#2547 - Daniel Everett

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The Joe Rogan Experience.
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Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
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Good to see you, sir.
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Good to be here.
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Thank you very much for doing this. I'm really excited
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to talk to you. I've been looking forward to this
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a lot.
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Thanks very much for having me.
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You have a very, very unique life story. So I
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want to start with how did you become, let's lay
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it out for people. What got me interested in you
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is you became a Christian missionary and then went to
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the jungle and met these people. Let me say this right.
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The Pidaha?
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Pidaha.
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Pidaha. Pidaha. And stopped being a missionary and lived with
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them for how long?
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Well, the total time that I lived with them is
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about eight years in the jungle with them over a period.
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But I've been working with them for 40 years. I
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go back a lot. Wow.
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But you lived with them for eight years, and during
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that eight-year time period, you kind of.
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Is it safe to say you're an atheist?
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Yes, it's safe to say that.
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And so let's take it back to the beginning. How
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did you become a missionary? Did you come from a
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religious family?
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No, I came from a very unreligious family. I was...
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In fact, I was standing out in front of a
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Jimi Hendrix concert in 1968, trying to sell LSD to get.
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In, and.
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And this guy that I knew from high school that
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was really straight-laced came up with his sister. She was
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very cute. So I went up to try to sell
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them some LSD. They didn't use drugs. And so I said, well,
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you got any change? I need to get some money
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to get into the concert. And I saw that she
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went to the same high school that I did. So
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after the concert, which she didn't like but I loved,
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I went to see her in high school. I went
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to sit by her during lunchtime and found out that
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she was a missionary and had been raised in Brazil.
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And That really intrigued me because it was the 60s
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and I was, you know, didn't want to have just
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a typical U.S. life and living in the Amazon sounded
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really cool. But then I became, you know, a genuine, strong,
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believing Christian. Went to Bible school. I did my undergraduate
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degree in Bible and theology and I was an ordained
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minister in the Wesleyan Church and very active in church and, um,
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was preached on street corners and did all that kind
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of thing.
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How did you make this transition from being a guy
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with a bag of acid in front of a Jimi
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Hendrix concert to....
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Well, her father, who had been a missionary now for
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20 years, was the most influential person outside my family
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in my life. And he and I would sit up
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late at night talking and And, you know, I was
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17 and I found everything he said to be very
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convincing and very interesting. But mainly I loved his stories
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of the jungle and what it was like to live
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in the jungle. And I wanted to do that. And
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I became a believer. It was a gradual process. Well, actually, no,
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it wasn't that gradual. My father was just astounded. He said,
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you know, from one minute I'm worrying about you getting arrested.
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And now you're going to church every Sunday with these
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people I don't even know. He wasn't that happy about it.
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He'd rather you just get loaded in front of the
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Hendrix concert?
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Yeah, he would have, actually, because he was a heavy
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drinker and a construction worker, and he considered that to
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be part of the masculine experience, you know.
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But acid? Was acid okay with him?
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I don't think he knew I was doing acid.
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Oh, okay.
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But he knew I was doing, you know, weed and
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things like that.
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And he didn't mind that?
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No, that was— he didn't want me doing it in the house, which.
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I did, but— So your rebellion was to become an
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outstanding citizen and a Christian missionary? Right.
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That was my greatest form of rebellion against the life
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I had been leading.
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Interesting. Yeah, that's what happens when parents push their kids
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into a certain direction.
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Right, right.
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Little people don't like being told what to do. Yeah.
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So you immediately, it seems like, go become a Christian.
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And then how long before you are actually doing missionary
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work in the jungle?
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Well, there's a lot of training you have to do.
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So first I had to do four years of college,
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Bible and theology, and then I had to do some
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linguistics training. And then not a graduate degree or anything
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like that, just some linguistics training from the missionary organization
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because I wanted to be a Bible translator. And then
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we did jungle training in southern Mexico. So we went
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to the jungles of Chiapas and had to do survival
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training and all of this.
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Whoa. What did you have to do there?
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Well, there are several phases to it. The family goes
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and the family's part of it. But the hardest thing
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is to really see how much you've learned. They take
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you on what's called survival hike and they leave you
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alone for about a week in the jungle. You're not
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allowed to take any food or any supplies of any kind.
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For a week?
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Yeah, for a week or more. You don't know. It's
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going to be at least a week. In my case,
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it was about 10 days. And you've got to set up.
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Your camp, how best you can figure out how to
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get a fire going.
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Do they teach you how to do all this stuff?
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They don't just like figure it out.
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This is like the final exam. So you've had almost
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four months of training before they finally take you out
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on this survival.
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Do you have water?
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You have maybe a quart of water when you leave,
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but you're going to be out there for 10 days.
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So you've got to find water. So we learned which
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vines have water and how to cut the vines. We
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did have a machete. So I was able to jump
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up and cut a vine out. At the top first
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and then at the bottom.
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And no one's monitoring you? They're just leaving you out
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there and they're not making sure you're okay?
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No, they just come along when the time's up. And
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if you're there, you're there.
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Oh, boy. And if you're not, you're dead?
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You could be.
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So that's insane.
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Yeah, well, this is what happens when you live by faith.
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You know, you're out there. And God's supposed to be
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supervising your training, but it's really rigorous training. So by
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the time I actually got to the Amazon, which was
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eight years after I converted, took that long, it felt
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like I was coming home. I wasn't surprised by things.
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Well, the training was good then. I mean, I would
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imagine if you really want someone to be able to
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survive alone in the jungle, best way to do it
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is to test them by making them survive alone in
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the jungle so that you get an actual hope. version
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of the experience. It's not simulated. You actually are getting
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water from vines. What were you eating?
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Well, I learned different kinds of plants that you could eat.
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And then I learned how to make with a stick,
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you know, make a stick the size of a toothpick
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sharpened on both ends. And I did have some fishing line.
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I would attach that to that. And I was so
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proud of myself because I brought up two fish that
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were about three inches long And I ate those. And
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most of the time I ate plants and went hungry.
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So when I see the programs like Alone, that wouldn't
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bother me. That's the kind of stuff we had to do.
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They didn't even give you fish hooks?
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No. You can't have that kind of stuff. You have
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to learn to cope on your own. You've got to
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make your own. You've got to be able to recognize
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the plants, which ones are poisonous, which ones are not poisonous.
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Did you try to make, like, a bow and arrow
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or anything?
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Yeah, yeah.
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You did? I did.
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I made a bow and arrow.
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How did you do that?
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Well, I had a machete, and that's what I had.
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It's crazy they give you a machete. They won't give
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you fish hooks.
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Like, come on, guys.
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Yeah, yeah. Fish hooks are so much easier to carry. Right.
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But the machete you need for firewood. You need for
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lots of things. You know, when I got to the Amazon.
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What? Do you have a lighter?
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No. No.
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How are you making fires?
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Well, I had just– they let me take just a
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few matches.
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Oh, Lord.
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And so no lighter, but a few matches, which you
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kept in a 35-millimeter film cartridge.
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People don't know about those things, those little containers.
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Yeah.
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How many matches did they give you for 10 days?
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Well, you had one of those little containers with about 10,
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15 matches in it at the most.
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Oh, boy. So you've got to match a day.
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You've got to keep your fire going all the time.
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You always have to keep that fire going. So before
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you start it, you spend half the day just cutting firewood.
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And I would imagine it's very wet.
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It's all wet. So you've got to find something dry
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to get it going. And as they told us— You've
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got to keep it going.
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Yeah.
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They said once it's hot enough, it'll burn anything. But
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until it gets hot, you can't just throw that wet
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wood on there. It'll put it out. So— You know,
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you have to spend a lot of time exploring, trying
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to find dry, crackly wood and leaves and things and
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get it going. And then slowly introduce the thinner pieces
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of wet wood until finally you can throw on a
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sopping log.
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So a big part of your day essentially is making
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sure that fire stays lit.
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Yeah.
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That's a big part of your day. And you can't
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get too far from it. No.
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You have to stay fairly close to it. And at
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night you definitely want to keep it going. So I
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remember one night waking up and hearing heavy steps around
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my camp.
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Oh, yeah.
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And– I was up immediately blowing on that fire for
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everything I was worth to get that thing up.
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Yeah. Was it Jaguars?
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I suspect that it could have been, although I didn't
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see it. I had my machete, which when I got
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to the Amazon and actually saw Jaguars, I realized that
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would have been a pretty pathetic thing to try to
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go against a Jaguar with a machete. They would rip
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your head off before.
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You— Everybody likes to think they have a chance, though.
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Yeah, yeah, but— What I found out is jaguars, you know,
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they get up to 400 pounds. And they're the third
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biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger.
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And they often hunt in pairs. And so you wouldn't
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have a chance against a jaguar unless you were one
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of the pitahas. I know that guys alone by themselves
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have killed jaguars. Really? Yeah.
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What are they using to kill a jaguar?
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Well, they're always with their bows and arrows.
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A bow and arrow range for a jaguar. That's crazy.
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Well, you better have it ready because it sneaks up
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on you. There's another group that I worked with for
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quite a while, several months, called the Bonowah, and they
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use poisoned darts and poisoned arrows. So there's a story
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of this guy who went out hunting and he reached
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a clearing in the jungle and he saw a deer
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come out running straight for him. And at first he
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was happy and he was going to kill the deer.
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Then he realized deers don't just come running out of
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the jungle towards people. And then right behind the deer
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came a jaguar. And the jaguar saw him, the guy,
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and he was bigger than the deer. So the jaguar
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just took off straight for him and jumped up. And
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the guy got his bow, his blowgun. out in front
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of him. They're about seven or eight feet long, these
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big blow guns. And they're very sturdy. And the jaguar,
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he holds it away. The jaguar's back legs are tearing
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the meat off of his legs. And the jaguar's head
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00:11:02.710 --> 00:11:05.070
just keeps snapping at his face, trying to get his face.
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And what saved his life was the jaguar jumped off
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to go around the back and try to get him
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00:11:10.330 --> 00:11:12.809
from the back. But he had a poisoned arrow and
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he stabbed the jaguar with it. And that hurts. And
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the jaguar started to run off and then he shot
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it with a poisoned arrow. But he passed out, and
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his family found him a couple of days later with
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00:11:25.779 --> 00:11:30.779
his legs just infected and torn to pieces. But he survived.
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00:11:33.659 --> 00:11:36.899
And so these Pidahad, would they go hunt the jaguars?
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00:11:37.889 --> 00:11:40.870
If they saw that it was a danger, if a
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00:11:40.929 --> 00:11:44.169
woman went out and a jaguar or a mountain lion
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00:11:45.370 --> 00:11:47.490
scared her, the men would go out to kill it.
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00:11:48.309 --> 00:11:49.340
So I've eaten jaguar.
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00:11:49.360 --> 00:11:52.139
What does it taste like?
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00:11:52.200 --> 00:11:56.879
Well, this one was sort of, this was a sick jaguar.
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00:11:56.919 --> 00:11:59.159
But it's stringy meat. I mean, it's very muscly meat.
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Is it a sick one?
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Yeah, that's how they wound up killing it. I found
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out later. I was really impressed, you know, they killed
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00:12:05.990 --> 00:12:08.490
a jaguar. And they have killed many jaguars. But this
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one turned out to be a sick jaguar, which is
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00:12:10.350 --> 00:12:11.730
why he attacked the woman.
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Like he was starving to death or something?
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00:12:14.120 --> 00:12:15.799
Yeah, he was starving. So the men killed it.
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00:12:16.299 --> 00:12:16.669
And ate it.
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00:12:16.700 --> 00:12:18.919
But I did, my children were with me this whole time.
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00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:21.980
So I told my children, I said, just remember who's
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eating whom.
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00:12:24.879 --> 00:12:26.159
So do you remember what it tastes like?
283
00:12:27.370 --> 00:12:29.710
Well, it's a, it's a stringy meat. It's really hard
284
00:12:29.730 --> 00:12:31.529
to describe all the, all the tastes.
285
00:12:32.210 --> 00:12:33.450
Like very sinewy?
286
00:12:33.470 --> 00:12:33.789
It's tough.
287
00:12:33.929 --> 00:12:34.129
Yeah.
288
00:12:34.149 --> 00:12:39.230
Sinewy and very tough. And my general rule of thumb,
289
00:12:39.649 --> 00:12:41.960
I eat anything that they kill, but my general rule
290
00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:44.279
of thumb is I usually have a bottle of Tabasco
291
00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:47.519
sauce and If you put Tabasco sauce on it, it's okay.
292
00:12:48.159 --> 00:12:51.299
And so these pitahas, am I saying it right?
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00:12:51.399 --> 00:12:52.700
Yeah, that's right.
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00:12:53.539 --> 00:12:57.159
They don't preserve anything, right? They just kill things and
295
00:12:57.200 --> 00:12:57.519
cook them.
296
00:12:58.080 --> 00:13:01.480
Yeah, they don't, you know, many, many different groups smoke
297
00:13:01.539 --> 00:13:04.059
the meat or salt the meat if they have salt
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00:13:04.980 --> 00:13:08.240
or dry it. And the pitahas know how to do that.
299
00:13:08.340 --> 00:13:09.639
I don't know where they learn how to do it
300
00:13:09.700 --> 00:13:11.879
because they never do it except if they want to
301
00:13:11.940 --> 00:13:14.830
trade the meat with Brazilian boats who come up. But
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00:13:14.870 --> 00:13:17.379
among themselves, they don't preserve any meat. You know, I
303
00:13:17.389 --> 00:13:20.240
was talking to a guy one time and, you know,
304
00:13:20.259 --> 00:13:22.320
why don't you preserve your meat? And he says, oh,
305
00:13:22.379 --> 00:13:25.720
I preserve it in the belly of my brother. So
306
00:13:25.879 --> 00:13:28.220
they share it. And if I get meat, I give
307
00:13:28.259 --> 00:13:29.980
you some. And if you get meat, you give me some.
308
00:13:30.039 --> 00:13:31.399
So why would I? Right.
309
00:13:31.919 --> 00:13:34.090
So there's no need to store. And also, I guess
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00:13:34.169 --> 00:13:37.190
it's very abundant. There's a lot of life where they live,
311
00:13:37.429 --> 00:13:39.049
like in terms of fish and game.
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00:13:39.690 --> 00:13:42.049
There have been. Yeah. I mean, they live on this river,
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00:13:42.110 --> 00:13:46.039
the Micey River. And they're the only humans that live
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00:13:46.080 --> 00:13:50.379
along the river for almost 300 miles of the curvy river.
315
00:13:50.960 --> 00:13:54.279
And it's a relatively large river by U.S. standards. In Brazil,
316
00:13:54.330 --> 00:13:56.730
it doesn't even make many of the maps. But it's
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00:13:56.750 --> 00:14:00.269
a couple of hundred yards across. And in the rainy season,
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00:14:00.309 --> 00:14:04.450
it can be as much as 75 feet deep, 100
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00:14:04.450 --> 00:14:08.210
feet deep. So there's plenty of fish for them. In
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00:14:08.269 --> 00:14:12.049
recent years, that's changed because the Brazilian... The government has
321
00:14:12.110 --> 00:14:16.309
allowed the construction of dams across various rivers. Not their river,
322
00:14:16.370 --> 00:14:19.490
but they affect the water level so much that it's
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00:14:19.570 --> 00:14:21.549
taken all the fish, most of the fish out of
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00:14:21.570 --> 00:14:24.580
their river. So now they're starving. And this has led
325
00:14:24.679 --> 00:14:28.799
to conflict with Brazilians who live not too far away.
326
00:14:28.879 --> 00:14:31.679
And they've killed a few people stealing food from their
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00:14:31.799 --> 00:14:33.960
farms and things. Oh, man.
328
00:14:33.980 --> 00:14:38.720
Can you imagine? You just have this... kind of harmonious
329
00:14:38.799 --> 00:14:41.820
existence with nature and someone just decides to make a dam.
330
00:14:41.840 --> 00:14:44.320
Like you've got it so dialed in that you don't
331
00:14:44.360 --> 00:14:47.100
need to preserve your food. Right. Because everyone's just like
332
00:14:47.139 --> 00:14:50.720
happy and eating fish right out of the river. Right.
333
00:14:51.299 --> 00:14:55.080
And, you know, that's, they don't know where the dam is.
334
00:14:55.139 --> 00:14:57.470
They've never seen the dam. I told them that they
335
00:14:57.490 --> 00:15:00.570
built something that crosses the river like a wall. And
336
00:15:01.590 --> 00:15:03.789
they say, why do they do that? And I said, well,
337
00:15:03.809 --> 00:15:07.240
they want electricity, which they barely understand. They've seen I
338
00:15:07.279 --> 00:15:09.919
have a generator. I never had one for the first
339
00:15:09.919 --> 00:15:12.980
20 years I was working with them, but I eventually
340
00:15:13.019 --> 00:15:15.159
got a generator and they could see what electricity was.
341
00:15:15.200 --> 00:15:17.690
And I said, so that's where they get the lights.
342
00:15:19.129 --> 00:15:22.649
But they don't understand it. And it's for the first
343
00:15:22.710 --> 00:15:24.750
time in their history, and they've been living there as
344
00:15:24.789 --> 00:15:28.070
far as I can tell for almost 300 years on
345
00:15:28.110 --> 00:15:31.700
this one river. For the first time in their history,
346
00:15:31.759 --> 00:15:36.460
they can't be self-sufficient in protein.
347
00:15:38.029 --> 00:15:40.870
That's crazy. And how long ago did they build this dam?
348
00:15:42.490 --> 00:15:45.850
I think it was about 10 years ago. But they didn't,
349
00:15:46.669 --> 00:15:50.809
when it first went into operation, then it flooded the entire,
350
00:15:51.590 --> 00:15:54.289
lots of farmland, lots of settlements and things up on
351
00:15:54.309 --> 00:15:57.450
the Madeira. But what was shocking was that way down
352
00:15:57.509 --> 00:16:01.529
river from the dam, it affected the water level so
353
00:16:01.590 --> 00:16:06.379
much that when their river, the Maisee, goes to its
354
00:16:06.460 --> 00:16:12.299
lowest point, in the dry season, there's still only a
355
00:16:12.340 --> 00:16:15.100
few places where you can see the bottom of the river.
356
00:16:15.139 --> 00:16:17.179
Most of the places, even when it's at its lowest,
357
00:16:17.220 --> 00:16:20.100
you can't see the bottom of the river. But in
358
00:16:20.120 --> 00:16:21.960
the last couple of years, it's gotten so low you
359
00:16:21.980 --> 00:16:22.759
can walk across.
360
00:16:23.580 --> 00:16:24.519
Oh, wow.
361
00:16:24.659 --> 00:16:25.820
And the fish don't stay there.
362
00:16:28.100 --> 00:16:29.159
So what are these people eating?
363
00:16:30.220 --> 00:16:33.279
Well, they go hunting, which they don't like to do.
364
00:16:33.299 --> 00:16:35.830
But of course, when the fish are gone and when
365
00:16:35.870 --> 00:16:38.620
the river's gone, You lose a lot of the game
366
00:16:38.659 --> 00:16:40.639
from the jungle. So they have to go, instead of
367
00:16:40.700 --> 00:16:43.539
going a mile into the jungle, they have to go
368
00:16:43.620 --> 00:16:46.700
many miles into the jungle. And they're still not successful.
369
00:16:46.799 --> 00:16:50.659
So it's busting up communities. Some people are moving out
370
00:16:50.720 --> 00:16:54.080
of their normal area to other areas to try to,
371
00:16:54.340 --> 00:16:56.820
you know, back on bigger rivers. But then that means
372
00:16:56.840 --> 00:17:00.659
they're surrounded by Brazilians and they're no longer leading the
373
00:17:00.720 --> 00:17:01.860
life that they used to lead.
374
00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:08.299
So... When they move into these civilization areas, are they
375
00:17:08.500 --> 00:17:11.900
integrating or are they trying to like stay as a
376
00:17:11.980 --> 00:17:15.789
tribe removed from urban society? Like how are they doing it?
377
00:17:16.279 --> 00:17:20.509
Well, up until about five years ago, they would never
378
00:17:20.549 --> 00:17:24.269
have thought about integrating. They would live in like ghettos.
379
00:17:24.390 --> 00:17:27.349
If they were out near some town, they would live
380
00:17:27.390 --> 00:17:29.569
in the jungle away from the town because that whole
381
00:17:29.609 --> 00:17:32.140
part of Brazil is covered in jungle. Even the cities
382
00:17:32.220 --> 00:17:33.279
are bordered by jungle.
383
00:17:33.299 --> 00:17:33.680
Right.
384
00:17:34.210 --> 00:17:38.230
But nowadays, because there's no food anywhere, they're trying to
385
00:17:38.319 --> 00:17:44.240
integrate more. They're trying to learn Portuguese. And it's a
386
00:17:44.259 --> 00:17:47.740
very unfortunate situation for them right now.
387
00:17:48.039 --> 00:17:52.329
God, it's such a bummer. That sucks so hard. So
388
00:17:52.589 --> 00:17:58.349
when you first got there, your aim was to try
389
00:17:58.369 --> 00:17:59.609
to convert them to Christianity.
390
00:17:59.849 --> 00:18:02.410
That's right. I went there to translate the Bible and
391
00:18:02.430 --> 00:18:04.450
to plant a church and get everybody believing.
392
00:18:04.529 --> 00:18:06.950
And why Pitahah? Why did you go to those people?
393
00:18:07.430 --> 00:18:10.490
Well, we were in our training, and the missionary organization,
394
00:18:10.549 --> 00:18:14.730
the Wycliffe Bible Translators, offered us three areas. They said,
395
00:18:14.779 --> 00:18:16.450
you can go to New Guinea. We need people in
396
00:18:16.490 --> 00:18:19.839
New Guinea. You can go to Mexico, or you can
397
00:18:19.880 --> 00:18:22.660
go to Brazil. And in Brazil, there's this tribe called
398
00:18:22.680 --> 00:18:25.950
the Pitahah. that we've had two teams assigned to, and
399
00:18:26.009 --> 00:18:28.190
nobody's been able to figure out the language because it's
400
00:18:28.230 --> 00:18:31.849
not related to any other known living language. And so
401
00:18:31.910 --> 00:18:33.650
they said, if you're up for that challenge, and we
402
00:18:33.690 --> 00:18:36.549
know you did well in linguistics, we'd be happy to
403
00:18:36.589 --> 00:18:39.849
have you take that group. So I thought, well, sure,
404
00:18:39.869 --> 00:18:41.470
I'm up for a challenge. So we took that.
405
00:18:42.319 --> 00:18:42.980
And so this was 1977?
406
00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:43.009
1977.
407
00:18:42.990 --> 00:18:45.079
We were assigned there in 76, and I made my
408
00:18:45.470 --> 00:18:53.789
first trip in in December of 1977. And so how
409
00:18:53.829 --> 00:18:58.309
much of the language did you know before you got there? Nothing. Nothing?
410
00:18:58.450 --> 00:18:59.009
No.
411
00:18:59.089 --> 00:19:02.029
What do we know in terms of like before you
412
00:19:02.069 --> 00:19:05.450
got there? Was it recorded? Was it something that people understood?
413
00:19:06.210 --> 00:19:09.509
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427
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Yeah, in 1784... Portuguese explorers made contact and they didn't
428
00:20:12.000 --> 00:20:15.589
take lists of words They they wrote a few descriptive
429
00:20:15.609 --> 00:20:19.190
things about the language and about the people And those
430
00:20:19.230 --> 00:20:23.970
things still fit them today and then in 1821 a
431
00:20:24.289 --> 00:20:26.529
German explorer went there and he took a long list
432
00:20:26.569 --> 00:20:29.730
of words which was amazing because he didn't have linguistics
433
00:20:29.789 --> 00:20:34.700
or anything like that and His list of words is
434
00:20:34.740 --> 00:20:39.819
pretty good and then in 1920 a Another German who
435
00:20:40.160 --> 00:20:45.470
naturalized Brazilian, the founder of Brazilian anthropology, went there and
436
00:20:45.529 --> 00:20:48.890
took a much larger word list, and that one is
437
00:20:49.029 --> 00:20:51.410
very good. And so I had those little word lists.
438
00:20:51.430 --> 00:20:53.920
They're not much, and there's no how does the grammar
439
00:20:53.960 --> 00:20:56.660
work or anything like that. It's just lists of words.
440
00:20:56.759 --> 00:21:00.519
So I had looked at those, but it's a tone language,
441
00:21:01.480 --> 00:21:03.160
and so they hadn't written the tone, so I had
442
00:21:03.200 --> 00:21:06.319
no idea how to pronounce the words. To give you
443
00:21:06.339 --> 00:21:10.160
an example of what a tone language is, so if
444
00:21:10.220 --> 00:21:13.700
I want to say friend, I say magiai. And if
445
00:21:13.759 --> 00:21:17.529
I want to say enemy, it's magiai.
446
00:21:18.630 --> 00:21:19.390
What's the difference?
447
00:21:19.549 --> 00:21:21.910
So if I whistle it, friend is whoop, whoop, whoop.
448
00:21:22.829 --> 00:21:26.349
And if I whistle enemy, it's whoop, whoop, whoop. If
449
00:21:26.390 --> 00:21:29.240
you can't hear the tones, you don't know what's going on.
450
00:21:29.680 --> 00:21:35.329
So the word for me is chie. And the word
451
00:21:35.349 --> 00:21:39.190
for shit is che. So, you know, you can be
452
00:21:39.230 --> 00:21:42.230
talking about yourself and everybody starts laughing because you've called
453
00:21:42.250 --> 00:21:43.950
yourself shit.
454
00:21:44.869 --> 00:21:45.970
Because you have the wrong tone.
455
00:21:46.150 --> 00:21:48.250
Because you have the wrong tone. So, you know, there
456
00:21:48.269 --> 00:21:51.289
are a lot of tone languages in the world, Mandarin, tonal, Korean,
457
00:21:51.690 --> 00:21:54.690
somewhat tonal, and many languages of Africa are tonal. But
458
00:21:55.430 --> 00:21:58.529
for those of us who speak European languages, this is
459
00:21:58.589 --> 00:22:01.210
just really weird and it's hard to hear.
460
00:22:01.230 --> 00:22:03.890
A complete mind shift. Yeah.
461
00:22:04.789 --> 00:22:07.410
So you've got to be able to pay attention to
462
00:22:07.450 --> 00:22:11.940
those tones. But the first thing you have to do
463
00:22:12.019 --> 00:22:14.279
is start just collecting words. So I would point at
464
00:22:14.319 --> 00:22:17.119
things my first day, my first hour. I was pointing
465
00:22:17.180 --> 00:22:19.099
at things and writing down what they said, and that
466
00:22:19.140 --> 00:22:22.089
was the basic linguistics I had had, phonetics, how to
467
00:22:22.119 --> 00:22:24.849
write down sounds of the world's languages.
468
00:22:25.809 --> 00:22:29.390
And when you got there, so on day one, how
469
00:22:29.430 --> 00:22:32.039
do you make a connection? Do you just show up? Hey,
470
00:22:32.119 --> 00:22:34.619
brought you the Bible. Everyone have a seat. How do
471
00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:35.240
you do this?
472
00:22:35.400 --> 00:22:39.059
Well, I got off and I started handing candy to
473
00:22:39.079 --> 00:22:39.480
the kids.
474
00:22:40.200 --> 00:22:40.599
Good move.
475
00:22:40.700 --> 00:22:45.569
That works. And the people were very curious because I'm
476
00:22:45.609 --> 00:22:48.970
this white guy with red hair. At that time, I
477
00:22:49.009 --> 00:22:51.869
had bright red hair and they found me curious to
478
00:22:51.910 --> 00:22:55.150
look at. And so they came around. They could tell,
479
00:22:55.630 --> 00:22:57.539
you know, at least I think they thought they could
480
00:22:57.579 --> 00:23:00.660
tell that I was no danger to them. They know
481
00:23:00.700 --> 00:23:02.869
how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger.
482
00:23:04.650 --> 00:23:06.430
So then I would just start pointing at things. I
483
00:23:06.470 --> 00:23:10.970
had my pen and paper, and I would get a stick,
484
00:23:11.150 --> 00:23:14.769
and I would say in English, you know, stick. And
485
00:23:14.789 --> 00:23:16.730
they know that I'm trying to communicate something, so they
486
00:23:16.750 --> 00:23:20.509
would say back, eh. And I thought, it probably means stick.
487
00:23:20.710 --> 00:23:22.170
And I would write that down. And then I would
488
00:23:22.190 --> 00:23:24.690
take the stick and drop it. And they would say, eh,
489
00:23:24.829 --> 00:23:28.059
he meke kaube. And that means stick fell to the ground.
490
00:23:28.299 --> 00:23:30.940
And that's what I thought it meant. So that's how
491
00:23:30.980 --> 00:23:31.339
I started.
492
00:23:32.400 --> 00:23:35.480
That's what you thought it meant. What is the reaction
493
00:23:35.539 --> 00:23:38.839
to this person coming in and demanding that they teach
494
00:23:39.039 --> 00:23:39.680
the language?
495
00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:42.140
Well, I didn't demand.
496
00:23:42.339 --> 00:23:45.619
Well, you know, you have a requirement. You can't communicate,
497
00:23:45.640 --> 00:23:49.140
but you're there. So they're kind enough to welcome you. Yes.
498
00:23:49.579 --> 00:23:52.180
Are you in the actual camp with all these people?
499
00:23:52.200 --> 00:23:53.819
Yeah, I'm in the middle of their village. The plane
500
00:23:53.839 --> 00:23:56.119
let me off on, you know, landed on the river.
501
00:23:56.599 --> 00:23:57.019
I got out.
502
00:23:57.039 --> 00:24:00.109
You don't even ask? You just, like... wander into their camp?
503
00:24:00.210 --> 00:24:01.789
There's no way to contact them ahead of time.
504
00:24:01.930 --> 00:24:02.890
This is crazy.
505
00:24:03.049 --> 00:24:03.250
Yeah.
506
00:24:03.470 --> 00:24:05.130
And you're just assuming they're not going to kill you.
507
00:24:05.250 --> 00:24:05.710
Is this you?
508
00:24:06.289 --> 00:24:08.269
This is the Pitaha. This is a Pitaha village.
509
00:24:08.289 --> 00:24:10.150
Yep. And so this is what it looked like when
510
00:24:10.190 --> 00:24:13.019
you showed up. You're like, hi, what's a stick? Yeah. Yeah.
511
00:24:13.059 --> 00:24:15.660
You land, you land on the river and, and you
512
00:24:15.680 --> 00:24:18.440
get there and that is, uh, that's the Pitaha.
513
00:24:18.519 --> 00:24:19.000
Wow.
514
00:24:19.240 --> 00:24:25.579
And, um, wow. So they're very friendly and they start talking. Um, But,
515
00:24:25.619 --> 00:24:27.079
of course, I don't know what they say. They just
516
00:24:27.140 --> 00:24:27.859
see me as.
517
00:24:27.799 --> 00:24:30.160
A very— Guy's got a Ferrari t-shirt on. What's up?
518
00:24:30.619 --> 00:24:35.619
Yeah, they— riverboats go in and give clothes. If a riverboat
519
00:24:35.640 --> 00:24:37.660
hasn't been there in a long time, they'll all be naked.
520
00:24:38.319 --> 00:24:44.769
Oh, wow. So— And so, like, day one, they just
521
00:24:45.529 --> 00:24:49.109
accept the fact that this redheaded dude just showed up
522
00:24:49.190 --> 00:24:50.170
and is hanging out with us now?
523
00:24:50.990 --> 00:24:52.650
Yeah, there were a couple of things that counted in
524
00:24:52.690 --> 00:24:55.779
my favor. I was all by myself, and so— Giving
525
00:24:55.839 --> 00:25:00.000
out candy was a big factor. They like to chew tobacco,
526
00:25:00.940 --> 00:25:03.019
and I had been told this by somebody who had
527
00:25:03.059 --> 00:25:05.920
been there. So I took in a big, long horn
528
00:25:06.000 --> 00:25:07.529
of tobacco. I don't know if it was a really
529
00:25:07.569 --> 00:25:09.609
old-fashioned way to— A horn? Yes.
530
00:25:09.650 --> 00:25:10.869
Like an animal horn?
531
00:25:11.170 --> 00:25:14.910
No, it looks like an animal horn, but it's probably
532
00:25:14.910 --> 00:25:18.430
8 feet, 9 feet long, just rolled up tight tobacco
533
00:25:18.490 --> 00:25:22.109
wrapped in latex. Really? Yeah, and you just cut it
534
00:25:22.210 --> 00:25:23.980
off for them, and they chew it, and they like it.
535
00:25:24.049 --> 00:25:28.799
So— I would, you know, the ones who would help me,
536
00:25:29.500 --> 00:25:32.240
I would give them a little bit of tobacco or candy.
537
00:25:33.299 --> 00:25:37.940
And I also brought canned food for me. And I
538
00:25:37.980 --> 00:25:40.700
would trade that to them for fish and other things
539
00:25:40.740 --> 00:25:42.900
that they got. And they liked that.
540
00:25:43.160 --> 00:25:44.539
How long did you stay initially?
541
00:25:45.400 --> 00:25:47.759
The first time was just to see what it was
542
00:25:47.819 --> 00:25:50.339
like before I brought my family. So I stayed 10 days.
543
00:25:51.059 --> 00:25:53.059
And then I came back with my family and we
544
00:25:53.140 --> 00:25:55.619
stayed a year at that time. We just stayed there
545
00:25:55.660 --> 00:25:56.119
the whole year.
546
00:25:56.720 --> 00:25:59.720
When you say family, so your wife and how many kids?
547
00:25:59.900 --> 00:26:00.819
Three kids. There they are.
548
00:26:00.859 --> 00:26:02.200
How old were the kids when you got there?
549
00:26:02.339 --> 00:26:06.079
Well, my oldest daughter, who there was about 12, was nine,
550
00:26:06.440 --> 00:26:09.440
and the middle daughter was six, and then my son
551
00:26:09.500 --> 00:26:14.410
was three years old. So this is around that time.
552
00:26:16.109 --> 00:26:19.269
And so my kids grew up among the Pitahon. Both
553
00:26:19.349 --> 00:26:21.990
my older daughters learned to speak the language fairly quickly.
554
00:26:22.430 --> 00:26:27.420
Wow, that's a risky move. You brought your little kids
555
00:26:27.480 --> 00:26:31.279
to the jungle. What is that decision like? Was that
556
00:26:31.299 --> 00:26:32.140
a difficult decision?
557
00:26:32.799 --> 00:26:34.839
Well, today it would be, but I was a Christian
558
00:26:35.160 --> 00:26:37.480
and I believed in miracles and I believed God would
559
00:26:37.500 --> 00:26:40.190
take care of us. And so I went there and
560
00:26:40.289 --> 00:26:42.549
figured he was in charge. He would take care of us.
