister learn how to make in terms of true Mexican food was menudo. And he wanted that every Saturday and she'd love to make it for him, so then she made this pozole with cow feet in it. And it's got the hooves and everything in the pozole, but it cooks all day. I remember when I was a kid, pickled pig's feet was a big thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so internal organs are really good. You know that a Brazilian churrascaria is authentic if they serve chicken hearts. Right. You know, and so if I go to one and they don't have chicken hearts, I'm quite disappointed. It's westernized. Yeah, yeah. They're still great, but yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Yeah, I went to one when I was in Brazil. It was awesome. Oh, yeah. It's Brazilian fast food. Yeah, it is fast and it's amazing food, too. It's like they know how to eat. If you're in a rush, a churrascaria is the best place to eat. Yeah. Because you sit down, you flip that cart over to green, the food keeps... 20 minutes later, you're stuffed. Exactly, exactly. And you ate much more nutrition than having a McDonald's Big Mac or something like that. Sure, and it's all you can eat. Yeah. Yeah, it's awesome. I used to come out of the village and go straight to one of those. I've been out of the village for six months and I was really hungry and I was coming out on my motorcycle and the first one I saw, I pulled over and that's... and I ate till I could barely move. Did you eat monkey when you were in the jungle? Yeah, yeah. I didn't eat the brains, but they didn't offer them either because that's the best part. Would you have if they offered you some? Yeah, I would have. I would have. I've tried a lot of stuff there and when I was doing my field experience in southern Mexico and Chiapas, I spent some time with the Seltales, the Seltal people, descendants of the Mayas and, you know, I ate this stuff they chew up and spit out and let ferment. Oh, I've heard of that. That's a beverage. Is that like an alcoholic beverage? Yeah, and so I was trying to fit in and so they gave me just a little bit and they said, what'd you think? And I said, I'm trying to be this cool guy and I said I loved it. I hated it, but I said I loved it. And so they bring me a big bowl. Oh! Drinking people spit. That night I was up with things coming out of both ends all night long and the next morning my blood pressure was 60 over 40 and I had to be flown out. They had to get me on a mule and get me out to the nearest airstrip and out. But I did my bit. I was accepted as a great gringo for eating this stuff, you know, for drinking it. What happened to you? Well, whatever it was, my body didn't like it. So is it just like the bacteria in it, you think? Probably. I think it had to be that because it didn't gross me out. I didn't like the taste of it, but it wasn't grossing me out and it was a happy time. We had little ribbons and stuff. We were having a festa and I was sitting with the men at the table. And their gut bacteria just knows how to handle it. Yeah. There you go. Boy! Yeah, there you go. It says that the human saliva creates the fermentation. Yeah, that's right. Isn't there a better way to get drunk? Good Lord. If you want to get drunk and you want it bad enough, there it is. And I bet that stuff you're not going to drink every day because it's so disgusting. Yeah, well, it's not going to become a problem. Once it's fermented, nobody really cares, you know, who's around that culture. Boy! What does the monkey taste like? Well, there again, I don't have a vocabulary to describe all these meats. It's a tough meat, but I pressure it. I put it in a pressure cooker over a fire. I take in a pressure cooker, you know, not an electric pressure cooker, obviously one of these pressure cookers you can sit on top of the fire. And after I pressure it, it's falling off the bone and I take the meat off and I throw it in a bowl and I put some manioc meal on top of that. And then I cover it in Tabasco and it's great. It's very filling and it tastes really good. Wow! Did you feel weird eating a monkey? When you see the monkey and you put the little monkey body inside the pressure cooker and it looks like a baby, it doesn't look too good. But once you open up the pressure cooker and it's all cooked and the bones are separated from the meat and then it's just meat floating in there, you know, and when you're out in the jungle and you've been out there long enough, just about any kind of meat sounds pretty good. I worked with a group called the Wadi. I actually wrote a 540-page grammar of their language, co-wrote it. And they were cannibals up until 1962. Yo! And they had two, they had Indo-cannibalism and Exo-cannibalism. Exo-cannibalism was eating their enemies and Indo-cannibalism was eating their people. And so if you die in the village at that time up until 1962, they keep your body. They call all the relatives. Your body might sit there in the Amazon sun for three days and your relatives come from