Danny Jones Podcast - #439 - "I Don't Need God" Bible Expert Turns Atheist After Living With Amazon Tribe | Daniel Everett

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

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

How many linguists and anthropologists also end up being Christian missionaries? Is that a common thing? It's not that common, but it's not all that unusual either. One of the greatest linguists of the 20th century was Kenneth Pike, and he was also a missionary. And so in the early days, when more people believed in God than today, and when missionary was considered a very high prestige, sacrificial service for Christianity. There was no stigma attached to it,

and people could be scientists and missionaries at the same time. But it's pretty rare today. And when I was started my linguistic career, I was a missionary first, and when I started my linguistic career, I was ostracized by a lot of linguistics. who had very strong opinions against missionaries,

and they really didn't want to accept a missionary. So there's been a lot of cultural shift over the last 50 years. So for people who don't know, can you define what is a linguist? Okay, a linguist in the popular definition is somebody who speaks a lot of languages. But as a profession, it's somebody who studies language scientifically. What is the nature of language? What's the origin of language? How is it structured? Why are languages? why are languages alike and how are they unalike?

So it can be very, so you have various branches of linguistics. You have phonetics, which is the study of the physical properties of sound. You have phonology, which is the study of how speakers represent the sounds in their mind. And then you have morphology, how words are put together, and syntax, how sentences are put together. And philosophy of language, there are a whole lot of areas attached to it. So if you take all of those areas, applied linguistics, how do people learn second languages? So it's quite a big field. And was there any, what came first your interest in Christianity or your interest in linguistics and languages?

And did one influence the other at all? Yes. I first became Christian when I was 17. And the people who first talked to me about, I was an atheist until I was 17. and the people who first talked to me about Christianity in a detailed way were missionaries from Brazil. And I wanted to do that, and I married their daughter, and she wanted to do that. And so I found out that the training I would need to become a missionary, a Bible translator, included linguistics. And so I asked my then-father-in-law, the missionary, you know, what is linguistics?

He says, oh, you'll find out. So the missionary call was much sooner then. So I became a Christian when I was 17. And then I did my first linguistics training when I was 25. Did you study Greek at all? Yes, I did. I took New Testament Greek when I was, because I did my bachelor's degree in Bible and theology.

And then I did all my graduate work in linguistics. But when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Bible and theology at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, very fundamentalist evangelical school. We had to take two years of Greek, and I just love that. That was one of the reasons I knew I was going to enjoy linguistics. Yeah, one of the things that I've learned is that linguists, philologists, and Bible scholars are all sort of in their own silos. And none of them really communicate with each other.

because a lot of the people that I've met and talked to on this podcast, who are scholars of the Bible or the New Testament or whatever, they subscribe to that belief. So, like, they're doing this scientific study of something, but, like, simultaneously believe, it's their religion. So it's like this weird thing, you know? Well, I was that way for many years. I was before I be reconverted back to atheism and gave up my Christian faith. I was Reverend Dr. Daniel Everett.

And I studied the Bible and I was interested in the ancient texts. My research moved on then to Amazonian languages and then the nature of human language. But I certainly understand that and I read a lot of philology. and so I always have a lot of respect for the people who study the biblical languages, whether they believe it or not. But although I'm an atheist, many in my family are still believers and still interested in that. I have two daughters who are still missionaries. So, you know, I don't try to convert anyone away from Christianity,

although my position is well known in my family and outside my family. family these days. How much did you look into like the ancient language of Europe, like ancient Greek and Hebrew and all of that stuff? Yeah, that's a great question. If you're going to be a Bible translator, you need to know Hebrew and Greek. I did not study Hebrew, however, but I did spend two years in Koine Greek, which is the common dialect of Greek that was spoken at the time that the New Testament was written. And so I still have all that. I can still read the New Testament in Greek, and I have all the Greek tools that I got when I was studying Greek, the books and things. So yeah, I mean, Greek opened a whole new world to me, studying Koine, Greek, and I realized it came pretty easily.

You know, I wasn't always a good student growing up. I was a very bad student in high school. But once I got to college, by some miracle I got to college, I realized that languages, I mean, I liked a lot of subjects by that time, but languages really attracted me. Yeah, it's always been interesting to me, you know, like the explosion of intellect in ancient Greece, you know, in classical Greece. I always wonder, like, did that have anything to do

with the language of ancient Greek? You know, because it had, like, from what I understand, it had, like, over a million unique words compared to Hebrew, which only has, like, 7,000 unique words. And, you know, it's such a deep language. they didn't they didn't have like if you read the ancient Greek text there's no spaces there's no you know it's just like on scrolls never ending right and they go left to right on one line and right to

left on the other line yeah so it's a challenge i mean if you get Greek uh like you if you purchase a Coyne Greek New Testament today the lines will go in one direction and they'll be separated and the words will be separated all these things that help us understand them but Greek was to um the 5th century BC up until the advent of the Roman Empire when Latin took over, it was the main language spoken by educated people throughout the world. It was like English today, right? Yeah, that's right. It was the major trade language. You know, there have been several over the deck, over the centuries. It was Greek. There was Latin. At one time, it was Portuguese, and then Spanish, you know, at the time that the Spanish and Portuguese were conquering and discovering the world. And then it was French, but these days, it's English.

and who knows what will come next. Right. Could be Mandarin. Honestly, yeah, you're probably right about that. I think that's a good chance. So the first time I heard about you was I had a lady on the show, Heather Lynn. She was discussed, she's an expert. She studied Sumerian, the Sumerian language.

Right, right. And she was telling me about this missionary who went down to the Amazon. and found a culture of these Piedaha folks that had no concept of God. You're the first one who's pronounced it correctly the first time. Oh, am I really? Yeah, yeah. That's all because I've been listening to you talk for the last few days. Who had no God, they have no language, no concept, or not no language, no concept of like numerical.

Like they don't have numbers. No numbers, no counting. Anything like that. And it wasn't until recently until I learned about your story. I'm like, oh, my God, this is the guy. who did all this. So it's amazing to be able to talk to you. So when you first went down to the Amazon as a missionary,

were you already aware of this culture, or did you run into them by accident? Or how did that work? Well, I knew they were there. I did really well in my linguistics training. Most of that was with the missionary organization called at that time, the Summer Institute of Linguistics

and the Wickliff Bible. translators and two teams from that mission had tried to work with the Pita Ha. And they stayed there several years each, but none of them could figure out how the language worked. They learned to speak it, you know, learning to speak a language doesn't mean that you know how the language works grammatically, which you have to know to do translation. So if you ask most English speakers, John said he went to town. What is the t in there? What is the two in there doing? John said He went to town or John wants to work. What is that to doing?

Well, everybody knows, every native English speakers knows how to use it, but they don't know exactly why they use it. It's just part of English. So these people had learned to speak the language okay, but they didn't understand how the grammar worked. And so the last team was getting ready to leave, and they wanted someone to replace them. And he wrote me and asked me if I would be willing to take on this group

in the middle of the Amazon. because he knew I wanted to work with the mission in the Amazon. And I needed to hear nothing more but that it was a challenge, and nobody had figured it out yet. And that made me want to go there. So we took that assignment in 76, and I met the people in December of 77 for the first time. Wow.

How old were you? I was 25 when I went in there, yeah, which I clearly am not now. What did you were you prepared for that like being in the Amazon jungle and surviving through that? I was. The missionary organization has, they call themselves now SIL International. They have an excellent training program that includes linguistics, which is just a basic introduction to linguistics, but also jungle training and living. So when I finished my linguistics training, my family and I went to southern Mexico. to the state of Chiapas in the jungle for it's called jungle camp. And it's five months of training how to live in the jungle,

how to kill animals and can meat and learn indigenous languages. So when I was getting ready to finish, the two major exams I had were survival hike, which is how well do you do in the jungle when you're left on your own with no food, no world, water just to survive for 10 days or so. And the other exam was I had lived with, we had to live with the Tzeltales, the people that are descended from the Mayans. And I was given a conversational test. How well could I converse with those people at the end of my time with them? Oh, interesting.

And so how long were you out there in Chiapas? Five months. Five months. Five months. But the last two months of that time was actually way out in the jungle, and the last two weeks of that time was by myself in the jungle doing what they called survival hike. How long were you by yourself, you said? Two weeks. Two weeks? In the jungle, yeah.

I mean, my family was with me the rest of the time. So the first phase of that training is you go to a place called Main Base. And there were a lot of missionaries there, we're all starting. And then when you finish that, which includes lots of hiking, 50-mile hikes through the jungle and all sorts of things to get you in condition, then they put each family in a different Southall Indian village. And you're not supposed to have contact with any other family from that point on. Make sure you talk right into here. Make sure you're going to talk close to that you can. Yeah. Got this loud rain in the background right now. So we got to make sure that we drown it out.

So they moved us to a Seltal village. And my family lived there for six weeks, and my children started learning Seltal. And my wife learned Seltal fairly well, and I was learning Seltal. And then at the end of that time, they moved you to another area called Advanced Base. And you arrive there with your family.

There's no house. There's nothing. You have to build a house in the jungle for your family using only a machete and jungle vines. you're not allowed to use any other tools. So I made bunk beds and, you know, just with sticks and vine and a roof with thatch. And then the last two weeks of that time, they randomly are just living there. And they randomly come around and say, come on.

And you're going out to survival hike. And you have no idea when that's going to be or when they're going to call you. So they call you and you can't take much with you. I got to take some matches and a canteen and my machete and a rain poncho. And that was it and change of clothes. I'm not a change, the clothes I had on. Oh, my God. And so they just walk you out in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles.

So they walk with you out there? Yeah, until they say stay here and then you don't see them again for two weeks. Oh, Jesus. So they just leave you off in the middle of nowhere. There's no shelter. There's no water. There's no food. It's just you with your machete.

But would you know? how to, if shit hit the fan, would you know how to get back? Yes, because they teach you, that's part of the test. They teach you how to mark your trail when you go. How to mark your trail. So, you know, you put two notches with your machete on this, on one side of the tree, and then one notch on the other. And that's supposed to be an arrow that tells you which way you were coming.

And you go the opposite way. However, if you step off your little path, you can't see them anymore. So it's still very easy to get lost. You have to be very careful not to get lost. And at the end of that time, they brought everybody together, and they gave us, the way they evaluate you is what kind of mental state you're in, how well you fed yourself, what your shelter looks like. So they want to know, not only can you live out there for two weeks. I mean, most people aren't going to die in two weeks unless they get bit by a snake. there are plenty of those but they want to know if you thrived while you were out there so by the

time i got to the amazon i felt very confident i was i felt very confident in the amazon um it was a bigger jungle than chiapas mexico it was uh but it was very similar what was different about it well for one thing the the plants and animals are quite different um you know everything you ever hear about that's in the jungle is in the Amazon. I mean, there's, I've seen jaguars and 21-foot alligators and been attacked by anacombos and seen just about every kind of snake there is. So I didn't really see many snakes when I was in the jungles of Chiapas. And I think part of the reason is that even though it's jungle, there still are a lot of Seltales that live around there. And so there's people constantly hunting and going through there. But when you go to

where the Piedaha are located, that's 300 people scattered over 350,000, well, 350 miles of river in about 500,000 square acres of jungle. And so those 300 people are not going to keep the wildlife depleted. The wildlife is just thriving there. Wow. So you see a lot more animals. That's a lot of land to spread out 300 people. Yeah, well, it's their traditional land. And I was actually with the Brazilian government when that land was, I went with the government to serve as an interpreter with the people to talk to them about what lands they used. And Brazil's such a huge country, you know, Brazil is larger than the continental U.S. by quite a bit. So there are some Brazilians in politics now who complain about the amount of land the Indians have, but nobody's using that

land. It's just, it's not good for agriculture because it floods every year. And the soil of the Amazon jungle is not good. A lot of people think it's great. The terra praeta. Yeah, yeah, that's right, which is really good, the black earth. Teh Preta means that somebody was there before. It's land that's where they've been burning and fields. So if you're walking along the Amazon and you see that darker, somebody used to live there. They used to live around there. So we're finding that the Amazon used to have large populations of people that are now totally disappeared and they had relatively large settlements and cities even. Like where the jungle currently is now?

Right, right. And they did a lot to affect the growth of the jungle. When I taught at the University of Pittsburgh, I had a PhD student, Mike Heckenberger, who's now a professor at the University of Florida, and he told me he wanted to do archaeology in the Amazon. And I said, how in the world are going to do archaeology in the Amazon? There's nothing there.

He said, oh, yes, there is. There's soil. And he discovered all kinds of really cool things and became a major archaeologist, probably the leading archaeologist of the Amazon, who pioneered all of these methods using soil and now lead our technology that can look at and see under the jungle the signs of civilization.

Right. I think they found pyramids under the canopy, some pyramids in some parts of the rainforest there. Yeah, they've been finding so much stuff recently. It's hard to believe because when I went there, the theory was that no civilization could be supported in the Amazon. The jungle just had soil that was too poor. And so if you saw any signs of it, like on this island at the mouth of the Amazon called Marajos, which is an island larger than the country of Switzerland, they had a civilization there. The Marajos civilization, and we still find beautiful pottery that they made and all kinds of signs.