561
00:26:42.589 --> 00:26:47.869
So my son got meningitis. My two daughters got malaria.
562
00:26:49.309 --> 00:26:52.009
I got malaria. In fact, after a few years, I
563
00:26:52.049 --> 00:26:54.720
went to San Diego and I I came down with
564
00:26:54.759 --> 00:26:59.670
malaria in University Hospital San Diego. They were thrilled because
565
00:26:59.710 --> 00:27:01.509
I was the only person they'd ever seen with all
566
00:27:01.549 --> 00:27:04.670
three strains of South American malaria at the same time.
567
00:27:05.109 --> 00:27:09.529
Did you have a relapse of malaria? Because I have
568
00:27:09.569 --> 00:27:13.009
a friend who got malaria in the Congo, and it
569
00:27:13.069 --> 00:27:13.759
came back.
570
00:27:14.799 --> 00:27:17.000
It can come back, and I've had relapses, but it's
571
00:27:17.039 --> 00:27:19.339
been a long time now that I haven't had relapses.
572
00:27:19.960 --> 00:27:23.740
I've taken so much medicine that supposedly— It won't come
573
00:27:23.779 --> 00:27:25.920
back anymore. But I can never give blood because it's
574
00:27:25.980 --> 00:27:26.799
always in my blood.
575
00:27:27.579 --> 00:27:29.740
What do they give you? Like what medicine they give you?
576
00:27:29.779 --> 00:27:35.920
Well, Daraprim, Primaquin, straight quinine. When my wife almost died,
577
00:27:37.259 --> 00:27:42.700
she weighed 115 pounds. And then she got malaria and
578
00:27:42.740 --> 00:27:46.980
almost died. She got down to 76 pounds. And the
579
00:27:47.019 --> 00:27:48.880
doctor told me she's going to die tonight. We don't
580
00:27:48.920 --> 00:27:50.079
have any way to keep her alive.
581
00:27:50.099 --> 00:27:50.839
Oh, my God. Yeah.
582
00:27:51.960 --> 00:27:54.599
They put her on blood transfusions because you lose a
583
00:27:54.640 --> 00:27:57.720
lot of blood. It kills the blood cells. And they
584
00:27:57.740 --> 00:28:01.359
put her on blood transfusions and also straight quinine, which
585
00:28:01.440 --> 00:28:05.039
caused her to be in agony for several days of
586
00:28:05.279 --> 00:28:09.359
just constant retching. And quinine is a really bad experience.
587
00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:11.349
But at the end of it, she pulled through.
588
00:28:11.460 --> 00:28:12.069
She pulled through.
589
00:28:12.089 --> 00:28:13.049
Oh, my God.
590
00:28:13.069 --> 00:28:15.230
Yeah, yeah. We all pulled through.
591
00:28:15.349 --> 00:28:18.400
You had to be like questioning your decisions. I mean,
592
00:28:18.420 --> 00:28:22.019
this has to be a trialing, you know, very difficult
593
00:28:22.660 --> 00:28:25.160
time because you chose to be there.
594
00:28:26.119 --> 00:28:29.650
Yeah. And so we were leaving the village to find
595
00:28:29.690 --> 00:28:32.650
help because my wife and daughter were dying of malaria
596
00:28:32.769 --> 00:28:34.809
at this time where she got down to 76 pounds.
597
00:28:34.829 --> 00:28:37.289
And my daughter lost a lot of weight, too. She
598
00:28:37.309 --> 00:28:42.240
was just skin and bones. And I'm getting my boat
599
00:28:42.319 --> 00:28:43.799
out of there. And I had never been out by boat.
600
00:28:43.819 --> 00:28:45.750
In fact, I didn't have a boat. We were I
601
00:28:45.789 --> 00:28:47.230
had no idea how to get out of there. So
602
00:28:47.250 --> 00:28:50.329
this Catholic priest came up to see what the Protestant
603
00:28:50.369 --> 00:28:53.470
missionaries were doing. And I said, can I borrow your boat?
604
00:28:53.569 --> 00:28:54.880
I got to get my family out of here. He
605
00:28:54.910 --> 00:28:58.640
had this very narrow aluminum canoe with a six horsepower Johnson.
606
00:28:59.380 --> 00:29:01.920
And I got my whole family in there and he
607
00:29:01.940 --> 00:29:04.319
just stayed there in the jungle and let my family
608
00:29:04.380 --> 00:29:08.210
take off in his boat. And I didn't know where
609
00:29:08.269 --> 00:29:09.769
we were, but I was thinking, you know, I've read
610
00:29:09.789 --> 00:29:12.710
all these books about missionaries and now I'm having a
611
00:29:12.750 --> 00:29:17.579
missionary experience, but it wasn't fun. It was really... That
612
00:29:17.599 --> 00:29:20.339
sounds horrific. It was a horrific experience, and I just
613
00:29:20.380 --> 00:29:21.480
didn't know what was going to happen.
614
00:29:23.059 --> 00:29:26.589
So your goal was to convert these people, and how
615
00:29:26.640 --> 00:29:27.569
long were you there for?
616
00:29:29.150 --> 00:29:31.769
Well, I was there... In 1980, I spent the whole
617
00:29:31.789 --> 00:29:34.230
year there. In all the other years, from 1977 to 2013,
618
00:29:34.210 --> 00:29:40.720
I was there for three to six months every year
619
00:29:41.900 --> 00:29:45.960
so i was there a lot and um got sick
620
00:29:46.019 --> 00:29:48.460
every time i went i had typhoid fever and all
621
00:29:48.480 --> 00:29:53.410
this stuff but um uh attacked by snakes and stuff
622
00:29:53.430 --> 00:29:59.829
like that but um It was just a mind-altering experience.
623
00:29:59.950 --> 00:30:04.450
Things didn't go the way I thought, and the people
624
00:30:04.509 --> 00:30:08.619
started questioning me. They started asking me about, why do
625
00:30:08.650 --> 00:30:10.859
you believe in this Jesus you keep telling us about?
626
00:30:10.900 --> 00:30:11.539
What's he like?
627
00:30:12.559 --> 00:30:17.059
And you're doing this also, you're translating these concepts from
628
00:30:17.259 --> 00:30:18.500
English to Pidaha.
629
00:30:18.859 --> 00:30:22.460
From Greek to Pidaha. Going from the Greek New Testament,
630
00:30:22.480 --> 00:30:24.569
because I was translating the New Testament, so going from
631
00:30:24.619 --> 00:30:29.019
Greek to Pitahum, but I'm referencing English and Portuguese at
632
00:30:29.039 --> 00:30:29.720
the same time.
633
00:30:29.839 --> 00:30:30.500
Oh my goodness.
634
00:30:30.880 --> 00:30:31.640
I'm staying in there.
635
00:30:31.819 --> 00:30:35.200
And you expect these people to understand what you're saying. Yeah.
636
00:30:35.259 --> 00:30:36.819
So, you know, if you're in the middle of the
637
00:30:36.839 --> 00:30:41.180
jungle and Jesus does something out in a desert, how
638
00:30:41.200 --> 00:30:42.220
do you describe desert?
639
00:30:42.589 --> 00:30:46.430
Isn't their language a completely different language than ours? Like
640
00:30:46.509 --> 00:30:50.150
in terms of like, they have no words for color. Right.
641
00:30:50.190 --> 00:30:51.470
They have no words for direction.
642
00:30:51.490 --> 00:30:56.539
They And this all takes time to find out because
643
00:30:56.559 --> 00:30:58.859
when I went there, I thought everybody had words for colors.
644
00:30:58.940 --> 00:31:02.579
Everybody had words for numbers. Everybody had a concept of God. Right.
645
00:31:02.740 --> 00:31:05.180
They don't have words for numbers. That's so crazy.
646
00:31:05.200 --> 00:31:05.819
Yeah, they don't have.
647
00:31:06.339 --> 00:31:07.299
Do they have numbers?
648
00:31:07.740 --> 00:31:08.859
No, no numbers.
649
00:31:09.119 --> 00:31:12.980
So how many fish did you catch today, Mike? A lot.
650
00:31:13.440 --> 00:31:13.720
That's it.
651
00:31:14.069 --> 00:31:14.349
That's it.
652
00:31:14.349 --> 00:31:15.230
A lot or a little.
653
00:31:15.309 --> 00:31:15.970
A lot or a little.
654
00:31:17.109 --> 00:31:17.769
Or a good amount.
655
00:31:18.029 --> 00:31:23.069
Yeah, yeah. So in fact, that claim was really controversial.
656
00:31:23.089 --> 00:31:27.380
I've had psycholinguists and cognitive scientists come down with me
657
00:31:27.400 --> 00:31:28.400
to do experiments.
658
00:31:28.440 --> 00:31:30.240
Didn't you get into it with Chomsky about that?
659
00:31:31.119 --> 00:31:34.440
Well, I got into it with Chomsky about their grammar.
660
00:31:35.059 --> 00:31:36.220
Yes. Oh, that's right.
661
00:31:36.319 --> 00:31:39.849
Chomsky made this claim. I've gotten other people. There have
662
00:31:39.900 --> 00:31:42.490
been people who find every claim controversial. So there's some
663
00:31:42.529 --> 00:31:44.890
people can't believe they don't have numbers. Some people who
664
00:31:44.930 --> 00:31:47.390
don't believe they don't have a concept of God. Other
665
00:31:47.430 --> 00:31:49.769
people who believe they don't, who don't believe they don't
666
00:31:49.809 --> 00:31:55.130
have colors. Um, but, um, Chomsky claimed that all languages
667
00:31:55.210 --> 00:32:00.369
are built on a common property called recursion. And recursion
668
00:32:00.450 --> 00:32:03.589
is this, English has it all over the place. So
669
00:32:03.950 --> 00:32:08.269
it's the ability to put one unit inside another unit
670
00:32:08.349 --> 00:32:10.670
of the same type. So take a noun. If I
671
00:32:10.710 --> 00:32:14.599
take the noun truck and the noun driver and I
672
00:32:14.640 --> 00:32:17.380
put them together, I can form a third word, truck driver.
673
00:32:18.099 --> 00:32:20.759
And so that's recursion. I put one noun inside another
674
00:32:20.799 --> 00:32:22.859
and I get a third noun. Or with a sentence,
675
00:32:22.920 --> 00:32:26.289
I can say John spoke. There's no recursion there. I
676
00:32:26.309 --> 00:32:29.910
can say John said that Bill spoke. And now that's
677
00:32:29.930 --> 00:32:34.589
got recursion because Bill spoke is a sentence inside John
678
00:32:34.650 --> 00:32:39.359
said that. And so Chomsky claimed, and in my opinion,
679
00:32:39.400 --> 00:32:42.279
without doing a lot of homework on this, I mean,
680
00:32:42.319 --> 00:32:45.240
he just was basing it on languages that he happened
681
00:32:45.319 --> 00:32:49.509
to know, which aren't many, that all languages were built
682
00:32:49.589 --> 00:32:51.940
on this. It made sense. And he had a principles
683
00:32:52.009 --> 00:32:54.769
built into his theory that required this. So when I
684
00:32:54.789 --> 00:32:57.869
came along and said they don't have it, and now
685
00:32:57.890 --> 00:33:00.240
I know there are other languages that don't have it,
686
00:33:02.029 --> 00:33:06.029
this was like saying you're wrong. And for me, a
687
00:33:06.750 --> 00:33:10.690
relative nobody, to tell the most famous linguist in history,
688
00:33:11.069 --> 00:33:13.589
somebody that Chomsky was called by the New York Times
689
00:33:13.609 --> 00:33:18.089
the most important intellectual alive, to tell him that he's wrong,
690
00:33:19.710 --> 00:33:25.349
a lot of people found that very Weird, you know, unbelievable. Yeah, problematic.
691
00:33:25.390 --> 00:33:28.710
But facts are facts. Yeah. I mean, it should be
692
00:33:28.750 --> 00:33:31.990
exciting for a linguist to look at something that violates
693
00:33:32.089 --> 00:33:33.710
all the laws of other known languages.
694
00:33:33.890 --> 00:33:37.769
It was exciting for some linguists and really off pissing
695
00:33:37.849 --> 00:33:39.019
for a lot of other linguists.
696
00:33:39.079 --> 00:33:42.180
Isn't that gross? That's so gross. Yeah. That is one
697
00:33:42.200 --> 00:33:46.480
of the grossest things about intellectuals, this gatekeeping of information
698
00:33:46.519 --> 00:33:49.119
and this appeal to authority that they're the only person
699
00:33:49.160 --> 00:33:52.779
who could possibly know. Especially when you're talking about languages,
700
00:33:53.319 --> 00:33:54.880
like how many languages are there?
701
00:33:55.099 --> 00:33:57.900
There are about 8,000 separate languages in the world.
702
00:33:58.019 --> 00:34:02.579
Okay. How the fuck could you know all the rules
703
00:34:03.279 --> 00:34:04.359
to 8,000 languages?
704
00:34:04.640 --> 00:34:07.049
We don't have data on more than about 1,200 or so.
705
00:34:07.109 --> 00:34:10.489
Well, isn't there also an issue with the Aboriginal tribes
706
00:34:10.869 --> 00:34:15.429
of Australia? My good friend, Adam Greentree, he's from Australia
707
00:34:15.650 --> 00:34:18.010
and he was running a mine there for a while
708
00:34:18.170 --> 00:34:21.320
and worked with a lot of Aboriginal people and really
709
00:34:21.360 --> 00:34:25.510
learned a lot about their cultures and they're called mobs,
710
00:34:25.809 --> 00:34:28.969
like their tribe, they call it a mob. And there
711
00:34:29.010 --> 00:34:32.010
could be a mob that's just like 30 kilometers over
712
00:34:32.090 --> 00:34:34.550
that way. They have no idea what they're saying. They
713
00:34:34.630 --> 00:34:36.690
don't know the language and it's not written anywhere. And
714
00:34:36.730 --> 00:34:39.630
there's hundreds of these. They're all over the place. Right.
715
00:34:40.670 --> 00:34:42.320
And the bit of field work that has been done,
716
00:34:42.360 --> 00:34:44.659
there are some really good Australian linguists trying to figure
717
00:34:44.699 --> 00:34:47.159
out these things, but the field work that has been
718
00:34:47.199 --> 00:34:50.380
done has found properties in that aren't like anything else
719
00:34:50.400 --> 00:34:55.199
we know about. So languages can vary so much that
720
00:34:55.360 --> 00:34:59.630
it's really premature, in my opinion, to be writing laws
721
00:34:59.869 --> 00:35:03.909
that languages are supposed to follow, all 8,000 of these languages.
722
00:35:04.030 --> 00:35:06.329
Well, all you'd have to do is say, as far
723
00:35:06.469 --> 00:35:09.789
as we've observed, and then you're okay. But as soon
724
00:35:09.829 --> 00:35:12.199
as you say it has to have this, and if
725
00:35:12.219 --> 00:35:15.130
someone says actually a language that doesn't have this, And
726
00:35:15.210 --> 00:35:18.110
then there's a controversy. You're a bad guy for pointing
727
00:35:18.139 --> 00:35:18.639
this out.
728
00:35:19.159 --> 00:35:24.139
You're a heretic. I had one of Chomsky's followers who
729
00:35:24.179 --> 00:35:27.559
was Brazilian write to the Brazilian Indian Agency, which is
730
00:35:27.719 --> 00:35:31.300
where I get my authorization to visit these tribes, and say,
731
00:35:31.320 --> 00:35:35.280
this Dan Everett guy, he's a racist. That's what they
732
00:35:35.320 --> 00:35:35.719
always say.
733
00:35:35.940 --> 00:35:37.480
Yeah. Isn't that the fun one?
734
00:35:37.679 --> 00:35:38.420
Yeah.
735
00:35:38.679 --> 00:35:40.260
The moment they want to get rid of you, you're
736
00:35:40.300 --> 00:35:41.099
a racist. Yeah.
737
00:35:41.260 --> 00:35:43.239
Well, she was silly because she said he's trying to
738
00:35:43.300 --> 00:35:46.360
reduce the pitahas to primates. And I said, well, in fact,
739
00:35:46.429 --> 00:35:47.639
I am because we're all primates.
740
00:35:48.090 --> 00:35:48.650
I'm a primate.
741
00:35:48.670 --> 00:35:52.150
You're a primate. But it's the thing. If Chomsky says
742
00:35:52.190 --> 00:35:55.909
that all languages have X and I say here's a
743
00:35:55.949 --> 00:35:58.869
language that doesn't have X, then either A, Chomsky's wrong
744
00:35:59.309 --> 00:36:01.630
or B, these aren't humans. And so the only person
745
00:36:01.650 --> 00:36:04.150
who would claim they're not humans is a racist.
746
00:36:04.690 --> 00:36:07.670
That's such a crazy way to put it. Yeah. It's
747
00:36:07.710 --> 00:36:09.510
so stupid. Yeah. God.
748
00:36:09.530 --> 00:36:11.590
But this is typical in science. As I got more
749
00:36:11.610 --> 00:36:14.730
and more into science, it's very unfortunate.
750
00:36:14.809 --> 00:36:18.289
It's men. It's men and their egos. That's what it is.
751
00:36:18.530 --> 00:36:21.949
And I'm sure women as well, but primarily men.
752
00:36:22.849 --> 00:36:24.869
Well, you know, you don't get a lot of money
753
00:36:24.909 --> 00:36:25.670
when you're a scientist.
754
00:36:25.730 --> 00:36:25.929
Right.
755
00:36:26.030 --> 00:36:28.530
It's not a money-making profession. You go into what is
756
00:36:28.590 --> 00:36:32.610
the biggest rate of exchange among scientists? It's ego. It's ego.
757
00:36:33.190 --> 00:36:35.070
But it's just so crazy to think that if it
758
00:36:35.130 --> 00:36:38.969
doesn't have this one characteristic of language that you're calling
759
00:36:39.010 --> 00:36:41.610
them primates, there's not a value judgment. You're saying it's
760
00:36:41.630 --> 00:36:43.690
a different kind of language. And this is fascinating.
761
00:36:43.909 --> 00:36:49.190
Exactly. That's my take. And many anthropologists took that. This,
762
00:36:49.210 --> 00:36:54.530
you know, so for example, they originally said that Homo
763
00:36:54.570 --> 00:36:58.150
erectus had no capability for human speech. And I thought
764
00:36:58.190 --> 00:37:01.599
that was kind of a questionable statement since you know,
765
00:37:01.619 --> 00:37:03.360
I've read a lot on Homo erectus, read a book
766
00:37:03.400 --> 00:37:10.639
about it and they don't, um, um, they, all their accomplishments,
767
00:37:10.679 --> 00:37:13.489
they had to have pretty advanced language to account for
768
00:37:13.530 --> 00:37:15.809
the fact that the ocean was never a barrier for them.
769
00:37:16.590 --> 00:37:19.829
And so I said that Homo erectus had language and
770
00:37:19.869 --> 00:37:22.030
I think the evidence supports that, but they don't have
771
00:37:22.449 --> 00:37:27.099
the kind of language Chomsky says necessarily. And, um, So
772
00:37:27.280 --> 00:37:30.159
an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool wrote me, and
773
00:37:30.199 --> 00:37:32.639
he says, my specialty is Homo erectus, and I think
774
00:37:32.679 --> 00:37:35.679
you're right. So we wrote a paper together. And then
775
00:37:35.780 --> 00:37:39.889
after we wrote the paper, he discovered last year the
776
00:37:40.130 --> 00:37:45.489
oldest wooden structure known in all of human history, 500,000-year-old
777
00:37:45.550 --> 00:37:49.530
structure built by Homo erectus in Zambia. And he showed
778
00:37:49.570 --> 00:37:54.969
that it has interlocking pieces and parts that, Nobody ever
779
00:37:55.010 --> 00:37:57.010
expected Homo erectus to be able to do, and their
780
00:37:57.050 --> 00:38:01.059
brains weren't that much smaller than ours. The average size
781
00:38:01.099 --> 00:38:04.760
of a modern human's brain is about 1,200 cc's for
782
00:38:04.840 --> 00:38:10.760
men and about 950 to 1,100 cc's for women. And
783
00:38:10.800 --> 00:38:12.889
since we know that men aren't more intelligent than women,
784
00:38:12.949 --> 00:38:15.730
the size of the brain can't be what's determining that.
785
00:38:16.750 --> 00:38:18.710
Homo erectus had brains of 950 to 1,000 cc's, cubic centimeters,
786
00:38:22.510 --> 00:38:24.969
You measure that by taking the skull and filling it
787
00:38:25.010 --> 00:38:27.590
full of sand and seeing how much sand fits in there.
788
00:38:29.349 --> 00:38:32.650
And so they were able to make these complex structures
789
00:38:32.710 --> 00:38:34.349
and they were able to make boats and they were
790
00:38:34.369 --> 00:38:37.730
able to do all these things. Yeah, that's what Larry
791
00:38:37.789 --> 00:38:42.150
Barham from the University of Liverpool discovered. This structure, you
792
00:38:42.190 --> 00:38:45.230
see the cross piece. And he recently gave a talk
793
00:38:45.789 --> 00:38:51.030
to a world association of archaeologists. to get their judgment
794
00:38:51.090 --> 00:38:55.429
on what this could be. Not archaeologists, but architects, to
795
00:38:55.469 --> 00:38:58.230
get their professional judgment. And they were really impressed by this.
796
00:38:58.289 --> 00:39:00.989
They said that's actually a pretty advanced structure for building
797
00:39:02.730 --> 00:39:04.070
a walkway or a house.
798
00:39:04.690 --> 00:39:07.630
We actually discussed this yesterday. I had a guy on
799
00:39:07.690 --> 00:39:10.789
named Michael Button. He's got a fantastic YouTube channel. It's
800
00:39:10.809 --> 00:39:13.969
all about sort of the mysteries of human history. And
801
00:39:14.710 --> 00:39:17.789
we talked about the seafaring aspect and how much evidence
802
00:39:17.829 --> 00:39:20.690
there is that these people were seafaring as much as
803
00:39:20.750 --> 00:39:21.559
a million years ago.
804
00:39:21.739 --> 00:39:25.139
Yeah, yeah. And in my book, How Language Began, I have.
805
00:39:25.300 --> 00:39:26.429
They had to be communicated.
806
00:39:26.840 --> 00:39:31.929
Yeah, you can't... There's an archaeologist in Australia. Bednarik is
807
00:39:31.969 --> 00:39:37.920
his name, and he showed by... He did experiments, and
808
00:39:38.260 --> 00:39:41.099
they're not exact because you can't find humans today that
809
00:39:41.139 --> 00:39:44.940
don't have any language, normal humans. But he got humans
810
00:39:44.980 --> 00:39:47.980
from different languages who couldn't communicate with each other that
811
00:39:48.019 --> 00:39:50.900
well to see if they could build a boat. And
812
00:39:50.940 --> 00:39:53.739
then another linguist wrote a paper based on some of
813
00:39:53.760 --> 00:39:56.000
this called How Much Language Does It Take to Build
814
00:39:56.059 --> 00:39:58.300
a Boat? And it turns out you've got to have
815
00:39:58.360 --> 00:40:00.900
language to build a boat. And so if they were
816
00:40:00.920 --> 00:40:03.880
building these boats that could carry water and could carry
817
00:40:03.920 --> 00:40:05.880
as many as 20 people because you've got to have
818
00:40:05.920 --> 00:40:08.679
enough to... If you find a colony of Homo erectus
819
00:40:08.760 --> 00:40:11.590
on an island that was always an island, it was
820
00:40:11.639 --> 00:40:15.909
never connected by land, there had to be more than
821
00:40:16.010 --> 00:40:18.769
one person that washed up there on some vegetation. There
822
00:40:18.809 --> 00:40:20.010
has to have been a community.
823
00:40:20.480 --> 00:40:25.219
Yeah, Michael brought up that the– what was it? What
824
00:40:25.260 --> 00:40:28.829
organization did it? Was it NASA? NASA did a study
825
00:40:28.869 --> 00:40:30.289
because they were trying to figure out how many people
826
00:40:30.329 --> 00:40:35.269
you need to colonize another planet. And they came up
827
00:40:35.289 --> 00:40:38.030
with the number 500. You need a minimum of 500
828
00:40:38.030 --> 00:40:42.050
to begin a colony. Right. In order to have genetic diversity,
829
00:40:42.150 --> 00:40:44.050
make sure you're not having sex with your cousin, that
830
00:40:44.070 --> 00:40:45.429
kind of jazz.
831
00:40:45.780 --> 00:40:48.440
Yeah, so you can't. just sent a couple over there,
832
00:40:48.539 --> 00:40:49.059
Adam and Eve.
833
00:40:49.300 --> 00:40:49.480
Right.
834
00:40:49.659 --> 00:40:50.900
And expect this to happen.
835
00:40:51.059 --> 00:40:53.119
Yeah. How did you feel about that story when you
836
00:40:53.139 --> 00:40:53.659
first heard it?
837
00:40:53.880 --> 00:40:54.320
Adam and Eve?
838
00:40:54.380 --> 00:40:57.139
Yeah. When you, when you were converting, you're 17, you're
839
00:40:57.159 --> 00:40:57.840
doing acid.
840
00:40:58.139 --> 00:41:00.000
I mean, I was one of these guys who I
841
00:41:00.039 --> 00:41:02.179
believe the Bible cover to cover and even the covers.
842
00:41:02.960 --> 00:41:04.300
Uh, so we'll get to that in a minute.
843
00:41:04.360 --> 00:41:04.559
Yeah.
844
00:41:04.659 --> 00:41:07.679
So, but go back to how this is all going down.
845
00:41:08.719 --> 00:41:10.300
With, uh, the, the controversy.
846
00:41:10.449 --> 00:41:10.769
Yes.
847
00:41:10.849 --> 00:41:14.909
So I started getting hate mail and then, um, uh,
848
00:41:15.789 --> 00:41:19.010
The article came out when I first proposed this in
849
00:41:19.050 --> 00:41:23.599
the major journal of anthropology, Current Anthropology. I was in
850
00:41:23.639 --> 00:41:26.260
Germany at the time at the Max Planck Institute for
851
00:41:26.320 --> 00:41:30.559
Evolutionary Anthropology. And right down the hall from me was
852
00:41:30.579 --> 00:41:33.579
Svante Pebo, who just won the Nobel Prize for decoding
853
00:41:33.619 --> 00:41:38.139
the genome of Neanderthals. And there was a reporter, a
854
00:41:38.179 --> 00:41:42.300
German reporter from Der Spiegel, to talk to him. And
855
00:41:42.480 --> 00:41:44.340
she found out about my article, so she walked down
856
00:41:44.380 --> 00:41:46.320
the hall after she interviewed him and interviewed me. And
857
00:41:46.340 --> 00:41:48.239
this came out, and it started to get picked up
858
00:41:48.760 --> 00:41:51.699
in the press in a lot of places. And so
859
00:41:51.760 --> 00:41:55.179
the New Yorker did a big profile. But then the
860
00:41:55.219 --> 00:41:58.659
reaction came, and it wasn't what I expected. I expected
861
00:41:58.699 --> 00:42:01.889
that if you make a proposal, that other scientists, if
862
00:42:01.909 --> 00:42:04.150
they're skeptical, which they have every right to be, are
863
00:42:04.170 --> 00:42:07.570
going to propose experiments to test what you're saying. And
864
00:42:07.590 --> 00:42:09.630
they're going to say, well, if they don't have recursion,
865
00:42:09.670 --> 00:42:11.610
you should find this and you should not find that.
866
00:42:11.670 --> 00:42:14.190
You should get this and this and this. And I
867
00:42:14.250 --> 00:42:16.989
tried to anticipate that. But that's the kind of objection
868
00:42:17.030 --> 00:42:20.309
I expected. But instead, they said, I'm a liar. I'm
869
00:42:20.349 --> 00:42:22.969
trying to get publicity. You know, I had a New
870
00:42:23.010 --> 00:42:25.769
York Times reporter. She called me and she said, do
871
00:42:25.809 --> 00:42:28.489
you try to get publicity? I said, did I ask
872
00:42:28.530 --> 00:42:31.110
you to call me? I said, you know, you called me.
873
00:42:31.389 --> 00:42:34.079
I said, you know, it's an interesting story. If people
874
00:42:34.119 --> 00:42:35.639
want to talk to me, I'm here to talk to them.
875
00:42:35.659 --> 00:42:37.940
But I'm not. I said, if I wrote you at
876
00:42:37.960 --> 00:42:40.039
the New York Times and said I'm an interesting person,
877
00:42:40.079 --> 00:42:42.320
interview me, would that make any difference?
878
00:42:43.000 --> 00:42:45.559
They're not mutually exclusive. Like you could be trying to
879
00:42:45.639 --> 00:42:49.480
get attention and publicity because you've discovered something that's very important.
880
00:42:49.929 --> 00:42:52.269
The idea that you're just trying to get attention. Are
881
00:42:52.289 --> 00:42:54.909
you trying to get attention? What are you talking about?
882
00:42:54.929 --> 00:43:02.889
It's so weird that the– intellectuals, the people who are
883
00:43:02.949 --> 00:43:07.429
literally professional thinkers, would fall into these like common human
884
00:43:07.530 --> 00:43:09.289
traps of ego. Yeah.
885
00:43:10.590 --> 00:43:17.480
Well, it was a mind-blowing, mind-expanding experience for me to
886
00:43:17.559 --> 00:43:21.739
see that intellectuals that I otherwise admired as deep thinkers
887
00:43:21.800 --> 00:43:25.699
about their subject would not think otherwise. And, you know,
888
00:43:25.719 --> 00:43:27.480
I mean, intellectuals.
889
00:43:27.920 --> 00:43:31.079
Did they ever gauge you on the actual information?
890
00:43:31.860 --> 00:43:36.269
Yeah, I had people from MIT, Department of Brain and
891
00:43:36.289 --> 00:43:41.949
Cognitive Sciences, from Stanford, Department of Psychology, from Columbia University,
892
00:43:42.010 --> 00:43:44.889
came down at separate times to run experiments, and they
893
00:43:44.929 --> 00:43:49.500
were well-designed experiments to test what I said. And they
894
00:43:49.539 --> 00:43:52.440
all came away saying, you know, it looks like Dan's right.
895
00:43:52.460 --> 00:43:58.349
You So where's the reaction then? And what do they
896
00:43:58.449 --> 00:44:01.050
say about that? Like the people that are negative about
897
00:44:01.090 --> 00:44:03.250
this and the people that are calling you a racist
898
00:44:03.329 --> 00:44:06.110
and all this saying you're trying to get attention, what
899
00:44:06.130 --> 00:44:07.650
are they saying about these results?
900
00:44:08.570 --> 00:44:12.340
They don't refer to them directly, but if asked, they
901
00:44:12.480 --> 00:44:15.099
often say that these people don't like Chomsky.
902
00:44:15.119 --> 00:44:17.829
So- All of them?
903
00:44:18.030 --> 00:44:18.289
Yeah.
904
00:44:18.570 --> 00:44:21.230
All of those individual scientists that are running these studies
905
00:44:21.269 --> 00:44:23.070
for you don't like Chomsky, and that's why they have
906
00:44:23.110 --> 00:44:24.030
these skewed results?
907
00:44:24.510 --> 00:44:27.210
That is one of the many objections that people raise.
908
00:44:27.230 --> 00:44:28.949
But by and large, they ignore it.
909
00:44:29.670 --> 00:44:31.989
They ignore it? Yeah. So they ignore the studies?
910
00:44:32.380 --> 00:44:35.449
Yeah, I had Chomsky write me some really nasty emails.
911
00:44:35.889 --> 00:44:36.239
You got them?
912
00:44:36.260 --> 00:44:37.159
Do you got them still?
913
00:44:37.340 --> 00:44:40.920
I have them. Yeah, I do have them. And I
914
00:44:41.019 --> 00:44:43.599
asked him, I said, why don't we debate at the
915
00:44:43.639 --> 00:44:46.880
Linguistic Society of America? I said, you think I'm an idiot,
916
00:44:46.940 --> 00:44:48.920
so here's your chance. You can show that I'm an idiot.
917
00:44:49.420 --> 00:44:51.460
Just we'll debate, and you'll make a fool of me
918
00:44:51.500 --> 00:44:52.099
in five minutes.
919
00:44:52.119 --> 00:44:54.530
Is he saying he thinks you're an idiot when you're
920
00:44:54.550 --> 00:44:56.190
explaining a language that he doesn't know?
921
00:44:56.510 --> 00:44:57.769
I'm an idiot or I'm a liar.
922
00:44:58.630 --> 00:44:59.869
Oh, my God.
923
00:44:59.989 --> 00:45:02.849
He gave an interview to a Brazilian newspaper, and he said,
924
00:45:03.489 --> 00:45:07.280
Dan used to be a fairly good linguist, but he
925
00:45:07.400 --> 00:45:10.570
is a charlatan. He's just a 100% charlatan. And he
926
00:45:10.590 --> 00:45:13.510
was interviewed on a Spanish station, and they said, what
927
00:45:13.530 --> 00:45:15.469
do you think of the contributions of Dan Everett? And
928
00:45:15.510 --> 00:45:18.219
he said, they're nothing, nothing, nothing.
929
00:45:19.039 --> 00:45:19.539
Oh, my God.
930
00:45:19.559 --> 00:45:20.460
And he's really popular.
931
00:45:21.019 --> 00:45:23.719
I used to really admire him. Yeah. I used to
932
00:45:23.780 --> 00:45:25.920
really admire him. Then I found out I was close
933
00:45:25.940 --> 00:45:28.820
homies with Jeffrey Epstein. That kind of threw a lot
934
00:45:28.860 --> 00:45:31.460
of water on that. Like, what? Yeah. Yeah. But then
935
00:45:31.559 --> 00:45:33.519
it was the stance during the vaccines when it was
936
00:45:33.539 --> 00:45:35.699
like people that weren't vaccinated should be round up and
937
00:45:35.739 --> 00:45:38.929
put into camps. So he had some crazy positions on
938
00:45:39.150 --> 00:45:45.190
the unvaccinated people and very just misinformed, just completely misinformed
939
00:45:45.230 --> 00:45:49.840
about whether it was natural immunity or there was other
940
00:45:49.880 --> 00:45:52.800
medications that were treat that you could use to treat
941
00:45:53.539 --> 00:45:57.280
COVID-19 or even the. the efficacy of the vaccine. It
942
00:45:57.300 --> 00:46:00.260
was crazy. That was just one thing about him. There's
943
00:46:00.280 --> 00:46:04.659
just like his earlier debates, like he's got these fantastic debates.