all over and then they cook you over a grill. And slowly they roast the body and then they cut it into chunks and they eat them with like little toothpicks and they eat it till everything's gone. They eat the bones, they eat the brains, they eat everything. They eat human brains. Yeah. And the purpose, as best I've been able to figure out, anthropologists have tried to answer this so my answer might not be theirs but it's based on interviews with the people, is to give your relatives eternal life. Because they live in you and you're going to live in somebody else so you just continue living. But Exo-cannibalism, I kill a guy in warfare, I'm going to eat him like an animal. I just chop him up and grill him and eat it and throw the bones off into the forest. Boy. So that's totally different. Some Native Americans practice that. Yeah. It's been said. But eating the brain though, what is that disease? What is this called? Jakob Kreutzfeld? Is that what it's called? Yeah, something like that. Something like that. I should know that. But it's mad cow disease essentially. It's like that, yeah. But they don't eat people all the time. They eat dead relatives. And if anybody's ever gotten that disease, it's never been registered. That's crazy. But I mean, even if you're eating dead relatives, you eat a dead relative, I would imagine you can get prion disease. Yeah, but it depends on how many die. There's a whole etiquette about it. You're never allowed to say that it just tastes really good. For example, you can't say that. You can't say delicious. Yeah, you can't say that. Uncle Thomas, yummy. And I've talked to some of the older men who have eaten their dead. And they say, oh, the babies taste really good. But you can't say that. The babies taste really good. It's rough. It's like human veal. But the Brazilian government and missionaries put a stop to that in 62. Good move. Why do they let it sit for three days before they cook it? Because it takes that long for the relatives to come. Because they might be in other villages. So they've got to send runners out to bring the whole family together. Doesn't the meat start rotting? Yeah, it starts to smell pretty bad. And there are a lot of stories about people puking after every bite. And these are people that could drink that puke beer. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. So you realize cultural differences aren't that superficial. What's also probably meat is probably extremely valuable to them. And they just probably think, look, there's no reason for this to go to waste when it could sustain us. It would be very interesting to go back in time and see how the customs started. They could have started out of hunger. And then you dress it up with some religious beliefs. Or the religious beliefs could have come first and you started doing it. But they do have oral histories about it. But the oral histories never say we were short of meat. So we ate Joe. We ate our buddy. But they do say we want to help them live in us and we will live in somebody else. So that's the explanation you get. Wow. Or that I got. Wow. Well, when you got there a few years after it's ended. Yeah, I didn't start working with them until 1985. OK. So it was 20 something years. But they still have stories about. Yeah, they still had a lot of stories about it. And, you know, anybody over 30 had had done it. Is there any kind of cannibalism that goes on in the Amazon still? Probably, but none that I know of. But there are still some uncontacted tribes. And there are still tribes that behave one way when foreigners around and another way when they're not. I have a friend. She died last year, but she was a missionary among those people from the 50s. So she remembers the cannibalism. And she told me, although some anthropologists deny this, but I think she knows them better than any anthropologist ever been there, that she said, I think when nobody's around, they still do that. Yeah, so I bet they do, too. They don't have to listen to someone else. They don't have warfare. Not anymore. They did. But that's been stopped and they have they're isolated from other groups that they used to be enemies with. But there are still some who believe the old time religion, and the old time religion says, eat your dead. So it's quite possible that it happens. But what you find is that since the 80s, most of the groups that have regular contact with the outside have undergone a very rapid process of enculturation into Brazilian society. Hmm. So even among the Pita Hasnel in the decade since I was there regularly, I see pictures of them because my ex-wife still lives right next to them. And she sends me short videos and pictures of them when they come up to her little wooden shack on the Trans-Amazon Highway by their river. And they're dressing very differently now. And some of them are speaking some Portuguese, not very well, but they're speaking some Portuguese. And your ex-wife is still a missionary? Yeah, she's still trying to convert. No