But one of the theories was that they just left to not be dominated by the Incas, and they went to the first fertile soil, which was all the way at the mouth of the Amazon. But now we know that's not entirely accurate. There were civilizations of different sizes in the Amazon itself, what today is just solid jungle. Sometimes even when you're doing everything right, from eating right, getting exercise, and getting enough sleep, you can still feel foggy, heavy, or just off. That's what got me interested in Qualia's two-day detox. This isn't some intensive week-long juice cleanse. It's four formulas timed throughout the day to support the systems your body already uses to detox,

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and get 50% off Qualia's two-day routine. And here's the bonus. Use the code Danny for an additional 15% off your order. That's Q-U-A-L-I-F-E.com slash Danny and use the code D-A-N-N-N-Y. Thank you to Quali. for sponsoring this episode. The mystery of the past is like one of the things

that fascinates people so much. You know, like what was really happening. And we only have like blunt tools to figure that out. You know, we can study languages. We can do anthropology. Right. You know, archeology and all that stuff. But like, again, a lot of those people don't collaborate.

So we have like different stories of the past. And that's another thing that frustrates me is, you know, a lot of the archaeologists that I talked to, a lot of like the biblical scholars and the ancient people who study ancient texts, a lot of them have very different opinions on things. Right. None of them agree. I mean, the problem about studying the past is that science likes replicability.

They like to be able to repeat the experiments and get the same results. But that's really hard when we're talking about the past. I wrote a book called How Language Began, in which I argued that language originated before Homo sapiens with Homo erectus. and most linguists thought that was crazy but then an archaeologist from the University of Liverpool in England wrote me and he said I agree with you and my specialty is Homo erectus and so we wrote a couple of articles together arguing

that Homo erectus had language but in the last couple of years Larry Barham is his name and in the last couple of years he discovered the oldest wooden structure known 500,000-year-old joined pieces of wood that were made by Homerrectus. Nobody else was around at the time in modern-day Zaire, which probably was part of a house that they had built. So Homer Erectus was capable of a lot more than we think, and they've been the most, they were the longest living species of humans. They started two million years ago.

So yeah, there's, that's Larry right there in the fork in the, right there, finding that piece of wood that looks there. Is there a better photo of the piece of wood? Yeah, there it is. Oh, there it is. Yeah. So, you know, the average person seeing that would think. It looks like nothing.

It looks like nothing. But it's 500,000 years old. It's two pieces of wood joined together. And Larry had already written a book on this vast technological improvement that putting two things together meant. So he wrote about the stone tools that didn't have handles and then the much greater efficiency of stone tools that did have handles and how putting two things together is a great technological improvement.

So that piece of wood confirmed what he was saying. And also, we both talked about you can't build a canoe, you can't build a house, you can't do that kind of thing. Yeah, so you see it's... Whoa, that's a lot bigger. It's quite large, yes. and you can't do this kind of thing without language. So Homo erectus, Larry agrees with me, which makes me very happy because he knows a lot more about them that I do that had to have had language.

They had to have had language to be able to construct something. Right. And they also, Homo erectus was not stopped by ocean boundaries. We find Homo erectus on islands off of Africa. find Homo erectus on Crete, we find Homo erectus on islands in Indonesia, on the island of Flores. So they were an amazing species of human. And for some reason, some archaeologists today don't even like to call them human, but they were clearly human.

They stood about 5 foot 10, 5 foot 11. Homo erectus did. Yeah, men. and their brains were probably, you know, if you take the skull off and scoop out all the wet stuff and fill it with sand, you measure how many cubic centimeters of sand you get in the skull. And so the average man, Homo sapiens today, has a cranial capacity of about 1,250 C C Cs. Homo Neanderthal Inces had a capacity of about 1,450 C Cs. Their brains were bigger than ours.

and Homo erectus had an average of about 950 cc's, which is equivalent to a modern human woman. So we know that women are every bit as smart as men, even though they have smaller brains because they also have smaller bodies. So erectus was no doubt less intelligent than us, but they had enough of a brain to support language. even if it were, you know, they wouldn't have talked about the things we talked about and who knows how extensive their conversations were. But with the accomplishments they have and the archaeological records that we have, we know that they could talk. I mean, I know they could talk.

It's still a case to present to others. But this is the problem of the past. People come up with different explanations for these things, although I don't find them at all convincing when it comes to Homo erectus. But these are exciting things. but you can't you can't prove it right you can't words don't leave fossils if they're not a written language so there's no record of the actual words that would have been used there is no way to interview a homo erectus they died out about they lived from 200 two million years ago to about

140,000 um um uh years ago so no other species of humans, not Neanderthals, and so far not even us, have lived as long as Homo erectus lived. And that's one of the other mysteries, is how did we get from them to us? You know, it seems like such a big leap with the human brain, obviously the human brain size didn't double. It was very similar. But that's like one of the tropes that you really hear, like the doubling of the brain size. Well, it doubled from chimpanzees. From chimpanzees, right, right, right. But like if Homo erectus was that long ago and that close to us, like there must be a long fucking lineage somewhere, right?

There's a huge gap. Well, this is a mystery. So people who study the DNA of ancient species, such as Savante Pébo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, who won the Nobel Prize last year for his discovery of the genome, his pioneering methods to get the genome of Neanderthals. But as they say, they're distinct genetically, but my view of Homo erectus is that that's who we are. And we came out of Homo erectus.

I mean, that is not to say, I mean, there was a time most likely when Homo erectus, Neanderthal, and Homo sapiens were all on the planet at the same time. And we would have seen each other almost certainly. Right. But Homo erectus was the original species of humans coming out of Africa. and that's also where Homo sapiens came from. Neanderthal is the only species of humans. Well, that used to be the case. It's not now, but Neanderthal is of the big three species.

It's the one that didn't originate in Africa. But it came out of Homo erectus in Europe. Can you find a drawing or a picture, like a rendition of a Homo erectus? I'm just curious. I want to see exactly what that looks like. And so the idea is the Homo erectus mated with the Homo sapiens? Well, no, the idea is that Homo erectus,

gradually evolved into Homo sapiens. Oh. That they became us, yeah. So I like that picture on the far left of the guy with the long hair. Yeah. I often use that picture and tell people, you know, you can do 23 and me and all the DNA tests you once, but that's who we go back to. Right.

This is the ancestor of all of us. But also, I make the point that if you shave this guy and clean him up and put a suit on him and sent him to college, not too many people would notice, you know. Right, right, right. Yeah, I got some friends who look like that. Yeah, yeah. So especially, you know, you see what's a short hair. Kind of like Steve. Yeah, I think he looks quite cool, actually. He does look pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me, these are the inventors of language, and I mean invention,

because I don't think language was just the product of some biological, um, um, um, um, um, mutation. I think that as our brains got larger, we did what all species who are living do. We communicated. Right. And all species communicate with the same tools like indexes, like if a dog is sniffing some other animal, that smell is an index of the animal that left it. If a dog sees an image of an animal, that's called an icon. Icons are images, indexes are physically connected. And a few animals invent symbols, but not many, and they're not usually productive. What makes humans different from all other creatures is that we can create symbols, which are these things that are created conventionally.

They're sort of arbitrary. You know, we just decide that we're going to call what we're walking on ground. And we all agree to that, and we call it ground. And that's the typical hallmark of a symbol. It's that it's a conventional creation. And other creatures have them. Dogs can recognize up to a thousand if they're trained properly, but they don't tend to invent many on their own.

But humans can invent them at will. We can just create as many symbols as we want. And I believe that once we got to that stage, that's where language came from. You know, there's these other theories out there of how human beings evolved to where we are today to have, you know, the capacity of language and, you know, the capacity of everything that we have today. Either psychedelics could be responsible for. That's the stoned ape theory. And then there's also, I think it's called catching fire or like cooking meat or something how to do with it. Those are all, they, it's.

possible that all of those things contributed to language. To me, the greatest contributor was when our brains reached a certain size and we were able to invent symbols. That seems to me to have been the greatest breakthrough. And the evidence suggests that that happened perhaps as long ago as two million years ago. Whereas many people who believe in language and focus on Homo sapiens think that it's in the last 100,000 to 200,000 years. But I think when the first Homo sapiens, stood up, they were born into a language speaking world. I think that Homo erectus groups already had language and the first Homo sapiens would have been born

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head on over to LiveMomenus.com and use the promo code Danny for up to 35% off your entire first order. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com, promo code Danny for up to 35% off. LiveMomenus.com promo code Danny. Are you familiar with the idea of the bicameral mind? And the idea of how, you know, like one of the examples that was recently explained to me was like, you know, long time ago if a father was telling his children some of the lessons of his father, of the grandfather, he could be like sort of like channeling the grandfather through him to the children or like teaching the lessons of the grandfather. but like there's no distinction of like is that the grandfather talking or is that me talking right

it's like there's not there wasn't really a sense of self it was just like these thoughts or the these things that are floating through our minds that we're trying to communicate are coming from some higher source the um the russian author dostoievsky was studied by another russian mikhail bactin And Bakhtin argued that what made Dostoyevsky different from all of the writers that he created a whole new way of writing was that every voice in his novels had equal authority so that you couldn't tell which was supposed to, you know, the author's voice was no more important than any of the other voices in his character. So in that sense, he was channeling all of these different characters in his writing, which made his writing stand out so uniquely from other. other authors. And I do think that people, people when they are raised in a particular, and they hear these stories and they have absorbed certain cultural values, that all enters what I call the dark matter of the mind, these things we know, but we don't know we know, and we use,

and sometimes they come up and we don't know about them, the unconscious, not the deep unconscious that Freud might have talked about. Right. And I think this is where culture comes from. We have these experiences and we interpret them and we don't realize that we're interpreting them. But when we are in the same environment with other people, we all kind of construct the same view of reality

because we're interacting with one another and this is where culture comes from. And I do think that when you're talking, a lot of cultural voices come through you that you're not even aware of where you've got this information. Right. I have a very good friend at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Evelina Federico, and she's one of the greatest authorities in the world on language in the brain.

I mean, there are many authorities. A lot of people like to study language in the brain, and there have been a lot of breakthroughs. But her work is exciting because she has identified a network in the brain, and we don't know how it got there. We don't know what it would be for otherwise. But she calls it the language network. And she studied languages from all over the world for many different language of families.

And she has found that whenever you're speaking or hearing a language, this network lights up in your brain. And in fact, she put me in an MRI scanner for three and a half hours to study me listening to Pita Ha and listening to English and a couple of other languages that I know. And she was able to show that roughly the same areas light up, no matter what language I'm listening to. She gave a talk on this, something about Dan Everett's brain or something like that.

But that's a very exciting discovery. What that was used for before language, or if it was, nobody knows. One interesting thing about the brain is that there are parts of the brain that specialize for different things. So the back of your brain specializes for vision. But what if you're born blind? If you're born blind, the brain uses it for other things. It's not needed, so it uses it for other stuff. And that's what the plasticity of the human brain is one of the most exciting things about it. But in the meantime, healthy, normal individuals tend to localize things in different parts of their brain. So there's a part of my brain where I store my ability to tie shoes or make

burritos or that kind of thing. It doesn't mean that making burritos is an innate capacity. It does mean that the cells of that part of the brain are more compatible with certain kinds of knowledge and tasks and things. So her discoveries have been great. Then there's also another friend of mine, Eddie Chang, who is a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, who's actually had success with people who've lost the power of speech and hooking neurons up in their brain to computers and then with the help of large language models that can help predict their sentences can actually take their thoughts and translate them into sounds over the computer so that by thinking they can communicate with other people.

And so that's a combination of his incredible ability as a neurosurgeon and his knowledge of the neurons and the structure of language and the brain, but also large language models which help complete the thoughts. That's wild. Yeah I mean it's just an astounding breakthrough that for people who've lost the power of speech gives tremendous hope. Now okay so on the topic of of that's so interesting that you were in the MRI machine and you were speaking or they were talking to you in different languages and right how many different languages do you know? Well I would say that I speak fairly fluently for English Portuguese

Pita Ha and Spanish. But I've been exposed to lots of languages and I read about, you know, 15 languages. Oh my God. So they, I told them that I could do this. Probably shouldn't have told them because then they played me samples of all these different languages. And they did detect, they, Evelyn's work can detect not only where the language is in your brain, but how well you speak it and how much of an effort it is for you to learn other languages. So she's identified that people who speak multiple languages, polyglots,

tend to expend less energy learning a language than people who aren't polyglots, people who struggle with language. So it's not like you work harder, it just comes easier for some reason. And so at the end of her talk, which was a conference in my honor at MIT, she argued that the data suggests that not only do I speak these languages, but learning languages is not such a great effort. Now, what about like learning abstract concepts or new ideas or being able to understand some new abstract idea that you've never been, that's never been positive to you before or just learning in general? Like if you understand multiple languages, you can you can connect the dots to, you know, abstract ideas and concisely attribute them to specific words across multiple language.

Does that have any like overall effect on your intellect? That's a very good question. You know, abstract learning, learning physics, for example, or learning mathematics uses different parts of the brain than I have developed well. But at the same time, when we do learn other languages and we learn the concepts that are associated with different. words, we expand our knowledge. We expand our ability to link concepts with words. And so there are some studies that argue that people's intelligence actually changes. We know that the brain changes when you learn other languages. It causes alterations in the brain. So does literacy when you learn to read and write. So I do think it helps increase intelligence. Intelligence is a weird concept

to begin with because if it were just absolutely genetic you would expect that you could take an IQ test and it would never change. Whatever score you got when you were in eighth grade would be the same score you got when you got out of college. But we know that's not true. IQ changes over time. And the USA, if you take the IQ test that we took back at the beginning of the 20th century and the IQ tests, if they still take them, that people take today, the entire U.S. population's intelligence has come up. It's changed. Interesting. So these are hard things for people to explain who believe that IQ is fixed once for all by

our genetics. But there is something that genetics clearly does. And teasing apart the role of genetics versus culture versus individual development and experience is pretty hard, but people have been working on it for quite a while. Hmm. So this idea, what I wanted to get to was from those scanning. that were done on you when they were playing the different languages that were letting up certain part of your brain this sounds sort of like chomksky's idea and chomsky had the idea correct me if i'm wrong but that

there was a certain part of the brain that was responsible at inherent in human beings for language and that we were we were born with that right right um chomsky was very amenable to discoveries by people like the french surgeon brocah and the German Vernicky, who argued that language was localized in one or two spots in the brain. Evalina has shown that that is not actually the case, that language is spread throughout this network. However, Chomsky never did any research on the brain. Chomsky simply said that language must be innate because everybody has it and everybody learns it before puberty, long before puberty. So it must be innate.