944
00:46:05.179 --> 00:46:07.750
I think it's him and William F. Buckley. Have you
945
00:46:07.789 --> 00:46:11.230
ever seen those? He's so good in those. He's so
946
00:46:11.369 --> 00:46:15.269
brilliant in those. It was a young Chomsky and like
947
00:46:15.429 --> 00:46:18.929
his intellect and his reason, it was like a breath
948
00:46:18.969 --> 00:46:22.519
of fresh air. It was like Super well informed. Every
949
00:46:22.579 --> 00:46:26.519
time Buckley tried to catch him on something, he judoed him.
950
00:46:26.900 --> 00:46:27.599
It was amazing.
951
00:46:27.980 --> 00:46:29.980
Yeah, well, the first two books of Chomsky I read
952
00:46:30.019 --> 00:46:33.559
when I started doing graduate work in linguistics.
953
00:46:33.860 --> 00:46:36.400
I read the media one. What is it?
954
00:46:36.739 --> 00:46:39.949
Oh, A Manufacturer of Consent.
955
00:46:39.989 --> 00:46:40.469
That's right.
956
00:46:40.590 --> 00:46:43.869
Yeah. But he had the first book of his I read.
957
00:46:44.210 --> 00:46:47.210
It was in linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
958
00:46:47.869 --> 00:46:50.050
And if you're a linguist and you're studying linguistics, that's
959
00:46:50.130 --> 00:46:53.630
just genius. It is just brilliant. And then the next
960
00:46:53.670 --> 00:46:57.590
book that he published the same year was American Power
961
00:46:57.699 --> 00:47:00.880
and the New Mandarins, which was about Vietnam. And that
962
00:47:00.920 --> 00:47:03.880
was also brilliant. And, you know, for one person to
963
00:47:03.920 --> 00:47:06.760
publish two books like that in one year, I mean,
964
00:47:07.039 --> 00:47:10.280
that's just first-order genius. So I admired him.
965
00:47:10.519 --> 00:47:12.380
What goes wrong with a guy like that, though? If
966
00:47:12.460 --> 00:47:15.039
a guy can be that smart, how can he not
967
00:47:15.139 --> 00:47:17.840
be curious about it? How could he not? Like when
968
00:47:17.900 --> 00:47:20.699
you say something that flies in the face of everything
969
00:47:20.780 --> 00:47:24.159
that he's taught, how could he not be curious and
970
00:47:24.219 --> 00:47:27.010
want to talk to you? And if you're right, why
971
00:47:27.030 --> 00:47:29.199
would he not want to like do something with you?
972
00:47:29.550 --> 00:47:31.690
Like if I found someone like you and I was,
973
00:47:31.849 --> 00:47:33.329
I mean, I would have hoped that that would be
974
00:47:33.369 --> 00:47:35.550
the same way as I am now. And I had
975
00:47:35.590 --> 00:47:38.070
an opportunity. I said, we should do a podcast together.
976
00:47:38.090 --> 00:47:39.869
We could explain this. This is crazy.
977
00:47:40.110 --> 00:47:42.269
Right. I invited him to the Pita Ha. He was
978
00:47:42.329 --> 00:47:44.889
coming to Brazil. And I said, hey, why don't you
979
00:47:44.929 --> 00:47:46.869
come with me to the Pita Ha? And I'll ask
980
00:47:46.909 --> 00:47:48.429
them any question you want me to ask them. We
981
00:47:48.469 --> 00:47:50.449
can talk about it there. And he said, I don't
982
00:47:50.489 --> 00:47:52.449
do that kind of thing. I don't do field work.
983
00:47:53.389 --> 00:47:54.030
So he didn't come.
984
00:47:54.300 --> 00:47:57.360
Good move. You don't want typhoid fever and fucking malaria
985
00:47:57.510 --> 00:48:00.360
bit by snakes, stalked by jaguars. That's all true. See,
986
00:48:00.460 --> 00:48:05.659
he's smart. It's just very disappointing when people are really brilliant.
987
00:48:05.719 --> 00:48:09.760
He's a brilliant guy. And essentially, I mean, especially rather
988
00:48:09.920 --> 00:48:13.750
was really brilliant when he was young. It's just so
989
00:48:13.829 --> 00:48:16.469
sad when you see someone like that just behaving with
990
00:48:16.639 --> 00:48:20.420
ego because he was the expert. He was the foremost
991
00:48:20.619 --> 00:48:21.800
linguist on planet Earth.
992
00:48:21.940 --> 00:48:23.940
When the New York Times is saying things like you're
993
00:48:23.960 --> 00:48:27.460
the most important intellectual alive and you have people hanging
994
00:48:27.579 --> 00:48:30.400
off every word as though it comes from, you know,
995
00:48:30.719 --> 00:48:32.019
the Oracle of Apollo.
996
00:48:32.139 --> 00:48:32.840
Yeah.
997
00:48:34.099 --> 00:48:36.469
I assume that it affects your ego to some degree.
998
00:48:36.469 --> 00:48:40.010
100 percent. Most people, especially back then when there's no
999
00:48:40.070 --> 00:48:42.349
Internet to check you. You know, you can get a
1000
00:48:42.409 --> 00:48:46.800
really distorted perception of how you stand. Also, everyone's kissing
1001
00:48:46.820 --> 00:48:50.500
your ass. You're surrounded by other people that are trying
1002
00:48:50.519 --> 00:48:52.519
to climb the same ladder you're on. You're in a
1003
00:48:52.559 --> 00:48:54.579
very lofty position of authority and power.
1004
00:48:55.519 --> 00:48:58.469
You know, he wrote letters of recommendation for me for
1005
00:48:58.510 --> 00:48:59.780
my first job in the U.S.
1006
00:48:59.929 --> 00:49:00.269
Really?
1007
00:49:00.409 --> 00:49:02.170
And he wrote a letter of recommendation when I came
1008
00:49:02.210 --> 00:49:05.210
up for promotion to tenure at the University of Pittsburgh.
1009
00:49:05.469 --> 00:49:06.929
Why would he do that if you're an idiot?
1010
00:49:07.070 --> 00:49:11.840
But I wasn't yet an idiot. Right. I became an idiot.
1011
00:49:12.139 --> 00:49:14.800
You became an idiot when you disagreed with him. Yeah. Meanwhile,
1012
00:49:14.889 --> 00:49:18.030
ha ha, you're right. That's what's funny. In the end,
1013
00:49:18.530 --> 00:49:19.849
you're right. Yeah. Well.
1014
00:49:20.280 --> 00:49:24.579
He, you know, I've had so many exchanges in journals
1015
00:49:24.760 --> 00:49:28.039
and magazines and things with his followers over the years
1016
00:49:28.159 --> 00:49:32.079
and with him that, you know, I go give a
1017
00:49:32.099 --> 00:49:34.360
talk somewhere and people say, you know, I hope you're
1018
00:49:34.409 --> 00:49:36.610
ready because there's a lot of skeptic, a lot of
1019
00:49:36.650 --> 00:49:39.380
skeptics in this audience. And I say, I don't think
1020
00:49:39.400 --> 00:49:41.139
they're going to ask me any new questions. I've done
1021
00:49:41.159 --> 00:49:43.070
this so much now that they're going to ask me.
1022
00:49:43.090 --> 00:49:46.929
I said, I'll be surprised if anybody asks me a
1023
00:49:47.429 --> 00:49:49.590
question that I haven't heard from Chomsky.
1024
00:49:50.570 --> 00:49:53.750
And when you have these conversations with Chomsky and you
1025
00:49:53.889 --> 00:49:57.820
lay out how the Piraha use their language and what
1026
00:49:57.860 --> 00:50:00.579
they say and how it works, what was his reaction
1027
00:50:00.599 --> 00:50:02.019
to that? You're just incorrect.
1028
00:50:02.610 --> 00:50:04.239
Well, the first time I talked to him about it,
1029
00:50:04.309 --> 00:50:06.690
he had not made this claim about recursion. This was
1030
00:50:06.929 --> 00:50:11.780
in 1984. I was a visitor at MIT Linguistics, and
1031
00:50:11.820 --> 00:50:14.519
my office was next to his. And so I talked
1032
00:50:14.559 --> 00:50:17.679
to him several times that year. And I said, I
1033
00:50:19.840 --> 00:50:23.199
don't think their language has this property. And he said,
1034
00:50:23.579 --> 00:50:25.699
you know, he was drinking coffee and looking at the board.
1035
00:50:25.719 --> 00:50:28.239
He had a blackboard right by his desk. And he said, hmm,
1036
00:50:28.460 --> 00:50:31.079
wonder what the consequences of that are. And then one
1037
00:50:31.119 --> 00:50:33.130
of his Ph.D. students told me, oh, you really got
1038
00:50:33.150 --> 00:50:36.610
known thinking. What is this? He found that very intriguing.
1039
00:50:36.929 --> 00:50:38.960
But then when he came out with the proclamation that
1040
00:50:39.000 --> 00:50:41.219
all languages had to have it, then I became an idiot.
1041
00:50:41.579 --> 00:50:49.489
Oh, God, that's so disappointing. Fucking people. Yeah. Fucking people.
1042
00:50:50.329 --> 00:50:55.110
Even the brightest minds. They're just, ego is such a motherfucker.
1043
00:50:55.469 --> 00:50:58.010
Yeah. Well, it's, it's really disappointing because, you know, he
1044
00:50:58.050 --> 00:51:00.210
was like my idol for the first part of my
1045
00:51:00.250 --> 00:51:01.070
linguistic career.
1046
00:51:01.090 --> 00:51:01.190
Right.
1047
00:51:01.750 --> 00:51:02.510
And I wasn't.
1048
00:51:03.090 --> 00:51:04.900
Did you try to have a conversation with him after
1049
00:51:05.119 --> 00:51:08.119
he denounced you? Did you try to like one-on-one get
1050
00:51:08.159 --> 00:51:08.679
together with him?
1051
00:51:09.679 --> 00:51:11.079
Well, we exchanged emails.
1052
00:51:11.119 --> 00:51:13.639
So for example, in his face, like right in front
1053
00:51:13.659 --> 00:51:14.699
of him, did you try to do that?
1054
00:51:15.320 --> 00:51:18.389
Uh, I had always told him when I was going
1055
00:51:18.409 --> 00:51:21.610
through Cambridge that I was coming and maybe he and
1056
00:51:21.650 --> 00:51:24.829
I could talk. And he always made time. And we talked.
1057
00:51:25.070 --> 00:51:27.000
I would be living somewhere else and I'd come to
1058
00:51:27.039 --> 00:51:29.519
MIT and he'd talk to me. And my first PhD
1059
00:51:29.559 --> 00:51:32.840
student is a full professor at MIT. And he started
1060
00:51:32.880 --> 00:51:37.039
off in linguistics. He's in brain and cognitive sciences now.
1061
00:51:37.340 --> 00:51:39.429
So I had a good relationship with Chomsky. But then
1062
00:51:39.489 --> 00:51:41.570
suddenly he never had time to meet with me.
1063
00:51:41.989 --> 00:51:45.210
So after his proclamation. Right. Okay.
1064
00:51:45.429 --> 00:51:47.610
He had no time to meet with me. His wife died,
1065
00:51:47.849 --> 00:51:50.190
and I wrote him a letter saying, I'm so sorry
1066
00:51:50.230 --> 00:51:52.320
that Carol died. This is really terrible. I know you
1067
00:51:52.360 --> 00:51:54.739
guys have been together for so long. And he wrote
1068
00:51:54.780 --> 00:51:57.139
back and said, thank you so much. That means a
1069
00:51:57.159 --> 00:51:59.440
great deal to me. And then I saw this article
1070
00:51:59.500 --> 00:52:01.679
in a Sao Paulo paper where he called me a charlatan.
1071
00:52:02.039 --> 00:52:03.780
So I wrote him right back, and I said, did
1072
00:52:03.800 --> 00:52:06.820
you call me a charlatan? And he said, yeah, you
1073
00:52:06.900 --> 00:52:09.449
are a charlatan. I said, you should be ashamed of yourself.
1074
00:52:09.489 --> 00:52:11.389
He said, no, you should be ashamed of yourself for
1075
00:52:11.449 --> 00:52:15.340
saying things you know that can't be right. So that
1076
00:52:15.360 --> 00:52:17.139
was the last exchange we had. Silly, silly.
1077
00:52:17.199 --> 00:52:18.980
No, of course you should have had that in front
1078
00:52:19.019 --> 00:52:22.619
of them. I mean, just, I think people say things
1079
00:52:22.659 --> 00:52:25.219
in emails that I think is a terrible way to communicate.
1080
00:52:25.280 --> 00:52:26.519
I agree completely.
1081
00:52:27.559 --> 00:52:30.719
You know, that's especially with insults. It's just, it's such
1082
00:52:30.760 --> 00:52:33.159
a way. And then you're waiting on the other person's
1083
00:52:33.239 --> 00:52:36.869
insult in return. Like, God, stop it. Are you fucking
1084
00:52:36.869 --> 00:52:37.349
12 years old?
1085
00:52:37.650 --> 00:52:37.929
Yeah.
1086
00:52:38.289 --> 00:52:38.650
Stop.
1087
00:52:39.070 --> 00:52:43.239
So the author, Tom Wolfe, um, The last book he
1088
00:52:43.300 --> 00:52:46.659
wrote was called Kingdom of Speech. And he talked about
1089
00:52:46.719 --> 00:52:52.659
two controversies, Darwin versus Alfred Russell Wallace and me versus Chomsky.
1090
00:52:52.949 --> 00:52:53.340
Oh, wow.
1091
00:52:53.489 --> 00:52:56.489
And so he has a very he has some bizarre,
1092
00:52:56.849 --> 00:52:59.829
absolutely wrong ideas about where language came from. He's not
1093
00:52:59.869 --> 00:53:04.389
a linguist, but he did cover that controversy extremely well. And,
1094
00:53:04.409 --> 00:53:07.719
you know, Tom used to call me every week when
1095
00:53:07.739 --> 00:53:09.219
he was writing the book. I didn't even know what
1096
00:53:09.239 --> 00:53:11.340
it was about to ask to get the details right.
1097
00:53:11.969 --> 00:53:14.550
But he was just shocked how this happened.
1098
00:53:15.369 --> 00:53:20.420
Yeah. Again, it's disappointing. But even the most brilliant humans
1099
00:53:20.519 --> 00:53:21.139
are just human.
1100
00:53:21.699 --> 00:53:21.960
Right.
1101
00:53:22.000 --> 00:53:24.840
And they're subject to all the flaws and all the
1102
00:53:24.940 --> 00:53:27.380
traps that the human mind could fall into.
1103
00:53:27.860 --> 00:53:32.329
Yeah. I've often said after long experience that intelligence is
1104
00:53:32.409 --> 00:53:33.929
no antidote for stupidity.
1105
00:53:34.510 --> 00:53:34.769
Right.
1106
00:53:34.869 --> 00:53:35.590
You can be both.
1107
00:53:36.050 --> 00:53:39.190
Oh, 100%. Absolutely. Especially when ego is involved.
1108
00:53:39.389 --> 00:53:39.590
Yeah.
1109
00:53:39.969 --> 00:53:43.599
So why? How many people, how many of the piddaha
1110
00:53:43.820 --> 00:53:44.579
did you convert?
1111
00:53:45.260 --> 00:53:52.300
Nobody. In decades, they weren't interested. They were so totally,
1112
00:53:52.570 --> 00:53:55.769
because my claims did not meet their standard of evidence.
1113
00:53:56.130 --> 00:53:58.409
They have a high standard of evidence, and I didn't
1114
00:53:58.690 --> 00:53:59.510
meet that standard.
1115
00:54:00.219 --> 00:54:03.170
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1132
00:55:08.050 --> 00:55:11.420
But don't they have like mystical creatures and stuff that
1133
00:55:11.440 --> 00:55:13.019
they believe live in the forest?
1134
00:55:13.659 --> 00:55:17.170
They do. And When I first got there as a Christian,
1135
00:55:18.010 --> 00:55:21.349
I called these things spirits because that's all I knew
1136
00:55:21.369 --> 00:55:21.869
how to characterize them.
1137
00:55:21.889 --> 00:55:22.750
How do they describe them?
1138
00:55:23.130 --> 00:55:26.769
They describe them as distinct beings. They don't say they're
1139
00:55:26.809 --> 00:55:32.230
spiritual or anything like that. But you see something. Maybe
1140
00:55:32.269 --> 00:55:35.300
there's another Indian from a different tribe hunting in your
1141
00:55:35.340 --> 00:55:37.679
jungle because there are some that are close enough to
1142
00:55:37.719 --> 00:55:40.400
be hunting in the same area. You see them, but
1143
00:55:40.420 --> 00:55:42.420
you don't see them well. They go behind a tree
1144
00:55:42.460 --> 00:55:46.139
or something. So you say, oh, that's one of these things.
1145
00:55:46.800 --> 00:55:50.969
I just saw one of these things. They don't put
1146
00:55:50.989 --> 00:55:52.889
it to the test necessarily, but they did see it.
1147
00:55:52.889 --> 00:55:54.070
When they say these things.
1148
00:55:54.409 --> 00:55:58.170
So they have three major types of entities besides humans.
1149
00:55:59.190 --> 00:56:01.650
And they have different types of humans. I'm one type
1150
00:56:01.730 --> 00:56:05.789
and they're another type. And so they have things.
1151
00:56:05.809 --> 00:56:08.630
How do they make the distinction? Is it the appearance?
1152
00:56:08.789 --> 00:56:12.429
For humans, yes, it's appearance. Well, actually for the other entities,
1153
00:56:12.469 --> 00:56:16.769
it's appearance too. So for me, I'm white. And white
1154
00:56:17.289 --> 00:56:20.150
means you don't have blood. So they asked me, they said,
1155
00:56:20.710 --> 00:56:23.969
so do you have blood? And they asked me one
1156
00:56:23.989 --> 00:56:25.579
time after I'd been there for years, they said, do
1157
00:56:25.619 --> 00:56:29.599
Americans die? And I said, yeah, we die. But you're
1158
00:56:29.639 --> 00:56:31.940
really old and you haven't died yet. And so I
1159
00:56:32.239 --> 00:56:33.300
cut myself once.
1160
00:56:33.340 --> 00:56:34.469
How old were you at the time?
1161
00:56:35.329 --> 00:56:37.119
Probably 45.
1162
00:56:37.119 --> 00:56:38.219
And they thought you were a goner.
1163
00:56:38.619 --> 00:56:41.300
Yeah, because we age differently. I already had gray hair,
1164
00:56:41.320 --> 00:56:42.619
you know, not all over.
1165
00:56:42.679 --> 00:56:44.639
Right. They look a lot different when they're 45.
1166
00:56:44.639 --> 00:56:47.320
Yeah, yeah. They're all still 100% black hair.
1167
00:56:47.840 --> 00:56:49.969
Oh, they thought you were a goner with the white hair.
1168
00:56:50.119 --> 00:56:54.849
So they have an expression, almost about to fall to
1169
00:56:54.869 --> 00:56:57.449
the ground. And that's the way they described me.
1170
00:56:57.670 --> 00:56:58.010
Wow.
1171
00:56:59.130 --> 00:57:02.190
So Americans are one way, Brazilians are another way. But
1172
00:57:02.210 --> 00:57:03.730
then there are these things, some of them are called
1173
00:57:03.789 --> 00:57:07.639
fast mouths. And so they They talk in a high-pitched voice.
1174
00:57:08.420 --> 00:57:11.960
And at night, you hear somebody, you know, a creature
1175
00:57:12.019 --> 00:57:15.110
talking in a high falsetto voice into the village. And
1176
00:57:15.159 --> 00:57:16.719
I say, what's that? And they said, oh, that's a
1177
00:57:16.739 --> 00:57:20.650
fast mouth. I said, but I'm seeing it, and it
1178
00:57:20.670 --> 00:57:22.250
looks like a pita ha. Oh, yeah, they look just
1179
00:57:22.269 --> 00:57:25.690
like us, but they're not. They're not us. And so
1180
00:57:26.369 --> 00:57:29.050
this is where we come to the border of fact
1181
00:57:29.130 --> 00:57:33.369
and fiction. And we try to draw a fairly rigid
1182
00:57:33.409 --> 00:57:36.980
line between fact and fiction. in our society and in
1183
00:57:37.019 --> 00:57:42.429
most European societies. But to them, they don't have to
1184
00:57:44.269 --> 00:57:48.050
have the full range of experience with this to describe it.
1185
00:57:48.590 --> 00:57:51.090
And so a fast mouth is just a fast mouth.
1186
00:57:51.230 --> 00:57:53.369
And you know who they are because they talk in
1187
00:57:53.389 --> 00:57:57.110
a high falsetto voice and they go naked. Whereas pitahas
1188
00:57:57.769 --> 00:57:59.809
often go naked, but if they have clothes, they'll wear them.
1189
00:57:59.929 --> 00:58:03.139
And the fast mouths will never wear clothes. And the
1190
00:58:03.159 --> 00:58:07.039
fast mouths are also sexually promiscuous. So I had a
1191
00:58:07.099 --> 00:58:10.440
reporter with me in the jungle from GEO magazine in Germany.
1192
00:58:11.059 --> 00:58:13.000
And he said, can I see one of these fast mouths?
1193
00:58:13.619 --> 00:58:16.119
And I told one guy, I said, he wants to
1194
00:58:16.139 --> 00:58:18.050
see a fast mouth. And he said, well, I'll go
1195
00:58:18.070 --> 00:58:20.429
get one. And he walks off into the jungle. And
1196
00:58:20.449 --> 00:58:24.710
then the same guy comes back in naked, talking in
1197
00:58:24.750 --> 00:58:29.130
this falsetto voice, and starts trying to hump the reporter. Yeah.
1198
00:58:31.570 --> 00:58:34.590
And the reporter says, oh, I'm feeling very uncomfortable. I said,
1199
00:58:34.610 --> 00:58:36.380
you asked for it. I mean, you know, I mean,
1200
00:58:36.400 --> 00:58:38.579
that's the way they are. And so I finally told
1201
00:58:38.619 --> 00:58:40.280
the guy, I said, you know, he doesn't he doesn't
1202
00:58:40.320 --> 00:58:42.159
want this. He doesn't want to see the fast mouth anymore.
1203
00:58:42.719 --> 00:58:44.219
So he talks to me in a high falsetto and
1204
00:58:44.239 --> 00:58:45.940
he walks off and he comes back on with his
1205
00:58:45.960 --> 00:58:50.650
clothes on. And I said, did you see the fast mouth?
1206
00:58:50.750 --> 00:58:52.630
He said, was there a fast mouth here? I was gone,
1207
00:58:53.110 --> 00:58:54.829
you know, but it's the same guy.
1208
00:58:56.429 --> 00:59:00.699
What did you take of that? Like, did you think
1209
00:59:00.780 --> 00:59:03.039
that they were playing a prank on you? Did you
1210
00:59:03.079 --> 00:59:06.389
think this is like some sort of a psychotic state
1211
00:59:06.429 --> 00:59:07.510
that they fall into?
1212
00:59:07.530 --> 00:59:13.710
It is a limit. area between being, say, theater and
1213
00:59:13.750 --> 00:59:17.699
being reality. And I don't know if they feel possessed.
1214
00:59:17.880 --> 00:59:20.679
I don't think they have a concept of possession. I've
1215
00:59:20.920 --> 00:59:23.360
asked them and I've investigated this and I've never seen that.
1216
00:59:23.900 --> 00:59:28.360
But they definitely believe that they're gone and this other
1217
00:59:28.400 --> 00:59:29.840
creature is there in their place.
1218
00:59:31.550 --> 00:59:34.659
Do they have memory of when they become a fast mouth?
1219
00:59:34.739 --> 00:59:36.780
They deny it. I've tried to get them to talk
1220
00:59:36.820 --> 00:59:37.099
about it.
1221
00:59:37.639 --> 00:59:37.980
I don't know.
1222
00:59:38.039 --> 00:59:38.619
I wasn't here.
1223
00:59:38.940 --> 00:59:40.039
Everyone denies it?
1224
00:59:40.179 --> 00:59:41.119
Everybody denies it.
1225
00:59:41.559 --> 00:59:44.219
Wow. Do you think that being a fast mouth is
1226
00:59:44.440 --> 00:59:48.250
like almost like a license to go and do stuff
1227
00:59:48.269 --> 00:59:51.389
you're not supposed to do? Go fuck everybody? Yeah. You
1228
00:59:51.409 --> 00:59:52.210
think that's what it is? Yeah.
1229
00:59:52.840 --> 00:59:56.619
They also change names very frequently. So if I go
1230
00:59:56.639 --> 00:59:58.829
back there now, all my old friends will have different names.
1231
00:59:59.150 --> 01:00:01.909
And anything done under the old name is, you know,
1232
01:00:01.929 --> 01:00:04.269
you'll say, you remember when you did this? Well, I
1233
01:00:04.309 --> 01:00:07.130
didn't do that. That was the guy with this name.
1234
01:00:08.030 --> 01:00:11.440
So they don't even claim. So the concept of constancy
1235
01:00:11.480 --> 01:00:14.940
of identity throughout time, they deny this.
1236
01:00:15.699 --> 01:00:18.079
So when do they choose to make a new name
1237
01:00:18.179 --> 01:00:20.400
or do they get a new name assigned to them?
1238
01:00:20.719 --> 01:00:24.900
They can. Children often get new names for different phases
1239
01:00:24.940 --> 01:00:28.449
of life. But adults, if you're out in the jungle
1240
01:00:28.530 --> 01:00:30.710
and you think you saw something and you can't explain it,
1241
01:00:30.730 --> 01:00:31.590
you might take a new name.
1242
01:00:35.929 --> 01:00:37.469
Not a bad idea, right?
1243
01:00:37.849 --> 01:00:39.570
This is a way of coping with things.
1244
01:00:39.679 --> 01:00:41.780
Yeah. I mean, it kind of makes sense. If something
1245
01:00:41.940 --> 01:00:44.880
really traumatic happens to you and you want to reclaim
1246
01:00:44.900 --> 01:00:47.900
your life, you change your name, start over from scratch. Right.
1247
01:00:48.519 --> 01:00:50.619
And some of us do it in American culture, but
1248
01:00:50.679 --> 01:00:53.579
it's a lot harder legal process to change your name.
1249
01:00:53.760 --> 01:00:55.639
How often do they get killed by jaguars?
1250
01:00:56.920 --> 01:01:00.090
Nobody's ever been killed in my almost 50 years coming
1251
01:01:00.110 --> 01:01:02.309
and going, but many of them have been attacked.
1252
01:01:02.769 --> 01:01:03.429
Really? Yeah.
1253
01:01:03.489 --> 01:01:08.050
Like one guy was coming back from getting Brazil nuts,
1254
01:01:08.110 --> 01:01:10.829
and he had a big basket. And so his head's
1255
01:01:11.329 --> 01:01:13.599
down a bit with the tump line, and the basket
1256
01:01:13.639 --> 01:01:18.949
probably weighs, you know, 60 pounds. Yeah. suddenly a jaguar
1257
01:01:19.010 --> 01:01:21.070
jumps out of the tree right on his back, but
1258
01:01:21.110 --> 01:01:23.469
it got the basket and not him, and it pulled
1259
01:01:23.489 --> 01:01:26.789
the basket off his head, and he shot it with
1260
01:01:26.829 --> 01:01:27.150
an arrow.
1261
01:01:28.170 --> 01:01:28.750
Oh, my God.
1262
01:01:28.809 --> 01:01:31.030
But they tell me that when you shoot a jaguar
1263
01:01:31.090 --> 01:01:33.869
with an arrow, the jaguar forgets about you and keeps
1264
01:01:33.889 --> 01:01:36.820
trying to get the arrow out. And by that time,
1265
01:01:36.840 --> 01:01:40.840
you've got three or four more arrows in it. So
1266
01:01:40.860 --> 01:01:43.699
these guys are deadly accurate with bows and arrows.
1267
01:01:43.780 --> 01:01:47.929
So if they did that and, like, maybe— they got attacked,
1268
01:01:48.090 --> 01:01:49.389
would they change their name after that?
1269
01:01:49.730 --> 01:01:52.170
They could. And I, so I don't completely have it
1270
01:01:52.210 --> 01:01:53.090
down to a formula.
1271
01:01:53.530 --> 01:01:56.550
Oh, okay. So it's not, it's not like when they're uncomfortable,
1272
01:01:56.590 --> 01:01:58.730
sometimes it's just like, it's time. It's time that Bob
1273
01:01:58.760 --> 01:01:59.030
becomes Mike.
1274
01:01:59.050 --> 01:02:02.480
It's a subjective reaction to objective experience that causes them
1275
01:02:02.519 --> 01:02:03.039
to do this.
1276
01:02:03.519 --> 01:02:05.420
And they, do they announce it to the village?
1277
01:02:06.800 --> 01:02:09.579
They announce it to their, like their spouse or their kids.
1278
01:02:09.820 --> 01:02:12.760
And then the word spreads. And so I'll come back in.
1279
01:02:12.800 --> 01:02:14.750
I came back in after six months and my buddy,
1280
01:02:14.789 --> 01:02:20.489
my main language teacher, And his name was, when I left,
1281
01:02:20.630 --> 01:02:24.909
it was Kohoi Behe, which means blood eater. And when
1282
01:02:24.949 --> 01:02:26.949
I got back, I said, you know, and the nickname
1283
01:02:27.010 --> 01:02:27.369
is Ko.
1284
01:02:27.489 --> 01:02:27.909
Hey, Ko.
1285
01:02:28.230 --> 01:02:29.710
You know, I asked him, how are you doing? And
1286
01:02:29.849 --> 01:02:31.949
nobody responds. He didn't turn and look at me or anything.
1287
01:02:32.050 --> 01:02:34.210
And I called him again and again. He said, you
1288
01:02:34.230 --> 01:02:36.190
talking to me? I said, yeah. He said, that's not
1289
01:02:36.210 --> 01:02:38.550
my name. And so I had to learn his new
1290
01:02:38.590 --> 01:02:42.789
name was Ka Paobi, you know, which, and he was
1291
01:02:42.829 --> 01:02:46.579
serious about it. He wouldn't respond anymore to that old name. Wow.
1292
01:02:47.639 --> 01:02:50.340
How odd. The first time that happened, were you like, oh,
1293
01:02:50.420 --> 01:02:51.960
my God, these people are fucking crazy?
1294
01:02:52.320 --> 01:02:54.739
No, I thought, I'm pretty stupid. I can't even remember
1295
01:02:54.760 --> 01:02:57.179
their names. Wow. That was my first reaction.
1296
01:02:57.260 --> 01:03:01.389
How quickly did this happen from you first, like, encountering
1297
01:03:01.409 --> 01:03:01.849
these people?
1298
01:03:02.429 --> 01:03:06.250
Well, I would be gone for three or four months
1299
01:03:06.309 --> 01:03:08.949
at a time and then come back because I was
1300
01:03:09.369 --> 01:03:10.070
doing linguistic.
1301
01:03:10.170 --> 01:03:13.110
Oh, so you never experienced it, like, as it was happening?
1302
01:03:13.460 --> 01:03:13.980
One time.
1303
01:03:14.260 --> 01:03:17.190
One time there was... You really need to spend at
1304
01:03:17.250 --> 01:03:19.409
least a full year there so you can see all
1305
01:03:19.449 --> 01:03:22.099
the seasons and all the changes. Then I saw some
1306
01:03:22.119 --> 01:03:24.159
of the stuff. But many of the name changes happened
1307
01:03:24.199 --> 01:03:25.960
when I was out of the village. Some of them
1308
01:03:26.000 --> 01:03:28.659
happened when I was in the village. But my best friends,
1309
01:03:28.760 --> 01:03:30.780
their name changes seemed to happen when I was out
1310
01:03:30.820 --> 01:03:34.030
of the village. And they were very serious about enforcing
1311
01:03:34.070 --> 01:03:39.550
those new name changes. So if you ask them to
1312
01:03:39.610 --> 01:03:43.820
tell stories about their childhood, you get these very vague stories.
1313
01:03:44.389 --> 01:03:47.019
And they'll say, you know, but I'm talking about this person,
1314
01:03:47.280 --> 01:03:49.900
you know. Or they'll tell me, you know, they changed
1315
01:03:49.940 --> 01:03:53.260
my name twice, you know. And so they name me
1316
01:03:53.300 --> 01:03:55.219
and so a guy comes up to me and he says,
1317
01:03:56.059 --> 01:03:58.559
that name is rotten, which is the same word you
1318
01:03:58.619 --> 01:04:02.090
use for spoiled food. You know, your name is spoiled.
1319
01:04:03.250 --> 01:04:05.170
So I'm going to give you this name. And then
1320
01:04:05.190 --> 01:04:07.090
I got it. Then one time I was in there
1321
01:04:07.349 --> 01:04:09.269
and was staying with this guy. He's just wearing a
1322
01:04:09.289 --> 01:04:13.550
loincloth and the other pitahaw fearing because he's this fierce guy.
1323
01:04:14.320 --> 01:04:18.269
And he says, you're really old. You know, they always
1324
01:04:18.309 --> 01:04:20.530
tell me that. He said, you're really old. And I said,
1325
01:04:21.289 --> 01:04:22.909
I'm not that old. He said, yeah, you are. My
1326
01:04:22.949 --> 01:04:25.210
dad's dead and you're about the same age as he was.
1327
01:04:25.269 --> 01:04:27.750
You know, they don't know what the age is. He said,
1328
01:04:27.789 --> 01:04:30.679
I'm gonna give you my dad's name. And Bao Aisi,
1329
01:04:30.699 --> 01:04:32.579
which is just the name of his dad. So that's
1330
01:04:32.619 --> 01:04:34.679
been my name ever since. I've had that name now
1331
01:04:34.719 --> 01:04:35.800
for about 15 years.
1332
01:04:36.039 --> 01:04:39.139
And when you go back, what happens if they want
1333
01:04:39.159 --> 01:04:40.489
to switch it up again? You have to learn a
1334
01:04:40.510 --> 01:04:43.070
new name? Yeah, yeah. And that could easily happen, right?
1335
01:04:43.269 --> 01:04:45.070
Yeah, it could easily happen. It just depends on which
1336
01:04:45.110 --> 01:04:46.949
village you go to and which person you're talking to.
1337
01:04:47.469 --> 01:04:49.570
What is the population of these people?
1338
01:04:50.190 --> 01:04:51.719
When I first got there, it was under 200. And
1339
01:04:51.780 --> 01:04:57.289
now it's around 700 to 800. They've grown because they've
1340
01:04:57.309 --> 01:05:00.170
had more medical assistance. I gave them medical assistance, my
1341
01:05:00.230 --> 01:05:02.469
wife and I, for 20 years.
1342
01:05:03.329 --> 01:05:09.340
And so your goal was to convert them to Christianity. Right.