conversions. They're not going to convert. Boy, you got to give it up to her for having, like, stick-to-tiveness. I mean, that's really determined. She is absolutely a New Testament first century Christian in terms of her faith. Wow. And she doesn't deviate and she's not afraid of anything. I mean, we've been in many life-threatening situations and I don't tend to get afraid and she definitely is not afraid. Not ever. So is that because of her belief that she believes that God is looking out for her and if she dies, she's going to go to heaven anyway? Yeah, a common refrain among Christian missionaries is, I'm immortal until my task is done. God will protect me until he's done with me. And so if he's not done with me, I don't have to worry about it. If he is, great. Wow. There's a lot of power in that, too. I mean, how many people just live in this constant state of existential angst? Yeah, that's something she's never had. Wow. She doesn't have that. There's a lot of value to that. It's what attracted me to her so much, besides the fact that she was really cute, that attracted me to her a lot when we first met. Were you bummed out when she wanted a divorce because you lost your faith? Well, by that time, we weren't getting along that well because she's very anti... it's not anti-science per se, but she's anti... Thai helicopter science. She feels that too many people who do studies of indigenous groups and languages come in for a short time, go out, and just speak a lot of bullshit that nobody's ever going to test. And so she hates that. And she's seen it happen with the Pidaha. I've seen it happen with the Pidaha. I've seen a couple of anthropologists and linguists go in and do doctoral dissertations on them that are like totally ridiculous. But if I say something, I'm a gringo. And I'm jealous because it disagrees with me. Do you think that they do that because no one's going to check? And so they just say, I want to just write whatever I want to write? That does happen. That definitely happens. It's also because people realize that it sounds really good to go study an indigenous culture or an indigenous language. When you get there and you find out, this is so damn hard. I had no, I have no words to put in how hard this is. So they bullshit. Because, you know, you want to say to a Pidaha, what is this? And so how do you ask that? Well, the phrase in Pidaha is, he go, okay, but where do you get that phrase? You can't ask somebody how to ask, what is this? If you don't know the language. So you have to watch them very carefully and somebody might get something new or you might even give them something new that they've never seen, hoping somebody is going to ask them, what is this? So you can write it down and then test it. And that's how I got it. And so now you're fluent in Pidaha. Yes. So you can go and have a conversation with them so you can explore some of these more nuanced subjects and do it in their language. Yes. So you can kind of translate things in a way that they're going to understand what you're saying. Yes. And that's what takes the most practice. So when I first translated the Gospel of Mark into Pidaha, I thought I had done a marvelous job. And I would read bits out to the Pidaha and they could explain it to me and it seemed like they were understanding it. But I used a grammar that was largely based on English. So when I read to them large sections, they were totally lost. They couldn't understand it at all. And what does that mean? It means I got it wrong. It means that I haven't figured out the language as well as I thought I did. And that's very humbling when you spent so many years trying to do it. So I had to start from the ground up again. And these are all, you know, before you can learn a language, you have to murder it. And before you can carry on a conversation, you just feel like an idiot for years. And for one thing, people who go in to do a PhD dissertation on a language like this are going to take one to two years of their life and that's it. And that's not enough time. It takes a year to get fluent in the language. And I know many people who've written about many different Amazonian languages who can't speak a word of the language or speak very little of it. They'll tell people they speak it, but you take, you go with them and you realize they don't speak it that well. So if you don't speak it that well, how can you ask them to distinguish subtle meaning differences? You can't. And that means that a lot of, you know, this kind of field work is, which is so vital, is not as reliable as we would like to think it is. That's unfortunate. Especially if a young student is coming along and they're interested in pursuing it further and they're starting off with some faulty assumptions. Yes. And the other problem is people learn a theory in graduate school and they take it as their job of their dissertation. And this isn't limited to just linguistics and anthropology, but they take it as the job of their dissertation