That's one possible explanation. and when he sees evidence that there are certain parts of the brain dedicated to it, he has often taken that as evidence that it must be innate. But like I said, how I tie my shoes is located in some part of the brain. That doesn't mean that shoe tying is innate. It just means that your knowledge is in the brain. It's got to be stored somewhere, and certain cells facilitate the storage of certain things better than other cells.

It's still, to a large degree, a mystery for many people. I'm sure there's a neuroscientist somewhere who thinks they have it figured out, but for me, it's still to a large degree, a mystery. So, Evealina's work, and Evelina would be one of the first people to tell you this. It doesn't address one way or the other whether language is innate. She wouldn't say that it's evidence for it or evidence against it. I don't think she herself believes the evidence that language is innate is very strong, but I don't want to put words in her mouth. but I do know that the fact that there's a language network doesn't mean that language itself is innate. Right.

Now, you came up as a Chomsky fanatic, right? Yes. Wasn't your dissertation kind of like an homage to Chomsky? Yes. All of my early work was Chomsky. And my kids who are all grown now, when they were little, they said, you seem to talk about Chomsky as much as you talk about Jesus. And in sort of the same way. So, yeah, he was an intellectual.

hero. He's, you know, he's a brilliant, brilliant person who had a lot of great ideas. And if I were to stop there, everybody who's a linguist might agree with me. But then after a while, I thought, yeah, there are a lot of great ideas, but so far none of them have panned out. So we don't have, you know, all the evidence that language is innate is, is highly indirect and there are many other explanations for it. So in a new book I have just submitted to Oxford University Press, I argue that the human ability to infer one thing from another is an ability that's shared with many, many other creatures, probably all creatures. And this is just, you see one thing and you know that relates to another thing. And then that relates to something else. So it's

recursive, actually. Even though I've argued against recursion in the grammar, I've never argued against recursion in the brain, the ability of one thing to recur time and time again. So this ability to infer things is far more developed in humans than in any other creature. I keep reminding people that we shouldn't be too conceited that we're humans because, you know, we've only had toilet paper for a couple of hundred years. Right. You know, we're basically hairless chimps that walk upright with a certain degree of ease, but not totally because that's why we get back problems because we originally evolved to walk

on all fours. But so the ability to infer in my new book, this replaces the need for a universal grammar. In fact, the first person to talk about universal grammar. grammar was to use that term, which is Chomsky's term, that's what he's known for, this innate universal grammar, was the monk from the 13th century, Roger Bacon, who was a brilliant person. When he talked about language, he talked about a logical, not a biological universal grammar. So that language was constrained by logic. Now, if we jump forward to 1865, 600 years after Roger Bacon, we get to Cambridge, we get to Cambridge,

Massachusetts to Charles Sanders Purse who argued that for universal grammar and he was the first American to use the term universal grammar but he didn't mean it as a biological capability well it is a biological capability but he didn't mean it as an innate biological entity that we're all born with language he said the brain is large enough and our powers of inference are great enough because of that brain that we can infer the structure of the language that we're hearing. We can build it as we hear it. So the greatest, in my opinion, the greatest thing that's ever been discovered in the history of the universe is the human brain. And it's still in many ways a mystery, this little piece

of wet stuff. And a lot of it is just saturated fat in our skull that we're able to figure out all the things we've figured out with that we have figured out in the course of our history. And it's interesting, too, that over the last since erectus disappeared with 950-C. Brain and then we got 1,250 C.C.s with the first humans over 200,000 years ago, there doesn't seem to have been much brain evolution. I wouldn't deny that there has been perhaps some for different populations, but the brain hasn't really evolved. What's evolved is our culture and the ability to store knowledge in a, in a, in a, you know, and

in a network of people, outside of the brain. Outside of the brain. Right. Yeah, that's a very interesting thing, you know. Like, you know, you hear the stories of, you know, in ancient Greece when people would walk around reading Homer or singing Homer, right? The Homeric hymns and, you know, how the hell do you memorize a part of an ancient scroll that's not paginated? You know, you can't go back and reference that book, that page, that paragraph. you have to, like the memory capacity of people in antiquity or before? Well, even today, I mean, all the people that I work with in the Amazon are preliterate.

They all use another way of saying that is that's preliterate sort of indicates that they're somehow not fully developed, but agraphic means they don't write anything. So they have to remember everything. Any Pita Ha you stop from about 10 years. of age and older, knows the name of every plant, animal, fish, I mean, everything. They know the name of everything in their universe. They know the names of many stars. They observe a lot and they don't write it down.

They just all know it. Wow. So this oral tradition that has been the hallmark of humans since we got language is not dead and it still works. And so, you know, I was walking with the Pita Ha in the jungle one time and normally I would carry, it's before iPhones and before electronic stuff that was portable. And so I would carry a pen in waterproof ink and a plastic covered notebook. And when I asked them questions, I would pull out my notebook and write it down. But this time we were out there.

I was with a few guys hunting. And I said, oh, what's the name of this tree? And they told me. And I said, well, what's the name of that tree over there? And they told me. And they said, you don't have your paper and pen. You're not going to remember this. And so they stopped telling me because they knew that without my paper and pen, I would

forget it. That you can't remember anything. Because that's the way my brain has become dependent on writing things down and theirs aren't. They just remember it. Wow. And so if you tell a pita ha a word in English, they're not going to forget it.

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

I believe it's cultural. Right. So hypothetically, if one of the Pita Ha was born in New York City with an iPhone and books and all that stuff, they would not have anywhere, they would have the same memory as us. Right. That's what I believe. I mean, there are a number of traits that the Pita ha's have and don't have that

are unusual for some of us from different cultures. But I have met Pita Ha who were kidnapped from the village. as children and raised as Brazilians in nearby towns. Oh, wow. And they speak perfect Portuguese. They run a store and do all the arithmetic that's needed for running the store. And they just don't act like Pita Haas. They act like Brazilian.

So that's the sort of real test for me. If I found a Pita Ha that had been raised in a Brazilian town and still couldn't do numbers and had no words for color and shared all these cultural characteristics, And I would think there was something maybe biologically different, but I don't see any evidence for biological differences, just profound cultural differences. This is why, you know, society is so important to us. Science is a social enterprise. Everything we do is dependent on society. There's no creature on Earth that is more dependent on society than humans.

Chimps, there are a lot of social creatures. Chimps are baboons are the primates, all of the primates, well, not all, but most of the primates tend to be very very. very social, but there's, if you take a pita ha who grew up in the jungle and you move them 20 miles into that same jungle by themselves, they're not going to survive for a long time because they depend on each other to help them with the tasks that they have. We evolved to live as members of society. I've been using nicotine pouches for quite a while and eventually the negative side effects started to show. I was on edge. Sometimes my heart would be racing and nicotine's vasoconstriction was really screwing up my workouts in the gym, which is why I started

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heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you. You mentioned a little bit earlier something about the dark matter of the mind, this being like the unconscious mind that we're not really aware of and that we don't actively think about. What got you thinking about that? Well, what got me thinking about it is when I wrote my first books and articles about culture being such an influence on language,

many skeptics said, yeah, but what do you mean by culture? Culture is this term that everybody uses. So I wrote a book called Dark Matter of the Mind in which I tried to develop my own theory of culture, which is as we go through the world, whether it's stubbing our toe or seeing someone we find attractive or reading a book that really moves us, our brain stores all of that,

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

But if you're a pita ha and you're standing and you're nonchalant and nobody's around, you're going to have both arms crossed like this and both legs crossed while you stand. And if I sit, I'm going to sit cross-legged on the ground. Whereas if I'm a pita ha, I'm going to sit with my legs straight out in front of me. Why do they sit like that? We have the same human body, you know. But when I told my wife this, she's a scuba diver, and she said, well, that's how you dive. You have your hands like this so that they take it.

They have less resistance in the water and you can dive faster. And so I thought about that. And I thought, oh, when they're walking through the jungle paths, having your hands like this, I walk swinging my arms and I'm always hitting thorns. They walk through the jungle like this. Yeah, they walk through the jungle like this most of the time. They hold their bows and arrows. but they also, very often, especially if they're not,

if they have a bag, a basket with a tump line over their head, they will have their arms in front of them like this because their paths are very narrow. And if you walk like most Americans walk, and they also walk single file all the time. They don't walk side by side. I was with the Pita Ha in the city, and I was trying to talk to him,

but he stayed right behind me. And I said, walk by me, and he never did. that's just not the way they walk. They would never walk by somebody. Side by side, they walk single file. And in the jungle, that's very adaptive. That works really well. And there are so many thorns and snakes and things that hang out on the trees by the path

that when you walk like this, that's a much safer way to walk. So then they've internalized that. They don't even know they're standing that way, just like most of us don't know how we're standing. When I see two Americans or three or four walking down a narrow sidewalk, taking the whole space and people have to step out in the way. the street and go around them, I think it's too bad they're not pita haz because we could all use the same sidewalk. We wouldn't have to step off the sidewalk, although it's harder to converse when somebody's behind you than when they're at the side. So they probably have way better hearing.

Well, they do. They can hear things far away that we can't hear. I mean at night, um, they will tell me that a, I can almost do this now after living with them for a long time, but at night they will say, oh, the boat's coming and I listen. and I can't hear anything. And then maybe 10, 15 minutes later, I'll start to hear the slightest put-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pt of these little diesel engines that travel to Amazon. And they hear it like that.

It's like sometimes reminds me of Darth Vader because, you know, the force is really strong in this one. They can sort of detect, and that's the way I've described it sometimes, any alteration in the force or in the universe, in the environment that they're in. And they actually, their language doesn't have a separate word for jungle and a separate word for cleared space or anything like that. Our whole living environment is the same word. So it is usually associated with jungle, but if I want to tell you don't move and you're sitting in a canoe, I will say don't disturb the jungle, which means stay still, don't move into the environment in any way. So their whole conception of the way the world is is different. We make all these boundaries and things.

They don't have a word for mother and they don't have a word for father. They have a word for parent. So they don't make any distinction based on sex. On sex. And they don't have brother and sister. They have sibling. And they don't have grandfather and grandmother. They have a big parent.

Wow. The only sex distinction they make is for your son and daughter. Then they have a word for daughter and a word for son. But after that, there's no gender distinctions. Wow, that's so fascinating. And so they don't perceive these things, right? And they're all siblings. Everybody in the tribe is a sibling.

So they all see themselves as one big family. And that affects the way we don't see ourselves as one big family. I mean, we know that we're all Americans. But you see first, your first culture that your encounter is your family. the second culture is maybe your school and then it starts going outwards like in concentric circles but it's that cultural experience

that society that we were raised in that shapes our unconscious as well as our conscience so you know we always we cut something with a knife and fork and we put the knife down and then put the fork on our right hand but if you're in England you see them

or France you see them cut it with the forks in their left hand and they put it in their mouth with and that has their historical explanations for that when the spoon and the fork first arrived in the different societies we use the spoon longer than they did and so it's harder to use a spoon with your left hand so but um nobody knows these things unless you study them this is just part of the unconscious that we're all born with you know why do you do this and um yeah um why do we smile the way we smile why do we laugh out loud versus not you know pita ha

laughing really loudly is something they do a lot of, but they know they use different contexts than we use. So these are all things that we do every day that we don't know that we do. And I believe this is all stored in each individual based on their experience, but when we get a people together that have had a lot of same experiences, that's where culture comes from.

So I don't think you can point to something to say, that's culture. Culture is stored in the minds of the individuals. Right. And it emerges sometimes, artifacts like microphones come out of our culture that would not come out of Pita Ha culture. In fact, Pita Haft told me when I started taking microphones in to record them, they said, yeah, we could have had that stuff, but we never needed it.

So without knowing what it takes to build a microphone, they're just not that impressed because they don't use this stuff. So what's the value of it? Right. Yeah, it almost seems like to me that the more conveniences a culture has, the more technology a culture has, the less happy they are? This is, you know, I haven't studied that, but I do know that when we start to accumulate things, that becomes a sign of success in a way that when you have fewer things, you feel

less happy. Some studies have shown that happiness of a society goes down when the television is introduced, especially in third world countries because they see things, especially if you're watching like an American movie, you see these fancy cars and you see all these electronic devices, things of technology that they don't have

and suddenly they wanted, they were fine before. They never wanted those things, but now that they have seen them, they want them. And I've had indigenous peoples of Brazil that have a lot of contact with Brazil, with Brazilians, unlike the Pita Ha. You know, one guy was with me in a store

and said, and buy me that. And I said, I can't buy you all this stuff. He said, well, we never wanted these things. It was you people who made us want them. So that's, so the Pita Ha-Don't, that's one reason they're so happy, I think, is because there's nothing we have that they really want.