1343
01:05:10.519 --> 01:05:12.800
So no one's buying it. So what are you doing?
1344
01:05:13.480 --> 01:05:15.699
What do your days consist of while you're there?
1345
01:05:15.780 --> 01:05:21.449
Well, my days consist of linguistic analysis and translation effort.
1346
01:05:22.269 --> 01:05:24.650
So I'll work with somebody. And so I worked with
1347
01:05:24.690 --> 01:05:27.860
this guy, for example— And we went through the story
1348
01:05:27.880 --> 01:05:30.599
of Jesus. I had translated a large part of the
1349
01:05:30.619 --> 01:05:33.679
Gospel of Luke. And I tell him this story. And
1350
01:05:33.699 --> 01:05:37.360
then I showed film strips, you know, made by, you know,
1351
01:05:37.380 --> 01:05:40.139
where Jesus looks like an American and has a beard
1352
01:05:40.199 --> 01:05:43.420
and all this stuff. And I explained it. They don't
1353
01:05:43.460 --> 01:05:46.699
make a difference between drawings and photographs. So they figured
1354
01:05:46.760 --> 01:05:50.420
it must be Jesus. He saw Jesus. So that night
1355
01:05:50.599 --> 01:05:52.320
after I told him all this and we'd seen the
1356
01:05:52.340 --> 01:05:56.010
film strips, His village was across the river. I lived
1357
01:05:56.050 --> 01:05:58.170
in one village, and across the river was another village,
1358
01:05:58.210 --> 01:06:00.769
and they went across the river. And all night long,
1359
01:06:00.829 --> 01:06:03.829
I heard screaming and yelling and people running around and
1360
01:06:03.869 --> 01:06:07.510
women laughing and then women screaming. And the next morning,
1361
01:06:07.530 --> 01:06:09.050
he comes back to work with me, and I said,
1362
01:06:09.150 --> 01:06:11.510
so what was going on all night? He said, oh,
1363
01:06:11.550 --> 01:06:15.750
Jesus came to our village. I said, what? He said, yeah,
1364
01:06:15.769 --> 01:06:17.110
he came to our village, you know, and he had
1365
01:06:17.150 --> 01:06:20.719
a penis three feet long. They don't have words for feet,
1366
01:06:20.760 --> 01:06:23.260
so I'm just going by his hand thing. He said,
1367
01:06:23.300 --> 01:06:24.800
and he was trying to stick it in all the women.
1368
01:06:25.380 --> 01:06:27.820
And so, you know, the women don't want to know
1369
01:06:27.860 --> 01:06:28.619
anymore about Jesus.
1370
01:06:29.159 --> 01:06:30.039
What?
1371
01:06:30.800 --> 01:06:34.840
This is their way of rejecting it. So I never
1372
01:06:34.900 --> 01:06:37.719
expected that. In all my Bible training and things.
1373
01:06:38.280 --> 01:06:41.900
Did they say, so they wouldn't admit if one of
1374
01:06:41.940 --> 01:06:44.920
them became like they become a fast talker if they
1375
01:06:44.960 --> 01:06:45.940
just became Jesus.
1376
01:06:46.079 --> 01:06:46.260
Right.
1377
01:06:46.760 --> 01:06:47.960
But that could have been what happened.
1378
01:06:48.119 --> 01:06:49.139
I'm sure that's what happened.
1379
01:06:49.719 --> 01:06:51.420
So one guy just decided I'm Jesus.
1380
01:06:51.500 --> 01:06:54.539
Yeah. But everybody took him, you're Jesus.
1381
01:06:54.840 --> 01:06:55.059
Yeah.
1382
01:06:55.179 --> 01:06:56.599
And this is what Jesus is trying to do.
1383
01:06:57.320 --> 01:06:58.280
Oh, boy.
1384
01:06:58.460 --> 01:07:01.260
But they would ask questions like, you know, hey, Dan,
1385
01:07:02.119 --> 01:07:04.150
what does Jesus look like? Is he brown like us
1386
01:07:04.269 --> 01:07:05.889
or is he white like you? And I say, well,
1387
01:07:05.909 --> 01:07:07.909
you know, some people say he was brown like you
1388
01:07:07.989 --> 01:07:09.789
and some people say he was white like me. And
1389
01:07:09.809 --> 01:07:11.690
they said, yeah, yeah, but you've seen him. What did
1390
01:07:11.730 --> 01:07:14.849
he look like? And I said, well, I never saw him. Well,
1391
01:07:14.869 --> 01:07:17.389
your dad saw him. No, my dad never saw him.
1392
01:07:17.409 --> 01:07:19.139
He lived a long time ago. I don't know anyone
1393
01:07:19.159 --> 01:07:21.349
who's ever seen Jesus. And they said, you don't know
1394
01:07:21.409 --> 01:07:23.550
anyone who's ever seen him and you're just talking about
1395
01:07:23.590 --> 01:07:26.050
him the whole time, telling us about him? They said,
1396
01:07:26.090 --> 01:07:30.429
we don't want to hear about this anymore. And that
1397
01:07:30.469 --> 01:07:30.840
was like.
1398
01:07:31.050 --> 01:07:33.110
But you at the time were a believer. You're a
1399
01:07:33.219 --> 01:07:37.559
true believer. Yeah. So when did that start to slip away?
1400
01:07:38.179 --> 01:07:42.079
It started to slip away from two sides. One, I
1401
01:07:42.119 --> 01:07:45.000
was spending a lot of my time in the intellectual
1402
01:07:45.039 --> 01:07:49.199
world and trying to do serious linguistic science. And it
1403
01:07:49.260 --> 01:07:49.960
slipped away.
1404
01:07:49.840 --> 01:07:50.599
Mainly, however.
1405
01:07:51.219 --> 01:07:53.969
by constant interaction with the Pirahã, because as I've gotten
1406
01:07:53.989 --> 01:07:57.150
to know these people over the years, these are really
1407
01:07:57.210 --> 01:08:01.630
smart people. They're very intelligent people. They had me figured
1408
01:08:01.730 --> 01:08:03.869
out before I had them figured out, and they can
1409
01:08:03.909 --> 01:08:06.849
predict my behavior better than I can predict theirs, even today.
1410
01:08:07.550 --> 01:08:10.389
And so, they would come to me and they would
1411
01:08:10.429 --> 01:08:12.150
say this, you know, they'd say, Dan, you keep telling
1412
01:08:12.190 --> 01:08:16.350
us about Jesus, but it seems that only Americans believe
1413
01:08:16.369 --> 01:08:18.329
in Jesus, because we don't know any Brazilians that we've
1414
01:08:18.390 --> 01:08:21.529
ever met that believe in Jesus. So this seems like
1415
01:08:21.569 --> 01:08:24.149
an American thing, but we're not Americans. And then they
1416
01:08:24.189 --> 01:08:26.210
would say, you know, where did you get your evidence?
1417
01:08:26.770 --> 01:08:29.270
And I began to think, you know, these are good questions.
1418
01:08:29.329 --> 01:08:31.710
I can't just throw these questions off. What is my evidence?
1419
01:08:32.109 --> 01:08:34.350
You know, I went to Bible school. I've been surrounded
1420
01:08:34.390 --> 01:08:38.590
by Christians. I've surrounded myself by people who believe. And
1421
01:08:38.630 --> 01:08:41.810
this is what happens in linguistic theory or other scientific theories.
1422
01:08:41.829 --> 01:08:45.329
You surround yourself with a community that believes the same thing,
1423
01:08:45.430 --> 01:08:49.029
and pretty soon it's hard for you to consider alternatives. Mm-hmm.
1424
01:08:50.439 --> 01:08:53.060
And so I started considering the alternative, and I realized
1425
01:08:54.130 --> 01:08:57.409
you know, I was an atheist back when I, you know,
1426
01:08:57.449 --> 01:09:00.670
met my first wife in front of a Jimi Hendrix concert.
1427
01:09:00.689 --> 01:09:02.649
I was an atheist. And then I became a Christian.
1428
01:09:02.689 --> 01:09:04.859
And then I thought, you know, maybe I was right
1429
01:09:05.319 --> 01:09:10.800
to begin with. And so eventually I told them, I said,
1430
01:09:10.819 --> 01:09:12.439
you know, I don't believe this stuff anymore either. And
1431
01:09:12.479 --> 01:09:14.739
they started laughing. All the guys started laughing. I said,
1432
01:09:14.779 --> 01:09:16.819
why are you? They said, oh, now you're like us,
1433
01:09:17.060 --> 01:09:20.489
you know. But... But then they told me one time,
1434
01:09:20.529 --> 01:09:23.779
they said, you know, from what we understand, Christians don't
1435
01:09:23.859 --> 01:09:27.100
drink and they don't sleep with other women. And, you know,
1436
01:09:27.239 --> 01:09:31.500
we like to do those things. So we're not interested.
1437
01:09:33.149 --> 01:09:36.510
What was convincing for you, though? If you're a true believer,
1438
01:09:36.890 --> 01:09:39.369
you think your path is the right way when you're
1439
01:09:39.409 --> 01:09:42.409
hanging out with these people. What is making you question it?
1440
01:09:42.869 --> 01:09:45.920
Well, several things. One of the most important things was
1441
01:09:45.960 --> 01:09:48.869
that having spent so many years as a Christian, and
1442
01:09:48.930 --> 01:09:51.810
knowing Christians both in the U.S. and missionaries, who are
1443
01:09:51.840 --> 01:09:56.000
the cream of the crop, supposedly, I didn't know anyone
1444
01:09:56.039 --> 01:09:58.859
in the Christian faith who was as well-adjusted, who could
1445
01:09:58.920 --> 01:10:01.199
cope with life as well, who was as satisfied and
1446
01:10:01.220 --> 01:10:04.390
content with their lives as the Pidahan. They were like
1447
01:10:04.430 --> 01:10:08.310
the ultimate Zen masters and the ultimate, you know, if
1448
01:10:08.350 --> 01:10:10.489
you thought, what is Jesus supposed to do for your life?
1449
01:10:11.010 --> 01:10:13.810
They already had it. And I didn't know many Christians
1450
01:10:13.829 --> 01:10:16.560
who did. So first it was quality of the spiritual life.
1451
01:10:16.760 --> 01:10:18.529
They seem to me to have the highest quality of
1452
01:10:18.569 --> 01:10:21.909
spiritual life. So one MIT guy who came down, an
1453
01:10:22.050 --> 01:10:25.609
MIT PhD student, said, these look like the happiest people
1454
01:10:25.649 --> 01:10:28.289
in the world. And I said, well, what kind of
1455
01:10:28.329 --> 01:10:31.960
statement is that? How would you measure who's happiest? He said, well,
1456
01:10:32.000 --> 01:10:34.960
I would spend time, I would see how long they
1457
01:10:35.039 --> 01:10:37.439
smile and laugh every day and compare it to others
1458
01:10:37.500 --> 01:10:40.840
and how much time they spend laughing and smiling. And
1459
01:10:40.880 --> 01:10:43.229
I'll guarantee you, he said, I've never seen a Peter
1460
01:10:43.250 --> 01:10:48.029
Hahn here who's not smiling or laughing at frequently. So
1461
01:10:48.329 --> 01:10:51.149
it was that quality of character and it was also
1462
01:10:51.210 --> 01:10:53.689
just the fact that I began to realize that the
1463
01:10:53.729 --> 01:10:56.880
scientific principles that I've been learning and that I'm applying
1464
01:10:56.909 --> 01:11:01.579
in linguistics almost have to be suspended to apply them
1465
01:11:01.899 --> 01:11:06.899
to the faith. Because, you know, for example, I've heard
1466
01:11:06.920 --> 01:11:12.479
a lot of stories of people being healed. But this
1467
01:11:12.539 --> 01:11:16.380
is anecdotal evidence. And I'm not going to deny anybody's experience.
1468
01:11:16.420 --> 01:11:22.039
If you tell me you had inoperable cancer, but now
1469
01:11:22.399 --> 01:11:24.979
you don't, something happened, and I can't tell you what
1470
01:11:25.000 --> 01:11:28.850
it was. But at the same time, there's no statistical
1471
01:11:28.899 --> 01:11:32.829
relevance to that. It's also the case that even when
1472
01:11:32.909 --> 01:11:36.989
I was in Bible school, one of my teachers said,
1473
01:11:37.409 --> 01:11:41.010
I wonder why healers, faith healers, never start with amputees.
1474
01:11:41.770 --> 01:11:44.420
you know. They always start with diseases you can't see,
1475
01:11:44.699 --> 01:11:49.119
like cancer, and explain how it went away. But they
1476
01:11:49.159 --> 01:11:51.859
said also in the Bible, and the Bible itself, you know,
1477
01:11:51.880 --> 01:11:55.000
says this, Jesus not only healed people, he raised them
1478
01:11:55.039 --> 01:11:57.569
from the dead. So if somebody claims to be a
1479
01:11:57.609 --> 01:12:00.930
healer in the same vein as Jesus, I'd like to
1480
01:12:00.970 --> 01:12:04.470
see them start at cemeteries and start raising people from
1481
01:12:04.510 --> 01:12:06.270
the dead. We're not seeing that, and we don't see
1482
01:12:06.329 --> 01:12:10.800
amputees healed. We see things that are sort of subjective experiences.
1483
01:12:10.819 --> 01:12:13.489
So that And I'm not claiming that nobody has a
1484
01:12:13.529 --> 01:12:15.529
right to believe what they believe or that I'm right
1485
01:12:15.569 --> 01:12:17.409
about all these things. But these are the reason this
1486
01:12:17.470 --> 01:12:20.210
is part of the reasoning process that went through my mind.
1487
01:12:20.350 --> 01:12:23.880
And I thought, yeah, I just can't I just can't
1488
01:12:25.239 --> 01:12:27.600
do this anymore. I cannot tell these people to believe
1489
01:12:27.659 --> 01:12:32.119
something that they have reasonable objections against and I don't
1490
01:12:32.159 --> 01:12:35.880
have reasonable answers for. So to me, they made more
1491
01:12:35.939 --> 01:12:36.699
sense than I did.
1492
01:12:37.699 --> 01:12:42.130
Well, there's. so many of these ancient religions that have
1493
01:12:42.310 --> 01:12:44.930
very similar stories to the Jesus story.
1494
01:12:44.989 --> 01:12:46.630
Yes, that's true.
1495
01:12:46.649 --> 01:12:51.270
It seems like a very old story. And I'm of
1496
01:12:51.340 --> 01:12:54.960
the opinion that what you're getting with all of these
1497
01:12:55.039 --> 01:13:01.680
religious texts is there were some events and there's some
1498
01:13:01.760 --> 01:13:05.069
sort of a documentation of this events, but it's very
1499
01:13:05.550 --> 01:13:10.220
hard to figure out what exactly happened. Like for instance,
1500
01:13:11.100 --> 01:13:15.479
Paul never met Jesus. When most people find that out,
1501
01:13:15.500 --> 01:13:18.100
they go, wait, what? So all that stuff that Jesus said,
1502
01:13:18.460 --> 01:13:22.159
Paul's writing down and well, how does Paul know this?
1503
01:13:22.630 --> 01:13:24.930
And then you go, oh, well, Paul met Jesus in
1504
01:13:24.970 --> 01:13:28.939
a dream. Like, hold the fuck on. Right.
1505
01:13:28.960 --> 01:13:31.880
See, ironically, the Pentecost might actually take that as evidence.
1506
01:13:31.939 --> 01:13:34.579
Right. But... I mean, Jesus came back to their camp
1507
01:13:34.640 --> 01:13:35.239
as a fast forward.
1508
01:13:35.260 --> 01:13:39.199
But we said, you know, I learned in Bible school
1509
01:13:39.239 --> 01:13:42.229
that all the apostles had to have met Jesus. And
1510
01:13:42.279 --> 01:13:44.250
Paul was an apostle, therefore he had to have met Jesus.
1511
01:13:44.310 --> 01:13:46.010
And so I said, well, when did he meet Jesus?
1512
01:13:46.029 --> 01:13:48.310
And they said, on the road to Damascus. He had
1513
01:13:48.369 --> 01:13:50.710
the revelation of Jesus on the road to Damascus, so
1514
01:13:50.729 --> 01:13:51.109
he met him.
1515
01:13:51.850 --> 01:13:53.260
But... It's tricky.
1516
01:13:53.500 --> 01:13:53.979
It's tricky.
1517
01:13:54.140 --> 01:13:59.510
It's tricky. It's also, again, when you get especially to
1518
01:13:59.550 --> 01:14:05.170
the Old Testament, like what were they documenting? What are
1519
01:14:05.210 --> 01:14:11.430
these events? What happened there? There's some stories that you say,
1520
01:14:11.670 --> 01:14:14.130
like the flood story, for example. Boy, there's a lot
1521
01:14:14.149 --> 01:14:15.899
of those. There's a lot of those in all sorts
1522
01:14:15.939 --> 01:14:19.539
of ancient religions. It seems to be some sort of
1523
01:14:19.600 --> 01:14:23.310
a historical record. of some sort of a catastrophe. Right.
1524
01:14:24.470 --> 01:14:26.300
All the other stuff that's attached to it, you just
1525
01:14:26.340 --> 01:14:29.760
got to go, I'm not sure what this means. Right.
1526
01:14:29.840 --> 01:14:31.520
You know, when I was a little boy, you know,
1527
01:14:31.560 --> 01:14:33.239
my mother died when I was very young, but when
1528
01:14:33.260 --> 01:14:34.680
I was a little boy, we would drive up from
1529
01:14:34.819 --> 01:14:36.920
Imperial Valley, California to San Diego, and you've got to
1530
01:14:36.960 --> 01:14:40.569
go through the mountains. And there's this line of white
1531
01:14:40.630 --> 01:14:43.090
stones that I noticed near the top of the mountains.
1532
01:14:43.630 --> 01:14:45.989
And I said, you know, what caused that? And my
1533
01:14:46.029 --> 01:14:49.489
mother said, the flood. And I thought, Well, that makes sense.
1534
01:14:49.649 --> 01:14:54.680
It must be the flood. I'm like seven. And so
1535
01:14:54.989 --> 01:14:57.079
some of this stuff gets started this way, and it
1536
01:14:57.119 --> 01:14:57.699
becomes truth.
1537
01:14:58.180 --> 01:15:00.479
Well, I mean, it's certainly when you're talking about a
1538
01:15:00.539 --> 01:15:06.220
time thousands of years ago where just the ability to
1539
01:15:06.340 --> 01:15:09.840
read was very limited, and then you're translating things from
1540
01:15:09.880 --> 01:15:13.550
languages that we don't even speak anymore. It gets real
1541
01:15:13.600 --> 01:15:16.189
squirrely when you try to figure out what these events
1542
01:15:16.390 --> 01:15:22.859
actually were that they were documenting. It's– having a belief system,
1543
01:15:22.960 --> 01:15:24.539
I think there's a lot of value to it. I
1544
01:15:24.579 --> 01:15:27.899
think it gives you a moral scaffolding, gives you structure
1545
01:15:27.920 --> 01:15:30.479
in your life, and that alone is like super beneficial
1546
01:15:30.899 --> 01:15:32.859
to people. And the people that I know that are
1547
01:15:32.979 --> 01:15:36.739
like true Christians, really follow the teachings of Jesus Christ,
1548
01:15:37.119 --> 01:15:38.859
they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. Right.
1549
01:15:38.890 --> 01:15:41.649
I think there's really great benefit to that. The problem
1550
01:15:41.670 --> 01:15:46.210
is like what are we saying here? You know, what exactly,
1551
01:15:46.270 --> 01:15:48.550
like do you, the Adam and Eve one, it's like, okay,
1552
01:15:48.689 --> 01:15:51.210
what do you think happened? Do you think there's two people?
1553
01:15:51.369 --> 01:15:53.130
That's the only two people on earth? And then where
1554
01:15:53.149 --> 01:15:55.550
do the other people come from? The brothers and sisters
1555
01:15:55.609 --> 01:15:57.789
just have sex with each other? Right. What?
1556
01:15:58.369 --> 01:16:02.300
Yeah, I mean, evolution explains that obviously very well. But
1557
01:16:02.439 --> 01:16:04.800
Adam and Eve, you know, I remember when my mother
1558
01:16:04.859 --> 01:16:09.199
told me the story of eating the apple and betraying God.
1559
01:16:09.819 --> 01:16:14.319
And Adam is hiding out and God says, where are you?
1560
01:16:15.119 --> 01:16:17.380
And I asked my mother, I said, I thought God
1561
01:16:17.420 --> 01:16:19.779
knew everything. Why is he asking him where he is?
1562
01:16:19.819 --> 01:16:22.439
I don't understand that. And she said, well, he wants
1563
01:16:22.460 --> 01:16:25.399
him to confess it. Well, there's always that kind of answer.
1564
01:16:25.439 --> 01:16:27.579
You can always give that kind of answer. But we,
1565
01:16:27.960 --> 01:16:29.960
you know, you don't have to focus on religion. You
1566
01:16:30.000 --> 01:16:33.409
can even go to paleoanthropology and you can look at,
1567
01:16:33.819 --> 01:16:36.869
are there 20 species of Homo that used to exist
1568
01:16:36.909 --> 01:16:40.810
in the past or more? Or were there just three, Erectus, Neanderthal,
1569
01:16:41.289 --> 01:16:45.029
and Sapiens? And what does it mean to be a species?
1570
01:16:45.630 --> 01:16:48.380
And how can we really prove some of that stuff?
1571
01:16:48.760 --> 01:16:53.100
Before the work of Svante Paibo and decoding the DNA,
1572
01:16:53.520 --> 01:16:58.279
the genome of ancient creatures doing this thing that people
1573
01:16:58.300 --> 01:17:01.819
thought was impossible, that was speculation. It was really hard
1574
01:17:01.859 --> 01:17:06.399
to tell. And there were a lot of controversies. And
1575
01:17:06.460 --> 01:17:09.359
now we can look at the genetic record and we
1576
01:17:09.390 --> 01:17:11.750
can look at the genome and But that still doesn't
1577
01:17:11.789 --> 01:17:15.319
tell us everything. So a lot of straight history and
1578
01:17:15.359 --> 01:17:19.840
a lot of paleoanthropology and paleoarchaeology, all of these things
1579
01:17:20.420 --> 01:17:26.859
always involve, as any theory does, speculation. You're guessing and
1580
01:17:26.880 --> 01:17:30.010
then trying to test your guess. And some things are
1581
01:17:30.069 --> 01:17:33.909
easier to test than other things. And so science is
1582
01:17:33.989 --> 01:17:38.310
a community of people who believe they can work towards
1583
01:17:38.369 --> 01:17:40.859
the truth, but the only way to do that is
1584
01:17:40.920 --> 01:17:43.319
to have good guesses and know how to test them
1585
01:17:44.039 --> 01:17:47.029
and be willing to admit that you're wrong and then
1586
01:17:47.090 --> 01:17:51.590
move on to the next best guess. Right. And every
1587
01:17:51.630 --> 01:17:54.229
scientist recognizes this, but in practice.
1588
01:17:54.409 --> 01:17:57.609
It's really hard. Well, it's certainly hard if you're also
1589
01:17:57.649 --> 01:17:58.789
a fundamentalist Christian.
1590
01:17:59.029 --> 01:18:00.220
Oh, yeah. That makes it much harder.
1591
01:18:00.229 --> 01:18:02.760
Because then you're living in conflict all the time. Right.
1592
01:18:02.779 --> 01:18:04.399
You believe a guy came back from the dead, but
1593
01:18:04.500 --> 01:18:05.720
show me proof for everything else.
1594
01:18:05.840 --> 01:18:10.000
Yeah. You believe in miracles, but they certainly can't be produced.
1595
01:18:10.659 --> 01:18:11.239
on demand.
1596
01:18:11.270 --> 01:18:14.649
You also believe that people tell the truth. That's, that's
1597
01:18:14.729 --> 01:18:16.390
part of the problem. Part of the problem with all
1598
01:18:16.430 --> 01:18:20.449
this stuff is like, look, the Bible condones slavery, talks
1599
01:18:20.489 --> 01:18:25.689
about slavery in multiple passages. Yeah. Um, that's a person thing.
1600
01:18:25.750 --> 01:18:26.590
That's a people thing.
1601
01:18:26.869 --> 01:18:27.050
Right.
1602
01:18:27.189 --> 01:18:27.430
That's.
1603
01:18:28.489 --> 01:18:31.210
And the Bible talks about, um, all sorts of things that,
1604
01:18:31.520 --> 01:18:35.159
you know, we don't, uh, agree with, uh, today, but
1605
01:18:35.180 --> 01:18:38.539
we try to, um, interpret it in such a way
1606
01:18:38.619 --> 01:18:39.520
that we can live with it.
1607
01:18:39.659 --> 01:18:40.720
Right, exactly.
1608
01:18:41.300 --> 01:18:43.750
You know, so God, I mean, if you read anything
1609
01:18:43.789 --> 01:18:46.869
by Mark Twain about God, which is not only brilliant
1610
01:18:46.930 --> 01:18:48.680
but funny, you know.
1611
01:18:48.689 --> 01:18:49.500
Right.
1612
01:18:50.989 --> 01:18:54.800
Just makes fun of the whole notion that— It.
1613
01:18:54.800 --> 01:18:57.260
Says religion started when the first con man made the
1614
01:18:57.300 --> 01:18:57.840
first sucker.
1615
01:18:58.300 --> 01:19:01.600
Yeah. And, you know, how many germs— he has this story
1616
01:19:01.640 --> 01:19:04.579
about Noah's Ark, about how Noah's family had to be
1617
01:19:04.739 --> 01:19:09.000
so infested with germs so they could survive the flood,
1618
01:19:09.439 --> 01:19:12.880
you know. When you stop and think about it, I mean, like,
1619
01:19:13.899 --> 01:19:17.720
you know, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat,
1620
01:19:17.920 --> 01:19:20.479
and then all these creatures had to boogie on down
1621
01:19:20.520 --> 01:19:24.770
to Australia almost immediately. And so you get these stories,
1622
01:19:24.810 --> 01:19:27.010
and people don't want to talk about those things. They say, well,
1623
01:19:27.189 --> 01:19:28.420
I don't know how God did it.
1624
01:19:28.770 --> 01:19:32.010
I think there was an event, and I think this
1625
01:19:32.430 --> 01:19:36.229
version of it, this doctrine that you're supposed to adhere to,
1626
01:19:37.319 --> 01:19:43.779
is woefully uninformed about the actual, like, real facts of
1627
01:19:43.819 --> 01:19:46.189
the event. I don't think anybody could possibly know, but
1628
01:19:46.210 --> 01:19:49.149
I think when you have the Epic of Gilgamesh, which
1629
01:19:49.409 --> 01:19:52.590
mirrors the story of Noah's Ark, which mirrors the story
1630
01:19:52.710 --> 01:19:56.489
of other religions that have similar flood myths or flood stories,
1631
01:19:56.930 --> 01:19:59.949
it's probably something happened. Yeah, it's probably one of the
1632
01:20:00.010 --> 01:20:00.750
things that happened.
1633
01:20:01.670 --> 01:20:06.279
Right. I mean, you can tell people It would be
1634
01:20:06.380 --> 01:20:09.779
intellectually dishonest to tell people that all the claims of
1635
01:20:09.819 --> 01:20:12.039
their religion are false. How do you know that? You
1636
01:20:12.079 --> 01:20:15.130
don't know that. And I used to tell Christians, I said,
1637
01:20:15.189 --> 01:20:18.189
you know, when I was a Christian, the best evidence
1638
01:20:18.250 --> 01:20:20.930
for God is what he's done in your life. And
1639
01:20:21.229 --> 01:20:23.229
are you living a better life? And if you're not
1640
01:20:23.270 --> 01:20:24.970
living a better life, then why are you saying that
1641
01:20:25.010 --> 01:20:28.510
he saved you? And if you can't live a more
1642
01:20:28.630 --> 01:20:33.060
moral life than people who don't know Christ, then what
1643
01:20:33.100 --> 01:20:35.630
are you saying? You've claimed that he changed your life
1644
01:20:35.649 --> 01:20:37.869
for the good, but you're not living a life for
1645
01:20:37.890 --> 01:20:40.720
the good. You know, I went to work in construction
1646
01:20:40.739 --> 01:20:44.640
when I was still in high school for a Christian contractor.
1647
01:20:45.340 --> 01:20:47.880
And I was in the union. I joined the laborers union,
1648
01:20:47.920 --> 01:20:50.159
which meant that as a hod carrier, that's the hardest
1649
01:20:50.189 --> 01:20:53.569
job I ever did, that you got paid $ 8. 25 an hour.
1650
01:20:53.590 --> 01:20:54.750
And this is 1968. And that was a lot of
1651
01:20:54.770 --> 01:20:55.909
money in 1968. And the guy told me when I
1652
01:20:55.930 --> 01:21:02.960
got hired, he said, The union says I got to
1653
01:21:03.000 --> 01:21:05.140
pay $ 8. 25 an hour, but I'm not going to pay
1654
01:21:05.159 --> 01:21:06.899
you that. I'm going to write you down as only
1655
01:21:06.960 --> 01:21:09.039
working four hours a day, but you're going to work eight.
1656
01:21:09.970 --> 01:21:11.729
And that's how he got around it. And I thought,
1657
01:21:12.850 --> 01:21:15.489
this guy's a Christian, and he's lying on these forms
1658
01:21:15.609 --> 01:21:18.829
and on his taxes. And he's going to church. And
1659
01:21:19.670 --> 01:21:22.460
I got the job through my Christian missionary father-in-law who
1660
01:21:22.500 --> 01:21:26.300
knew this guy. And I saw that happening time and
1661
01:21:26.359 --> 01:21:31.170
time again. So very often, unfortunately, people who claim to
1662
01:21:31.229 --> 01:21:34.329
be religious and follow the commandments of Jesus, which are
1663
01:21:34.369 --> 01:21:37.109
much more difficult to follow than the commandments of the
1664
01:21:37.170 --> 01:21:41.140
Old Testament because they affect your thoughts and not just
1665
01:21:41.199 --> 01:21:47.000
your overt action. When you don't see consistency, the answer
1666
01:21:47.039 --> 01:21:49.699
could be, well, we're just humans. We're not perfect. And
1667
01:21:49.739 --> 01:21:53.239
that's true. But why doesn't the Holy Spirit that you
1668
01:21:53.310 --> 01:21:55.510
say you believe in make a bigger difference in your
1669
01:21:55.550 --> 01:21:58.130
life than he does in Joe Schmo down the street
1670
01:21:58.539 --> 01:22:01.960
who doesn't claim anything, and he's leading a more moral
1671
01:22:02.000 --> 01:22:02.699
life than you are.
1672
01:22:02.720 --> 01:22:04.460
Especially if you're robbing laborers.
1673
01:22:04.859 --> 01:22:05.560
Yeah, exactly.
1674
01:22:05.979 --> 01:22:07.079
And lying on your taxes.
1675
01:22:07.319 --> 01:22:07.729
Yeah.
1676
01:22:08.149 --> 01:22:12.829
And so when you're with a pitaha, they live a
1677
01:22:12.869 --> 01:22:17.090
subsistence lifestyle. Right. And there's been a lot of evidence
1678
01:22:17.270 --> 01:22:24.380
that subsistence lifestyles are some of the Most compatible lifestyles
1679
01:22:24.659 --> 01:22:28.800
in terms of like people's happiness and peace and having
1680
01:22:28.859 --> 01:22:35.039
like a sense of meaning. Like your life is wrapped
1681
01:22:35.100 --> 01:22:38.279
around the gathering of food and community and spending time together.
1682
01:22:38.520 --> 01:22:41.090
And they're the happiest people in the world. Right.
1683
01:22:41.350 --> 01:22:43.489
You know, I monitor them for a while. How many
1684
01:22:43.550 --> 01:22:46.590
hours a week does a hunter work? And I came
1685
01:22:46.649 --> 01:22:49.850
up with about 15 or 20 hours a week. Yeah.
1686
01:22:50.109 --> 01:22:51.670
Unless it's not going well. Yeah.
1687
01:22:51.770 --> 01:22:54.229
And then, yeah, like now they're doing it all the time.
1688
01:22:54.260 --> 01:22:57.619
But when the fish are jumping, it's that. And then
1689
01:22:57.640 --> 01:22:58.760
so what do you do with the rest of your time?
1690
01:22:58.960 --> 01:23:01.380
You lay around the fire and tell jokes and talk
1691
01:23:01.420 --> 01:23:03.760
to people and play with your kids. You know, the
1692
01:23:03.800 --> 01:23:05.220
men love to play with everybody.
1693
01:23:05.239 --> 01:23:09.399
They're in pure subsistence too because they're not even preserving food. Right.
1694
01:23:09.680 --> 01:23:12.340
If they don't find food today, they go hungry today.
1695
01:23:12.960 --> 01:23:15.819
Have you ever seen the Werner Herzog documentary, Happy People?
1696
01:23:16.720 --> 01:23:19.300
I haven't seen that. I did meet him once, but
1697
01:23:19.739 --> 01:23:24.470
I haven't seen that documentary. He's really big into these
1698
01:23:24.550 --> 01:23:26.069
kinds of societies. I know that.
1699
01:23:26.210 --> 01:23:28.170
That's what Happy People is about. It's about these people
1700
01:23:28.189 --> 01:23:31.550
that live in Siberia. Right. There are hunters and trappers
1701
01:23:31.649 --> 01:23:34.649
that live in Siberia, and they're all happy. Right. Yeah,
1702
01:23:34.770 --> 01:23:38.510
and they basically just spend most of their time gathering food,
1703
01:23:38.789 --> 01:23:40.770
gathering food and then spending time with the communities.
1704
01:23:41.029 --> 01:23:43.829
Yeah. Well, the documentary that was made about the Pitaha
1705
01:23:43.850 --> 01:23:48.189
by the Smithsonian and a couple of other institutions. It's
1706
01:23:48.229 --> 01:23:52.569
called The Grammar of Happiness. Because the film crew that
1707
01:23:52.609 --> 01:23:55.569
went with me, it was very small, like three people,
1708
01:23:55.869 --> 01:23:59.020
but they were deeply impressed by what they saw and
1709
01:23:59.029 --> 01:24:01.300
the level of happiness. And all the psychologists that I've
1710
01:24:01.319 --> 01:24:05.039
taken and linguists have also been very impressed by the level.
1711
01:24:05.140 --> 01:24:07.539
If they get past the heat and they get past
1712
01:24:07.659 --> 01:24:12.609
the confrontation with your body and the pita hump don't
1713
01:24:12.649 --> 01:24:14.789
have outhouses. They don't have, you know, I mean, if
1714
01:24:14.810 --> 01:24:17.029
somebody needs to take a dump, they walk off 10
1715
01:24:17.029 --> 01:24:21.210
feet into the bush and do it. And so we
1716
01:24:21.250 --> 01:24:21.590
have to have.