to support that theory. So, you know, it's like Paul Simon says, a man sees what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. When you're, when you're trying to do theoretical research, field research shouldn't be that theoretically motivated. It should be basically descriptive and then you can do the theory later. But most people bring the theory into it and you can't totally divorce those two. But you see a fact. So for example, I've worked with Pina Ha and I'm asking for a certain kind of data and they don't give me what I wanted. And I thought this guy's, this guy's not giving me what I want. What's wrong with him? What am I saying wrong? Why is he stupid? You know? And then as I learned to speak the language better, I realized, oh, he's giving me exactly what I needed and I was too stupid to know it. And so that's hard. You're the one working for the PhD. He's just a hunter gatherer and it turns out he's at least as smart as you are. And often he's able to know what you need better than you do. And that's another, another part of the humbling experience of doing field research. Wow. The amount of commitment that's involved in going as deep as you went with this is really crazy. Yeah. I give demonstrations and you can find some on the internet where I take a language that I know nothing about and I switched to Pina Ha, which I know they know nothing about. And within 20 or 30 minutes I'm able to explain to the audience some basic facts about how their grammar works and what their basic vocabulary, you know, a lot of basic vocabulary. And I do this to linguists. I've done it in front of as many as 500 linguists at a time. Um, and um, then I tell them that a lot of people think this is magic. This is really cool. I said, what you've seen here is me working for about an hour. Now you just do that every day for two years and you're in, you know, and that's the part it's intensive. I get a headache when I do these demonstrations because my concentration is so hard and you know, um, you miss obvious things and you say bad things and um, you're just self-correcting all the time. You're just constantly, you start off this wide and you're trying to get this narrow, get down to this point of what it actually means, what this, and as you work through that, there, there are no shortcuts. There's no shortcut to doing that. And you need to be well-trained and you need to be very committed and you need to have a little bit of talent and work really hard. And when people see how it easy it looks and then they try it, they realize they're seeing me at 20 years down the road from when I started. Um, but yeah, there are methods to use to learn a language where there's no language in common, but it's got to be very difficult to achieve a fluent understanding of their language and the way you did it from the ground, literally from starting from what is this, how do you say that? And then remembering it, piecing it together and then you have to write it down and then you're writing it down. Right? Oh my goodness. And then like imagine if a guy like you didn't do that, like how many people are willing to do that? Literally how many people that are, you know, you're a linguist, you want to be, you're, you want to be a working intellectual. You don't necessarily want to get into malaria. You don't want to get eaten by a jaguar. You don't want to live in the jungle. But so, so there are people who would like to spend that much time, but they don't have the funding. So, you know, the, the National Science Foundation and the Brazilian National Science Foundation and the British equivalent of the National Science Foundation have all funded my research over the years. But the bulk of my research was funded by being a missionary. And so I had all these years because churches were supporting me. But today, But did they ever ask, how come you haven't converted anybody yet? Well, they asked me that all the time. I've had people, I showed slides of the Pita Haan to a church here in Texas, in Dallas. And the people started getting up and leaving. And I thought they were interested. They gave me money to work in these people. And I said, what's the problem? And they said, you're no good at all. And I said, well, what are you seeing that you don't like? They said, these people are naked. And if you're a Christian missionary, why haven't you taught them to wear clothes? And I said, well, they don't want to wear clothes. I said, what in the Bible says you have to wear clothes? They said, Adam saw Eve's nakedness and they were ashamed of each other. You must wear clothes. You're not even teaching them the basics of Christianity. I thought, I guess I'm not. That's not part of the basics of Christianity for me. How do you tell a guy who wears a loincloth that it's three inches too short? Something's peeking out there. So they don't wear it for modesty. They wear it to keep from sticks getting poked in your penis. And so modesty has nothing to do with it. Why would