You know, they're self-sufficient when they're left alone. And, you know, so their attitude and talking to them about Jesus, It was like talking to them about something that could not have possibly been less relevant. Yeah, walk me through that. I'm very, very interested in that whole process of how that worked. When you being a young missionary going into the jungles of the Amazon with this tribe, this primitive tribe. And so my first question is, were you the first person to try to introduce the concept of Jesus and Christianity to them?

The two other missionary families that were there before us tried. I think I'm the first one who did it in a way that they could sort of understand what I was getting across. And so... So did you understand their language at that already? Did you take the time to already learn their language? I spoke the language really well, and I had written a 400-page book that was published in 1989 on their grammar and how their language works. So I had been spending almost every day, all day for years, just trying to working on their language until I had it. The parts that I was interested in figured

out, nobody figures out an entire language completely, not even English. There are still new doctoral dissertations coming out about English, and you would think that if there's a language, we understood backwards and forwards, it would be English. But languages are inexhaustible. But there were a couple of factors that sort of came together. for me in the village. One was that I was starting to study science seriously. My doctorate is a doctrine of science of language. So doesn't mean that linguistics has a lot of mathematics, but a lot of parts of linguistics do have a lot of mathematics, which I consider to be fundamental to science. But I was

starting to realize what it meant to replicate experiments, what it meant to get data and test it. And so induction, building general ideas from specific facts, deduction, going from general ideas to predict the specific facts and abduction, which is guessing at the facts that you're going to test. So most science happens by guesswork, which is then tested. If you don't test it, it's just guessing. Have a hypothesis. Yeah, hypothesis. Yeah. So you have a hypothesis. You have an object you don't understand. You have a hypothesis. If you stop there, you're not a scientist. Right. have an object and a hypothesis, and you test the hypothesis,

then you come up with an alternative hypothesis, and you test that. So God was in that sense for me, I began to realize, since I made the decision to follow God when I was 17, a hypothesis. And I was starting to think about it in terms of a hypothesis, and I was starting to test it. But when I met the Pita Ha who test everything, they don't take anything at face value, you know, there's this whole philosophy of importance.

empiricism, or pragmatism, American pragmatism, which is if you can't tell somebody how to implement something practically, you don't understand it. And you have to be able to test it. You have to be able to do something that shows, that supports what you believe. So I wasn't finding that with God. And then the Pita Ha weren't finding that with God. They kept asking me facts. So these weren't the only facts. I've had some people make little videos. saying, I gave up God for the stupid reason that some primitive tribe didn't find him convince him. That is not it. First of all, the pita ha are sophisticated intellectually.

And if you have a long talk with them, first you have to learn their language, but if you're a long talk with them, they are really, really insightful people, and their intelligence is second to none. But at the same time, they don't take things at face value. You know, we call the U.S. state of Missouri, the show me state, because people don't believe something unless you can show them. Well, that's the pita ha. They don't believe something unless you can show them. And that is, in a sense, just like the science I was learning, that you have a hypothesis, but show me, show me how that works and test it. And if you can't test it, if there's no way to test it, if you don't have any facts to support it.

So, for example, somebody says Jesus is their Savior. And this is the way I was thinking. I'm not making this up now. If I say Jesus is my Savior, what does that mean empirically for me? I've even preached on this in churches. If you say that Jesus, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and he makes your life better, how is your life better? Okay, so there was you before Jesus, and there's you after Jesus, and how is it better?

And I don't mean happier because now you have more friends. I mean, how are you morally superior to the person you were before? Right. Morally superior. That's very interesting. I don't mean to cut you off here. No, that's fine. I had a conversation.

Hold that thought, please. I don't mean to derail you. Yeah, that's fine. I had a conversation with a young woman the other day in her early 20s who was telling me how when her and her boyfriend recently went to their church and tithed a bunch of money, the pastor told her and her boyfriend that they were. we're going to make more money in their businesses. Right.

As a response to them tying to God, which is very counterintuitive to what you just said. Right. One interesting thing about Christians, and since I was one, I can say this, is that some of the parts of the Bible that don't seem to be intended to be taken literally, such as the creation, the six-day creation, they take very literally. But some of the other parts of the Bible that I think were meant to be taken literally, like turn the other cheek, sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, they say is not literal.

So I was talking to a guy one time, and I said, you know, what do you do about the fact that Jesus said to the young man who wanted to follow him, sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor? And that guy did not follow Jesus because he thought to himself, I got a lot of stuff. You know, he didn't want to sell at all. So, and then the response was, well, you don't have to. to actually do that, you have to be willing to do it. I said, okay, so you're willing to do it, yes. Well, there are a lot of poor people in the world. Why don't you do it then? If you're

willing to do it, do it. And that they don't want to take literally. So if you see, there are very, you know, I have met priests living in the middle of nowhere in the jungle, like an Italian priest born and raised, say, in Rome, and he comes to the Amazon, and he's living in complete poverty along with the people, and he's out there working with them every day, and then he has mass for them. Now, I consider that much closer to living according to the morality of the gospel. Right. Than I do the prosperity gospel, which says that God actually wants us rich.

If there's anything the Bible teaches me, it's what Jesus said. It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get. into heaven. And then I had a Christian respond to saying, Yeah, but see, the eye of the needle was the name of a specific gate in Jerusalem that was narrow, but you can get through it. I said, no, that's not what it meant. It meant an actual needle with an eye in it. So it's impossible. Yeah. That's, so. And the reason I got into this deep conversation with this young lady the other day was, I was kind of getting in it back and forth. I was like, I was really trying to understand

her thinking to like, she really believed that this money was going to God and was going to earn them more money and that this is the right thing to do. And meanwhile, the pastor who she gave the money to drove to the church in a Rolls-Royce and was wearing a gold Rolex. Yeah. This is so common. If that's the way God works, he's just another investment.

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

Because they know what it's like to be poor. And I have often found that there are very generous wealthy people, not all of them are Christians. They're just generous people. And there are very wealthy poor people. I mean, not wealthy in money, but wealthy in generosity of the spirit that give what they have. If I'm traveling the Amazon in my outboard motor, and I've done that over a thousand miles at a time with all my gas with me, usually I camp on a beach somewhere by myself. But I know that if I see a little shack with a family in it, I can pull up there and they'll put me up for the night and they'll feed me.

and they're porous dirt. They'd have almost nothing. But what they have, they're going to give to me. They're going to share with me. And also, because I know that's how they are, I also give them a lot of canned food and stuff like that to sort of repay them. But there's nobody who's going to say, get out of here. They're going to give me, if they have one cup,

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

Exactly. So my ex-father-in-law, who had been a missionary in Brazil and the Amazon for many years, he liked to pitch up. When he was in the States, he would pick up hitchhikers, and he would bring them home, and he would feed them and give them a place to stay, and then he might drive them 100 miles down the road

to their next ride or drive them to their final destination. And that's biblical. That is a literal interpretation. You know, Jesus said if a person asked for your sweater, give them your coat too. If they want you to go with them a mile, go with them two miles. If they ask you for this, give them double. Be generous. Generosity is what Jesus taught.

And that's a rare quality. I mean, it's not unknown. A lot of people are generous. But I think my father-in-law, and it affected me too, when you experience all the that generosity from people who really don't seem to have anything to give, you need to be generous. You feel a need to be generous yourself. So would I, today, if somebody poor came to my house and asked to spend the night, would I let him into my house to spend the night?

I used to, and I like to think that I would now still. I remember being in the city because I would spend half the year at the university, whether I was either studying or teaching after I finished my graduate work, or I would be in the tribe. And one time where I'm just sitting in my house having a cup of coffee with my wife and three Chavante Indians from the Shingu Park of Brazil, you know, with their paint and long hair and pierced ears with the guys, came up the house and said in broken Portuguese, somebody said you work with Indians. I said, I do. They said, we want to stay with you. We have to be here for four days and we don't have a place to stay. So they came into my house and they took over the house.

I was cooking for them and doing all this stuff for them, and their dog was pooping all over the house because they had a little puppy with him. And I'm thinking, you know, this is what it means to be a missionary. This is what it means to follow Jesus, is to give what you have and share your last crust of bread with people like that. And so when I see Christians doing that,

I can think, yeah, maybe they're morally superior to what they were before. I don't expect us to compare ourselves to other people because we never walked in the same shoes. Everybody has a different life story. What I want is people to compare themselves with themselves. What were you like before you became a Christian, and what are you like now that you're a Christian?

Well, I took a lot of drugs. I didn't study, and when I became a Christian, I started getting straight A's, and I stopped using drugs and all of that. I now explain that socially rather than spiritually. Right. Did that make you a better person, that you were no longer, you know, slinging acid in front of a, what was it, a Jimmy Hendricks concert? Yeah, in front of a Jimmy Hendricks concert, yeah, but I, in which I don't actually consider immoral. But,

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

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

especially using the church to get wealthy. So that view just contradicts everything I believe about the Bible. Yeah, there's a great Thomas Payne book about the age of, called The Age of Reason. Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's really interesting, you know, how he talks about like the lineage or the bastardization of Christianity from Jesus Christ, you know, when all, everything was written until now, how you have like the church fathers who rely to make money off preaching this gospel and like how like over time that gets more corrupt. Right. You know. So there are some denominations today in which the pastor is always a lay pastor, which means he has a regular job like everybody else.

but he's considered to be a good teacher of the Bible. And so on Sundays, in addition to everything else he does, he does this, and he accepts no salary, he accepts no house. I think that's a lot closer aligned to the New Testament. The New Testament does say that a worker is worthy of his pay. So some pastors say they can take pay. I asked an African-American pastor in Chicago once when I was out there at Moody studying. I said, you drive a Cadillac, and nobody else in your church drives, and many of them don't have cars. And he said, well, this is the fact that many white people don't understand about the black church.

He said, we're all poor. And when we have a church, we can make one person look really good, and we want it to be the pastor, because he represents us. So they're paying for this stuff for me because I am their representative, and they don't want people to think that their representative is poor. That might be true. I really like this guy very much. And so I actually think that that was an accurate statement. This was 1974. So who knows whether anybody believes this kind of stuff anymore, but he did. But when you see a white pastor who's really wealthy and they're in a wealthy congregation,

or especially if they're wealthy and they're in a poor congregation, I find this to be absolutely problematic. problematic with regard to the New Testament. Some pastors have come up with the idea that the pastor's salary should be more or less the average salary of people in their church because they're representing that social group. Yeah, that might be okay, but I actually think that the pastor's salary should be, he should be one of the poorest people. He should be living this example of, and yeah, she's. The pastor needs books, the pastor needs a place to study. He doesn't need to own those things, though.

Those things can be provided. But this is such a radical difference. You have to go all the way back to Jesus to see somebody who live like that. Unless you find one of these incredible priests that I have located in different parts of the jungle, who are living the New Testament far more faithfully than many Protestants, I know. So going back to you teaching this stuff, to the... No, I'm forgetting how to pronounce their name again. Pita ha.

Pita ha. When you're explaining this stuff to the Pita ha, you've learned their language, you understand how to communicate with them, you're telling them. You start by telling them about Jesus. Right. Right. And you're saying that they look at everything in life pragmatically. Like, how does this affect me? I need to see it to believe it.

Right. And you're explaining to them essentially myths. Right. So just to emphasize that I already was struggling with this from my scientific training. So it wasn't that the Pita Haw were the first ones to do this. But when they started acting like scientists with me, then that really affected my thinking. But they would ask just first of all mundane questions like, what's Jesus look like? What's his color?

They really wanted to know the color of Jesus because my color, white, is considered quite unhealthy. They're not even sure if you have blood. Because if you have blood, how can you be white? but they saw me bleed one time. So they said, well, that's interesting. He's white, but he has blood, you know. New data point. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So they would ask me questions. I mean, what color was he? And I couldn't tell him for sure because nobody knows for sure. I said, some people think he was white. Some people think he was brown. And they couldn't believe that I hadn't seen him, and I didn't know anybody who had seen him. And they said, you don't even know what he looks like.

What is, you know, how did he do this? How did he do that? They wanted to know about Jesus, the person. because I was always talking to him about Jesus the person. And I realized I have the hypothesis of Jesus, and I don't have any evidence to back it up. And this to me is the people sometimes ask me, why are you an atheist instead of an agnostic?

Because an agnostic says there could be a God, but I don't know. I haven't seen evidence. They don't believe and don't not believe. An atheist says there is no God. So how could you be so certain? Have you been to every planet to check it out and see there's no God? and I say simply, it is the scientific principle of parsimony. What is the quickest and shortest explanation, or William of Occam's Razor?

What is the easiest explanation? There has been nothing in my life that I need God to help me explain. There's not a single fact of my life anymore that the hypothesis of God plays any role in. there are a lot of things I don't understand, but I don't need God to help me not understand them. There are a lot of things I do understand, or I think I understand fairly well, through scientific method and through other people.

You know, we learn things because of authorities. That's the most dangerous. And authority says this is the truth, and we believe it because the authority said it. We believe things because we've used the scientific method to arrive at our beliefs. We've had hypotheses and we test the hypotheses, and we keep testing them all our lives. We've never done testing our hypotheses about what gets us through life.

So the combination of my changed thinking to what I consider to be more scientific thinking, as well as the much more scientific thinking of the Pita Haas. So I sort of get offended when people say he converted due to some Stone Age primitive group. There's no Stone Age group in the world today. The Stone Age disappeared thousands and thousands of years ago. There are, even if you just find a group that can only use stones, that doesn't mean they're living in the Stone Age. These are modern humans with modern human brains and modern human cultures.