1717
01:24:21.609 --> 01:24:24.270
Do they have toilet paper? No. What do they do?
1718
01:24:24.869 --> 01:24:25.789
A stick or leaves.
1719
01:24:26.010 --> 01:24:26.770
Oh, sticks.
1720
01:24:26.850 --> 01:24:29.569
Yeah. Hey. Or if you have corn cobs, that's great,
1721
01:24:29.590 --> 01:24:31.590
but they don't have corn cobs.
1722
01:24:31.630 --> 01:24:33.069
Good Lord. Yeah.
1723
01:24:33.130 --> 01:24:36.170
So, so, yeah, but it's just not a big deal.
1724
01:24:36.210 --> 01:24:39.489
They grow up that way. It's just a function, you know?
1725
01:24:39.550 --> 01:24:41.250
And so you ask them things about life. What happens
1726
01:24:41.289 --> 01:24:44.229
to you after you die? What do you mean? Well,
1727
01:24:44.270 --> 01:24:48.050
when you're dead, what happens? Well, you're dead. And so
1728
01:24:48.069 --> 01:24:50.220
there's like a dead monkey that somebody just brought back
1729
01:24:50.229 --> 01:24:51.920
and they're going to eat. And he says, he's dead.
1730
01:24:52.180 --> 01:24:55.699
What else is there? Why are you asking this question?
1731
01:24:55.960 --> 01:24:59.140
We die, we die. And they don't fear death. They
1732
01:24:59.159 --> 01:25:02.479
don't make up a story to make themselves not fear death.
1733
01:25:02.859 --> 01:25:04.060
Were there a lot of them injured?
1734
01:25:04.880 --> 01:25:09.050
Oh, yeah. They live a violent life. I have people
1735
01:25:09.109 --> 01:25:12.289
bitten by snakes, cut I had people who split their
1736
01:25:12.310 --> 01:25:15.170
hand almost in two with a machete, run arrows all
1737
01:25:15.189 --> 01:25:18.840
the way up their arm, step on sticks that go
1738
01:25:18.880 --> 01:25:20.729
all the way through their foot. I mean, these are
1739
01:25:20.770 --> 01:25:23.359
people who are naked running through the jungle, and they
1740
01:25:23.399 --> 01:25:30.380
get scratches. If you get bitten by a snake that's hemotoxic,
1741
01:25:30.460 --> 01:25:36.100
like a jararaca, I don't know what it is. It's
1742
01:25:36.119 --> 01:25:38.819
a bushmaster. When you get bit by one of those things,
1743
01:25:39.600 --> 01:25:41.899
even if you survive, a lot of the flesh is
1744
01:25:41.939 --> 01:25:44.300
going to come off whatever they bit. So you see
1745
01:25:44.359 --> 01:25:46.880
people with one leg normal and one leg that looks
1746
01:25:46.920 --> 01:25:49.380
like bone because it's basically bone with a little bit
1747
01:25:49.399 --> 01:25:52.319
of muscle covered in skin because the flesh all fell
1748
01:25:52.380 --> 01:25:57.260
off after the snake bite. So they know what it
1749
01:25:57.319 --> 01:25:59.279
is to suffer, and they're tough. You know, if you
1750
01:25:59.319 --> 01:26:02.399
get a toothache, how do you fix it? Well, if
1751
01:26:02.500 --> 01:26:04.159
I'm there, I have some things that can help with
1752
01:26:04.180 --> 01:26:07.699
the pain, or I can pull the tooth. But most
1753
01:26:07.729 --> 01:26:10.310
of the time, it rots out. That's how they deal
1754
01:26:10.350 --> 01:26:14.039
with it. So they learn, you know, I was talking
1755
01:26:14.079 --> 01:26:17.439
to a woman one time, you know, really for, you know,
1756
01:26:17.460 --> 01:26:20.399
pina ha, looking very feminine looking woman. And she gets
1757
01:26:20.500 --> 01:26:22.479
bit by a wasp on the face while I'm talking
1758
01:26:22.520 --> 01:26:25.500
to her. And she pulls the stinger out and she doesn't,
1759
01:26:25.760 --> 01:26:27.960
it doesn't stop her conversation. And I've been stung by
1760
01:26:27.979 --> 01:26:30.279
those wasps and I know they hurt like hell. And
1761
01:26:30.430 --> 01:26:31.430
I said, didn't that hurt?
1762
01:26:32.270 --> 01:26:32.350
Yeah.
1763
01:26:32.369 --> 01:26:35.550
Well, you didn't say anything. She says, I'm not a baby.
1764
01:26:35.569 --> 01:26:38.890
You know, so this is the way they are.
1765
01:26:38.909 --> 01:26:38.979
Wow.
1766
01:26:39.500 --> 01:26:41.680
From the time they're children, they learn to deal with pain.
1767
01:26:41.699 --> 01:26:43.840
They learn to be tough. In fact, they have an
1768
01:26:43.880 --> 01:26:46.779
expression for that. He wants to be hard. And that
1769
01:26:46.859 --> 01:26:50.569
means you deliberately sleep sometimes less than you need. You
1770
01:26:50.609 --> 01:26:53.529
go hungry on purpose and you put yourself in hard
1771
01:26:53.569 --> 01:26:56.430
situations because you want to be tough. Because that's what
1772
01:26:56.470 --> 01:26:57.409
the environment demands.
1773
01:26:58.050 --> 01:27:00.609
So they build their resilience on purpose.
1774
01:27:00.770 --> 01:27:01.010
Yes.
1775
01:27:02.060 --> 01:27:05.800
Voluntarily. Well, I would imagine that's like the most important
1776
01:27:05.840 --> 01:27:08.079
thing to have. If you're running around naked in the jungle,
1777
01:27:08.119 --> 01:27:08.779
you have to be tough.
1778
01:27:09.050 --> 01:27:14.369
Right. You have to be. I go barefoot sometimes in
1779
01:27:14.390 --> 01:27:19.229
the village. You can get parasites that way, but I
1780
01:27:19.260 --> 01:27:22.500
do it anyway. But when I go to the jungle,
1781
01:27:22.520 --> 01:27:25.260
I always put on shoes because my feet can't take
1782
01:27:25.579 --> 01:27:28.479
all the thorns and everything. And theirs are covered with
1783
01:27:29.560 --> 01:27:32.050
a whole layer of callus all around their foot.
1784
01:27:32.510 --> 01:27:34.409
They have those crazy splayed out toes as well.
1785
01:27:34.430 --> 01:27:37.130
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the way feet are supposed
1786
01:27:37.170 --> 01:27:39.069
to look, really. Right. You know, ours don't look that
1787
01:27:39.109 --> 01:27:42.069
way because we protect them. But their feet are tough,
1788
01:27:42.590 --> 01:27:45.210
you know. Their hands are tough. Their skin is tough.
1789
01:27:45.609 --> 01:27:48.319
It's like leather. Even a little kid, their little kids,
1790
01:27:48.859 --> 01:27:52.220
rather than crawl, they scoot around on their butt. And
1791
01:27:52.779 --> 01:27:54.119
so you pick a little kid up and you look
1792
01:27:54.140 --> 01:27:57.659
at their butt and it's just callous. It's just solid callous.
1793
01:27:58.180 --> 01:27:59.279
And these kids are tough.
1794
01:28:01.340 --> 01:28:01.500
But.
1795
01:28:04.470 --> 01:28:06.529
By their standards, they're very gentle to their kids. I
1796
01:28:06.569 --> 01:28:08.640
had a guy with me one time, and he was
1797
01:28:08.649 --> 01:28:10.760
trying to sleep at night, and a baby was screaming
1798
01:28:10.819 --> 01:28:13.739
all night. And he said, why don't they tell that
1799
01:28:13.779 --> 01:28:16.739
baby to shut up? And I said, why? I said,
1800
01:28:16.760 --> 01:28:18.720
they don't need to tell it to shut up. That's
1801
01:28:18.739 --> 01:28:20.680
just part of life. They don't have a schedule to
1802
01:28:20.699 --> 01:28:22.680
keep tomorrow. He said, well, what would happen if I
1803
01:28:22.720 --> 01:28:24.699
went over and swatted it on the behind? I said,
1804
01:28:24.720 --> 01:28:27.300
they'd kill you. They'd kill me? I said, yeah, you
1805
01:28:27.319 --> 01:28:29.810
don't hit kids. They don't believe in hitting kids.
1806
01:28:30.229 --> 01:28:32.560
Swat a baby to get it to— does he think that's
1807
01:28:32.600 --> 01:28:33.800
how babies stop screaming?
1808
01:28:34.659 --> 01:28:35.079
I don't know.
1809
01:28:35.159 --> 01:28:36.619
I mean— Does he have any kids?
1810
01:28:37.840 --> 01:28:40.810
I don't think this guy did, but Christian— often believe,
1811
01:28:41.229 --> 01:28:44.430
really believe, spare the rod and spoil the child. And
1812
01:28:44.449 --> 01:28:47.130
they believe very much in corporal— Back then at least, right? Yeah,
1813
01:28:47.170 --> 01:28:51.739
back then. I don't know today. But, you know, so
1814
01:28:51.779 --> 01:28:55.430
the Bidahav never believed this. They don't accept it.
1815
01:28:56.079 --> 01:28:59.949
Well, I think they're probably correct. It is interesting how
1816
01:29:00.029 --> 01:29:03.350
those people are happier. Like we've done something to ourselves
1817
01:29:03.449 --> 01:29:07.890
by forcing ourselves into cities and jobs and constant stress
1818
01:29:07.930 --> 01:29:11.409
and bills and taxes and all these external things that
1819
01:29:11.449 --> 01:29:14.960
we've attached to our lives that we think are 100% necessary.
1820
01:29:15.579 --> 01:29:20.300
Don't bring anybody any happier. Don't bring anybody any more happiness.
1821
01:29:20.739 --> 01:29:24.399
In fact, make you way more miserable, make you susceptible
1822
01:29:24.500 --> 01:29:26.479
to a bunch of stress-related illnesses.
1823
01:29:26.500 --> 01:29:29.810
Yeah. I've had friends visit me in the jungle. I mean,
1824
01:29:29.909 --> 01:29:34.600
researchers who are friends. And they'll say things like, I've
1825
01:29:34.640 --> 01:29:37.520
never seen you so relaxed. You know, you seem tense
1826
01:29:37.539 --> 01:29:39.479
when you're at the university, but down here you just
1827
01:29:39.500 --> 01:29:42.619
seem totally laid back. And I said, well, I didn't
1828
01:29:42.680 --> 01:29:45.340
notice it, but that makes perfect sense to me because
1829
01:29:45.399 --> 01:29:47.359
all these people are laid back. There's pina ha that
1830
01:29:47.380 --> 01:29:49.180
I go to talk to the guy and I find
1831
01:29:49.220 --> 01:29:52.239
myself nodding off. And I'm not even sleepy when I
1832
01:29:52.279 --> 01:29:55.060
go over there. But he's just so laid back and
1833
01:29:55.100 --> 01:29:59.250
talks so calmly and softly. and telling jokes and things
1834
01:29:59.689 --> 01:30:00.689
that it just puts me to sleep.
1835
01:30:00.989 --> 01:30:02.850
God, it's such a bummer that those people have to
1836
01:30:02.890 --> 01:30:03.510
struggle now.
1837
01:30:03.829 --> 01:30:06.210
Yeah, it's terrible.
1838
01:30:08.060 --> 01:30:09.579
What do they hunt? What do they eat?
1839
01:30:10.699 --> 01:30:13.420
Seventy percent of their diet before they started having river
1840
01:30:13.479 --> 01:30:17.800
problems was fish. So the average diet of a Pidaha
1841
01:30:17.960 --> 01:30:23.159
family is fish and water and jungle nuts and things
1842
01:30:23.199 --> 01:30:27.689
you get from the jungle. Hunter-gatherers, which they are, have...
1843
01:30:27.840 --> 01:30:32.420
healthier diets than agriculturalists. Because, you know, we had this
1844
01:30:32.699 --> 01:30:37.630
outbreak of disease from lettuce recently in this country. They
1845
01:30:37.670 --> 01:30:39.550
don't grow vegetables, so they're never going to get that
1846
01:30:39.569 --> 01:30:42.170
kind of thing. They don't get that in naturally occurring
1847
01:30:42.229 --> 01:30:43.489
things out in the jungle.
1848
01:30:43.729 --> 01:30:43.970
Right.
1849
01:30:44.229 --> 01:30:48.850
So their diets are healthier. They're eating protein. I know,
1850
01:30:48.890 --> 01:30:51.949
for example, that I could take any Pitaham man out
1851
01:30:51.989 --> 01:30:54.659
of the jungle at random, and if I weigh him,
1852
01:30:55.100 --> 01:30:58.789
he's going to be 155 pounds. He's going to have
1853
01:30:59.310 --> 01:31:04.189
about a 25-inch waist, 26. He's going to have about
1854
01:31:04.189 --> 01:31:08.289
4% body fat, and he's just going to be lean,
1855
01:31:08.510 --> 01:31:13.149
mean machine. And they do try to harden themselves, but
1856
01:31:13.189 --> 01:31:14.970
that's just what the life does to you.
1857
01:31:16.149 --> 01:31:18.409
But they're not overweight. They're not dealing with obesity.
1858
01:31:18.489 --> 01:31:25.399
No, you're never. Only when outsiders, you know, representatives of
1859
01:31:25.420 --> 01:31:27.609
the Brazilian government thought it would be good to give
1860
01:31:27.649 --> 01:31:30.100
them something to rely on. So they brought in a
1861
01:31:30.109 --> 01:31:33.060
lot of rice and they started letting the people feed.
1862
01:31:33.359 --> 01:31:35.689
The people don't grow rice, but the government would supply it.
1863
01:31:36.079 --> 01:31:39.039
So now all of a sudden you see people overweight
1864
01:31:40.100 --> 01:31:42.739
because they're eating starch, which they never used to eat
1865
01:31:42.779 --> 01:31:45.600
that much of. Or I took a dentist in once
1866
01:31:45.729 --> 01:31:49.590
about 25 years ago and we inspected the mouth of
1867
01:31:49.770 --> 01:31:53.609
every living pitaha and not one cavity. He was disappointed.
1868
01:31:53.630 --> 01:31:54.550
He said, I thought I was going to be able
1869
01:31:54.569 --> 01:31:57.529
to do some free dental work here, and nobody has
1870
01:31:57.569 --> 01:32:01.779
a cavity. Well, then somebody introduced sugar cane into their
1871
01:32:01.840 --> 01:32:06.020
fields from the outside world, and now it's almost 100% cavities.
1872
01:32:06.140 --> 01:32:09.000
Everybody has cavities because they eat sugar cane.
1873
01:32:09.579 --> 01:32:09.899
Wow.
1874
01:32:10.020 --> 01:32:12.359
So you keep away the sweets, you keep away the starch,
1875
01:32:13.020 --> 01:32:15.699
and you get healthier people. This is just living proof
1876
01:32:15.760 --> 01:32:19.590
of what we often read about diets, but that we're
1877
01:32:19.619 --> 01:32:22.670
so tempted by that we don't normally follow.
1878
01:32:22.689 --> 01:32:25.170
I heard another issue with them is when they get
1879
01:32:25.270 --> 01:32:26.250
introduced to soda.
1880
01:32:27.380 --> 01:32:31.050
Yeah, that's bad. Yeah. Also whiskey, but that's a different matter.
1881
01:32:31.310 --> 01:32:31.590
Sure.
1882
01:32:31.609 --> 01:32:35.060
They're both bad. Soda is, yeah, I mean, they love it.
1883
01:32:35.069 --> 01:32:38.609
They call it, you know, sweet water. And they will
1884
01:32:38.630 --> 01:32:40.489
drink the hell out of that. If they got, you know,
1885
01:32:40.510 --> 01:32:42.170
five gallons, they'll drink it all. I had a guy
1886
01:32:42.250 --> 01:32:45.630
once who wove a basket for me. And I said,
1887
01:32:45.789 --> 01:32:48.609
you know, what do you want for it? And he
1888
01:32:48.680 --> 01:32:51.180
knew that I had some canned fruit that I used
1889
01:32:51.359 --> 01:32:53.579
on Sundays for my kids when we were all living there.
1890
01:32:54.140 --> 01:32:56.739
And he said, I want a can of this stuff,
1891
01:32:56.779 --> 01:33:00.590
which is peaches and sweet syrup. And it was a
1892
01:33:00.609 --> 01:33:02.850
big can. And he ate that whole thing. And the
1893
01:33:02.869 --> 01:33:05.750
kids came around. And I've seen guys trade with a boat.
1894
01:33:06.409 --> 01:33:08.489
And they'll get like a kilo of sugar, two and
1895
01:33:08.510 --> 01:33:10.569
a half pounds of sugar. And they just sit down
1896
01:33:10.609 --> 01:33:11.430
with a spoon and eat it.
1897
01:33:11.609 --> 01:33:12.149
Oh, boy.
1898
01:33:12.270 --> 01:33:14.119
And so if they have it, they eat it. And
1899
01:33:14.140 --> 01:33:15.319
if they don't have it, they don't eat it.
1900
01:33:15.319 --> 01:33:16.840
And they have no idea that it's bad for them
1901
01:33:16.859 --> 01:33:18.340
because it tastes good. Why would it be bad?
1902
01:33:18.539 --> 01:33:21.880
Right. You can eat anything you find as a hunter-gatherer.
1903
01:33:22.020 --> 01:33:24.180
And you're not going to have enough of it. To
1904
01:33:24.199 --> 01:33:24.819
be bad for you.
1905
01:33:25.000 --> 01:33:25.260
Right.
1906
01:33:25.500 --> 01:33:27.060
Because you're going to get something else the next day.
1907
01:33:27.359 --> 01:33:29.859
Or like tobacco. I can take in tobacco, but they're
1908
01:33:29.880 --> 01:33:31.739
not going to get addicted to it. They're not going to,
1909
01:33:32.310 --> 01:33:35.109
you know, even when they roll cigarettes, they like them,
1910
01:33:35.189 --> 01:33:37.710
but they only have it like once or twice a year.
1911
01:33:37.770 --> 01:33:40.369
So you don't have to worry about it. You know,
1912
01:33:40.510 --> 01:33:42.170
if they had it all the time, they would have
1913
01:33:42.329 --> 01:33:43.210
serious issues.
1914
01:33:43.850 --> 01:33:46.909
So they've only developed addictions based on what they've been
1915
01:33:46.949 --> 01:33:48.399
introduced from the Western world.
1916
01:33:48.569 --> 01:33:50.770
Right. 100%.
1917
01:33:51.279 --> 01:33:54.479
So tell me about this conversion that you have. Tell
1918
01:33:54.500 --> 01:33:57.420
me about how you, like, what are the steps to
1919
01:33:57.460 --> 01:34:00.180
go from being a true believer, living with the Peter
1920
01:34:00.199 --> 01:34:04.520
Ha and then changing your opinions? How many steps did
1921
01:34:04.560 --> 01:34:04.939
it take?
1922
01:34:05.819 --> 01:34:08.270
It took some practical steps and it took a lot
1923
01:34:08.279 --> 01:34:09.199
of mental steps.
1924
01:34:10.029 --> 01:34:10.649
How much time?
1925
01:34:12.409 --> 01:34:15.189
I would say that I started seriously doubting my faith
1926
01:34:15.489 --> 01:34:21.130
about five or six years into my time. So about 1982, 1983.
1927
01:34:21.130 --> 01:34:22.939
And I did not announce that I was not a
1928
01:34:22.979 --> 01:34:31.420
Christian until 2000. And because Christians were saying things about,
1929
01:34:31.539 --> 01:34:34.060
actually it was 2001, Christians were saying things about the
1930
01:34:34.119 --> 01:34:38.359
war in Iraq, about how the soldiers that we send
1931
01:34:38.420 --> 01:34:42.960
over there are the blessed peacemakers of the gospel. And
1932
01:34:43.319 --> 01:34:47.180
I didn't like that. And so the first step is
1933
01:34:47.380 --> 01:34:50.069
you start to doubt. Then you pray so that you
1934
01:34:50.350 --> 01:34:53.840
won't doubt because the Apostle Thomas said, Lord, I believe.
1935
01:34:53.939 --> 01:34:58.020
Help mine unbelief. But then after a certain point, that
1936
01:34:58.039 --> 01:35:01.739
doesn't work so well. So you start to read literature
1937
01:35:01.859 --> 01:35:05.840
from apologetics, trying to defend these, you know, defend your
1938
01:35:05.899 --> 01:35:08.359
mind against these things that you're thinking. And then you realize,
1939
01:35:08.380 --> 01:35:12.720
I'm not satisfied with those answers either. So finally, one day,
1940
01:35:13.520 --> 01:35:17.279
you reach the conclusion that I just, I just can't
1941
01:35:17.319 --> 01:35:21.199
do it anymore. I can't sustain this belief. I can't
1942
01:35:21.380 --> 01:35:24.159
pretend that I have something that I'm not. And so
1943
01:35:25.359 --> 01:35:28.619
then eventually I told my wife, I said, I just
1944
01:35:28.649 --> 01:35:31.609
don't believe this stuff anymore. I can't believe it. And
1945
01:35:34.170 --> 01:35:37.029
pretty much instantaneously, she walked out of the house and
1946
01:35:37.050 --> 01:35:40.029
we got a divorce. That was the end of that. Also,
1947
01:35:40.090 --> 01:35:41.989
if you're a Christian missionary and you're getting your income
1948
01:35:42.050 --> 01:35:44.479
from being a missionary, and then you tell people, oh,
1949
01:35:44.539 --> 01:35:46.500
I don't believe anymore, then you're unemployed.
1950
01:35:46.699 --> 01:35:48.500
Did you have any other issues in the marriage other
1951
01:35:48.560 --> 01:35:48.979
than that?
1952
01:35:49.920 --> 01:35:52.640
Yeah, it wasn't. That wasn't the only issue. But she
1953
01:35:52.699 --> 01:35:55.439
tracked up all the issues we had to what she
1954
01:35:55.479 --> 01:36:02.600
perceived as my declining faith. Oh, of course. Because, you know,
1955
01:36:04.340 --> 01:36:06.229
I loved rock music before we met. We met at
1956
01:36:06.270 --> 01:36:08.550
a Jimi Hendrix concert, and I went many years without
1957
01:36:08.590 --> 01:36:11.779
listening to rock music. And I love rock music. And
1958
01:36:11.840 --> 01:36:13.680
so I finally started listening to it again.
1959
01:36:14.279 --> 01:36:16.170
And, um, she got upset.
1960
01:36:16.289 --> 01:36:21.010
That was a sign that I was starting to fade away. Um,
1961
01:36:21.630 --> 01:36:24.170
and you know, so, and I'm not a perfect person,
1962
01:36:24.189 --> 01:36:26.609
you know, I would go out with Brazilian friends, uh,
1963
01:36:26.649 --> 01:36:28.659
drinking and that's definitely a no, no.
1964
01:36:29.600 --> 01:36:32.840
Um, and, um, any religion that tries to keep you
1965
01:36:32.859 --> 01:36:36.520
from Hendricks. Yeah. Yeah. Can't be, can't be a real religion.
1966
01:36:36.560 --> 01:36:38.739
My dad said to me when I first became a Christian,
1967
01:36:38.760 --> 01:36:40.939
you know, he was the epitome of an atheist, you know,
1968
01:36:41.050 --> 01:36:45.310
and he's, He said, the one thing about religions is
1969
01:36:45.750 --> 01:36:48.850
they're always trying to beat their own system. They're always
1970
01:36:48.909 --> 01:36:51.170
trying to find an exception so they don't have to
1971
01:36:51.250 --> 01:36:53.750
do the unpleasant things that religion tells them they need
1972
01:36:53.789 --> 01:36:56.609
to do. And I thought, oh, you don't know anything.
1973
01:36:58.149 --> 01:36:59.949
You don't know anything about religion. You've never been in
1974
01:36:59.989 --> 01:37:03.949
part of a church. But it's not entirely false. People
1975
01:37:03.989 --> 01:37:07.949
are always trying to make, you know, it's like another
1976
01:37:07.989 --> 01:37:10.600
expression that comes to mind when you're, If you see
1977
01:37:10.649 --> 01:37:12.880
somebody who says they're a believer and now they start
1978
01:37:12.899 --> 01:37:15.800
doing things you don't think they should do, there are
1979
01:37:15.819 --> 01:37:18.340
two reactions you could have. One is justice and one
1980
01:37:18.380 --> 01:37:21.840
is mercy. And everybody wants to give justice and get
1981
01:37:21.899 --> 01:37:28.170
mercy for their beliefs and for their transgressions. And so
1982
01:37:29.130 --> 01:37:31.850
I was giving myself mercy and my wife was giving
1983
01:37:31.909 --> 01:37:35.170
me justice. But in the end, I realized I'm not
1984
01:37:35.210 --> 01:37:37.640
going to be bound by these rules anymore. I'm just
1985
01:37:37.680 --> 01:37:39.720
going to live my life according to my best lights
1986
01:37:39.819 --> 01:37:42.119
and according to the best decisions. And I'm not going
1987
01:37:42.159 --> 01:37:44.579
to let this book tell me anymore. The ironic thing is,
1988
01:37:44.619 --> 01:37:46.560
you know, I graduated number one in my class at
1989
01:37:46.590 --> 01:37:48.350
a Bible school. So I know the Bible really well.
1990
01:37:49.289 --> 01:37:51.310
And when people try to reconvert me, I've had many
1991
01:37:51.369 --> 01:37:54.329
Christians try to reconvert me. I said, that's not going
1992
01:37:54.350 --> 01:37:56.470
to work, you know, because I know the Bible probably
1993
01:37:56.510 --> 01:37:57.970
better than you do. So you're not going to give
1994
01:37:57.989 --> 01:38:00.689
me a verse I don't know. I said, I'm not
1995
01:38:00.729 --> 01:38:02.689
telling you you're wrong. And I'm not even telling you
1996
01:38:02.729 --> 01:38:04.930
your interpretation is wrong. I'm just saying it doesn't work
1997
01:38:04.970 --> 01:38:09.590
for me. And I can't pretend that it does. Right.
1998
01:38:10.270 --> 01:38:14.920
It's got to be weird to have your beliefs confronted
1999
01:38:15.020 --> 01:38:18.479
by a group of people where as you're learning their language,
2000
01:38:19.300 --> 01:38:24.199
you're realizing that this moral framework and the scaffolding that
2001
01:38:24.229 --> 01:38:28.069
you've only attributed to Christianity and you think that it's
2002
01:38:28.289 --> 01:38:31.409
just Christianity and religion that makes people good people. And
2003
01:38:31.449 --> 01:38:33.779
then here's people that don't have any God.
2004
01:38:34.180 --> 01:38:34.399
Right.
2005
01:38:35.460 --> 01:38:35.600
Yeah.
2006
01:38:35.619 --> 01:38:37.340
So like, you know, you're in a big storm. The
2007
01:38:37.380 --> 01:38:40.819
Amazon has storms in the rainy season. So somebody's house
2008
01:38:40.859 --> 01:38:43.800
blows over because their houses, they're hunter gatherers and they're
2009
01:38:43.819 --> 01:38:46.569
semi nomadic. So they don't build the best houses. So
2010
01:38:46.670 --> 01:38:49.750
it's pouring rain and somebody's house blows over and they're
2011
01:38:49.789 --> 01:38:52.590
just stuck there in the rain. What is their reaction?
2012
01:38:52.909 --> 01:38:55.829
They start laughing like it's the funniest thing that ever happened.
2013
01:38:56.329 --> 01:38:58.510
And they will go off into other people's huts and
2014
01:38:58.550 --> 01:39:00.329
sleep on the ground or get near the fire or
2015
01:39:00.369 --> 01:39:02.689
they might come to my house, that's very common, and
2016
01:39:02.800 --> 01:39:04.199
want to sleep with me and then the next day
2017
01:39:04.239 --> 01:39:08.380
they'll rebuild it. There's nothing except for fear of immediate
2018
01:39:08.460 --> 01:39:11.619
threat from the outside or from animals that gets them
2019
01:39:12.000 --> 01:39:14.819
to lose their cool. And when they do lose their cool,
2020
01:39:15.949 --> 01:39:20.550
It's not really losing their cool. It is calculated defense.
2021
01:39:21.510 --> 01:39:24.850
They know how to take care of themselves. When I
2022
01:39:24.890 --> 01:39:27.630
mentioned to this guy that they would kill him, I said,
2023
01:39:27.649 --> 01:39:29.609
they kill for a living. Don't forget that. That's how
2024
01:39:29.630 --> 01:39:33.260
they make their living. Every man there, every boy here
2025
01:39:33.649 --> 01:39:36.699
could shoot you through the eye at 50 yards with
2026
01:39:36.760 --> 01:39:39.000
one of those arrows. They're not going to miss. If
2027
01:39:39.020 --> 01:39:42.569
they decide to kill you or me, we're dead. So
2028
01:39:42.909 --> 01:39:45.569
they don't because they make a difference between killing out
2029
01:39:45.590 --> 01:39:49.770
of necessity and killing to murder. But if they think
2030
01:39:49.810 --> 01:39:51.399
they have to defend their family, you're dead.
2031
01:39:51.880 --> 01:39:55.939
But their culture doesn't encourage squabbles. Like they just, they're easygoing.
2032
01:39:56.000 --> 01:39:56.760
They take everything.
2033
01:39:57.439 --> 01:40:00.699
The biggest, if there's a concept of sin among the Pidaha,
2034
01:40:00.859 --> 01:40:03.779
it is anger. You don't raise your voice in anger.
2035
01:40:03.859 --> 01:40:07.619
You don't hit another Pidaha in anger. You know, I
2036
01:40:07.659 --> 01:40:10.479
saw a guy get drunk. When they get alcohol, they
2037
01:40:10.500 --> 01:40:13.029
get drunk. And he took a shotgun that he had
2038
01:40:13.069 --> 01:40:16.199
gotten from a Brazilian and he shot a dog that
2039
01:40:16.239 --> 01:40:20.760
belonged to his brother. And his brother runs up to
2040
01:40:20.779 --> 01:40:23.500
the dog and he's just sobbing because they love their dogs.
2041
01:40:23.560 --> 01:40:26.220
And he's just crying that his dog's dead. And I
2042
01:40:26.260 --> 01:40:27.699
went up to him and I thought, oh God, there's
2043
01:40:27.720 --> 01:40:29.220
going to be some violence here. I got to get
2044
01:40:29.300 --> 01:40:31.199
ready for this. And I said, what are you going
2045
01:40:31.239 --> 01:40:33.739
to do? He said, what do you mean? I said,
2046
01:40:34.020 --> 01:40:35.560
are you going to do anything to your brother? He
2047
01:40:35.579 --> 01:40:38.220
shot your dog. He said, I don't do anything to
2048
01:40:38.260 --> 01:40:40.420
my brother. He's my brother. He shouldn't have shot my dog,
2049
01:40:40.460 --> 01:40:42.920
but he's drunk and his head's not working. You know,
2050
01:40:42.979 --> 01:40:44.640
I miss my dog. I love my dog, but I
2051
01:40:44.680 --> 01:40:46.220
love my brother. I'm not going to hurt my brother.
2052
01:40:47.159 --> 01:40:48.479
So they just don't react that way.
2053
01:40:48.899 --> 01:40:50.960
So do they have punishment for crimes?
2054
01:40:52.270 --> 01:40:55.670
They have punishment if it threatens the survival of the village.
2055
01:40:55.789 --> 01:40:58.869
So there was one young man, a teenager, and I
2056
01:40:58.930 --> 01:41:02.350
talk about him in, um, in both my book, don't
2057
01:41:02.409 --> 01:41:04.109
sleep through our snakes. And in the new one that's
2058
01:41:04.149 --> 01:41:08.409
coming out next year, born of the river, um, who
2059
01:41:08.449 --> 01:41:12.170
was paid in alcohol and a new shotgun to kill
2060
01:41:12.789 --> 01:41:17.689
somebody who was living up the river, who wasn't a pitaha,
2061
01:41:17.949 --> 01:41:21.810
living on the same river. And he killed him. And
2062
01:41:21.850 --> 01:41:25.520
the pitaha saw this as an existential threat to the
2063
01:41:25.560 --> 01:41:28.079
whole community because they knew that the police could come up.
2064
01:41:28.420 --> 01:41:30.720
They knew that soldiers could come up. They knew that
2065
01:41:31.319 --> 01:41:34.680
many pitaha could be killed if this wasn't handled. So
2066
01:41:34.819 --> 01:41:36.359
they didn't hurt him, but they kicked him out of
2067
01:41:36.380 --> 01:41:37.739
the village. He had to live on his own. And
2068
01:41:37.779 --> 01:41:41.220
he died about two months later. He was dead. It's
2069
01:41:41.239 --> 01:41:42.680
hard to live on your own in the middle of
2070
01:41:42.699 --> 01:41:45.350
the jungle with no community and nobody who has anything
2071
01:41:45.390 --> 01:41:49.649
to do with you, just shun. So that's the worst
2072
01:41:49.710 --> 01:41:51.590
punishment they have. Banishment. Banishment.
2073
01:41:52.770 --> 01:41:55.109
Banishment. The jungle's crazy.
2074
01:41:55.350 --> 01:41:55.569
Yeah.
2075
01:41:55.770 --> 01:41:57.649
What did they give him to survive? Was it like
2076
01:41:57.689 --> 01:41:58.630
you when you were learning?
2077
01:41:59.250 --> 01:41:59.750
He got nothing.
2078
01:42:00.050 --> 01:42:00.390
Nothing.
2079
01:42:00.489 --> 01:42:03.039
Yeah, get out. He could take what he had. But
2080
01:42:03.159 --> 01:42:05.060
nobody gave him anything else. So he had a bow
2081
01:42:05.079 --> 01:42:06.920
and arrow, no food, no clothes.
2082
01:42:07.199 --> 01:42:07.899
How did he die?
2083
01:42:09.920 --> 01:42:12.270
Well, that I don't know because I just know that
2084
01:42:12.319 --> 01:42:15.449
when I came, I would ask about him, and then
2085
01:42:15.470 --> 01:42:18.829
they said, oh, he's dead. So there's two possibilities. He died,
2086
01:42:19.149 --> 01:42:22.229
naturally death, which I think is probably what happened, or
2087
01:42:22.270 --> 01:42:22.939
somebody killed him.
2088
01:42:23.630 --> 01:42:25.220
And then changed their name. I didn't do it.
2089
01:42:25.409 --> 01:42:29.140
Yeah, yeah. That could have easily happened.
2090
01:42:29.180 --> 01:42:31.619
The change of the name gag is awesome. Yeah.