you, you know, to, to the average pita ha, a woman's breast is about as erotic as an elbow. You know, you know, you see a woman, she's nursing her baby and then the baby stops nursing and she's still talking to you and her, her tits hanging out and it doesn't mean anything to her. And after a while, it doesn't mean anything to you either. You know, what's the big deal? And so to get across the idea that it may be clothes, it's causing this problem instead of going naked, which then eliminates the problem of lust. I mean, it's hard concept for some churches, but churches tend to get very impatient. But then the National Science Foundation, for example, if I say, I'm going to go study language X and I need funding for five years. Oh no, we fund those. And that's a year's funding. Yeah. But nobody who goes out for a year really learns it that well. I need to learn it a lot better. Oh yeah. We'll go somewhere else. We're not giving you the money for that. Oh, that's ridiculous. Is there, are there really a lot of people that are willing to do that kind of extensive work? I wouldn't say a lot. But enough to do it? Well, there's 8,000 languages and there's maybe 2,000, 3,000, let's say 5,000 linguists in the whole world. And only a small percentage of them want to do this kind of work. The rest of them, most of them want to do Chomsky's kind of work where you sit at your desk and you say language has this property and it must also have this property. And so the rubber is never meeting the road, you know? I mean, if you can do your field research on database, I shouldn't say that because that's what my son does. He's also a linguist and he grew up in an Indian tribe and you know, the Pitahaha. And he also did a dissertation on another tribe that he learned to speak the language. But nowadays he goes through databases and comes up with statistical generalizations. And it's pretty interesting, but he'll tell me flat out. He said, yeah, I don't want to do that field work anymore. That's really demanding. Even though he grew up there. So, and that's the way most people are. How many more cultures that have completely different languages and completely different sets of rules and structure are out there that we're not aware of? Well, when I was back in the 80s, they used to say there's about 5,000 languages. Well, 20 years later, 21 years later, we're saying, or 31 years later, we're saying there are 8,000. Languages die out at the rate of about one every two weeks. So they're dying. And once they die, we can never recover that information. But also languages are being born on a regular basis because you talk like who you talk with. So why are Portuguese and Spanish separate languages? Because you've got the Eber river and you've got natural divides between in that part of the Iberian peninsula. And so they stopped talking to each other. And so their speech diverges. That's how Latin became French and Romanian and Germanic became English. And so they stopped talking to each other. So as soon as people stop talking, their language evolves and they have different languages. So British English and American English have evolved apart. And yet at the same time, we have television and movies and things that keeps them sort of together. But if you don't have media and you don't have that, then eventually they're talking, they're not talking with each other at all and they become different languages. And that's where most languages come from. Wow. And there's got to be a lot of these tribes that aren't talking to each other. And how many of these tribes have been investigated and how many people have been embedded in the, are there tribes out there where there's no one has ever examined the language, no one's ever embedded themselves in their culture? There are tribes, there probably are over a thousand where no one's gone there, but there are, there are a couple of thousand where no scientist has gone there to study their language or their culture. A couple thousand. Yeah. A couple thousand, I would say, if not more. And they probably have completely different languages. Yeah. And you know, we're, we're worried and we should be about the disappearance of certain bird species and all these other kinds of species. And we should be concerned about that, but we're not concerned enough about the disappearance of these languages and the, and how the new languages are arising. And why should we be concerned? Well, for one thing, every language is like a library. It's a repository of information that is lost when they switch to Portuguese, because Portuguese doesn't have all the same knowledge embedded in it. It doesn't have the same way of talking about the world. There's a lot that's missing. Every Pidahã, every child, every woman, every man knows the name of every species of plant and animal in their environment. They will never just say tree. Like I walked with a Pidahã into the jungle and they said, this is what we call this. And so I write it down. What do you call