They just live very differently and technologically much more simply. But these are modern human beings that choose not to live any differently than they live. And they've seen the city, they've seen other things, they don't desire those things. They deserve to live the way they live. They're not, as the Bible talks about, the sin of covetousness. Well, that's one thing pinahas don't have. If you have something you want to share with them, fine, we'll take it. You know, that's great.

But the only thing they ever ask me for are really small things. They'll ask for, like, they'll see that I have fish hooks. So when they teach me their language, they've all been so good to me over the last 50 years teaching me. And I'm the student still. I've gone in there as a student, not the teacher. That's another thing that the missionary occupation irritates me a little bit because not only is it a sort of colonial activity, but the missionary comes in as the teacher. But the missionary is nobody from the outside is the teacher. They're the student.

So as I talked to the Pina-Han and realized how happy they were and how I didn't have the evidence that I needed to really say that I had tested my hypothesis meaningfully. and I saw that both as a scientist and as a missionary, I began to think, you know, maybe they're onto something. And they would never tell you. One time a group of men came into the house and they said, hey, Dan, yeah, we really like you. You're here with us. You do medical work for our kids and you're funny and we like you.

But we don't want to hear you more about Jesus. We're not Americans. And we don't want somebody who tells us we can't have sex with other women. we don't want somebody who tells us we can't drink. We do what we want. That's the Pita Highway. We all do what we want. And nobody tells other people what they should be doing.

That's not entirely true, but it's pretty close to true. And so they said, you know, we don't know any Brazilians who do this either. We only know Americans who do this. So this seems to be an American thing. Yeah. So like great anthropologists, they discovered that what I was trying to share with him was really more about America and America's interpretation of the New Testament than it was about other countries' interpretation of the New Testament.

But there are a lot of people who believe in the gospel who don't believe in missionaries. Don't believe the missionary should be sent out. That's very foreign to many Americans. But the number of missionaries going into the world today is from what I've read. I haven't stopped studying. My undergraduate degree involved a lot of missionary studies. But the number is less because most churches today don't want to give money from their church to send people abroad. They want to spend the money from the church on the church.

church itself. So it's more of this gospel where Jesus wants us to get wealthier and wealthier, which is just, in my opinion, millions of people would disagree with me, but it's the opposite of the gospel. Annual checkups usually means weeks of waiting for 10 rushed minutes with a doctor who usually tells you everything's normal, and we'll see again next year. But normal doesn't answer the questions of energy, recovery, hormones, and what could be changing inside your body over time, which is why I started using superpower. Your membership includes 150,000. 50 plus biomarkers every year across two lab tests, one comprehensive baseline test, and one progress check so you can actually see how your health is changing over time. That gives you a much

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Head over to Superpower.com and use the code Danny for $50 off. After you sign up, they're going to how you heard about superpower, and please tell them that Danny Jones podcast sent you. So they had no concept for gods whatsoever, like in general, no concept of spirits or ghosts. I thought they had concepts of spirits when I first got there. And in some of my publications,

I've talked about their spirits. But that was a contamination of my Christian mind. I could only, so they were talking about entities of the jungle that they saw that I couldn't see. And it took me a while to realize These weren't spirits. These were just unexplained things they had seen, but they categorized them. So they might hear somebody talking with a high voice, and they would give that a particular name.

Kauai Boggi, which means fast mouth, talking fast, like records speeded up, you know, with a high voice. And they might see something, it could have been a deer, you know, but it could have been a, they thought it was a person-like thing, but it had long teeth. And so they call that big tooth. and they have these things, but they're sort of a mixture of fact and fiction. They see these entities, and they tell stories about them, and those stories are very entertaining,

so it's like The Boogie Man or Little Red Riding Hood. Or like Bigfoot. Yeah, Bigfoot. Exactly. It's very much like Bigfoot and the abominable snowman. And so then I realized, well, they don't have spirits. And talking to God, you have to, that concept just means nothing to them.

So, you know, anthropologists, one or two anthropologists have gone in and said they do have a concept of God, but these people don't speak the language. If you don't learn to speak the language fluently, the Piedas have learned some stories in very simple Portuguese that have been told to them by Brazilians, which are part of the river culture of Brazil, legends and entities and things like this. So some people record these stories and don't realize they're getting them secondhand. These aren't Pita Ha stories. They sound like Pita Ha stories, but when you speak the language, you hear the Pita Ha tell the real stories, the stories they tell among themselves.

And you realize, you know, there's nothing like God. And so if you want to talk about God, how do you describe God? You can say, God tells everybody what to do. Everybody has to obey God. That's like antithetical to Pita Ha culture in which nobody tells anybody what to do. That's a high value for them.

You don't tell me what to do. and I don't tell you what to do. We work together, but if you don't want to work with me and you don't want to go hunting, well, your family is going to go hungry, but that's up to you. That's your business. So many of the things, like Christians often talk about being born again, this is not something that is going to appeal to a Hindu who is always being born again on the cycle of life, and, in fact, would like to reach Nirvana and not have to do that anymore.

So these are cultural concepts that we import poorly into other societies. And you often find what you're looking for. So if you're looking for God, you might latch on to something that sounds like a God's concept. In fact, many missionaries believe that every single culture has concepts, they call them redemptive analogies, that you can use once you understand the culture to bring in the message of Jesus. But I found no evidence for that. And the more or less 20 groups of the Amazon that I've worked with. Did you ever have any conversation with them about like, do they have any belief of what happens when they die?

Or do they just think they're dead and gone and there's nothing there? Yeah, right. You know, I've asked somebody, what happens when you die and there's a dead monkey line by the fire. He said, well, that's what happens. You're just dead. Your food. Yeah, that's the, you know, they bury people, you know. They just dig a hole in the ground and put some.

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

And so they miss people. I have somebody come in from the field one time, a guy, and a friend of ours had just died that year, and his name was Isabe, and he came in, and he says, I almost cried today in the field because I was thinking of Isabi. He was such a good friend. But he's dead, and he's gone. It's not like he lives on in the,

memory, but they don't think he's in heaven or with God or anything like that. I've had some people say, so you think, you know, like my mother died when I was 11, and I have missed her in 1962, the same day that Kennedy died in 1963. And so I've missed my mother now for 64 years. But I don't plan to ever, I don't expect to ever see her again. And for some people, that's really hard to. But if I'm dead and she's dead, neither one of us is going to miss the other. You know, as Mark Twain said, I lived for, I in, eternity was no problem for me,

billions of years before I was born. Right. And I don't think it will be for billions of years after I'm gone. So, yeah, I just don't find, I agree with the Pita Ha that there doesn't seem to be any evidence worthwhile that says were anything other than dead when we're dead. Right. Yeah, it's probably the same thing. Well, there's probably this, we probably experienced the same thing.

that we experienced before we were born. Right. Yeah, which is unconsciousness. Mm-hmm. You know? Man, that's a terrifying thought, though. It's very uncomfortable. The fear of death is like, there's been a lot of, lots of people who have theorized,

like the fear of death is what drives our psyche, right? Yeah, probably that has something to do with it. I don't fear death. I fear the pain. I don't want to die in a flaming car accident. Right. I don't, but I don't fear death itself. But, you know, it's,

I don't understand the fear of death, but it is a very big thing, and it affects people psychologically. Freud had a lot to say about it. You only many other pioneering psychoanalysts and psychologists talk about the fear of death. And the ironic thing is the people who are most preoccupied with death when I was a missionary or other missionaries. Right. They're worried about death. And I'm like my father-in-law, he was a really cool guy, brave. guy and everything, but he was terrified of death. And I said, why are you afraid of death? Isn't that the

whole point is to remove the fear of death from people? You know, you're going to go in heaven and be singing hymns or whatever it is you're going to be doing up there. Why would you fear death? But he was terrified of death. And these people aren't? No, they're not afraid of death. They don't want to die right now, but they're not afraid of it. It happens to everybody. They see everybody die. And life requires a lot of effort. If you're a hunter-gatherer, you cannot let days go by morning. You've got to get right back out there and hunt, or your children are going to go hungry.

And so they don't stop for anything. They might mourn. I've seen them cry, but I've also seen them bury somebody cry and then head right out hunting because you're still hungry. You still have to have food, and they don't have a custom of everybody

bringing you casseroles after the funeral. Right. So... What's their lifespan? Well, to figure out the lifespan, you have to take into account infant mortality. Right. And when we first got there,

I would say that very few children made it to 10 years of age. They died really young. That's improved a bit because we helped them, and also the Brazilian government still makes trips and helps them now with vaccinations and things. I don't know if they're still doing it, but they were. But once you get past that critical period, I know people who seem to be in their 70s and 80s.

I would talk to a guy back in 1978 who I showed him a picture that was taken in 1917 by an explorer there. And he was surrounded by Pita Hahn. He said, that's me right there. I remember that guy. What? So he remembered this picture that was taken in 1917, and we're talking 1978. So 61 years later, well, I can remember things now that happened 61 years ago. Right.

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

laws, or if they do something bad, they will change their whole identity to, like, get away, separate themselves from that? Yes, they have, they have different names throughout their life. And those names are based on what they consider to be major transitions. So a very common name for children, little children who are like five to ten years of age, but usually around four or five, is corn, Chihuahua. So when we first got there, my son, who was, you know, not even two years old, had really blonde hair, and they called him corn. But that's a common name with them. My daughters had common names for different kinds of straw. But as you get older, you take, once you get to puberty, you take on a different name. But if you've also had some traumatic experience or

some wonderfully pleasurable experience, you change your name. And then who you were before then, you know that you're associated with them, but that's not who you are today. So if you did something really bad under one name, you're not necessarily responsible for that when you change names. So they go through life metamorphosizing sort of morally and experientially. And they, you know, we've all gone through traumatic experiences. We've all had these life-changing experiences.

We just don't name ourselves differently after every one. But that's a good way to keep record of how many of those experiences we've had. But I came into the village one time, and my main language teacher was, you know, his name was one thing. And I started calling him by that name. And he didn't respond. And then he turned, and he knew that I didn't know his new name. So he turned, he says, you're calling that guy, that's not me anymore. That name got old and rotten.

It's spoiled like meat. Now I use this name. And so, you know, and we do that to a much smaller scale. You know, sometimes people have names for writing. They have a different name for writing. They have Nome de Plum or somebody writes a book. Like Stephen King has written so many novels, but not all of them under the names, Stephen King. I forget what his other name is, but he's written several novels under a different name.

And J.K. Rowling wrote books under a different name. And sometimes celebrities, they take a different name. Yeah. And one of my favorite singers. Darth Brooks. Yeah. Muddy Waters. He was McKinley Morgan Field, you know, which doesn't have the same ring as Muddy Waters. Right. You know, but so Muddy Waters represents, I'm a blues man. I'm a blues man now. I'm not McKinling, Morgan Field. I'm Muddy Waters.

And so it's not unheard of in our culture, but for the Pita Ha, it's universal. Everybody changes names. Yeah, it seems like, you know, maybe it's like some sort of a way of releasing trauma or, you know, getting away from, you know, like a similar way to coping that like Christians will do, where they like confess their sins.

They feel like they're being released. Maybe this is kind of like similar. They feel like they're releasing themselves or forgiving themselves. Right. Of all of the negative stuff they've done or whatever and transforming into somebody else that's not associated with any of that stuff anymore. Right. And the Pope usually takes a different name once they're made Pope.

You know, the King of England takes a different name. This king didn't, Charles, but often they can, He can take any name he wants. He wants to be known as King Leon. He can be called King Leon. It just depends on the tradition. But the name change represents a change in life. So it's not unheard of for us.

It's just that not everybody does it. You know, the Egyptians mummified the people from wealthy families. But the first civilization of the Americas, the Carl Soupei civilization of ancient Peru, 10,000 years ago was mummifying everybody. If you died, you were mummified. So they had a process of mummification, quite sophisticated, you know, 10,000 years ago,

but it wasn't reserved for the wealthy. So we do all these things as a society, name changes, mummification, and all of this to indicate these transitions and indicate our relationship with the person and that person's own relationship with themselves, you know. So I think it's a very interesting. but it is a way to, you know, get free of guilt in a sense.

You know, Christians are told that once they accept Christ, all their sins are forgiven and they should not feel guilty anymore. All that's been forgiven. And that's a huge, if you're a person who's done a lot of bad things and feel really guilty, that's a huge attraction, right? Of course. And some churches, you take on a new name. So it's very similar to the pita house,

but there's no baptism and there's no religion involved. Now, when you were starting to question, your own faith, like how long did that take? Like, how much time did you have to spend down there living with those people before you started to question that? And then also something we didn't mention, at one point you actually brought your entire family, including your small children down there to live. Yes. So I first went to them in 1977, and then in 1979, and from that point onward, whenever I went, my whole family went. So my kids were pretty much raised there, and they still today speak pita ha my middle daughter sometimes sends me texts in pita ha which is really cool um and if i

start speaking pita ha my kids understand it just fine um so they grew up there um but um i forget the other question that you i was gonna yeah the first part of it was um like what was that process like of you starting to like question your own faith and you know you're down there with your entire with your entire family, who obviously they're also Christians, right? Yes. Oh, very strong Christians. So I would read the Bible by kerosene lamp every night to my kids and my family. We would always pray together. I also read other books like To Kill a Mockingbird and the Chronicles of Narni and stuff. No TV, no radio. Just your family out there in the middle of the jungle. So by the kerosene lamp, we would sit around in a circle. And it was the one part of

the house where I asked the Pina Ha not to come to because it was where the kids slept and I wanted to read to them before they went to bed. So we had this one private time as a family. In the meantime, I'm going back and forth between graduate school and the tribe. I'm spending about six months in each place. And I was getting challenges to my faith from science down in graduate school, and I was getting challenges to my faith. And I prayed about it because the Apostle Thomas said that he was struggling with his faith. And so he told Jesus, Lord, I believe, help mine unbelief. And so I prayed like that. I said, I'm struggling, believing God, help me with my belief. So after about, probably after about eight years, I was starting to lose the battle of keeping my faith.