2091
01:42:31.779 --> 01:42:34.399
Everybody up there is violent. You see Brazilians coming up
2092
01:42:34.439 --> 01:42:37.689
in these boats. Many of them are like pirates. I mean,
2093
01:42:37.699 --> 01:42:40.770
they don't practice piracy now. Some of them do. But
2094
01:42:41.130 --> 01:42:43.489
you go on a boat with these guys and these
2095
01:42:43.550 --> 01:42:45.750
are some tough looking guys. They've got scars on their
2096
01:42:45.789 --> 01:42:48.630
faces and scars on their, these are knife fights. These
2097
01:42:48.670 --> 01:42:53.310
are guys who, you know, like I got really mad
2098
01:42:53.350 --> 01:42:56.989
at somebody once and I mentioned to another Brazilian, I said,
2099
01:42:57.069 --> 01:42:58.229
you know, if he keeps doing that, I'm going to
2100
01:42:58.270 --> 01:43:00.539
punch him in the face. And he says, If you
2101
01:43:00.560 --> 01:43:01.859
punch him in the face, he's going to kill you.
2102
01:43:02.720 --> 01:43:04.239
You know, he'll either get a knife or he'll get
2103
01:43:04.260 --> 01:43:06.279
a gun. So if you decide you're going to hit somebody,
2104
01:43:06.300 --> 01:43:08.140
you better be armed because they're going to come at
2105
01:43:08.159 --> 01:43:09.810
you with whatever weapon they can get their hands on.
2106
01:43:09.810 --> 01:43:11.189
You really thought that you were just going to be
2107
01:43:11.210 --> 01:43:11.789
able to punch him?
2108
01:43:13.149 --> 01:43:15.949
I was just talking, but I, you know, obviously didn't
2109
01:43:15.989 --> 01:43:18.170
have a lot of, you know, my dad liked to
2110
01:43:18.210 --> 01:43:18.670
fight a lot.
2111
01:43:18.869 --> 01:43:22.029
Were you guys drunk at the time when you were
2112
01:43:22.050 --> 01:43:22.369
doing this?
2113
01:43:24.069 --> 01:43:26.460
Oh, no, I wasn't drunk. This guy was drunk and
2114
01:43:26.500 --> 01:43:29.470
he was pushing and he was. giving my daughters, who
2115
01:43:29.630 --> 01:43:33.109
by that time were pretty little blonde teenagers, a hard time.
2116
01:43:33.609 --> 01:43:37.060
And I told him to get away. And he wanted
2117
01:43:37.069 --> 01:43:40.720
to fight. And I got it calmed down, but I thought,
2118
01:43:40.979 --> 01:43:42.579
you know, if he keeps trying, I'm going to punch
2119
01:43:42.600 --> 01:43:44.039
him in the face. And I told this guy that,
2120
01:43:44.060 --> 01:43:47.020
and he said, you don't do that out here. Unless
2121
01:43:47.039 --> 01:43:49.439
you're willing to kill him right now, don't do that.
2122
01:43:49.920 --> 01:43:52.560
Because he's not going to fight you fair. He's going
2123
01:43:52.579 --> 01:43:54.199
to come at you when you're not expecting it, and
2124
01:43:54.220 --> 01:43:54.899
you're going to die.
2125
01:43:55.890 --> 01:43:56.010
So.
2126
01:43:56.909 --> 01:44:00.380
This is– it's just a different concept. So avoiding violence
2127
01:44:00.760 --> 01:44:04.840
has lots of reasons to be done.
2128
01:44:04.859 --> 01:44:07.960
I agree with that at all times. Yeah. I think
2129
01:44:08.000 --> 01:44:09.800
people should constantly avoid violence.
2130
01:44:10.340 --> 01:44:12.800
I completely agree too. And the PETA has shown you that.
2131
01:44:12.840 --> 01:44:16.289
These are people who are much better at violence than
2132
01:44:16.890 --> 01:44:20.090
most people in this country without guns.
2133
01:44:20.710 --> 01:44:21.630
And they avoid it at all costs.
2134
01:44:21.649 --> 01:44:23.369
And they avoid it at all costs. Yeah.
2135
01:44:23.550 --> 01:44:23.770
Wise.
2136
01:44:23.789 --> 01:44:25.279
Wise. Yeah, very wise.
2137
01:44:25.779 --> 01:44:28.279
What did you think when you were just looking at
2138
01:44:28.340 --> 01:44:31.979
the framework that they live by that these people don't
2139
01:44:32.020 --> 01:44:36.039
have a God, that they don't have like someone watching over,
2140
01:44:36.159 --> 01:44:38.539
making sure they're doing the right thing all the time
2141
01:44:38.640 --> 01:44:42.869
or this punishment of being burning forever in hell? None
2142
01:44:42.890 --> 01:44:44.569
of that is motivating them. No.
2143
01:44:45.050 --> 01:44:47.250
And I also thought that they would be afraid of death.
2144
01:44:47.510 --> 01:44:51.409
They're not. I thought they would be afraid of the unknown.
2145
01:44:51.710 --> 01:44:55.710
They're not. They're willing to learn. I sit outside on
2146
01:44:55.729 --> 01:44:59.310
the riverbank with them and they point out satellites going
2147
01:44:59.350 --> 01:45:03.029
overhead because they know the sky so well that they say,
2148
01:45:03.050 --> 01:45:06.000
what's that? And I look and it's like, must be
2149
01:45:06.039 --> 01:45:08.500
a satellite. I said, it's like a radio thing because
2150
01:45:08.520 --> 01:45:10.479
they have radio. I mean, they don't have radios, but
2151
01:45:10.520 --> 01:45:14.119
I have radio. And they said, well, who put that
2152
01:45:14.180 --> 01:45:17.890
up there? I said, I don't know. I said, Americans,
2153
01:45:18.850 --> 01:45:21.409
I think. And they said, You know how to do that?
2154
01:45:21.449 --> 01:45:22.649
I said, no, I don't know how to do that.
2155
01:45:22.710 --> 01:45:24.550
So they said, some other Americans know how to do that.
2156
01:45:24.590 --> 01:45:26.069
I said, yeah, I don't know how to do that.
2157
01:45:27.609 --> 01:45:31.949
But they're very conscious of their environment. Right. And they're
2158
01:45:32.010 --> 01:45:34.640
very curious and they want to learn these things. But
2159
01:45:34.680 --> 01:45:36.260
if I told them that God put it up there,
2160
01:45:36.520 --> 01:45:37.380
they wouldn't pay attention.
2161
01:45:37.779 --> 01:45:42.140
Now, they have these spirits that we talked about earlier
2162
01:45:42.340 --> 01:45:46.960
where they believe a thing embodies a spirit. Like it
2163
01:45:47.000 --> 01:45:49.680
could be like a jaguar embodies a spirit. Yes, exactly.
2164
01:45:50.789 --> 01:45:53.510
So, they have some spirits, so that's a spirit we
2165
01:45:53.550 --> 01:45:55.789
haven't talked about yet. So they have this spirit, Igagai,
2166
01:45:56.350 --> 01:45:59.949
which they believe, you know, so they might see a
2167
01:45:59.989 --> 01:46:01.989
man and then they might see a jaguar and then
2168
01:46:02.029 --> 01:46:03.770
they say, that must be the same thing, you know,
2169
01:46:03.850 --> 01:46:06.729
this man became a jaguar or the jaguar became a man.
2170
01:46:07.680 --> 01:46:11.800
And this is a belief that is, in fact, shape-shifting
2171
01:46:11.859 --> 01:46:15.520
is not an uncommon belief in the Amazon among even
2172
01:46:15.560 --> 01:46:19.760
Brazilians that live there. So, One time I got up
2173
01:46:19.800 --> 01:46:22.750
in the morning and everybody was yelling and pointing at
2174
01:46:23.050 --> 01:46:27.210
the beach on the other side. And I said, what
2175
01:46:27.229 --> 01:46:29.739
are we looking at? They said, can't you see it?
2176
01:46:29.869 --> 01:46:32.310
I said, I don't see anything. And they said, that's Igagai.
2177
01:46:32.930 --> 01:46:37.859
And I didn't see anything. Then later, a few nights later,
2178
01:46:37.920 --> 01:46:41.119
somebody said, we've seen Igagai. It's dark. It's night. And
2179
01:46:41.140 --> 01:46:42.939
the guy wakes me up. He says, we've seen Igagai.
2180
01:46:42.960 --> 01:46:45.779
He's not far behind your house. Would you come with us?
2181
01:46:45.779 --> 01:46:47.859
Because we know you're not afraid of him. you know,
2182
01:46:48.060 --> 01:46:51.199
and I fell for that. And so we go out
2183
01:46:51.239 --> 01:46:53.239
there and then I turn around and they're not by
2184
01:46:53.300 --> 01:46:57.050
me because Igagai can also refer to the jaguar shape.
2185
01:46:57.229 --> 01:47:00.090
So there's a jaguar out there and I just won't
2186
01:47:00.130 --> 01:47:02.329
go walking out there with a machete, you know, and
2187
01:47:02.369 --> 01:47:04.010
then I realized they're not with me and I go
2188
01:47:04.029 --> 01:47:06.250
back and they said, did you see it? I said, no,
2189
01:47:06.289 --> 01:47:11.979
I didn't see anything. But they, if they see a jaguar,
2190
01:47:12.539 --> 01:47:14.579
they believe that it could be a jaguar or it
2191
01:47:14.640 --> 01:47:16.140
could be Igagai.
2192
01:47:17.050 --> 01:47:19.590
But when they were seeing this Igagai and you couldn't
2193
01:47:19.630 --> 01:47:20.890
see anything, they were seeing it.
2194
01:47:21.729 --> 01:47:27.229
Yes. And I was looking for a human-looking creature. But
2195
01:47:27.810 --> 01:47:31.130
it's very possible that there was a jaguar just inside
2196
01:47:31.170 --> 01:47:32.170
the forest.
2197
01:47:31.869 --> 01:47:33.250
That I didn't see. But they could see it and
2198
01:47:33.289 --> 01:47:33.770
you couldn't.
2199
01:47:34.350 --> 01:47:36.869
Yeah, because, well, yeah, but if you walk around with
2200
01:47:36.890 --> 01:47:38.810
them in the jungle, you find that they can see
2201
01:47:38.850 --> 01:47:41.149
a lot of things you can't see. So once I
2202
01:47:41.170 --> 01:47:43.470
was walking with a guy down a path and he said, oh,
2203
01:47:43.630 --> 01:47:46.479
don't step on that snake. It's a bushmaster. And I said, what?
2204
01:47:47.220 --> 01:47:49.020
And I'm looking down. I'm looking at the path. I
2205
01:47:49.039 --> 01:47:52.619
don't see anything. And I said, what snake? And he
2206
01:47:52.659 --> 01:47:55.560
takes his bow and he shoots. And the arrow starts
2207
01:47:56.010 --> 01:47:58.020
flocking around like that. And he pulls it up. And
2208
01:47:58.050 --> 01:47:59.750
there's a Bushmaster at the end. He said, that one.
2209
01:48:00.289 --> 01:48:02.989
Don't step on that one. And I didn't see it.
2210
01:48:03.050 --> 01:48:07.409
And I've almost put my hand on snakes. I don't
2211
01:48:07.449 --> 01:48:11.569
know why I'm still alive. Because it's like I'm a
2212
01:48:12.289 --> 01:48:15.869
special needs person. They have to watch out for me
2213
01:48:15.890 --> 01:48:18.149
when I'm in the jungle. Because It takes a lot
2214
01:48:18.199 --> 01:48:20.579
of skill to be able to see these things. Just
2215
01:48:20.600 --> 01:48:22.479
like when I take them to the city for like
2216
01:48:22.649 --> 01:48:26.409
medical work, they get totally lost. They can't they it's
2217
01:48:26.449 --> 01:48:28.210
hard for them to understand how I can find my
2218
01:48:28.250 --> 01:48:32.409
way around the city because the cues that I'm using
2219
01:48:33.010 --> 01:48:34.760
are totally different than the things they're used to.
2220
01:48:35.279 --> 01:48:38.500
So this Igagai, this thing that they said they saw,
2221
01:48:38.579 --> 01:48:41.220
they could have just been seeing an animal and saying
2222
01:48:41.439 --> 01:48:44.470
it was Igagai and agreeing that it was a spirit.
2223
01:48:44.810 --> 01:48:45.869
And that's not.
2224
01:48:45.710 --> 01:48:48.949
Like they're seeing a spirit that you're not seeing. Did
2225
01:48:48.970 --> 01:48:51.909
you ever take that into consideration that they can see
2226
01:48:51.949 --> 01:48:52.750
things you can't see?
2227
01:48:52.930 --> 01:48:55.390
Yes, that is another possibility. And I definitely took that.
2228
01:48:55.670 --> 01:48:58.189
In fact, for the first several years before I had
2229
01:48:58.250 --> 01:49:02.489
really investigated the different shape shifting of Igagai, I thought
2230
01:49:02.520 --> 01:49:04.989
that's all it could mean. They were seeing something. And
2231
01:49:05.069 --> 01:49:06.800
I couldn't see it. They were all seeing it.
2232
01:49:06.850 --> 01:49:10.229
So you took that into consideration that maybe they have
2233
01:49:10.270 --> 01:49:12.050
a sense that you don't have? Yes.
2234
01:49:12.470 --> 01:49:16.539
And it's clear that they have senses in the jungle.
2235
01:49:16.560 --> 01:49:18.239
They're able to sense things that I cannot.
2236
01:49:18.520 --> 01:49:18.920
Like how?
2237
01:49:19.960 --> 01:49:26.399
Well, like I say, they've grown up learning. So let's
2238
01:49:26.420 --> 01:49:28.239
say that you see a branch move in a tree.
2239
01:49:29.439 --> 01:49:32.829
Was that the wind? Was that a monkey moving? Was
2240
01:49:32.869 --> 01:49:35.079
that a snake up in the tree? What was it?
2241
01:49:36.260 --> 01:49:36.640
I don't know.
2242
01:49:36.880 --> 01:49:39.939
I barely noticed that the branches make moving. But they
2243
01:49:39.979 --> 01:49:42.609
know not only that it's moving, but exactly what caused it.
2244
01:49:42.979 --> 01:49:45.500
I can see bubbles coming out of the water from
2245
01:49:45.560 --> 01:49:49.500
the river. They're just bubbles to me, but to them,
2246
01:49:49.779 --> 01:49:55.520
they represent either a rock underneath or an alligator or
2247
01:49:55.619 --> 01:49:58.430
some other creature that's under the water. And they can
2248
01:49:58.449 --> 01:50:01.350
tell by the bubbles. But I can't. So they've learned
2249
01:50:01.470 --> 01:50:06.109
to interpret their world in a way that I can't.
2250
01:50:06.510 --> 01:50:08.829
So it's not that they don't have senses that you,
2251
01:50:09.710 --> 01:50:11.510
that they have senses that you don't have, but that
2252
01:50:11.609 --> 01:50:12.949
they have pattern recognition.
2253
01:50:13.789 --> 01:50:18.029
That's the way I would put it. But again, you
2254
01:50:18.050 --> 01:50:22.729
would need to do some sort of psychological testing and
2255
01:50:22.810 --> 01:50:25.550
much more controlled conditions than I've ever been able to
2256
01:50:25.609 --> 01:50:29.600
do to sort those things out. But my view now
2257
01:50:29.729 --> 01:50:33.449
is that they simply have the ability to recognize and,
2258
01:50:34.189 --> 01:50:37.430
and perceive things that they've grown up with that I
2259
01:50:37.489 --> 01:50:38.250
miss entirely.
2260
01:50:39.489 --> 01:50:45.029
And this spirit thing, does it always embody a creature
2261
01:50:45.109 --> 01:50:48.560
that they're, that they're, that's common like a Jaguar or
2262
01:50:48.649 --> 01:50:51.920
does it sometimes take on another form?
2263
01:50:54.140 --> 01:50:57.720
It can take these, these, um, entities that I've talked about.
2264
01:50:58.659 --> 01:51:06.029
So there's another one, um, um, Ai, which has long teeth.
2265
01:51:06.989 --> 01:51:09.989
And so they see these different creatures. One's naked, talks
2266
01:51:10.029 --> 01:51:16.060
in a high voice. And so they're putting experiences they
2267
01:51:16.119 --> 01:51:20.060
can't explain into the shapes of these entities that they
2268
01:51:20.119 --> 01:51:23.779
can explain. So just like us, we see so many
2269
01:51:23.840 --> 01:51:26.050
things in the world we don't understand. That's what science
2270
01:51:26.090 --> 01:51:30.050
is all about. So we create theoretical entities to be
2271
01:51:30.149 --> 01:51:33.789
able to explain those observations that we otherwise have no
2272
01:51:33.869 --> 01:51:39.689
explanation for. So in a sense, these separate entities are
2273
01:51:39.710 --> 01:51:41.850
a primitive form. I shouldn't even use the word primitive.
2274
01:51:41.880 --> 01:51:44.949
They're a form of science given what they have. They're
2275
01:51:45.439 --> 01:51:48.760
reducing the unexplained to the explainable.
2276
01:51:49.460 --> 01:51:53.680
And their audit of the jungle is limited to the
2277
01:51:53.819 --> 01:51:57.319
places that they've traveled. Right. So their version of the
2278
01:51:57.399 --> 01:52:01.340
world is entirely limited to the language they possess. Is
2279
01:52:01.399 --> 01:52:02.039
it written at all?
2280
01:52:02.960 --> 01:52:05.060
I developed a writing system for them, yes.
2281
01:52:05.079 --> 01:52:05.899
But before you know.
2282
01:52:06.180 --> 01:52:06.899
Before you know.
2283
01:52:06.920 --> 01:52:11.680
So non-written language, verbal language with no historical database to
2284
01:52:11.720 --> 01:52:12.800
draw from. Right.
2285
01:52:13.539 --> 01:52:16.159
But they actually get some really good skills out of this.
2286
01:52:16.199 --> 01:52:18.779
So I took a guy to the nearest town, a
2287
01:52:19.260 --> 01:52:21.979
big town, Porto Velho. It's the capital of a Brazilian state.
2288
01:52:22.869 --> 01:52:25.909
because he had cirrhosis of the liver, however he got that.
2289
01:52:26.630 --> 01:52:28.329
And I took him to the hospital. First, we went
2290
01:52:28.369 --> 01:52:31.380
to my house that I had in that city on
2291
01:52:31.399 --> 01:52:34.520
the missionary compound. He had never been out of the
2292
01:52:34.539 --> 01:52:37.140
jungle before in his life. So we go there and
2293
01:52:37.199 --> 01:52:38.819
we have lunch. And I said, now it's time to
2294
01:52:38.859 --> 01:52:40.659
go to the hospital. So I take him to the
2295
01:52:40.699 --> 01:52:42.659
hospital and he says, I don't want to stay here.
2296
01:52:43.159 --> 01:52:45.260
I said, the doctors say you have to stay here
2297
01:52:45.300 --> 01:52:47.359
so they can make you feel better. And so then
2298
01:52:47.420 --> 01:52:49.479
I drive off after I spent a couple of hours
2299
01:52:49.500 --> 01:52:54.939
with him. And, um, The next morning, about 6 a.m.,
2300
01:52:55.439 --> 01:52:57.920
there's this knocking on my door. So this is 30
2301
01:52:57.920 --> 01:53:01.640
miles away. The hospital's 30 miles away. And he's standing
2302
01:53:01.680 --> 01:53:04.399
there wearing a hospital gown with no underwear or anything on.
2303
01:53:04.979 --> 01:53:09.220
And I said, how did you find my house? He said, well,
2304
01:53:09.239 --> 01:53:11.159
I just walked here. I said, but how did you
2305
01:53:11.199 --> 01:53:12.920
know how to walk here? Well, I saw it yesterday.
2306
01:53:13.680 --> 01:53:15.340
But all he had to do was get the river
2307
01:53:15.399 --> 01:53:19.760
where the river is and then mentally compute where we're at.
2308
01:53:19.859 --> 01:53:23.850
So Many experiments have shown that people who don't have
2309
01:53:24.149 --> 01:53:27.489
right and left, front and back, but use absolute directions
2310
01:53:27.529 --> 01:53:29.550
like up river, down river, to the jungle, away from
2311
01:53:29.569 --> 01:53:33.409
the jungle, are better at finding their way in new
2312
01:53:33.479 --> 01:53:36.079
places than we are. You know, I can tell you
2313
01:53:36.159 --> 01:53:38.420
turn north, and you might know what I'm talking about.
2314
01:53:38.579 --> 01:53:41.199
For the average person, I say, turn north. If your
2315
01:53:41.239 --> 01:53:42.899
life depends on it, you don't know which way to turn.
2316
01:53:44.119 --> 01:53:46.520
But they would know. And so that gives them a
2317
01:53:46.579 --> 01:53:49.600
better sense of a map of where they're at.
2318
01:53:49.949 --> 01:53:51.510
So do they have a word for north?
2319
01:53:52.729 --> 01:53:56.119
No, they only use upriver. So the first thing they
2320
01:53:56.159 --> 01:53:57.699
have to do, the first thing he did when we
2321
01:53:57.739 --> 01:54:00.939
got him out to town was, where's the river? And
2322
01:54:01.000 --> 01:54:03.239
I showed him the river, and now he knew where
2323
01:54:03.260 --> 01:54:07.710
everything was. Because he got the river, hence he's got
2324
01:54:07.729 --> 01:54:09.569
my house, now he knows where everything is.
2325
01:54:09.569 --> 01:54:11.130
30 miles away.
2326
01:54:11.350 --> 01:54:12.270
Yeah, 30 miles away.
2327
01:54:12.770 --> 01:54:14.369
But doesn't the river wind?
2328
01:54:14.649 --> 01:54:17.229
Yes, but they know how rivers work. And they can
2329
01:54:17.260 --> 01:54:19.119
tell by the direction which way it's flowing. And when
2330
01:54:19.140 --> 01:54:20.619
he looks at it, he knows which way is up
2331
01:54:20.680 --> 01:54:22.439
river and down river based on the way the water
2332
01:54:22.460 --> 01:54:25.779
is flowing. And he walked out barefoot with nothing but
2333
01:54:25.800 --> 01:54:29.539
a hospital gown on, 30 kilometers. And so he left
2334
01:54:29.600 --> 01:54:31.279
at night and he got there first thing in the morning.
2335
01:54:31.500 --> 01:54:31.899
Wow.
2336
01:54:32.140 --> 01:54:33.960
And I said, well, we have to go back. He said,
2337
01:54:34.100 --> 01:54:36.609
I am not going back. I said, well, the doctor
2338
01:54:36.649 --> 01:54:38.550
says you'll die if you don't go back. He says, well,
2339
01:54:38.569 --> 01:54:40.170
I'm going to die then because I'm not going back.
2340
01:54:40.649 --> 01:54:42.250
He said, I would rather go back and die with
2341
01:54:42.289 --> 01:54:44.710
my people. And so I took him back. And a
2342
01:54:44.729 --> 01:54:45.810
few days later, he was dead.
2343
01:54:47.180 --> 01:54:47.819
Was he a drinker?
2344
01:54:48.739 --> 01:54:51.840
He had been, yeah. There was a time before I
2345
01:54:51.920 --> 01:54:56.260
helped the Indian agency demarcate their reservation so it could
2346
01:54:56.279 --> 01:54:59.539
be controlled that boats came up and down all the
2347
01:54:59.600 --> 01:55:04.130
time when the Brazil nuts were falling and when there
2348
01:55:04.149 --> 01:55:07.189
were other jungle products like latex and sorva, which is
2349
01:55:07.229 --> 01:55:09.449
a product used to make chewing gum and all sorts
2350
01:55:09.489 --> 01:55:12.649
of other things, and copaiba, which is used for suntan lotion.
2351
01:55:12.689 --> 01:55:14.939
So the Brazilian boats would come up. and trade for
2352
01:55:14.979 --> 01:55:17.420
all these things. And they always traded with whiskey because
2353
01:55:17.479 --> 01:55:21.659
that's the, I mean, sugar cane rum, cachaca, which is
2354
01:55:21.739 --> 01:55:24.149
the cheapest thing. You know, it's 30 cents a bottle.
2355
01:55:24.560 --> 01:55:25.869
It was a lot easier to give them that and
2356
01:55:25.890 --> 01:55:28.229
the pitahal like it. You know, I told him one time,
2357
01:55:28.270 --> 01:55:30.229
I said, this stuff's really cheap. It doesn't cost, he said,
2358
01:55:30.289 --> 01:55:32.470
not for us it isn't. We don't otherwise get it
2359
01:55:32.770 --> 01:55:36.470
and we like it. So, you know, they like to drink.
2360
01:55:36.569 --> 01:55:40.550
Did they understand the concept of health, of the consequences
2361
01:55:40.609 --> 01:55:41.489
of drinking alcohol?
2362
01:55:41.750 --> 01:55:44.449
No, because if you're a hunter-gatherer, and you're not used
2363
01:55:44.479 --> 01:55:47.600
to having something in constant supply, you don't have to
2364
01:55:47.640 --> 01:55:50.520
worry about it. But once it comes in constant supply,
2365
01:55:50.539 --> 01:55:52.699
then you do have to worry about it. And when
2366
01:55:52.739 --> 01:55:55.380
these guys keep coming up, giving, leaving this stuff off,
2367
01:55:55.779 --> 01:55:58.600
then it becomes a serious health problem. Whereas before it
2368
01:55:58.619 --> 01:56:00.319
was like, I got drunk six months ago.
2369
01:56:00.350 --> 01:56:00.890
Right.
2370
01:56:01.060 --> 01:56:02.069
You know, it's not a big deal.
2371
01:56:02.409 --> 01:56:06.329
Right. So once it became commonplace. Yeah. And do they
2372
01:56:06.369 --> 01:56:10.510
adjust their behavior based on people dying of like liver sclerosis?
2373
01:56:10.710 --> 01:56:14.130
Not that I've ever seen. They, they don't, I can
2374
01:56:14.170 --> 01:56:16.489
tell them till I'm blue in the face that it's
2375
01:56:16.510 --> 01:56:19.670
the alcohol that's doing this or the tobacco that's doing this.
2376
01:56:21.090 --> 01:56:23.210
Why would they believe me? They know a lot of
2377
01:56:23.250 --> 01:56:25.539
guys who have drunk a lot of whiskey and they
2378
01:56:25.579 --> 01:56:28.649
don't have it. So these couple of guys got it.
2379
01:56:29.380 --> 01:56:33.119
How do I know that's what caused it? So they
2380
01:56:33.140 --> 01:56:37.119
don't take my word on childlike. It is childlike in
2381
01:56:37.159 --> 01:56:41.649
the sense that children learn by evidence. And if children
2382
01:56:41.689 --> 01:56:45.579
don't have evidence for something, And it takes a while
2383
01:56:45.619 --> 01:56:47.500
for the evidence to start to sink in. You've got
2384
01:56:47.520 --> 01:56:48.659
to repeat the experiment.
2385
01:56:49.039 --> 01:56:52.000
Right. But you would imagine that if they're intelligent people,
2386
01:56:52.100 --> 01:56:57.680
you could explain this consumption of alcohol when done infrequently,
2387
01:56:57.739 --> 01:57:01.279
it's okay. But the everyday consumption of alcohol, because you
2388
01:57:01.319 --> 01:57:03.909
have an endless supply of it now, is becoming a
2389
01:57:03.949 --> 01:57:04.649
real problem.
2390
01:57:04.930 --> 01:57:06.770
That's a very good point. And I have brought that
2391
01:57:06.829 --> 01:57:10.329
up with them before. And they say, yeah, we know
2392
01:57:10.350 --> 01:57:11.850
a lot of Brazilians that drink and they don't get
2393
01:57:11.869 --> 01:57:15.750
that sickness. Yeah. They come right up. It's like I
2394
01:57:15.770 --> 01:57:19.310
could tell you that the COVID vaccine is really good
2395
01:57:19.350 --> 01:57:20.859
for you. And you can say, well, I know a
2396
01:57:20.859 --> 01:57:22.079
lot of people didn't get it, and they didn't get
2397
01:57:22.119 --> 01:57:25.920
COVID either. They weren't vaccinated. They didn't get COVID. So
2398
01:57:25.960 --> 01:57:29.840
you have to look at the statistics. And even there,
2399
01:57:30.000 --> 01:57:30.840
it's hard.
2400
01:57:31.520 --> 01:57:34.279
They just don't seem very concerned with dying anyway.
2401
01:57:34.979 --> 01:57:38.859
They're not. They don't want to die right now, but
2402
01:57:39.350 --> 01:57:40.989
it happens, and they're not worried about it.
2403
01:57:42.229 --> 01:57:46.010
What do they think? do they have a purpose for life?
2404
01:57:46.449 --> 01:57:49.630
Do they have a thing they worship at all?
2405
01:57:50.789 --> 01:57:55.619
No, they don't worship anything. The community is everything. You
2406
01:57:55.680 --> 01:57:58.840
make a contribution to the community while you're alive, and
2407
01:57:59.180 --> 01:57:59.979
that's your purpose.
2408
01:58:00.680 --> 01:58:01.100
That's it.
2409
01:58:01.279 --> 01:58:04.930
That's it. And it doesn't take any thought. You don't
2410
01:58:04.949 --> 01:58:07.050
need somebody to give a lesson. This is what our
2411
01:58:07.090 --> 01:58:09.970
purpose is, folks. You just see everybody living, and that's
2412
01:58:10.039 --> 01:58:10.520
how you live.
2413
01:58:10.539 --> 01:58:14.659
Isn't it odd that that's not the primary way people live,
2414
01:58:14.739 --> 01:58:18.840
if that makes you so happy? It's interesting because even me,
2415
01:58:19.100 --> 01:58:21.430
I'm hearing this, I'm like, God, it's so appealing. But
2416
01:58:21.560 --> 01:58:23.390
part of me is like, I'm not fucking living like that.
2417
01:58:23.670 --> 01:58:25.510
You know, nobody wants to live like that. It just
2418
01:58:25.550 --> 01:58:28.649
seems too crazy, too difficult, too daunting.
2419
01:58:28.670 --> 01:58:29.069
I don't want to.
2420
01:58:29.350 --> 01:58:31.850
Get bit by a snake and have my bones exposed?
2421
01:58:32.130 --> 01:58:34.170
Well, I often think this when I talk to people
2422
01:58:34.210 --> 01:58:37.680
who are extreme ecologists who think we need to not
2423
01:58:37.720 --> 01:58:39.979
affect the environment. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, go live
2424
01:58:40.020 --> 01:58:42.039
with the pitaha. You know, you're not going to last
2425
01:58:42.079 --> 01:58:45.979
three days there with them. Maybe a few days more,
2426
01:58:46.039 --> 01:58:51.199
but not much. So it is very appealing. And I
2427
01:58:51.270 --> 01:58:53.989
live there and enjoyed it. But while I was living there,
2428
01:58:54.130 --> 01:58:56.130
I had things they didn't have access to. So I
2429
01:58:56.510 --> 01:58:58.750
I can't fairly say that I live just like them.
2430
01:58:58.850 --> 01:58:59.689
And you could always leave.
2431
01:59:00.010 --> 01:59:02.250
And I can always leave, yeah. I mean, I can
2432
01:59:02.670 --> 01:59:06.020
get in my motorboat and take off. Or, in the
2433
01:59:06.069 --> 01:59:08.960
worst case, I can get on my two-way radio or
2434
01:59:09.020 --> 01:59:10.840
satellite phone and call for help.
2435
01:59:11.140 --> 01:59:13.479
Did you ever think about just saying, fuck it, stay
2436
01:59:13.520 --> 01:59:14.800
there forever? Yeah.
2437
01:59:15.140 --> 01:59:17.000
In the early years, I did think about it. I
2438
01:59:17.039 --> 01:59:20.140
thought about not pursuing any kind of graduate degree, not
2439
01:59:20.180 --> 01:59:23.920
worrying about ever coming back to the U.S. And I
2440
01:59:23.979 --> 01:59:26.550
was really loving it there. But then I realized... My
2441
01:59:26.609 --> 01:59:31.640
kids wanted a wider experience, and I didn't have the
2442
01:59:31.699 --> 01:59:32.779
right to deprive them of that.
2443
01:59:32.800 --> 01:59:34.140
So you think if you were single, you would have
2444
01:59:34.159 --> 01:59:34.800
just integrated?
2445
01:59:35.560 --> 01:59:38.380
It's very possible, yeah. I mean, that would have been
2446
01:59:38.439 --> 01:59:41.159
easy to do, although I would have had to become
2447
01:59:41.239 --> 01:59:45.399
much better at outdoor skills than I ever was. I mean,
2448
01:59:45.420 --> 01:59:48.439
I would not stand up to a pitaha's standards of
2449
01:59:48.520 --> 01:59:51.470
hunting and fishing, and no woman would have married me
2450
01:59:51.829 --> 01:59:53.449
because they would have starved to death.
2451
01:59:54.819 --> 01:59:56.420
Did you ever get better at those things?
2452
01:59:57.229 --> 02:00:02.949
Not really. No? For one thing, I like to hunt.
2453
02:00:03.069 --> 02:00:05.409
I started hunting when I was like 10 years old,
2454
02:00:05.470 --> 02:00:09.029
pheasant hunting, dove hunting. And so I do enjoy that,
2455
02:00:09.649 --> 02:00:14.140
but I've never given it the time to become really
2456
02:00:14.159 --> 02:00:16.119
good at it. Now, if I were abandoned in the jungle,
2457
02:00:16.319 --> 02:00:19.260
I probably would, but it would take me a long time.
2458
02:00:19.640 --> 02:00:21.979
These guys are using bows and arrows from the time
2459
02:00:22.020 --> 02:00:24.430
they're two years old. So by the time they get
2460
02:00:24.920 --> 02:00:29.010
To be teenagers, they're perfect. They are absolutely unmatchless in
2461
02:00:29.029 --> 02:00:32.170
their skill. And I've done little archery contests before to
2462
02:00:32.189 --> 02:00:35.829
see how good they are. And it's just astounding. So
2463
02:00:36.289 --> 02:00:39.090
I would have to spend many years practicing to get
2464
02:00:39.130 --> 02:00:41.609
as good as they are. And then in the meantime,
2465
02:00:41.630 --> 02:00:43.279
I would starve to death because they're not going to
2466
02:00:43.319 --> 02:00:43.659
feed me.
2467
02:00:45.600 --> 02:00:46.899
How are they making their bows?
2468
02:00:48.819 --> 02:00:50.939
There's a couple of different kinds of wood that they use.