it? Tree. What do you call that over there? Tree. And what's that over there? Tree. They said, you just have one word for all these things, but they're calling them by the species name. And I'm thinking, well, I told them, I said, well, there's some Americans who do know all the different names, but I'm just not one of them, but they find it hard to believe that any American could get by without that knowledge of their environment. So when that language goes, we've lost the difference. So a friend of mine did a study on how a group in the Amazon classify birds and they don't classify them based on their anatomy like Western science. They classify them based on what they eat. And so if you know their classification, you know what all these birds eat and you know how to deal with those birds to capture them or to follow them. And when that language is gone, all that knowledge is gone. So it's like, you know, the Library of Congress has been blown up or something when you lose a language. And why do new languages come into being? What are the conditions? And what does all this mean for us being human beings? How do we know ourselves better? How are we to understand our species if we don't study all the different exemplars of our species? And that's the challenge. And that's what keeps the work exciting. But it also is what makes it a challenge because you tell a really bright 25-year-old or 24-year-old PhD student. Okay, now you have to take off to the jungle for three years or four. And they're thinking, I could get a job without doing that. You know, I don't need to go spend four years in the jungle to get a job. And you know, professors are pretty cushy job. It doesn't pay well, but it's also, it's not like, you know, it's not like real labor. And I told, people tell me how hard professors work. I said, yeah, well, you know, it does take a lot of hours, but I'd rather do this than run a jackhammer because I ran a jackhammer. And I'll tell you, this is a lot easier than running a jackhammer. So, but you go off to the field and you spend this time. Ironically, anthropologists seem more prepared to do this than linguists. And the other ironic thing is I know, this is anecdote. I know more anthropologists who speak the language fluently than I know linguists who speak the language fluently, which I have to put down to the pernicious influence of certain theories and linguistics that makes people think they don't have to learn a language to know how it works. And I tell people, when you're going off to do field work, I did write a field manual and I say the first six months, just work on learning the language. Don't take many notes, you know, take notes of words and stuff. So I had a goal where I wanted to learn 10 new words a day. And I kept a little spiral notebook clip in my belt buckle. And I would walk around learning these things and I'm gonna learn new words and write those down. And then I would spend the evening memorizing those words and I would try them out again the next day and I'd try to make sentences with them. And when people start laughing at you, you know that I didn't get that right. And sometimes they like to teach you dirty words, right? They think that's hilarious, you know, you'll ask. So then I, you know, how do you learn the words for genitals, for example? That's kind of an embarrassing thing if you stop and think about it. So I started to ask the guy, I said, what do you call that? You know, I pointed to his dick and he said, and he calls, he, you know, he says, I'm not gonna tell you, but he calls a little boy over who's naked and he shows me every part of his body. And he said, you call this, this, and this, that, and this, that. And then he says, but the names change once they start to grow hair. So penis as a boy is different from penis as a man and vagina as a girl is different from vagina as a woman. And so, you know, how do you get those words? You gotta count on close friendships. Like I said at the beginning of this, man, you've had a fascinating life. You really have. It's very, very interesting. I really appreciate you sharing everything today. It was really, really fun. Thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it. Jamie, pull up his book. Well, books, I should say. This one, Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. Whew. The life and language in the Amazon jungle, Amazonian jungle. That's what they say to each other each night before they go to bed. I, the best sign, Hank, you got you. Don't sleep, there are snakes. Amazing. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you, it was awesome. Bye, everybody. Oh. Welcome back, fricking frack. Welcome to the jungle. ABC Wednesdays. Abbott is back. It's gonna be the best year yet. Thank you, now we can finally turn this up. And everyone's going wild. Y'all think you run this school, but you don't. It's going great. Abbott Elementary. Anything can happen in the jungle, right guys? All new Wednesdays on ABC and stream next day on Hulu.