And there was a time, so I became a Christian in 1968, and by about 1988, I realized that I didn't believe anymore. This process took several years. So from about 1982 to 1988, I was struggling with faith. 1988, I went over to the dark side of science and realized that there's no scientific support for this stuff that was so important to me. But I didn't tell anybody. My wife sort of knew. I never told her exactly. But she sort of knew.

And I stopped leading prayers a lot and stuff because I felt hypocritical, you know, praying with my children. And I didn't actually. But you didn't have a conversation with them about this? Eventually. But it was not until 2002. Oh, wow. So the Iraq war started. And I started getting emails from Christians telling me that the soldiers are the angels of peace of God.

And I thought, that's like the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. And they were talking about God's work in Iraq through the American soldiers. and I'm thinking, we're wiping out people and burning them with napalm. I don't want to be associated with this. So I decided, because when you're a missionary and a pastor and you say, I don't believe, you lose your job. But by this time, I had a stable job in academics. I was teaching at the University of Manchester in England, and my children were grown and gone.

And I told my wife, after I got that email, I read it to her, and I said, I'm not going to pretend to believe anymore. I do not believe this stuff. So she walked over to the phone and made a long-distance call from England to the U.S. and told my kids that your father says he doesn't believe anymore. And this led to lots of turmoil, and she led to divorce and stuff like this. And she still lives down in Brazil near the Pita Haas. They come out and visit her.

Oh, she does. Yeah. And so, you know, she's so, you know, this little. She's still trying to convert them? Yeah, yeah, she still is. Wow. It's not, you're not going to convert them. I've told her this and it just upsets her.

But so she's made no progress, but she believes it, and she's really faithful to it. And she also believes in living in poverty. And she lives in incredibly humble circumstances there in the middle of nowhere. And she barely has enough money to feed herself. But she's always taking in money, always taking in food to share with the pita ha as much as she can. And she always has coffee for them when they come or she'll make Kool-Aid or something like that. So they all love her to pieces because she's this sweet person. They can go.

And if they want to sleep in her house, they can. She doesn't mind. And, you know, so it's a dangerous existence for an elderly woman to be living there all by herself in the middle of nowhere. Right. But that's what she does. So she's consistent. She's never wavered in her faith. And I have, and I abandon it, and that led to the breakup of our relationship.

But she still, she has Starlink, and she still sends me videos of the Pina Ha on WhatsApp, and we talk about how they're doing and stuff. Oh, wow. She's, you know, she'll say things. I don't want to be married again, but you were so good down here, and I really do miss having somebody else to talk to who knows this stuff as well as I do. Oh, man. You know, but, so it took me a long time, and, but now it's been 20, 25 years since I've been out and open. It was somewhat, some, something like, I guess, coming out as gay to your family would be like, you know, it's just this confession that all this stuff you

thought about me and who you thought I was was not entirely correct. I have this thing that makes me very, very different than you thought I was. And it took my kids quite a while to get used to it. They are now. Are your kids still religious? My two daughters are. My son is not. But my two daughters are very strong in their faith. And they say, you know, I don't care what you believe that. You know, it's up to you. I love you. You're my dad. But it doesn't affect my belief. Right. Which I think is very healthy, they're very smart. I think my kids are all smart. They've just reached different conclusions than I have. Radically different conclusions than I have. But, you know, we talk all the time, and I know that a couple of my grandkids like the fact that I'm not a believer. I don't know if

they're believers or not. I never asked them. I don't really care one way or the other. And I've had, you know, one grandchild that I'm close to all my grandchildren, one of them called me, and he said, I'm really worried about your grandpa. I said, why are you worried about me? He said, because if you don't believe in Jesus, then my belief tells me you're going to go to hell after you die. I said, yes, I understand that. I know your belief. Don't forget that I have an undergraduate degree in Bible and theology, and I have no excuse. You know, you don't have to worry about me. My decision is my responsibility. And if there is a hell, whoops, I made a mistake. You know, but that's up to me. And you don't have to worry about it.

Don't have any fear for me. I'm quite happy. I'm pretty confident there is none. You're confident there is one. And I think neither one of us is going to find out who was right because we're both going to be unconscious for eternity. But don't worry about me. I have made myself who I am and I'll have to live with the consequences or not. Right. Do they have any, the Pita Ha, do they have any access to any kind of drugs or alcohol or like yes and yes okay um so i've never really seen them use the drugs that much it's a the one they've shown me the only one they've shown me comes from the bark of a certain tree and i've never been with them to collect the bark i've only seen the bark and they they they let it boil down and they rub this stuff all over their skin skin and they get really high Wow. And they start running.

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

Wow. Every man, woman, and child will get falling down drunk. they're, I told them, I said, it'll be really easy. And child. Yeah, everybody. There's no age limit. They don't, there's no, if they have tobacco, you'll see two-year-olds walking around smoking cigarettes.

They just don't make these age distinctions. It's not part of their culture. You're a human being. Why can I do something that you can't do? Right. You know, so, you know, it's really funny. They also are very, you know, so they drink. I told them it would be very easy to kill all of you.

Oh, how can you kill us? I said, well, a Brazilian could kill all of you. How? We've just run to the jungle. They can't find us. I said, oh, no, they just put whiskey on the beach and it's all poisoned. And they said, oh, yeah, that would kill us all. Because they know that they would drink it all.

Oh, wow. You know, they said they would almost certainly drink it all. They know that, you know. So they're free about that kind of stuff. They're free about sex. You know, there's no age limit for sex. I've seen guys who are like 50 and over with six-year-old girls that they're living with.

And, but pedophilia just doesn't, that's the concept we have. It's not a concept they have. And those girls are going to be normal parts of society. And nobody's going to think that's a weird thing. You know, I had a married woman, you know, I was a very attractive married Pinaaha woman, married in their culture. And she came to me one time when I was by myself.

She said, do you want to get on top of me? And I said, I already have a wife. She said, you only want one woman? I said, yeah, I just have a wife. And she turns, around. She says, he won't get on top of me. He says he only wants one woman. So they all laughed at you. Yeah, they all laughed. What a weirdo, you know, what a weirdo. And then that was, I thought, I suppose not being a Christian has its benefits in some way. Right. Yeah, that's what they talk

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

So no rituals, no ceremonies, nothing like that? Not really. The closest thing that they have to a ritual is they, when it's dry season and it's a full moon and the night is so beautiful,

the jungle is so beautiful at night, they like to walk around in a circle. And if there's enough people, they walk around in a circle, the other direction. And their music is tonal. I mean, their language is tonal. And so by making the high tones a bit

higher and the low tones a bit lower and changing the rhythm it sounds like song and so they're actually in a sense just talking but it sounds like they're singing so are they singing or are they talking it's a sort of i call it musical speech and it's a way of talking and communicating but they'll do that for like three days at a time and there's all kinds of promiscuity that goes on at that time but they're all just having it that's the closest thing they have to a ritual wow so so so it doesn't represent any or anything. But they do have the concept of wives or no.

Yes. But they can just, there's no polygamy. They don't have to stay loyal to that one woman. No, once in a while you see polygamy. But most of the time, it's like I talk about American culture, serial monogamy. They marry, they have many partners in the course of their life, but it's not the same one. You know, my uncle was killed in a drunk driving accident when he was 39, but he had already been married seven times. So in that sense, he was more like a pina ha.

So they change partners frequently and you decide you want to stay with somebody else. The two of you disappear and live together in the jungle for a few days. And when you come back, everybody knows now you're the couple. And the other partners that you did have, they cry or they get upset, but it doesn't last long and then they're done. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, I'm so curious about the drug aspect of it, you know, as far as like, you know, what plants they could use for a certain thing. or like certain medicines or whatever because, you know, there's so many things that can go wrong and when you're living in the jungle, like whether you get attacked by a jaguar or been by a snake

and like, are there ways that they have figured out to treat that, like, or deal with the pain? Or, you know, like the one thing that nature created was pain and suffering, but nature also created drugs to help with that. I have to confess that I do know that they have a lot of plans. that they use for different things in that sense. But I've never not being an ethnobotanist. I have never studied it because I don't know the names of all the plants.

But I did read a wonderful book about the Amazon by a guy named Plotkin, the Shaman's Apprentice, in which he is an ethnobotanist. And he talks about his time collecting plants and their functions, especially their medicinal functions. And so I thought, I'd need to be making more of an effort in this area.

So I was with another group that time, the Bonnewa, and I was starting to study their language. And so I just started collecting plants, because they spoke Portuguese as well as their language, unlike the Pita Ha. So they would tell me the Portuguese names for all these plants and what they were used for. And I had read that book,

so I knew sort of how to store the plants, how to dry them and store them. So I had a big bunch of them with the Portuguese names and I was trying to get somebody to come in and a serious ethnobotanist and do that and I was not able to locate someone and since I'm not an ethnobotanist, it would have sort of been pointless for me to pursue that further.

That's why I have argued that when we go in and study a group in the Amazon, it's very costly and this is an idealization that probably can't happen many times that we need to go in as a team and we need to have an ethnobotanist. and we need to have an anthropologist, and we need to have a linguist,

and maybe a cross-cultural psychologist, and people like this, and maybe, you know, a biologist. There's so many things to find out about the jungle. I've seen animals. I did invest in a couple of books like mammals of the neotropics in which, you know, they're very clear pictures or drawings, at least, of all the animals of that part of the jungle that I lived in. and there were these two jungle dogs,

and it said they hadn't been seen in the wild in over 50 years, and I was looking at the two of them, just down the path from me, there's the peanut high, we're keeping two of them, one of each species. Oh, wow.

And so I knew that they were there. They thought they were probably extinct, but there they were right there. And so their knowledge is so great, and it will be lost at some point. You know, that's one thing when a language goes. If they all learn to speak Portuguese, they won't remember all the creatures

that they know now because the Portuguese doesn't have those words. Latin does. I did work with an ethnobotanist once, and he would get the name of a plant and he would write it down in the indigenous language in Portuguese, and then he wrote down the Latin. So he knew all their Latin-specific names,

and I don't. So he was able to find out more in three days than I had and could in three years. Right. You know, with that kind of training. Yeah, I'm also curious, you know, you find, you say it's hard for them. They can't believe anything that they can't actually see an experience, right? So I would be curious, like, what if you gave them some crazy psychedelic, like ayahuasca or something?

And they were actually able to have some like fucking transcendental religious experience where they were seeing something that's unexplainable in reality. Would that like, okay, now we see it? Well, that probably would work. It would be very interesting because when they dream, they don't make a, distinction between dreaming and they do know when they're dreaming and when they're when they're when they're awake obviously but if I have a dream about something that's an experience I had and if I see it with my own eyes that's another experience that I had those experiences are equally valid right so they

can imagine things when they're dreaming which I suppose would also apply when they're on drugs would have I'm not going to carry out the experiments but but when they're dreaming they they talk about going up into outer space and seeing the stars and stuff like this, and they tell me about it. And so if I asked the guy a couple of years later, have you been to the stars who say, yeah, yeah, I went up there, you know? Wow.

And so they do have these sort of mind-altering, mind-expanding experiences through dreams. And it would not surprise me if they use an experience as an experience. They're equally valid if they had that experience when they were on. drugs. Yeah, because I often wonder when I read certain parts of the Bible, like, was this, was this drug inspired? Was this guy bombed on drugs when he wrote this? Because it sounds like something that somebody, you know, tripping their balls off would write about. Many people talking about the Book of Revelations, that it was somebody on acid or something like that. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of stuff that in the Bible that could be more easily explained as a

drug trip. What is the last book called? Book of Revelations. That's Revelations, right? Yeah. Where they're talking about the seven churches and all that. Yeah. That's what I read first.

A wheel and all this stuff. Somebody was really tripping out. Or God told them all this stuff. But if it was God, he didn't communicate it very clearly because we still don't know what it means. Right. So. Yeah, it makes me wonder sometimes, is that the origin of religion?

Like, was it something like this? Is that how human or how we came up with this concept? of gods and religions and angels and demons and? Well, I think, you know, I don't know because I don't study the origin of religions, but I do know that when I was on LSD, I saw a lot of stuff that made me think differently about the world. And I was a 17-year-old person who didn't spend a lot of time contemplating abstractions. So I can easily see that happening.

Yeah. You know, I mean, Timothy Leary, when he was pushing. LSD back before it was illegal was talking about mind expansion and and and talking about tripping out and seeing all these things and you know we back in the 60s when we were doing this stuff we took it very seriously you know we didn't just see it as just recreation we saw right you know I mean you can see colors and you can I mean see sounds and hear colors and right and you know I just remember standing in front of the mirror synesthesia.

Yeah, pulling all this stuff out of my head, you know, these thoughts. I was pulling them right out of my head like this. And I was thinking, I can't believe nobody does this all the time. Right. And so, yeah, drugs were powerful. When I talked to my kids about drugs, when they started getting into teen years and drugs were still more prevalent for them, I would say, the problem with drugs is not that they feel bad. They feel wonderful.

That's the problem with drugs. They feel really good. And I said, the problem is you just want to keep feeling. good and at some point you're going to wake up and you've wasted it years just doing drugs. So I don't have any moral objection. You know, I've had close relatives who died of heroin addiction and cocaine. So I'm not neutral on the abuse of drugs, but, you know, you can eat too many McDonald's hamburgers and kill yourself.