2469
02:00:51.060 --> 02:00:54.979
But there's one that is a bright red wood. And
2470
02:00:55.020 --> 02:01:04.090
it's called piranha food because it grows near the edge
2471
02:01:04.130 --> 02:01:07.090
of the river and it drops flowers off the tree
2472
02:01:07.149 --> 02:01:09.649
into the river. And the piranhas love to eat those flowers.
2473
02:01:10.569 --> 02:01:12.170
So if you see a lot of those flowers in
2474
02:01:12.189 --> 02:01:15.329
the water, probably not good to swim there. But they
2475
02:01:15.390 --> 02:01:17.949
take a section of the bark, a big section. It
2476
02:01:17.970 --> 02:01:22.489
might be like four inches by four inches or six inches.
2477
02:01:23.569 --> 02:01:28.390
And it's just a hard piece, maybe eight feet long.
2478
02:01:29.069 --> 02:01:32.050
And they bring that back, and they have a special tool.
2479
02:01:32.949 --> 02:01:35.119
And it could be wood or bone, or if they
2480
02:01:35.140 --> 02:01:37.420
have a machete, they use that. And they just start
2481
02:01:37.479 --> 02:01:40.699
shaping it until finally they get a bow that's probably
2482
02:01:42.899 --> 02:01:45.819
two inches wide and an inch and a half thick.
2483
02:01:46.689 --> 02:01:51.029
And it's taller than they are. It's about seven feet long. And.
2484
02:01:52.789 --> 02:01:54.869
Then they get the bark from a tree, a certain
2485
02:01:54.890 --> 02:01:58.989
kind of tree, and they get it off in strands.
2486
02:01:59.409 --> 02:02:02.779
And so a man, a brother or a father or
2487
02:02:02.979 --> 02:02:06.260
a husband will give it to their closest woman relative,
2488
02:02:06.720 --> 02:02:09.300
and she takes those strands and she makes a bowstring.
2489
02:02:09.939 --> 02:02:13.300
So the bow represents man and woman working together. A
2490
02:02:13.340 --> 02:02:15.800
man can make the wood. A woman makes the string.
2491
02:02:16.180 --> 02:02:18.590
Then they get the arrows. A man gets the feathers.
2492
02:02:18.649 --> 02:02:20.970
A man gets the shaft. The woman makes the strings
2493
02:02:21.029 --> 02:02:25.550
that tie everything on. So she's the glue. And once
2494
02:02:25.569 --> 02:02:28.550
you get that, that thing... Yeah, there's one right there.
2495
02:02:29.369 --> 02:02:31.829
This guy. That's a pretty.
2496
02:02:31.869 --> 02:02:32.949
And those are the arrows?
2497
02:02:33.010 --> 02:02:34.930
Really long arrows? Yeah, yeah. Those are the arrows. And
2498
02:02:35.310 --> 02:02:38.300
these are fishing arrows, so they're much longer. But actually,
2499
02:02:38.310 --> 02:02:39.779
they're not both fishing arrows. One of them is just
2500
02:02:39.819 --> 02:02:42.479
a regular arrow. So their arrows are quite long. And
2501
02:02:42.520 --> 02:02:45.939
that thing is a very powerful bow. And you can
2502
02:02:46.000 --> 02:02:52.920
see the thickness of the string there. So... Yeah, and
2503
02:02:52.939 --> 02:02:53.659
that's the bow.
2504
02:02:54.720 --> 02:02:55.739
They eat a lot of monkeys?
2505
02:02:56.300 --> 02:02:57.439
Yeah, they eat a lot of monkeys.
2506
02:02:57.460 --> 02:02:58.479
Isn't that weird?
2507
02:03:00.079 --> 02:03:04.810
No, I asked them once. I said, do monkeys look
2508
02:03:04.829 --> 02:03:07.989
like people? And they say, no, why would you ask that?
2509
02:03:08.090 --> 02:03:11.029
I said, they look like people to me. And he said, no, no,
2510
02:03:11.069 --> 02:03:14.569
they're covered in hair. You're not covered in hair. So
2511
02:03:14.630 --> 02:03:19.239
I went to the Trans-Amazon Road. I was traveling out
2512
02:03:19.359 --> 02:03:23.989
all by myself, hitchhiking, and I stayed with this Brazilian. Um,
2513
02:03:24.569 --> 02:03:26.369
and I said, do you have any cold water? He said,
2514
02:03:26.510 --> 02:03:29.949
and he had a kerosene, um, refrigerator. And so I
2515
02:03:29.989 --> 02:03:31.930
went over and I opened it to get his cold water.
2516
02:03:32.329 --> 02:03:33.869
And at the bottom, it looked like there were like
2517
02:03:33.949 --> 02:03:37.810
four dead babies. And I'm thinking, Oh my God, what
2518
02:03:37.850 --> 02:03:39.890
is that? I said, what is this? He said, Oh,
2519
02:03:39.930 --> 02:03:42.689
it's just some monkeys. I skinned him, you know, and
2520
02:03:43.630 --> 02:03:47.640
a monkey that's been skinned does look a lot more human. Um, and, uh,
2521
02:03:47.689 --> 02:03:51.779
but nobody thinks twice about it, you know? Um, I said,
2522
02:03:52.060 --> 02:03:55.079
are the monkeys more like us or are they more
2523
02:03:55.119 --> 02:03:57.630
like dogs? Oh, they're like dogs. They're much more like
2524
02:03:57.689 --> 02:04:00.109
dogs than they are like us. They just don't see
2525
02:04:00.130 --> 02:04:00.609
the problem.
2526
02:04:01.229 --> 02:04:01.770
It's just food.
2527
02:04:02.090 --> 02:04:06.430
Yeah, it's just food. And so, you know, and they love,
2528
02:04:06.649 --> 02:04:10.010
their favorite part of any animal is the brains. And
2529
02:04:10.130 --> 02:04:12.539
one reason the brains are so good is because brains
2530
02:04:12.779 --> 02:04:16.000
have a lot of saturated fat. It's a great source
2531
02:04:16.020 --> 02:04:19.180
of saturated fat. They eat monkey brains? Yeah, they eat
2532
02:04:19.199 --> 02:04:21.699
monkey brains. So, The favorite thing, I was talking to
2533
02:04:21.739 --> 02:04:25.380
a woman one time and I was making a sandwich.
2534
02:04:25.439 --> 02:04:27.899
I had brought in some lunch meat and bread. I
2535
02:04:27.939 --> 02:04:29.520
had just gotten there. It was my first day there.
2536
02:04:29.560 --> 02:04:31.020
And so I had a little bit enough to make
2537
02:04:31.060 --> 02:04:34.899
a sandwich for that night. And I'm squirting mustard. And,
2538
02:04:34.930 --> 02:04:36.050
you know, when you get to the end of the
2539
02:04:36.060 --> 02:04:39.109
mustard bottle and you're squeezing, it makes a sound like
2540
02:04:39.609 --> 02:04:45.590
somebody who's got diarrhea. And she says, what is that
2541
02:04:45.949 --> 02:04:49.550
bird shit stuff you're eating? And I said, Well, it's good.
2542
02:04:49.609 --> 02:04:50.810
It's mustard. You want to try some?
2543
02:04:51.010 --> 02:04:51.630
Oh, no.
2544
02:04:52.310 --> 02:04:55.449
And she said, look at this bird shit. He's eating
2545
02:04:55.510 --> 02:04:58.909
bird shit. And then I look at her, and she's
2546
02:04:58.970 --> 02:05:02.569
eating the brains out of a rat. And he's got
2547
02:05:02.609 --> 02:05:05.840
this rat head, and she's sucking the brains out. And
2548
02:05:06.760 --> 02:05:09.859
they're cooked, of course. But she's sucking the brains. And
2549
02:05:09.899 --> 02:05:14.159
I'm thinking, this is a great example for an introductory
2550
02:05:14.199 --> 02:05:18.220
class in anthropology, you know, how different we perceive things.
2551
02:05:18.619 --> 02:05:20.500
That's great to her. This is great to me. But
2552
02:05:20.520 --> 02:05:21.979
it grosses the other one out.
2553
02:05:22.180 --> 02:05:27.399
That's wild. Mustard's disgusting. Rat brain's great. Yeah. And isn't
2554
02:05:27.460 --> 02:05:31.699
there an issue with eating primate brain tissue? Can you
2555
02:05:31.720 --> 02:05:32.800
get prion diseases?
2556
02:05:32.979 --> 02:05:36.100
Well, there are diseases that they discovered in New Guinea
2557
02:05:36.180 --> 02:05:40.590
from cannibals who were eating human brains. Right. But I'm
2558
02:05:40.619 --> 02:05:43.350
not aware of any diseases that are passed by eating
2559
02:05:43.409 --> 02:05:47.069
monkey brains or other kinds of brains. They'll eat any
2560
02:05:47.130 --> 02:05:47.850
animal's brains.
2561
02:05:49.319 --> 02:05:52.000
So the prion diseases that you get are from animals
2562
02:05:52.079 --> 02:05:55.439
eating the same animal, right? Like mad cow disease is
2563
02:05:55.479 --> 02:05:58.899
because they serve cows literal brain and neural tissue from
2564
02:05:59.119 --> 02:06:00.159
other cows. Right.
2565
02:06:00.720 --> 02:06:03.619
So I'm not an expert on that, but I do
2566
02:06:03.649 --> 02:06:05.409
know that I've never seen a case of them getting
2567
02:06:05.590 --> 02:06:08.710
disease from that. And the superficial reading that I've done
2568
02:06:08.789 --> 02:06:11.729
on it suggests that humans get it from eating human brains.
2569
02:06:12.270 --> 02:06:17.229
Interesting. So they can eat deer brains, rat brains, no problem. Right.
2570
02:06:17.310 --> 02:06:20.060
So- The favorite part of any animal is the head.
2571
02:06:20.720 --> 02:06:22.930
So if they bring me a fish, they'll give me
2572
02:06:22.970 --> 02:06:26.109
a fish. They like to trade fish for canned meat
2573
02:06:26.189 --> 02:06:30.909
because canned meat keeps. But I like fish cheeks, but
2574
02:06:31.850 --> 02:06:34.329
my wife hated the fish heads. She didn't want the
2575
02:06:34.369 --> 02:06:37.529
fish heads around. So they would be happy to keep
2576
02:06:37.550 --> 02:06:39.149
the fish heads, and they just make a big stew
2577
02:06:39.170 --> 02:06:40.789
of fish heads, and they eat the brains and the
2578
02:06:40.869 --> 02:06:43.130
eyeballs and everything. Those are really tasty bits.
2579
02:06:44.010 --> 02:06:45.710
And probably rich in nutrients.
2580
02:06:46.000 --> 02:06:48.060
Yeah, they are rich in nutrients. They know what they're doing.
2581
02:06:48.100 --> 02:06:49.680
They love all the internal organs.
2582
02:06:50.039 --> 02:06:52.539
Yeah, it's so weird how we've moved away from all
2583
02:06:52.579 --> 02:06:53.060
that stuff.
2584
02:06:53.399 --> 02:06:53.619
Right.
2585
02:06:53.920 --> 02:06:56.319
I mean, that's one of the things that happens with wolves.
2586
02:06:56.399 --> 02:06:58.000
The alpha in the pack is the one that eats
2587
02:06:58.039 --> 02:06:58.510
the liver.
2588
02:06:59.399 --> 02:07:00.010
Right.
2589
02:07:00.149 --> 02:07:02.590
They know something's going on. There's a lot of nutrients
2590
02:07:02.630 --> 02:07:05.149
in these organ meats, and we've moved away from that
2591
02:07:05.189 --> 02:07:07.869
in a very strange way. Right. People are disgusted by
2592
02:07:07.909 --> 02:07:09.310
the idea of liver. Yeah.
2593
02:07:09.710 --> 02:07:11.529
So, you know, you go to some— if you go to
2594
02:07:11.590 --> 02:07:13.810
northern Brazil and you go to one of these churrascarias,
2595
02:07:13.869 --> 02:07:19.489
Brazilian steak restaurants— Love those. If you're in an everyday person's,
2596
02:07:19.829 --> 02:07:22.409
you're going to get a lot of heart and you're
2597
02:07:22.439 --> 02:07:23.560
going to get liver.
2598
02:07:23.779 --> 02:07:24.159
Kidney.
2599
02:07:24.380 --> 02:07:27.859
Kidney. You're going to get all that stuff. You know,
2600
02:07:27.939 --> 02:07:30.979
so that is stuff they love to eat.
2601
02:07:31.199 --> 02:07:36.439
Sure. A lot of cultures. Mexicans, menudo. Menudo's got tripe
2602
02:07:36.500 --> 02:07:38.619
in it and organ meat. Right.
2603
02:07:38.760 --> 02:07:43.050
And, you know, my brother-in-law, deceased now, but he was
2604
02:07:43.430 --> 02:07:46.159
Mexican and That's the first thing he insisted that my
2605
02:07:46.239 --> 02:07:49.140
sister learn how to make in terms of true Mexican
2606
02:07:49.180 --> 02:07:52.729
food was menudo. And he wanted that every Saturday, and
2607
02:07:52.810 --> 02:07:55.609
she loved to make it for him. So then she
2608
02:07:55.649 --> 02:08:00.619
made this pozole with cow feet in it. Whoa. And,
2609
02:08:00.779 --> 02:08:02.840
you know, got the hooves and everything in the pozole,
2610
02:08:02.880 --> 02:08:04.260
but cooks all day.
2611
02:08:04.279 --> 02:08:07.010
I remember when I was a kid, pickled pig's feet
2612
02:08:07.050 --> 02:08:07.750
was a big thing.
2613
02:08:07.850 --> 02:08:11.810
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so internal organs are really good.
2614
02:08:11.829 --> 02:08:15.890
You know that a Brazilian churrascaria is authentic if they
2615
02:08:15.949 --> 02:08:18.890
serve chicken hearts. Right. You know? And so if I
2616
02:08:18.909 --> 02:08:20.689
go to one and they don't have chicken hearts, I'm
2617
02:08:20.729 --> 02:08:21.430
quite disappointed.
2618
02:08:21.449 --> 02:08:22.380
It's westernized.
2619
02:08:22.479 --> 02:08:23.140
Yeah, yeah.
2620
02:08:23.460 --> 02:08:25.619
They're still great, but, yeah, I know what you mean.
2621
02:08:25.760 --> 02:08:25.979
Yeah.
2622
02:08:26.159 --> 02:08:28.220
Yeah, I went to one when I was in Brazil.
2623
02:08:28.340 --> 02:08:28.899
It was awesome.
2624
02:08:29.180 --> 02:08:31.659
Oh, yeah. It's Brazilian fast food.
2625
02:08:31.899 --> 02:08:34.539
Yeah, and it is fast, and it's amazing food, too.
2626
02:08:34.560 --> 02:08:36.340
It's like they know how to eat. If you're in
2627
02:08:36.380 --> 02:08:38.399
a rush, a chujascari is the best place to eat.
2628
02:08:38.649 --> 02:08:38.829
Yeah.
2629
02:08:38.850 --> 02:08:41.270
Because you sit down, you flip that cart over to green,
2630
02:08:41.289 --> 02:08:43.630
the food keeps— 20 minutes later, you're stuffed. Exactly.
2631
02:08:43.670 --> 02:08:47.680
Exactly. Exactly. And you ate much more nutrition than having
2632
02:08:47.720 --> 02:08:49.560
a McDonald's Big Mac or something like that.
2633
02:08:49.579 --> 02:08:50.539
Sure. And it's all you can eat.
2634
02:08:50.779 --> 02:08:51.000
Yeah.
2635
02:08:51.199 --> 02:08:52.399
Yeah. It's awesome.
2636
02:08:52.800 --> 02:08:55.359
I used to come out of the village and go
2637
02:08:55.420 --> 02:08:56.600
straight to one of those. I've been out of the
2638
02:08:56.619 --> 02:08:58.979
village for six months and I was really hungry and
2639
02:08:59.000 --> 02:09:01.479
I was coming out on my motorcycle. And the first
2640
02:09:01.539 --> 02:09:03.279
one I saw, I pulled over and that's and I
2641
02:09:03.319 --> 02:09:04.319
ate till I could barely move.
2642
02:09:04.560 --> 02:09:07.470
Did you eat monkey when you were in the jungle? Yeah. Yeah.
2643
02:09:07.739 --> 02:09:09.619
I didn't eat the brains, but they didn't offer them
2644
02:09:09.659 --> 02:09:11.890
either because that's the best part.
2645
02:09:12.529 --> 02:09:14.090
Would you have if they offered you some?
2646
02:09:14.500 --> 02:09:16.239
Yeah, I would have. I would have. I've tried a
2647
02:09:16.279 --> 02:09:18.939
lot of stuff there. And when I was doing my
2648
02:09:19.000 --> 02:09:22.319
field experience in southern Mexico in Chiapas, I spent some
2649
02:09:22.359 --> 02:09:26.899
time with the Celtales, the Celta people, descendants of the Mayas. And,
2650
02:09:27.140 --> 02:09:30.960
you know, I ate this stuff they chew up and
2651
02:09:31.020 --> 02:09:32.420
spit out and let ferment.
2652
02:09:32.699 --> 02:09:36.239
Oh, I've heard of that. That's a beverage. Is that
2653
02:09:36.319 --> 02:09:37.880
like an alcoholic beverage? Yeah.
2654
02:09:38.100 --> 02:09:39.479
And so I was trying to fit in. And so
2655
02:09:39.500 --> 02:09:43.029
they gave me just a little bit. And they said,
2656
02:09:43.050 --> 02:09:45.609
what'd you think? And I, I'm trying to be this
2657
02:09:46.130 --> 02:09:48.210
cool guy. And I said, I loved it. I hated it,
2658
02:09:48.569 --> 02:09:50.479
but I said, I loved it. And so they bring
2659
02:09:50.500 --> 02:09:55.899
me a big bowl. And so then that night I
2660
02:09:55.960 --> 02:10:00.020
was up, uh, with, um, things coming out of both
2661
02:10:00.119 --> 02:10:03.699
ends all night long. And the next morning, my blood
2662
02:10:03.739 --> 02:10:07.000
pressure was 60 over 40 and I had to be, uh,
2663
02:10:07.060 --> 02:10:08.899
flown out. They had to get me on a mule
2664
02:10:08.939 --> 02:10:12.239
and get me out to the nearest airstrip and out. And, uh,
2665
02:10:13.220 --> 02:10:15.119
But I did my bit. I was accepted as a
2666
02:10:15.180 --> 02:10:18.319
great gringo for eating this stuff, you know, for drinking it.
2667
02:10:18.399 --> 02:10:19.119
What happened to you?
2668
02:10:20.399 --> 02:10:25.239
Well, whatever it was, my body didn't like it.
2669
02:10:26.010 --> 02:10:28.789
So is it just like the bacteria in it, you think?
2670
02:10:29.350 --> 02:10:31.489
Probably. I think it had to be that because it
2671
02:10:31.510 --> 02:10:33.409
didn't gross me out. I didn't like the taste of it,
2672
02:10:33.449 --> 02:10:35.329
but it wasn't grossing me out. And it was a
2673
02:10:35.350 --> 02:10:37.909
happy time. We had little ribbons and stuff. We were
2674
02:10:37.949 --> 02:10:40.109
having a festa and I was sitting with the men
2675
02:10:40.189 --> 02:10:41.130
at the table.
2676
02:10:40.850 --> 02:10:43.500
And And their gut bacteria just knows how to handle it.
2677
02:10:44.100 --> 02:10:47.119
There you go. There you go.
2678
02:10:47.140 --> 02:10:53.199
It says that the human saliva creates the fermentation.
2679
02:10:53.220 --> 02:10:54.060
Yeah, that's right.
2680
02:10:54.300 --> 02:10:57.649
Come on, people. Isn't there a better way to get drunk?
2681
02:10:58.119 --> 02:10:59.010
Good Lord.
2682
02:10:59.149 --> 02:11:01.829
If you want to get drunk and you want it
2683
02:11:01.850 --> 02:11:03.350
bad enough, there it is.
2684
02:11:03.489 --> 02:11:05.289
And I bet that stuff you're not going to drink
2685
02:11:05.350 --> 02:11:08.289
every day because it's so disgusting. It's not going to
2686
02:11:08.310 --> 02:11:09.050
become a problem.
2687
02:11:09.270 --> 02:11:12.729
Once it's fermented, Nobody really cares, you know, who's around
2688
02:11:12.770 --> 02:11:13.310
that culture.
2689
02:11:13.470 --> 02:11:13.829
Boy.
2690
02:11:14.069 --> 02:11:14.729
You know, but.
2691
02:11:16.010 --> 02:11:17.050
What does a monkey taste like?
2692
02:11:18.210 --> 02:11:21.350
Well, there again, I don't have a vocabulary to describe
2693
02:11:21.390 --> 02:11:25.020
all these meats. It's a tough meat, but I pressure it.
2694
02:11:25.609 --> 02:11:26.189
I put the.
2695
02:11:26.210 --> 02:11:27.630
A crock pot?
2696
02:11:27.750 --> 02:11:29.630
Yeah, I put it in a pressure cooker over a fire.
2697
02:11:29.670 --> 02:11:31.729
I take in a pressure cooker, you know, not an
2698
02:11:31.770 --> 02:11:34.109
electric pressure cooker, obviously. One of these pressure cookers you
2699
02:11:34.149 --> 02:11:36.180
can set on top of the fire. And after I
2700
02:11:36.239 --> 02:11:39.079
pressure it, it's falling off the bone, and I take
2701
02:11:39.119 --> 02:11:40.899
the meat off. And I throw it in a bowl
2702
02:11:40.960 --> 02:11:42.979
and I put some manioc meal on top of that.
2703
02:11:43.380 --> 02:11:46.060
And then I cover it in Tabasco. And it's great.
2704
02:11:46.420 --> 02:11:48.000
It's very filling and it tastes really good.
2705
02:11:48.340 --> 02:11:50.739
Wow. Did you feel weird eating a monkey?
2706
02:11:52.779 --> 02:11:55.569
When you see the monkey and you put the little
2707
02:11:55.609 --> 02:11:58.470
monkey body inside the pressure cooker and it looks like
2708
02:11:58.510 --> 02:12:01.210
a baby, it doesn't look too good. But once you
2709
02:12:01.390 --> 02:12:03.270
open up the pressure cooker and it's all cooked and
2710
02:12:03.289 --> 02:12:05.350
the bones are separated from the meat and then it's
2711
02:12:05.390 --> 02:12:08.689
just meat floating in there, you know. And when you're
2712
02:12:08.750 --> 02:12:10.609
out in the jungle and you've been out there long enough,
2713
02:12:11.729 --> 02:12:14.770
just about any kind of meat sounds pretty good. I
2714
02:12:14.810 --> 02:12:18.699
worked with a group called the Wadi. I actually wrote
2715
02:12:18.720 --> 02:12:22.720
a 540-page grammar of their language, co-wrote it. And they
2716
02:12:22.739 --> 02:12:28.020
were cannibals up until 1962. And they had two, they
2717
02:12:28.039 --> 02:12:34.270
had Indo-cannibalism and Exo-cannibalism. Exo-cannibalism was eating their enemies and
2718
02:12:34.430 --> 02:12:38.470
Indo-cannibalism was eating their people. And So if you die
2719
02:12:38.529 --> 02:12:43.470
in the village at that time, up until 1962, they
2720
02:12:43.489 --> 02:12:45.989
keep your body. They call all the relatives. Your body
2721
02:12:46.029 --> 02:12:48.720
might sit there in the Amazon sun for three days.
2722
02:12:49.199 --> 02:12:52.779
And your relatives come from all over. And then they
2723
02:12:52.800 --> 02:12:57.729
cook you over a grill. And slowly, they roast the body.
2724
02:12:58.270 --> 02:13:00.930
And then they cut it into chunks. And they eat
2725
02:13:00.949 --> 02:13:02.090
them with, like, little toothpicks.
2726
02:13:02.789 --> 02:13:02.909
And.
2727
02:13:04.079 --> 02:13:05.859
They eat it until everything's gone. They eat the bones.
2728
02:13:06.340 --> 02:13:08.079
They eat the brains. They eat everything.
2729
02:13:08.100 --> 02:13:09.529
They eat human brains. Yeah.
2730
02:13:09.909 --> 02:13:13.050
And the purpose, as best I've been able to figure out,
2731
02:13:13.550 --> 02:13:15.810
anthropologists have tried to answer this, so my answer might
2732
02:13:15.850 --> 02:13:18.250
not be theirs, but it's based on interviews with the people,
2733
02:13:19.029 --> 02:13:23.180
is to give your relatives eternal life. Because they live
2734
02:13:23.220 --> 02:13:24.960
in you, and you're going to live in somebody else,
2735
02:13:24.979 --> 02:13:29.380
so you just continue living. But exocannibalism, I kill a
2736
02:13:29.399 --> 02:13:31.600
guy in warfare, I'm going to eat him like an animal.
2737
02:13:31.640 --> 02:13:33.560
I just chop him up and grill him and eat
2738
02:13:33.600 --> 02:13:35.199
it and throw the bones off into the forest.
2739
02:13:35.420 --> 02:13:35.899
Boy.
2740
02:13:35.960 --> 02:13:36.899
So that's totally different.
2741
02:13:37.539 --> 02:13:39.560
Some Native Americans practice that.
2742
02:13:40.000 --> 02:13:41.180
Yeah.
2743
02:13:43.199 --> 02:13:45.670
It's been said. But eating the brain, though, wouldn't that–
2744
02:13:45.760 --> 02:13:48.659
what is that disease? What is this called? Jakob Kretzfeld?
2745
02:13:48.859 --> 02:13:49.479
Is that what it's called?
2746
02:13:49.680 --> 02:13:51.560
Yeah, something like that. I should know that.
2747
02:13:51.979 --> 02:13:53.739
But it's mad cow disease essentially.
2748
02:13:53.819 --> 02:13:58.010
It's like that, yeah. So– but they don't eat people
2749
02:13:58.050 --> 02:14:01.810
all the time. They eat dead relatives. And if anybody's
2750
02:14:01.850 --> 02:14:04.130
ever gotten that disease, it's never been registered.
2751
02:14:04.310 --> 02:14:08.250
That's crazy. But I mean, even if you're eating dead relatives,
2752
02:14:08.289 --> 02:14:10.510
you eat a dead relative, I would imagine you can
2753
02:14:10.550 --> 02:14:11.550
get prion disease.
2754
02:14:12.170 --> 02:14:15.510
Yeah, but it depends on how many die. There's a
2755
02:14:15.529 --> 02:14:17.609
whole etiquette about it. You're never allowed to say that
2756
02:14:17.909 --> 02:14:19.800
it just tastes really good. You know, for example, you
2757
02:14:19.840 --> 02:14:20.319
can't say that.
2758
02:14:20.340 --> 02:14:22.920
You can't say delicious. Yeah, you can't say that. Uncle
2759
02:14:22.939 --> 02:14:23.439
Tom is yummy.
2760
02:14:23.520 --> 02:14:25.760
And I've talked to some of the older men who
2761
02:14:25.819 --> 02:14:29.229
have eaten, they're dead, and they say, oh, the The
2762
02:14:29.270 --> 02:14:32.010
babies taste really good, but you can't say that.
2763
02:14:33.270 --> 02:14:35.909
The babies taste really good. It's rough.
2764
02:14:36.729 --> 02:14:42.260
It's like human veal. But the Brazilian government and missionaries
2765
02:14:42.319 --> 02:14:44.300
put a stop to that in 62.
2766
02:14:44.300 --> 02:14:47.600
Good move. Why do they let it sit for three
2767
02:14:47.619 --> 02:14:48.439
days before they cook it?
2768
02:14:48.439 --> 02:14:50.270
Because it takes that long for the relatives to come
2769
02:14:50.770 --> 02:14:52.510
because they might be in other villages. So they've got
2770
02:14:52.529 --> 02:14:53.850
to send runners out to bring.
2771
02:14:53.710 --> 02:14:55.909
The whole family together. Doesn't the meat start rotting? Yeah.
2772
02:14:56.130 --> 02:14:57.979
It starts to smell pretty bad. And there are a
2773
02:14:57.979 --> 02:15:00.680
lot of stories about people puking after every bite.
2774
02:15:01.159 --> 02:15:06.020
Oh, these are people that could drink that puke beer. Yeah, yeah. Oh,
2775
02:15:06.039 --> 02:15:06.760
my God.
2776
02:15:07.060 --> 02:15:14.300
Yeah. So you realize cultural differences aren't that superficial.
2777
02:15:14.380 --> 02:15:17.680
What's also probably meat is probably extremely valuable to them.
2778
02:15:18.140 --> 02:15:20.220
And they just probably think, look, there's no reason for
2779
02:15:20.239 --> 02:15:21.979
this to go to waste when it could sustain us.
2780
02:15:22.340 --> 02:15:24.659
It would be very interesting to go back in time
2781
02:15:24.720 --> 02:15:28.229
and see how the customs started. They could have started
2782
02:15:28.300 --> 02:15:30.300
out of hunger, and then you dress it up with
2783
02:15:30.340 --> 02:15:34.720
some religious beliefs. Or the religious beliefs could have come first,
2784
02:15:34.819 --> 02:15:38.239
and you started doing it. But they do have oral
2785
02:15:38.279 --> 02:15:42.659
histories about it. But the oral histories never say we
2786
02:15:43.039 --> 02:15:45.319
were short of meat, so we ate Joe. We ate
2787
02:15:45.359 --> 02:15:51.300
our buddy. But they do say we want to help
2788
02:15:51.319 --> 02:15:53.420
them live in us, and we will live in somebody else.
2789
02:15:53.460 --> 02:15:55.159
So that's the explanation you get.
2790
02:15:55.479 --> 02:15:56.000
Wow.
2791
02:15:56.279 --> 02:15:56.899
Or that I got.
2792
02:15:57.619 --> 02:16:01.079
Wow. Well, when you got there a few years after,
2793
02:16:01.100 --> 02:16:01.279
it was.
2794
02:16:02.399 --> 02:16:04.939
Yeah, I didn't start working with them until 1985. Okay.
2795
02:16:04.960 --> 02:16:07.460
So it was 20-something years after.
2796
02:16:07.500 --> 02:16:09.420
But they still had stories about... Oh, yeah.
2797
02:16:09.439 --> 02:16:10.979
They still had a lot of stories about it. And,
2798
02:16:11.640 --> 02:16:14.409
you know, anybody over 30 had done it.
2799
02:16:15.050 --> 02:16:17.710
Is there any kind of cannibalism that goes on in
2800
02:16:17.729 --> 02:16:18.590
the Amazon still?
2801
02:16:19.789 --> 02:16:22.930
Probably, but none that I know of. But there are
2802
02:16:22.970 --> 02:16:26.329
still some uncontacted tribes. And there are still tribes that
2803
02:16:26.369 --> 02:16:28.930
behave one way when foreigners are around and another way
2804
02:16:28.970 --> 02:16:33.389
when they're not. I have a friend, she died last year,
2805
02:16:33.430 --> 02:16:37.629
but she was a missionary among those people from the 50s.
2806
02:16:38.479 --> 02:16:42.540
So she remembers the cannibalism. And she told me, although
2807
02:16:42.620 --> 02:16:45.139
some anthropologists deny this, but I think she knows them
2808
02:16:45.159 --> 02:16:48.620
better than any anthropologist who's ever been there, that she said,
2809
02:16:48.700 --> 02:16:50.620
I think when nobody's around, they still do that.
2810
02:16:52.219 --> 02:16:52.319
Yeah.
2811
02:16:52.360 --> 02:16:52.579
Yeah.
2812
02:16:53.290 --> 02:16:54.450
I bet they do, too.
2813
02:16:54.690 --> 02:16:55.409
They don't have warfare.
2814
02:16:55.430 --> 02:16:57.610
They listen to someone else. They don't have warfare.
2815
02:16:57.850 --> 02:17:02.209
Not anymore. They did. But that's been stopped, and they're
2816
02:17:02.270 --> 02:17:04.840
isolated from other groups that they used to be enemies with.
2817
02:17:04.940 --> 02:17:08.479
But there are still some who believe the old-time religion.
2818
02:17:09.559 --> 02:17:15.979
And the old-time religion says, eat your dead. So it's
2819
02:17:16.180 --> 02:17:19.069
quite possible that it happens. But what you find is
2820
02:17:19.100 --> 02:17:22.639
that since the 80s— Most of the groups that have
2821
02:17:22.700 --> 02:17:27.399
regular contact with the outside have undergone a very rapid
2822
02:17:27.479 --> 02:17:35.040
process of enculturation into Brazilian society. So even among the
2823
02:17:35.079 --> 02:17:38.649
Pita Hasnauth in the decades since I was there regularly,
2824
02:17:39.370 --> 02:17:42.209
I see pictures of them because my ex-wife still lives
2825
02:17:42.270 --> 02:17:45.930
right next to them. And she sends me short videos
2826
02:17:46.329 --> 02:17:48.049
and pictures of them when they come up to her
2827
02:17:48.870 --> 02:17:52.040
little wooden shack on... the Trans-Amazon Highway by their river.
2828
02:17:52.799 --> 02:17:55.819
And they're dressing very differently now. And some of them
2829
02:17:56.479 --> 02:17:59.579
are speaking some Portuguese. Not very well, but they're speaking
2830
02:17:59.620 --> 02:18:00.059
some Portuguese.
2831
02:18:00.079 --> 02:18:02.040
And your ex-wife is still a missionary?
2832
02:18:02.239 --> 02:18:07.219
Yeah, she's still trying to convert them. No conversions. They're
2833
02:18:07.239 --> 02:18:07.959
not going to convert.
2834
02:18:08.000 --> 02:18:12.309
Boy, you got to give it up to her for having, like, stick-to-itiveness.
2835
02:18:12.889 --> 02:18:15.270
I mean, that's really determined.
2836
02:18:15.709 --> 02:18:20.329
She is absolutely a New Testament first century Christian in
2837
02:18:20.389 --> 02:18:21.170
terms of her faith.
2838
02:18:21.409 --> 02:18:22.010
Wow.
2839
02:18:22.030 --> 02:18:24.670
And she doesn't deviate, and she's not afraid of anything.
2840
02:18:25.309 --> 02:18:29.450
I mean, we've been in many life-threatening situations, and I
2841
02:18:29.489 --> 02:18:32.510
don't tend to get afraid, and she definitely is not afraid,
2842
02:18:32.590 --> 02:18:33.110
not ever.
2843
02:18:33.729 --> 02:18:35.989
So is that because of her belief that she believes
2844
02:18:36.010 --> 02:18:38.069
that God is looking out for her and if she dies,
2845
02:18:38.110 --> 02:18:39.290
she's going to go to heaven anyway?
2846
02:18:39.530 --> 02:18:44.850
Yeah. The constant, a common refrain among Christian missionaries is,
2847
02:18:45.909 --> 02:18:50.430
I'm immortal until my task is done. God will protect
2848
02:18:50.489 --> 02:18:52.110
me until he's done with me. And so if he's
2849
02:18:52.129 --> 02:18:53.670
not done with me, I don't have to worry about it.
2850
02:18:53.670 --> 02:18:56.010
And if he is, great. Wow.
2851
02:18:56.799 --> 02:18:58.600
There's a lot of power in that too. I mean,
2852
02:18:58.620 --> 02:19:01.159
how many people just live in this constant state of
2853
02:19:01.399 --> 02:19:02.479
existential angst?
2854
02:19:02.979 --> 02:19:04.870
Yeah. That's something she's never had.
2855
02:19:05.149 --> 02:19:05.629
Wow.
2856
02:19:05.690 --> 02:19:06.790
She doesn't have that.
2857
02:19:06.809 --> 02:19:07.989
There's a lot of value to that.
2858
02:19:08.149 --> 02:19:10.530
It's what attracted me to her so much, besides the
2859
02:19:10.549 --> 02:19:13.719
fact that she was really cute, that attracted me to
2860
02:19:13.750 --> 02:19:14.950
her a lot when we first met.
2861
02:19:14.979 --> 02:19:17.139
Were you bummed out when she wanted a divorce because
2862
02:19:17.159 --> 02:19:18.040
you lost your faith?
2863
02:19:18.860 --> 02:19:21.420
Well, by that time, we weren't getting along that well
2864
02:19:21.459 --> 02:19:26.479
because she's very anti... She's not anti-science per se, but
2865
02:19:26.540 --> 02:19:32.489
she's anti-helicopter science. She feels that too many people who
2866
02:19:32.530 --> 02:19:36.190
do studies of indigenous groups and languages, come in for
2867
02:19:36.229 --> 02:19:38.739
a short time, go out and just speak a lot
2868
02:19:38.750 --> 02:19:41.379
of bullshit that nobody's ever going to test. And so
2869
02:19:41.420 --> 02:19:43.819
she hates that. And she's seen it happen with the Piraha.
2870
02:19:43.899 --> 02:19:46.700
I've seen it happen with the Piraha. I've seen a
2871
02:19:46.739 --> 02:19:49.040
couple of anthropologists and linguists go in and do doctoral
2872
02:19:49.059 --> 02:19:53.120
dissertations on them that are like totally ridiculous. But if
2873
02:19:53.219 --> 02:19:56.780
I say something, I'm a gringo. And I'm jealous because
2874
02:19:56.979 --> 02:19:57.879
it disagrees with me.
2875
02:19:58.479 --> 02:20:00.899
Do you think that they do that because no one's
2876
02:20:00.920 --> 02:20:03.020
going to check and so they just say, I want
2877
02:20:03.040 --> 02:20:04.719
to just write whatever I want to write?
2878
02:20:05.180 --> 02:20:10.040
That does happen. That definitely happens. It's also because people
2879
02:20:10.100 --> 02:20:12.579
realize it sounds really good to go study an indigenous
2880
02:20:12.620 --> 02:20:14.840
culture or an indigenous language. When you get there and
2881
02:20:14.860 --> 02:20:17.879
you find out this is so damn hard, I have
2882
02:20:17.979 --> 02:20:21.559
no words to put in how hard this is.
2883
02:20:21.620 --> 02:20:22.319
So they bullshit.
2884
02:20:22.479 --> 02:20:26.379
Yeah. Because, you know, you want to say to a Piraha,
2885
02:20:26.420 --> 02:20:29.389
what is this? And so how do you ask that? Well,
2886
02:20:30.250 --> 02:20:33.729
the phrase in Pirahas, he go, but where do you
2887
02:20:33.770 --> 02:20:36.670
get that phrase? You can't ask somebody how to ask,
2888
02:20:36.870 --> 02:20:39.270
what is this? Right. If you don't know the language.
2889
02:20:39.719 --> 02:20:42.680
So you have to watch them very carefully and somebody
2890
02:20:42.719 --> 02:20:45.200
might get something new or you might even give them
2891
02:20:45.280 --> 02:20:48.059
something new that they've never seen, hoping somebody's going to
2892
02:20:48.200 --> 02:20:50.180
ask them, what is this? So you can write it
2893
02:20:50.219 --> 02:20:52.079
down and then test it. And that's how I got it.
2894
02:20:52.610 --> 02:20:54.909
And so now you're fluent in Pirahas.
2895
02:20:55.350 --> 02:20:55.590
Yes.
2896
02:20:55.850 --> 02:20:58.129
So you can go and have a conversation with them
2897
02:20:58.229 --> 02:21:01.530
so you can explore some of these more nuanced subjects
2898
02:21:01.889 --> 02:21:03.549
and do it in their language.
2899
02:21:03.750 --> 02:21:03.969
Yes.
2900
02:21:04.389 --> 02:21:06.430
So you can kind of translate things in a way
2901
02:21:06.450 --> 02:21:07.889
that they're going to understand what you're saying.
2902
02:21:08.530 --> 02:21:11.430
Yes. And that's what takes the most practice. So when
2903
02:21:11.469 --> 02:21:15.469
I first translated the Gospel of Mark into Pitaha, I
2904
02:21:15.489 --> 02:21:18.149
thought I had done a marvelous job. And I would
2905
02:21:18.190 --> 02:21:20.409
read bits out to the Pitaha and they could explain
2906
02:21:20.450 --> 02:21:22.530
it to me and it seemed like they were understanding it.
2907
02:21:23.899 --> 02:21:27.440
But I used... a grammar that was largely based on English.
2908
02:21:27.479 --> 02:21:29.799
So when I read to them large sections, they were
2909
02:21:29.840 --> 02:21:32.540
totally lost. They couldn't understand it at all. And what
2910
02:21:32.559 --> 02:21:35.139
does that mean? It means I got it wrong. It
2911
02:21:35.200 --> 02:21:37.760
means that I haven't figured out the language as well
2912
02:21:37.799 --> 02:21:40.219
as I thought I did. And that's very humbling when
2913
02:21:40.239 --> 02:21:42.840
you spent so many years trying to do it. So
2914
02:21:42.889 --> 02:21:46.149
I had to start from the ground up again. And
2915
02:21:46.170 --> 02:21:48.709
these are all, you know, before you can learn a language,
2916
02:21:48.729 --> 02:21:51.670
you have to murder it. And before you can carry
2917
02:21:51.709 --> 02:21:54.750
on a conversation, you just feel like an idiot for years.
2918
02:21:56.110 --> 02:21:59.819
And for one thing, people who go in to do
2919
02:21:59.879 --> 02:22:02.420
a PhD dissertation on a language like this are going
2920
02:22:02.440 --> 02:22:04.840
to take one to two years of their life, and
2921
02:22:04.879 --> 02:22:08.430
that's it. And that's not enough time. It takes a
2922
02:22:08.489 --> 02:22:10.110
year to get fluent in the language. And I know
2923
02:22:10.170 --> 02:22:13.770
many people who've written about many different Amazonian languages who
2924
02:22:13.809 --> 02:22:16.129
can't speak a word of the language or speak very
2925
02:22:16.190 --> 02:22:18.770
little of it. They'll tell people they speak it, but
2926
02:22:18.950 --> 02:22:21.659
you go with them and you realize they don't speak
2927
02:22:21.700 --> 02:22:23.829
it that well. So if you don't speak it that well,
2928
02:22:23.870 --> 02:22:27.590
how can you ask them to distinguish subtle meaning differences?
2929
02:22:28.090 --> 02:22:33.110
You can't. And that means that a lot of, you know,
2930
02:22:33.639 --> 02:22:37.139
this kind of field work, which is so vital, is
2931
02:22:37.200 --> 02:22:39.360
not as reliable as we would like to think it is.
2932
02:22:40.120 --> 02:22:44.719
That's unfortunate. Yeah. Especially if a young student is coming
2933
02:22:44.760 --> 02:22:47.819
along and they're interested in pursuing it further and they're
2934
02:22:47.920 --> 02:22:50.629
starting off with some faulty assumptions. Yeah.
2935
02:22:51.229 --> 02:22:54.829
Yes, and the other problem is people learn a theory
2936
02:22:55.350 --> 02:22:59.610
in graduate school, and they take it as their job
2937
02:22:59.649 --> 02:23:02.850
of their dissertation, and this isn't limited to just linguistics
2938
02:23:02.889 --> 02:23:04.729
and anthropology, but they take it as the job of
2939
02:23:04.770 --> 02:23:10.329
their dissertation to support that theory. So, you know, it's
2940
02:23:10.350 --> 02:23:12.549
like Paul Simon says, a man sees what he wants
2941
02:23:12.610 --> 02:23:16.590
to hear and disregards the rest. When you're trying to
2942
02:23:16.629 --> 02:23:21.819
do theoretical research, field research, shouldn't be that theoretically motivated.
2943
02:23:21.860 --> 02:23:24.620
It should be basically descriptive. And then you can do
2944
02:23:24.659 --> 02:23:27.139
the theory later. But most people bring the theory into it.
2945
02:23:27.940 --> 02:23:34.250
And you can't totally divorce those two. But you see
2946
02:23:34.290 --> 02:23:36.770
a fact. So, for example, I've worked with Pinaha and
2947
02:23:36.790 --> 02:23:39.719
I'm asking for a certain kind of data. And they
2948
02:23:39.760 --> 02:23:44.010
don't give me what I wanted. And I thought, This
2949
02:23:44.069 --> 02:23:45.790
guy's not giving me what I want. What's wrong with him?
2950
02:23:45.829 --> 02:23:49.239
What am I saying wrong? Is he stupid? And then
2951
02:23:49.719 --> 02:23:52.079
as I learned to speak the language better, I realized, oh,
2952
02:23:52.139 --> 02:23:54.459
he's giving me exactly what I needed, and I was
2953
02:23:54.520 --> 02:23:58.020
too stupid to know it. And so that's hard. You're
2954
02:23:58.059 --> 02:24:00.860
the one working for the PhD. He's just a hunter-gatherer,
2955
02:24:00.879 --> 02:24:02.959
and it turns out he's at least as smart as
2956
02:24:03.000 --> 02:24:04.860
you are, and often he's able to know what you
2957
02:24:04.899 --> 02:24:08.049
need better than you do. And that's another part of
2958
02:24:08.090 --> 02:24:10.549
the humbling experience of doing field research.
2959
02:24:12.340 --> 02:24:15.649
The amount of commitment that's involved in going as deep
2960
02:24:15.709 --> 02:24:17.729
as you went with this is really crazy.
2961
02:24:18.829 --> 02:24:21.370
Yeah, I give demonstrations, and you can find some on
2962
02:24:21.389 --> 02:24:23.790
the Internet, where I take a language that I know
2963
02:24:23.829 --> 02:24:26.889
nothing about, and I switch to Pitaha, which I know
2964
02:24:26.909 --> 02:24:29.739
they know nothing about, and within 20 or 30 minutes,
2965
02:24:30.139 --> 02:24:33.500
I'm able to explain to the audience some basic facts
2966
02:24:33.559 --> 02:24:35.920
about how their grammar works and what their basic vocabulary,
2967
02:24:35.940 --> 02:24:37.840
you know, a lot of basic vocabulary. And I do
2968
02:24:37.879 --> 02:24:39.760
this to linguists. I've done it in front of as
2969
02:24:39.799 --> 02:24:44.180
many as 500 linguists at a time, Um, and, um,
2970
02:24:45.059 --> 02:24:46.879
then I tell them that a lot of people think
2971
02:24:46.920 --> 02:24:49.579
this is magic. This is really cool. I said, what
2972
02:24:49.620 --> 02:24:51.819
you've seen here is me working for about an hour.
2973
02:24:52.180 --> 02:24:54.459
Now you just do that every day for two years
2974
02:24:55.079 --> 02:24:58.860
and you're in, you know, and that's the part it's intensive.
2975
02:24:59.479 --> 02:25:02.059
I get a headache when I do these demonstrations because
2976
02:25:02.100 --> 02:25:06.309
my concentration is so hard and, you know, um, you
2977
02:25:06.350 --> 02:25:10.319
miss obvious things and you say bad things and, um,
2978
02:25:10.969 --> 02:25:13.950
You're just self-correcting all the time. You're just constantly, you
2979
02:25:13.989 --> 02:25:16.270
start off this wide and you're trying to get this narrow,
2980
02:25:16.649 --> 02:25:19.010
get down to this point of what it actually means.
2981
02:25:19.149 --> 02:25:22.729
And as you work through that, there are no shortcuts.
2982
02:25:23.209 --> 02:25:25.709
There's no shortcut to doing that. And you need to
2983
02:25:25.770 --> 02:25:28.750
be well-trained and you need to be very committed and
2984
02:25:28.770 --> 02:25:30.850
you need to have a little bit of talent and
2985
02:25:30.909 --> 02:25:35.920
work really hard. And when people see how easy it
2986
02:25:35.959 --> 02:25:39.000
looks and then they try it, they realize they're seeing
2987
02:25:39.020 --> 02:25:41.889
me at, 20 years down the road from when I started.
2988
02:25:43.750 --> 02:25:46.829
But yeah, there are methods to use to learn a
2989
02:25:46.870 --> 02:25:48.629
language where there's no language in common.
2990
02:25:48.930 --> 02:25:54.590
But it's got to be very difficult to achieve a
2991
02:25:54.889 --> 02:25:58.069
fluent understanding of their language. And the way you did
2992
02:25:58.129 --> 02:26:01.750
it from the ground, literally from starting from what is this?
2993
02:26:02.129 --> 02:26:05.069
How do you say that? And then remembering it, piecing
2994
02:26:05.110 --> 02:26:07.450
it together. And then you have to write it down.
2995
02:26:07.469 --> 02:26:08.510
Then you're writing it down.
2996
02:26:08.750 --> 02:26:08.930
Right.
2997
02:26:09.309 --> 02:26:12.809
Oh, my goodness. And imagine if a guy like you
2998
02:26:12.889 --> 02:26:15.270
didn't do that. Like how many people are willing to
2999
02:26:15.329 --> 02:26:19.500
do that? Especially how many people that are, you know,
3000
02:26:19.639 --> 02:26:24.100
you're a linguist. You want to be a working intellectual.
3001
02:26:24.139 --> 02:26:27.180
You don't necessarily want to get malaria. You don't want
3002
02:26:27.200 --> 02:26:28.719
to get eaten by a jaguar. You don't want to
3003
02:26:28.760 --> 02:26:29.639
live in the jungle.
3004
02:26:30.979 --> 02:26:32.909
So there are people who would like to spend that
3005
02:26:32.940 --> 02:26:35.229
much time, but they don't have the funding.
3006
02:26:35.250 --> 02:26:36.209
Right.
3007
02:26:37.270 --> 02:26:41.129
You know, the National Science Foundation and the Brazilian National
3008
02:26:41.149 --> 02:26:44.489
Science Foundation and the British equivalent of the National Science
3009
02:26:44.510 --> 02:26:48.399
Foundation have all funded my research over the years. But
3010
02:26:48.780 --> 02:26:51.319
the bulk of my research was funded by being a missionary.
3011
02:26:52.500 --> 02:26:54.700
And so I had all these years because churches were
3012
02:26:54.739 --> 02:26:57.120
supporting me. But today... But did.
3013
02:26:57.059 --> 02:26:59.180
They ever ask, how come you haven't converted anybody yet?
3014
02:26:59.809 --> 02:27:02.110
Well, they ask me that all the time. I've had people...
3015
02:27:02.190 --> 02:27:05.030
I showed slides of the Pidaha to a church here
3016
02:27:05.069 --> 02:27:10.360
in Texas, in Dallas. And the people started getting up
3017
02:27:10.420 --> 02:27:13.120
and leaving. And I thought they were interested. They gave
3018
02:27:13.159 --> 02:27:15.549
me money to work in these people. And I said,
3019
02:27:15.569 --> 02:27:18.149
what's the problem? And they said, you're no good at all.
3020
02:27:18.649 --> 02:27:20.409
And I said, well, what are you seeing that you
3021
02:27:20.450 --> 02:27:23.530
don't like? They said, these people are naked. And if
3022
02:27:23.569 --> 02:27:25.889
you're a Christian missionary, why haven't you taught them to
3023
02:27:25.909 --> 02:27:29.040
wear clothes? And I said... Well, they don't want to
3024
02:27:29.079 --> 02:27:31.440
wear clothes. I said, what in the Bible says you
3025
02:27:31.459 --> 02:27:35.329
have to wear clothes? They said, Adam saw Eve's nakedness
3026
02:27:35.409 --> 02:27:38.989
and they were ashamed of each other. You must wear clothes.
3027
02:27:39.170 --> 02:27:41.600
You're not even teaching them the basics of Christianity. And
3028
02:27:41.620 --> 02:27:44.239
I thought, you know, I guess I'm not. You know,
3029
02:27:44.299 --> 02:27:46.360
I didn't realize that's not part of the basics of
3030
02:27:46.399 --> 02:27:47.399
Christianity for me.
3031
02:27:47.420 --> 02:27:47.590
But....
3032
02:27:50.030 --> 02:27:51.350
You know, how do you tell a guy who wears
3033
02:27:51.409 --> 02:27:57.309
a loincloth that it's three inches too short? You know,
3034
02:27:58.250 --> 02:28:00.709
something's peeking out there. So it's not, they don't wear
3035
02:28:00.750 --> 02:28:03.610
it for modesty, you know. They wear it to keep
3036
02:28:03.649 --> 02:28:07.989
from sticks getting poked in your penis. And so modesty
3037
02:28:08.049 --> 02:28:10.610
has nothing to do with it. Why would you, you know,
3038
02:28:11.229 --> 02:28:13.829
to the average pita ha, a woman's breast is about
3039
02:28:13.870 --> 02:28:17.649
as erotic as an elbow. You know, you see a woman,
3040
02:28:17.690 --> 02:28:20.799
she's nursing her baby. And then the baby stops nursing
3041
02:28:20.860 --> 02:28:23.399
and she's still talking to you and her tits hanging out.
3042
02:28:23.520 --> 02:28:25.659
And it doesn't mean anything to her. And after a while,
3043
02:28:25.680 --> 02:28:27.340
it doesn't mean anything to you either. You know, what's
3044
02:28:27.360 --> 02:28:30.879
the big deal? And so to get across the idea
3045
02:28:30.920 --> 02:28:34.450
that it may be clothes that's causing this problem instead
3046
02:28:34.469 --> 02:28:38.590
of going naked, which then eliminates the problem of lust.
3047
02:28:39.370 --> 02:28:42.129
I mean, it's a hard concept for some churches, but
3048
02:28:42.190 --> 02:28:44.829
churches tend to get very impatient. But then the National
3049
02:28:44.889 --> 02:28:47.520
Science Foundation, for example, if I say I'm going to
3050
02:28:47.540 --> 02:28:51.979
go study language X, and I need funding for five years. Oh, no,
3051
02:28:52.020 --> 02:28:54.440
we fund those, and that's a year's funding. Yeah, but
3052
02:28:54.760 --> 02:28:56.520
nobody who goes out for a year really learns it
3053
02:28:56.559 --> 02:28:59.399
that well. I need to learn it a lot better. Oh, yeah,
3054
02:28:59.420 --> 02:29:01.180
we'll go somewhere else. We're not giving you the money
3055
02:29:01.219 --> 02:29:01.479
for that.
3056
02:29:02.479 --> 02:29:04.879
Oh, that's ridiculous. Are there really a lot of people
3057
02:29:04.899 --> 02:29:07.040
that are willing to do that kind of extensive work?
3058
02:29:07.260 --> 02:29:08.159
I wouldn't say a lot.
3059
02:29:08.549 --> 02:29:10.110
But enough to do it?
3060
02:29:10.440 --> 02:29:17.270
Well, there's 8,000 languages, and there's maybe 2,000. 3,000, let's
3061
02:29:17.309 --> 02:29:21.049
say 5,000 linguists in the whole world, and only a
3062
02:29:21.270 --> 02:29:23.190
small percentage of them want to do this kind of work.
3063
02:29:23.750 --> 02:29:25.290
The rest of them, most of them want to do
3064
02:29:25.350 --> 02:29:27.170
Chomsky's kind of work, where you sit at your desk
3065
02:29:27.590 --> 02:29:30.110
and you say, language has this property, and it must
3066
02:29:30.290 --> 02:29:34.110
also have this property. And so the rubber's never meeting
3067
02:29:34.159 --> 02:29:37.780
the road. I mean, if you can do your field
3068
02:29:37.819 --> 02:29:41.360
research on database, I shouldn't say that because that's what
3069
02:29:41.399 --> 02:29:43.659
my son does. He's also a linguist, and he grew
3070
02:29:43.700 --> 02:29:46.840
up in an Indian tribe And he also did a
3071
02:29:46.879 --> 02:29:49.379
dissertation on another tribe that he learned to speak the language.
3072
02:29:49.819 --> 02:29:52.280
But nowadays, he goes through databases and comes up with
3073
02:29:52.299 --> 02:29:57.479
statistical generalizations. And it's pretty interesting. But he'll tell me
3074
02:29:57.520 --> 02:29:58.819
flat out, he said, yeah, I don't want to do
3075
02:29:58.860 --> 02:30:02.000
that fieldwork anymore. That's really demanding, even though he grew
3076
02:30:02.059 --> 02:30:04.500
up there. And that's the way most people are.
3077
02:30:05.040 --> 02:30:10.020
How many more cultures that have completely different languages and
3078
02:30:10.069 --> 02:30:14.780
completely different sets of rules and structure are out there
3079
02:30:14.840 --> 02:30:15.670
that we're not aware of?
3080
02:30:17.690 --> 02:30:21.290
Well, when I was, back in the 80s, they used
3081
02:30:21.309 --> 02:30:24.590
to say there's about 5,000 languages. So 20 years later,
3082
02:30:24.590 --> 02:30:30.270
21 years later, we're saying, or 31 years later, we're
3083
02:30:30.309 --> 02:30:34.280
saying there are 8,000. Languages die out at the rate
3084
02:30:34.340 --> 02:30:37.879
of about one every two weeks. So they're dying. And
3085
02:30:38.360 --> 02:30:41.100
once they die, we can never recover that information. But
3086
02:30:41.239 --> 02:30:44.879
also languages are being born. on a regular basis because
3087
02:30:45.540 --> 02:30:48.459
you talk like who you talk with. So why are
3088
02:30:48.500 --> 02:30:53.200
Portuguese and Spanish separate languages? Because you've got the Eber
3089
02:30:53.250 --> 02:30:56.190
River and you've got natural divides in that part of
3090
02:30:56.229 --> 02:30:59.270
the Iberian Peninsula. And so they stop talking to each
3091
02:30:59.329 --> 02:31:02.190
other and so their speech diverges. That's how Latin became
3092
02:31:02.309 --> 02:31:07.850
French and Romanian and Germanic became English. So they stop
3093
02:31:07.889 --> 02:31:10.969
talking to each other. So as soon as people stop talking,
3094
02:31:11.389 --> 02:31:14.889
their language evolves. And they have different languages. So British
3095
02:31:14.950 --> 02:31:19.049
English and American English have evolved apart. And yet at
3096
02:31:19.069 --> 02:31:21.670
the same time, we have television and movies and things
3097
02:31:21.709 --> 02:31:25.809
that keeps them sort of together. But if you don't
3098
02:31:25.870 --> 02:31:30.350
have media and you don't have that, then eventually they're talking.
3099
02:31:31.690 --> 02:31:33.149
They're not talking with each other at all and they
3100
02:31:33.170 --> 02:31:36.940
become different languages. And that's where most languages come from.
3101
02:31:37.299 --> 02:31:40.879
Wow. And there's got to be a lot of these
3102
02:31:40.920 --> 02:31:42.930
tribes that aren't talking to each other. And how many
3103
02:31:42.950 --> 02:31:46.120
of these tribes have been investigated, and how many people
3104
02:31:46.139 --> 02:31:49.379
have been embedded? Are there tribes out there where no
3105
02:31:49.500 --> 02:31:52.559
one has ever examined the language, no one's ever embedded
3106
02:31:52.579 --> 02:31:53.680
themselves in their culture?
3107
02:31:55.360 --> 02:31:59.159
There probably are over 1,000 where no one's gone there,
3108
02:31:59.200 --> 02:32:02.739
but there are a couple of thousand where no scientist
3109
02:32:02.799 --> 02:32:05.219
has gone there to study their language or their culture.
3110
02:32:05.239 --> 02:32:06.159
A couple thousand.
3111
02:32:06.299 --> 02:32:08.809
Yeah, a couple thousand, I would say, if not more.
3112
02:32:09.309 --> 02:32:11.870
And they probably have completely different languages.
3113
02:32:12.190 --> 02:32:15.870
Yeah, you know, we're worried, and we should be, about
3114
02:32:15.889 --> 02:32:19.110
the disappearance of certain bird species and all these other
3115
02:32:19.129 --> 02:32:22.149
kinds of species. And we should be concerned about that.
3116
02:32:22.850 --> 02:32:26.190
But we're not concerned enough about the disappearance of these
3117
02:32:26.250 --> 02:32:30.209
languages and how the new languages are arising. And why
3118
02:32:30.250 --> 02:32:32.590
should we be concerned? Well, for one thing, every language
3119
02:32:33.350 --> 02:32:37.350
is like a library. It's a repository of information that
3120
02:32:37.450 --> 02:32:41.340
is lost when they switch to Portuguese. Because Portuguese doesn't
3121
02:32:41.379 --> 02:32:43.500
have all the same knowledge embedded in it. It doesn't
3122
02:32:43.540 --> 02:32:45.979
have the same way of talking about the world. There's
3123
02:32:46.020 --> 02:32:50.620
a lot that's missing. Every pitahã, every child, every woman,
3124
02:32:50.729 --> 02:32:54.469
every man knows the name of every species of plant
3125
02:32:54.610 --> 02:32:58.030
and animal in their environment. They will never just say tree.
3126
02:32:58.370 --> 02:33:00.709
Like I walked with the pitahã into the jungle and
3127
02:33:00.750 --> 02:33:03.190
they said, this is what we call this. And so
3128
02:33:03.229 --> 02:33:04.760
I write it down. What do you call it?
3129
02:33:04.889 --> 02:33:05.110
Tree.
3130
02:33:05.129 --> 02:33:07.309
What do you call that over there? Tree.
3131
02:33:07.329 --> 02:33:07.469
Tree.
3132
02:33:08.149 --> 02:33:08.940
And what's that over there?
3133
02:33:09.229 --> 02:33:09.440
Tree.
3134
02:33:09.549 --> 02:33:11.450
They said, you just have one word for all these things.
3135
02:33:12.270 --> 02:33:15.610
But they're calling them by the species name. And I'm thinking, well,
3136
02:33:16.149 --> 02:33:17.790
I told them, I said, well, there's some Americans who
3137
02:33:17.829 --> 02:33:19.469
do know all the different names, but I'm just not
3138
02:33:19.549 --> 02:33:21.649
one of them. But they find it hard to believe
3139
02:33:21.690 --> 02:33:24.750
that any American could get by without that knowledge of
3140
02:33:24.889 --> 02:33:30.170
their environment. So when that language goes, we've lost the difference.
3141
02:33:30.190 --> 02:33:32.969
So a friend of mine did a study on how
3142
02:33:33.309 --> 02:33:36.510
a group in the Amazon classify birds. And they don't
3143
02:33:36.569 --> 02:33:41.010
classify them based on their anatomy like Western science. They
3144
02:33:41.049 --> 02:33:44.299
classify them based on what they eat. And so if
3145
02:33:44.340 --> 02:33:46.959
you know their classification, you know what all these birds eat.
3146
02:33:47.440 --> 02:33:49.360
And you know how to deal with those birds to
3147
02:33:49.420 --> 02:33:52.700
capture them or to follow them. And when that language
3148
02:33:52.760 --> 02:33:58.450
is gone, all that knowledge is gone. So it's like
3149
02:33:59.510 --> 02:34:02.250
the Library of Congress has been blown up or something
3150
02:34:02.409 --> 02:34:04.850
when you lose a language. And why do new languages
3151
02:34:04.889 --> 02:34:07.170
come into being? What are the conditions? And what does
3152
02:34:07.209 --> 02:34:09.450
all this mean for us being human beings? How do
3153
02:34:09.489 --> 02:34:12.299
we know ourselves better? How are we to understand our
3154
02:34:12.379 --> 02:34:16.059
species if we don't study all the different exemplars of
3155
02:34:16.120 --> 02:34:21.020
our species? And that's the challenge. And that's what keeps
3156
02:34:21.059 --> 02:34:23.659
the work exciting. But it also is what makes it
3157
02:34:23.680 --> 02:34:28.930
a challenge. Because you tell a really bright 25-year-old or
3158
02:34:28.950 --> 02:34:32.920
24-year-old PhD student, okay, now you have to take off
3159
02:34:32.930 --> 02:34:36.840
to the jungle for three years or four. And they're thinking,
3160
02:34:37.659 --> 02:34:40.059
I could get a job without doing that. You know,
3161
02:34:40.219 --> 02:34:41.739
I don't need to go spend four years in the
3162
02:34:41.780 --> 02:34:44.159
jungle to get a job. And, you know, a professor
3163
02:34:44.200 --> 02:34:46.440
is a pretty cushy job. It doesn't pay well, but
3164
02:34:47.120 --> 02:34:49.379
it's also, it's not like, you know, it's not like
3165
02:34:49.459 --> 02:34:52.120
real labor. And I told, people tell me how hard
3166
02:34:52.180 --> 02:34:53.879
professors work. I said, yeah, well, you know, it does
3167
02:34:53.899 --> 02:34:55.579
take a lot of hours, but I'd rather do this
3168
02:34:55.620 --> 02:34:58.030
than run a jackhammer because I ran a jackhammer. And
3169
02:34:58.069 --> 02:34:59.569
I'll tell you, this is a lot easier than running
3170
02:34:59.590 --> 02:35:03.989
a jackhammer. So, um, But you go off to the
3171
02:35:04.049 --> 02:35:07.489
field and you spend this time. Ironically, anthropologists seem more
3172
02:35:07.549 --> 02:35:09.809
prepared to do this than linguists. And the other ironic
3173
02:35:09.850 --> 02:35:13.489
thing is I know, this is anecdote, I know more
3174
02:35:13.549 --> 02:35:16.399
anthropologists who speak the language fluently than I know linguists
3175
02:35:16.430 --> 02:35:19.899
who speak the language fluently, which I have to put
3176
02:35:19.959 --> 02:35:24.420
down to the pernicious influence of certain theories and linguistics
3177
02:35:24.920 --> 02:35:26.719
that makes people think they don't have to learn a
3178
02:35:26.780 --> 02:35:30.280
language to know how it works. And I tell people,
3179
02:35:30.319 --> 02:35:32.079
when you're going off to do fieldwork, I did write
3180
02:35:32.120 --> 02:35:34.100
a field manual. And I say, the first six months,
3181
02:35:34.540 --> 02:35:37.479
just work on learning the language. Don't take many notes.
3182
02:35:38.040 --> 02:35:40.079
Take notes of words and stuff. So I had a
3183
02:35:40.120 --> 02:35:42.159
goal where I wanted to learn 10 new words a day.
3184
02:35:42.620 --> 02:35:46.559
And I kept a little spiral notebook clip in my
3185
02:35:46.620 --> 02:35:49.280
belt buckle. And I would walk around learning these things.
3186
02:35:49.299 --> 02:35:51.020
And I want to learn new words and write those down.
3187
02:35:51.700 --> 02:35:54.600
And then I would spend the evening memorizing those words.
3188
02:35:54.639 --> 02:35:56.409
And I would try them out again the next day.
3189
02:35:56.420 --> 02:35:58.399
And I'd try to make sentences with them. And when
3190
02:35:58.440 --> 02:36:00.520
people start laughing at you, you know that I didn't
3191
02:36:00.540 --> 02:36:02.680
get that right. And sometimes they like to teach you
3192
02:36:02.700 --> 02:36:06.299
dirty words, right? They think that's hilarious. You know, you'll ask,
3193
02:36:07.620 --> 02:36:09.780
so then I, you know, you want, how do you
3194
02:36:09.829 --> 02:36:12.370
learn the words for genitals, for example? That's kind of
3195
02:36:12.409 --> 02:36:14.729
an embarrassing thing if you stop and think about it.
3196
02:36:15.110 --> 02:36:17.229
So I asked, I started to ask the guy, I said,
3197
02:36:17.250 --> 02:36:18.670
what do you call that? You know, pointed to his
3198
02:36:18.690 --> 02:36:22.590
dick and he said, And he calls, he, you know,
3199
02:36:22.610 --> 02:36:23.450
he says, I'm not going to tell you, but he
3200
02:36:23.489 --> 02:36:25.790
calls a little boy over who's naked and he shows
3201
02:36:25.809 --> 02:36:27.190
me every part of his body. And he said, you
3202
02:36:27.219 --> 02:36:29.440
call this, this and this, that and this, that. And
3203
02:36:29.479 --> 02:36:32.739
then he says, but the names change once they start
3204
02:36:32.780 --> 02:36:37.459
to grow hair. So penis as a boy is different
3205
02:36:37.500 --> 02:36:40.219
from penis as a man and vagina as a girl
3206
02:36:40.299 --> 02:36:43.329
is different from vagina as a woman. And so, you know,
3207
02:36:43.350 --> 02:36:47.530
how do you get those words? You've got to count
3208
02:36:47.590 --> 02:36:49.350
on close friendships, right?
3209
02:36:51.350 --> 02:36:53.030
Like I said at the beginning of this, man, you've
3210
02:36:53.069 --> 02:36:57.610
had a fascinating life. You really have. It's very, very interesting.
3211
02:36:57.969 --> 02:37:01.049
I really appreciate you sharing everything today. It was really,
3212
02:37:01.350 --> 02:37:01.850
really fun.
3213
02:37:02.469 --> 02:37:03.530
Thank you very much for having me.
3214
02:37:03.530 --> 02:37:08.829
I enjoyed it. Jamie, pull up his book. Well, books,
3215
02:37:08.989 --> 02:37:13.610
I should say. This one, Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep, There
3216
02:37:13.670 --> 02:37:20.260
Are Snakes. The Life and Language... In the Amazon jungle,
3217
02:37:20.420 --> 02:37:21.340
Amazonian jungle.
3218
02:37:21.809 --> 02:37:23.850
That's what they say to each other each night before
3219
02:37:23.870 --> 02:37:27.209
they go to bed. Don't sleep, there are snakes.
3220
02:37:30.340 --> 02:37:31.979
Amazing. Thank you very much.
3221
02:37:32.059 --> 02:37:33.299
Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.
3222
02:37:33.319 --> 02:37:34.969
It was awesome. Bye, everybody.