So it has to do with how you manage your input, what comes into, how much you allow into your body. So, you know, I don't have any problem with drug use. I think that drugs should be legalized, although some of the experiments to legalize them have not been successful, and you have, you know, bad situations in cities. Because the problem is the fact that we tend to overdo the things we do, whether it's eating or watching television or drugs or alcohol.

We just have a tendency to overdo stuff. Not everybody has that same tendency, but a lot of people do. Right. And the pita ha, they don't have access to all this stuff all the time. Do you think if they did that they would experience the same issues that we see in Western society? If they had constant access to alcohol, most of the men would be alcoholics. And these families would starve to death. It would totally destroy the culture.

Jesus. So I used to believe, I think it used to be believed more generally that American Indians had less resistance to alcohol. But that doesn't seem to be true. They seem to, you know, if you're in the jungle and everything's the same day after day, it's like getting the television for the first time. Now you see things you never thought about before. And it's really nice to be drunk.

And if you don't have any understanding of medicine and you haven't seen the social problems that being drunk can produce, then I can see. see that it would be attractive to just stay drunk. But I've buried Pita Ha who died of cirrhosis of the liver from drinking because they lived in a part of the river that had more river traders coming up and they drank all the time. And the river traders come up. They need the Pita Ha to help them get Brazil nuts and natural jungle products.

They don't bring cash. They don't bring hammocks and things to trade with them. They bring alcohol. And a Pita Ha will work for days for a bottle of alcohol, which... Wow. I tried to, I showed a pita ha in a grocery store. He went out with me to town. And I showed him the alcohol that the traders gave to him.

And I showed him how cheap it was and how a can of meat cost a lot more than that alcohol. It was like, it's very cheap sugar cane rum. And he said, yeah, but for us, it's expensive because we don't get it much. Right. And so he just, my lesson didn't work. The same, it's the same thing with like sweets and soda and stuff like that, right? Because they never, that's a completely alien to them. When I first went in, I took a demo.

after I'd been there for a few years from the states. And we looked in every mouth of every Piedaha. We looked at, and looking for cavities, to help them with cavities. Not one cavity. We troubled up and down the river, and we actually looked in the mouth of every living Piedaha. Nobody had a cavity.

A couple of years later, the Brazilian government or somebody else introduced sugar cane into their fields, and now everybody has cavities. Oh, God. And so, you know, sugar's not, sugar's not, not sugar is bad for you, but if you don't have access to it, it's not bad for you. I've had guys sit down and eat back in the days when they had no access to sugar. I've seen a guy pour two pounds of sugar in a bowl and eat it with a spoon.

And he loved every second of it. But that's going to be the last time he does that for a couple of years. So it wasn't good on him. His system didn't like it. But he had a great time and he's not going to have it again for a couple years. But you leave sugar in there all the time. And now Pida Haas are overweight. They never used to be overweight.

There are several of them that are overweight. They have cavities because some people think it's a kind thing to give them rice and sugar and sugar cane, things that don't form part of their diet and candy. And these things, like all things, taken to excess, are just really bad for them. Now, I have a friend who has been living in the Amazon for probably about, I think, 20 years. And he's got a like a nonprofit that helps conserve the Amphazone, like to fight the loggers and to fight all the farming that's going in there trying to like level it out and create cattle farms and stuff like that. And he was explaining to me that like those uncontacted tribes that are out there, if soon as they see a human being, it's like kill on site. And they've killed a lot of young people, a lot of, you know, travelers and stuff like that where there's absolutely no contact with any other human beings.

Right. This is, I mean, many American Indians of North America, the U.S. were like that too. The idea of uncontacted tribes, in a sense, all of them have been contacted by disease. They may have had face. So most of these uncontacted groups have heard stories or had some contact in their past that have been transmitted about death is not far behind white people. you know, and you're going to get disease, and so they don't want them around. And if white people start to come to your area, kill them, because your whole group could be in danger. So they know about epid...

Most of them, I haven't visited them all and talked to them all, obviously, but there's a general feeling among many anthropologists and government workers that these people, maybe a few hundred years ago, had contact with some of the first Portuguese explorers that came through, and they saw people dying from disease. They just retreated far into the junk,

and they want no more contact. And all their legends and myths now have to do with the danger of white people. The Pieda Ha had legends. When I first came there, I was scary to all the kids because they had legends about white people are evil and they will kill you and they will eat you

and drink your blood because they don't have any. I was a vampire. Oh, wow. And so it took me a long time to overcome that. I would walk up to a little kid and they would just start screaming, and running. After they, some of them cried because of my beard, but, you know, the pina house said, well,

they don't know if you're a man or a dog because we don't have a beard, you know. So, but, but that's self-preservation. I, you know, I mean, I'm sorry for the white people that try to make contact, they get killed, but their history, even if they don't have their own stories and things about it, the history of Amazonian Indians with outsiders is a very sad, history just as it is throughout all of the Americas. Right. I would be curious how different those uncontacted tribes are from the Piedaha. You know, like, do those tribes that are also in the Amazon that no one has interaction with?

Do they have any belief in gods? Or how different is their language or their concepts or their values? Well, some of the uncontacted groups are actually known. We have enough data on their language or from other Indians who have had to have. contact with them to know that they are related to Indians that have a lot of contact. Oh, okay. So, and we know that those Indians, they do have contact with that are part of the same language family do have these legends and do have some of the stories that the Pieda

ha don't have. But the thing is there's 8,000 distinct languages spoken in the world today, of which we might have data on 3,500 or so. So the vast majority of cultures and languages in the world, we have very little systematic study, a very little understanding of. And so I think it's very premature to say that this or that is universal among all cultures, because we just really don't know until we get people willing to pay the price of going out there to do field research. Let's face it, if you're a linguist, you can work in a lab or you can work on Portuguese or French And so if you're working on French and you do field work, you go to Paris.

That's not the same thing as if you're doing field work on a language of New Guinea or Africa. And so the people who are my real heroes are these field researchers that go out to work with these small minority languages and try to figure them out and preserve their stories and figure out how their culture works and learn about their culture and who actually go in as students, almost any field researcher I know of in anthropology. their linguistics realizes they're a student first and foremost. And we need a lot more of those kinds of people, but the funding is difficult and the amount of people now who want to leave the air-conditioned office of a university to go out and live in really primitive circumstances and face malaria and Leshmaniasis and all the other

diseases. I mean, I was hospitalized in San Diego once. There are three strains of malaria in Brazil. There's malaria, VEVACs, and Phalsypiram, and I was hospitalized in San Diego. San Diego with all three at once. Oh, God. And the doctors were delighted. They were the doctor of tropical medicine there.

And she said, oh, I've never found anyone that has all three at the same time. So I was, you know, like dying and all these doctors are around talking to me. And then they said, and how is it treated in Brazil when you have these things? So I told them the medicines and the doses, and that's exactly what they gave me. Really? Yeah, it's kind of rare up here to get somebody with these different strains of malaria. You have Asians coming over, have a kind of malaria found in Asia. We're pretty sure that malaria originated in Africa because that's where you find the most strains.

Actually, most things originated in Africa at some point. So there are four strains in Africa. There are three strains in Brazil, and all three strains in Brazil are also found in Africa, but not all four strains in Africa are found in Brazil. But I've had all three of them at once, and they have different symptoms. and so any field worker can encounter that kind of stuff. You can have your life threatened. You can have diseases.

It's not that pleasant to become a field worker. No wonder, Chomsky didn't want to do that. Yeah, actually, when he and I were on speaking terms, he was coming to, I was trying to get him to come to Brazil, and he was willing to come and speak at universities. I said, and I would love it if you could visit me with the Pita Ha, come and spend a few days with. I said, it doesn't have to be long. We can arrange to fly you in and fly you out. He says, yeah, I don't do that. So that was his answer to that.

It's ironic that it's that very language that he was invited to visit that has caused him so many issues over the years. And he said I was making stuff up. He'd rather go on an airplane, do a little St. James. Yeah, yeah, but if he would have come in with me, I think it would have given him a very different perspective on things. Right. I'm sure. I just think that... And you were tried across the hall from him at one point, right? Yeah, 1984, 85, I received funding from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies to spend the year as a visitor.

I had just finished my Ph.D. on the Pieda Ha Language, and I spent the year as a visitor at MIT because I was doing all, I was interpreting everything through a Chomsky and Linz. My office was right across the hall from NOMS. In fact, I made a trip to Brazil, and when I got back, he walked into my office to talk to me about it. And I spoke to him many times during the year and told him about really unusual things about Pina Ha. And he was fascinated. But then when I said, this language shows that you're wrong about this particular claim, then I became persona non grata. And I was a liar and a Charlotte. That's such a shame, man.

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

Right, right. And still he is diluted by these basic human things, like ego and, you know, stuff like that. I mean, that's right. I'm sure that a supporter of his might say, look, he's been at this long enough and he's enough of a genius to know what the possibilities of human language are.

And this doesn't fit, therefore you're wrong. But I don't have that opinion. One time I thought about him that way, but I've caught him in, you know, so many errors and different things, and that just means he's human, right? It doesn't mean that he's different from anybody else. But one of the things I love,

learned during the period of time that I was so religious is that there's a certain amount of religious fervor that carries over into science. Yes. Science is a social enterprise, and we like to have heroes, we like to have saviors, and this human characteristic contaminates inquiry at times. And this is just philosophy of science. You know, you find people who don't like to be corrected. I mean, who likes to be corrected?

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

But you could show that I'm wrong. Right. Right. Yeah, that's one of the things is that, you know, even in science, at the highest levels of science, it's tribalism is prevalent. And, you know, people want to be a part of the right team or they want to be on the right side of history or whatever it is. And when you look at innovators, people who are really creating new ideas that are important, there's a very fine line between the genius and the crackpot.

Right. Right. And the genius is a successful crackpot. And the crackpot is an unsuccessful crackpot. So if you get enough people to buy your idea, then you're a genius. And if nobody buys your idea, you're a crackpot. Now, that's a simplification. And to some degree, if the majority of scientists think you're a crackpot, you might be, actually. But not everybody.

A lot of the most famous scientists of our past, are, you know, from on face value, a lot of people tell stories about how crazy they were in real life. You know, like John Lilly is a great example of that, you know, who was, he was studying, I think, he was trying to study dolphin language. Right. And, you know, he was also getting blasted on ketamine all the time. Yeah, right. Well, you know, a lot of people do that kind of thing. I know, I was, I shouldn't mention the institution, but I was, I used to, when I lived in Germany for a year, I used to play at a local bar because I like to play the guitar and sing. And so I would play at this bar. And, you know, I was in my, I was in my late 40s or maybe even early 50s.

And all these young, beautiful, smart people were sitting in the bar. And some guy comes up to me, says, hey, you want to be? come we're going to have an orgy. This is interesting. But I was married. I didn't go. But these are really smart, serious people who were doing science. Oh, wow. And they were not always behaving according to the average picture of how a scientist spends their time. And they were all drunk when they told me that too. So I was playing the guitar and they were drinking and I was drinking. and I think something also happens to people when they become like very recognized globally for some achievement, right? Like when you receive so many accolades for whatever it is, if it's a scientific discovery or you win a Nobel Prize for something or even if you're like some, you know, globally recognized rock star, you know, some of those people are,

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

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

But the other thing, you know, when I've... Jerry Lee Lewis is a great example of that. Yeah, yeah. He's great. I have a friend who's a well-known linguist who was also a rock star back in the 50s. He had a top 40 hit. I mean, it wasn't a big star. He was, but with a very well-known band. And he wrote, Jerry Lee Lewis had this, had a movie. He was a star in this musical movie in the 50s called Be My Guest. And this friend of mine wrote the music for that movie. And anyone but me or no one else but me. That was the song he wrote for Jerry Lee Lewis.

and he talked to me about teaching it to Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano. No way. And playing it with Jerry Lee Lewis and everything. And my friend said, I decided I wanted to leave rock and roll. Everybody was just crazy and so ego. And I wanted to go into science. So he taught himself a lot of stuff and he went into science. But he didn't escape the ego.

You know, I mean, he doesn't struggle too much well. He knows he's smart and he doesn't. Sometimes he'll let you know that he knows he's smart. But most of the time, he's just a really cool guy. I met Barry McGuire. Barry McGuire had this song in the 60s called Eve of Destruction, which was number one hit in the United States. And he used to be before that.

He was the lead singer for this very popular group, the new Christie Minstrels. And he wrote songs for the Kingston Trio, for a lot of groups back in the 50s and 60s. So he was a big thing then. But he got totally addicted to heroin and was having all these problems. And then he became a Christian.

And he started hanging out with the Christians. Some of them I had brought to Christianity. Oh, wow. And so he and I got to know each other a little bit, and we were ushers and a mutual friend's wedding. And he just had all these stories about people who went crazy. He was, when he was at his height, the Mamas and the Pappas were his warm-up group. Oh, yeah.

They were his warm-up group at his concerts. That's how big he was. And he lived with him for quite a while. He had all these stories about... John Phillips? John Phillips. Yeah. I heard that he made him.

or he made, you know, people like McGeagra look like choir boys with the amount of shit that he would do. Oh, yeah. His daughter told the story about waking up and having her daughter was, her father was injecting heroin into her. Right. And she had been asleep. So he was a crazy guy. But that's what Barry said. He said, all these people are just crazy.

So when I got to know, he was just down-to-earth sweet guy who just happened to have a few platinum and gold albums. But he was just a very down-to-earth guy, really sweet guy. We were ushers in a wedding. But he had so many stories. There's a book out. I can't remember who it's by. It's called 1968. And on the cover of the book, there's this long, blonde-haired guy

wearing his flowery shirt laying on top of a girl in a park. And that's Barry. He was like the epitome of the 60s at one time. But I've known so many people who've used drugs and, you know, the wrong kind of drugs. my rule in the 60s was I wouldn't take anything that needed to be injected. Right. It's a good rule.

Yeah. But I knew a lot of people who didn't have that rule. And my sister died of AIDS from injecting cocaine. And our cousin, our mutual cousin, was dealing heroin and spent 20 years in prison in Texas before she died. So the stories of that kind of drug are not very happy. I heard there was a connection between John Phillips. and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Somebody was...

It could have been because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was really into drugs at one time. And they were somehow in, like, the same... Like, he was getting his drugs from the same person that John Phillips did, or somebody he knew that had a pharmacy in New York. Somebody told me this recently. Pretty vague on it. That's interesting. But, yeah, John Kennedy was, like, you know, really into all that stuff.

Like, he was going down the tubes bad in the 70s and 80s. I don't know that he's fully recovered, but... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, because I've known so many people who abused. I had one of my best friends in high school guy named Rex. He used everything. He would inject wine into his veins.

We just did weirdest stuff. And I saw him like 20 years later, which was already a long time ago. And he was just like had lost his mind. He was just, you know, and he just barely able to complete a sentence. Yeah. So there are drugs and there are drugs. The best rock stars. my experience, like, they're always at their peak when they're always just like going off the rails on drugs.

And whenever they get sober, their music starts to suck. That's my take on it. I don't know what it is. Yeah, I know that, you know, in the early days, everybody was on drugs because that's the only way they could keep up with their schedule. John, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Then towards, you know, several years ago, Willie Nelson came up with this thing for his band that said, if you're wired, you're fired. If you're wired, you're fired. I love it.

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

is the individuality of the person, you know, especially in particular, in crimes that don't involve hurting anyone else. Right. You know, then why are they crimes? I mean, that's the main thing, if they, if you didn't hurt somebody, right, in some way. But these are just, these are just issues

that society's never fully dealt with. And, but for the pita ha, I suppose if they all started becoming alcoholics because alcohol was always around, the women would be, the women don't like it when the men are drunk all the time. The women will also get drunk, but they don't, but when the men are drunk, they don't hunt. And then that makes the kids hungry. That's their priority. Yeah, that's their priority is feeding the kids and feeding themselves. Yeah.

So, and the men are normally very responsible. And not violent. But when they get drunk, you know, they're like, it's like the full moon's out and they're werewolves. They just become totally transformed into violent people. Man. You know, my dad was like that. My dad was an alcoholic.

And when he wasn't drinking, he was a lot of fun to be around. But those were rare times. He was usually drinking. Right. And then he was violent. And so I have much less tolerance for. drunks than I do for people on LSD. I find alcohol in that sense much more harmful.

So has anyone did anyone ever, has anyone ever showed those guys an iPhone? They've seen a lot of electronic stuff, but they don't fully grasp it. I mean, they've seen a television and so an iPhone is like a little television to them. They don't have the idea, you know, talking in real time. Like FaceTime? Well, that would sort of impress them, but it's one of those things where it's so far out of their culture, they've seen me talk to people on the radio and they've seen television. To see a television where you can talk to people in a little size, they would find that curious,

but they wouldn't want it. Right. You know, it's not something that they have any use for. So, it would just be another experience of the oddity of white people. Do they have any ambitions above where they're at right now? Like, do they have, like we see in Western society, like we want to accumulate more wealth, invent newer, technology and stuff like this to make to make life easier do they have any ambitions to make their lives more comfortable or easier are they just happy on the trajectory they're on they're on they are not looking to improve anything because they feel like they've got it pretty good right now you want to eat walk get in your canoe and go out and shoot two fish and bring it back and

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

Yeah. What do you think about when you hear some of these tech folks in society today talk about brain implants making us able to communicate telepathically without words? You know, like Elon has said, like, once I do my neuralink, we'll be able to communicate telepathically. and we'll just be able to convey intentions or emotions to people. Well, I'm not sure what medium he's going to use to get the thoughts from my brain to your brain. There are, Eddie Chang-Hoy mentioned earlier, can hook people up to their neurons and get them to speak through a computer. So there's definitely a lot to be said for the science and developing that, and I would never want to say what can't happen.

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

So like if hypothetically you could develop some way of people to not communicate with language where they're just transmitting thoughts or conveying intentions, it's like I relate that to social media, right? Like if I'm just typing out 240 characters or something real quick on social media, I can instantly transmit it to people across the world. like that editorial process is not very there's not much that goes into that right like if you're writing a book or you're writing a dissertation there's a long process of editorialization of that like it starts from a thought in your head an abstract concept you put it on paper you write it out then you edit that you change stuff up you redact stuff you add stuff to make that message communicated more accurately to the person who's reading it so like Like, if I am just thinking of something spontaneously and transmitting it to you, like, that's going to be miscommunication on another level, I would imagine. Well, you know, it's like you push the send button too soon on your email and you wished you could have taken it back. Right. I have all my email set up with a 30 second delay. Oh, that's nice.

So I can maybe, oh, I didn't mean that, you know. But the interesting thing is every bit of technology. that we become dependent on exacts a price in the lowering of our abilities. Right. So, you know, the second we got pen and paper, which is such a part of my life and everybody's life, we started depriving ourselves of what the pita ha have, that's the ability to remember things that you just hear very accurately. I don't think we can ever escape language if just there are a number of reasons I say that,

but if we are able to communicate telepathically, it will be in signs that are very similar to language. We will, maybe even if it's like Morse code, that's still based on language. So it may not be the language that we currently speak, but it'll be another language. Oh, okay. But so when we have computers and phones, I mean, how many can, I'm writing this biography of Charles Sanders Perce, who I consider to be one of the smartest people who's ever walked the face of the earth. And when he's doing calculations, he was good at so many things, including mathematics. And when he was doing his mathematics, there was no computer.

And you see him, you see his notes where he worked all this stuff out. longhand. These amazing formulas and stuff. And today we could do that in a few seconds, and it took him like a whole day to work this out, even though he knew what he was doing. Did we lose anything by having the calculator do it so quickly? I used to pride myself when I first got married, I was 18, and I was working out of service station that I could always make change instantly in my head. No matter what they could make it instantly, I didn't rely on the adding machine or anything like that. If they gave me this amount of money and I knew they had had this amount of debt, I could just immediately just hand them the change.

And I felt very good about that. And if you told me your phone number, I wouldn't forget it. I would just remember it. But partly as a function of getting older, I suppose, but also as a function of just committing everything to writing now because the way my life has changed, I find it a little more difficult to remember some of those things that were so easy for me at that time. And I don't think it's all age. I haven't noticed any real decline in my mental powers,

and I don't know that my children or anybody else has noticed it. So I do think that's one of the prices of technology. So I just read an article this morning about the effects of TikTok on literacy. I used to ask my students, how many of you read a book a week? And there would always be somebody who raised their hand that they read a book a week. And now I can say how many read a book a month and nobody will read their hands, and I can even say how many read three books this year? Nobody.

People just aren't reading it. You know, book sales are going down unless they're really superficial books, but the more difficult to understand, Dostoevsky, one of my favorite writers, could he be a star today? I mean, could he make money today when anybody read his books? I don't think anybody much is reading his books anymore, or Tolstoy or even Mark Treasurer. You know, who his books were as rich as anybody's, but also very humorous.

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

for the first time in 200,000 years. So who knows what's going to come out on the other side? It's also writing is inherently deceptive, too, because, you know, it's funny that we study history based on mostly on ancient texts and translating, ancient writing and stuff like that. But just because you're reading something that was written down 2,000 years ago

doesn't mean that was the fact of what was happening on the ground. Right. You know, just the same way in 2,000 years from now, somebody reading the Lord of the Rings, they're not going to know, like, is this something that happened? Was there this guy named Gandalf?

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

knowledge to knowledge through like reading and the written the written word because there's a big difference between those two right so there are a couple of things you know because these are things that i think about um you know we we fix our beliefs based on science based on stubbornness based on what sounds attractive and based on authority. Writing can become an authority that oral language isn't for many of us. So when you see it written, it sounds, and we take it as more authoritative than when it's just spoken. A pastor can stand up in a church and give a beautiful sermon, but people might take the same words in a published book more seriously than in there.

So one of the dangers is to put too much authority in one form or another. Also, we write differently than we talk. If you listen to the way people speak on a day-to-day basis, their sentences are not that complicated. But if you look at the writing of the same person who's an accomplished scholar, let's say, then the writing becomes much more complicated. The sentences are much more complicated. When I'm writing a scientific book, I don't worry so much about this because I'm writing it for a very small audience of people who know all the terms. If I'm writing a book for the general public, I read it out loud regularly.

Or I simply, if I want to tell stories, first I tell them to my tape recorder and then I listen to them. And somehow I feel like my writing is more effectively when it's effective, when it's informed by this. oral medium as well. So I have also found that I tell stories when I write and people react to it okay. But when I tell the same stories orally, they react to it much more positively. So there's something about my oral communication that I have to work to get into my written communication. So there are various differences between written and oral communication. And the biggest danger, as you just said, we take written as somehow more authoritative. Yeah, definitely. And that seems to be one of the biggest things, like in these people that study these ancient texts for religious reasons and try to study like, what was Jesus actually, right?

Like there's so many different texts that you could read about Jesus and have your own interpretation of what he was. Right. Which is why there's people who have books about Jesus was a mushroom. Jesus was, you know, I had one guy on here who was obsessed with Mark 14 and Jesus in the park thinking that Jesus was like praying on little kids and using. drugs in the park and, you know, was this drug associated guy? Well, this is the kind of thing that causes the pita ha to reject it entirely. Right. They don't write it and they don't see any authority in it. You're just, I'm telling you the story.

Well, he could tell me another story about something else. So why should I believe this is any more authoritative than anything else if I don't have a written culture? This is not going to feed my family. Right. Exactly. This has no use to me whatsoever. And you don't even seem to know what you're talking about.

So that makes you think. But that is a very good point. in a culture like that that has no written tradition, there is no form of language that they consider more authoritative than the way they normally talk. And they certainly don't consider outsiders any more authoritative than they are. Right.

Just because I have a nice boat and I have a radio and can meet doesn't mean that my words carry any more authority than theirs. Well, Dan, thank you so much for doing this, man. This has been fascinating. Do you ever plan on going back to see those? those guys down there? I was hoping to go back this summer, but there was a lot of turmoil there. They actually killed somebody who was trying to invade and-

Oh, no. So the government shut it off, but I'm still hoping that I can go back. Why did they kill somebody? They were facing hunger for the first time in their history because of dams that were causing the river to get too low and the fish were leaving. Oh, no. So they went up to a farm that was actually built on their reservation, and they said, stole some chickens and they killed a cow and took a lot of meat and they were getting back to the

village. Three young guys from the farm took off after them with shotguns. And you shouldn't do that with the pita ha on their land. So the pinahas knew they were after them. So they just pulled over to the side, hid their canoes and waded with bows and arrows and shot them all. And so that was the end of those guys. That's crazy. You can't sneak up on the ptahans in their land. No. So these guys thought they had shotguns and they were really young. All in their 20s looked really fit and probably were tough guys, but they had no idea what they were getting into.

Jesus, man. That's insane. Yeah, I wonder, you know, I really hope that, you know, some of these logging organizations and the farming stuff that's happening down there that's like eating up part of the rainforest doesn't encroach on them and it doesn't, you know, affect them too bad. I mean, they're protected pretty well, right? Well, they are from that kind of thing, but when you start affecting the water, when you build dams that cause the river to change its cycles almost entirely and it gets so low that what used to be 20 feet deep, you can now

walk across the fish leave and the fish that they eat most go down to other rivers. Because that's where they rely on the most for food is fish. Yeah, 70% of their diet is fish. So now they're going hungry. And also the animals leave because the streams and the jungle flow into the river, but the river goes so low, the streams are empty so the animals migrate. And so now they don't have hunting or fishing. And for the first time in their history, they're starting to starve. So the government, I believe, is helping them since I can't go. I can't say. But if it comes to letting my family starve or stealing a cow, I'm going to steal the cow. What about people? Have they ever hunted actual humans from other tribes or like outsiders?

No. They, they did. If somebody tried to come in, they would hurt them because they go into this defensive mode. But they're very, by and large, they're extremely peaceful people. Is there any cannibalism in those tribes? No, I did work with a group called the Wadi on the border with Bolivia. I wrote a large grammar of their language. And up until about 1962, they were cannibals.

and so I have a lot of stories about them eating their own dead and eating the dead that they killed in battle. Oh, Jesus. So part of a funeral, before 1962, if somebody died in the village, you ate them. You know, the whole family would gather around and cook them and eat them. All of it. And if there was an enemy, they would just chunk them up and eat them like some sort of wild animal they killed. But they stopped doing that.

Yeah, they stopped. stopped in 62 because of missionaries and the government. Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Well, again, I appreciate you doing this. Where can people find all your books and do you look at a website or anything like that?

Well, I have Daneverettbooks.com is my book site. And most of my books are listed there. But if you just go to Amazon and type in my name, you'll find most of my books, all of my books there. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, we'll make sure we link it all below for folks. And thanks again. This was fun.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to talk. Good night, everybody.