Daniel Everett

The episode opens by setting out an unusual life story: someone who became a Christian missionary, went into the Amazon to live with an Indigenous group, and later stopped being a missionary. The transcript spells the group's name in several ways, including "Pita-ha," "Pita Ha" and "Piedaha." The time spent living with them is put at "about eight years in the jungle with them over a period," within a working relationship of 40 years with repeated return visits. Asked whether it is safe to call him an atheist now, the reply is "Yes, it's safe to say that."

The conversion story starts in the 1960s, outside a concert that the transcript later refers to as a "Jimmy Hendricks concert," where the future missionary needed money to get in and was described as "a guy with a bag of acid." There he met a young woman from his own high school who had been raised in Brazil by missionary parents. Living in the Amazon "sounded really cool" to someone who did not want "a typical U.S. life." He then became a committed believer, studied Bible and theology as an undergraduate, was ordained in the Wesleyan church, and preached on street corners.

Her father, a missionary of 20 years, is described as "the most influential person outside my family in my life." The two talked late into the night. At 17 he found the father's arguments convincing, but the jungle stories were the main draw. The father knew about the marijuana use and objected only to it happening in the house. The conversation frames the conversion as a reversal of teenage rebellion, and the account agrees:

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

The account says he reached the Amazon eight years after converting, because training came in several phases and involved the whole family. The final test was a "survival hike": after almost four months of training, trainees were left alone in the jungle for at least a week with no food or supplies. In his case it lasted about 10 days. Nobody checked on them. Trainers simply came back when the time was up, and the possibility that a trainee might not survive gets the reply "you could be." The account ties this to living "by faith": God was "supposed to be supervising your training."

The equipment is described precisely. Trainees left with "maybe a quarter of water," a machete, a little fishing line and "about 10, 15 matches" kept in a 35 millimeter film canister, but no lighter and no fish hooks. They found water by cutting particular vines at the top and then at the bottom. A hook was made from a sharpened stick "the size of a toothpick." The result was two fish "about three inches long." Otherwise, "most of the time I ate plants and went hungry." He also made a bow and arrow with the machete. The conversation mocks the rule that allowed a machete but not fish hooks, and the explanation offered is that machetes are easy to carry and needed for many jobs, firewood included.

Fire was the biggest daily job. With roughly one match per day, the fire could never go out, so half a day could go into cutting firewood before even lighting it. Because everything was wet, a fire had to start from dry, crackly wood and leaves, then take thinner wet pieces one at a time, until it was hot enough to burn "a sopping log." That kept the trainee near camp. One night he woke to "heavy steps" around the camp and immediately blew on the fire to build it back up. He thinks a jaguar may have made the steps but says he did not see one. The account calls the training rigorous and effective: when he finally reached the Amazon, "it felt like i was coming home."

After seeing real jaguars, he concluded that fighting one with a machete "would have been a pretty pathetic thing" to try. The figures given are that jaguars "get up to 400 pounds," are "the third biggest cat in the world after the lion and the tiger," and "often hunt in pairs." Even so, the account says men of the group have killed jaguars alone with bows and arrows.

A second group, called the "Bonnewa" in the transcript and studied for several months, uses poisoned darts and arrows. Their story is about a hunter who saw a deer running toward him and realized that deer do not run at people unless something is chasing them. A jaguar followed and attacked him. He held it off with a blowgun seven or eight feet long while its back legs tore at his legs. When it moved to attack from behind, he stabbed it with a poisoned arrow and then shot it. He passed out, and his family found him "a couple of days later" with badly infected wounds. He survived.

The Pita Ha, the account says, hunt jaguars when one becomes a danger, for example when one frightened a woman. One jaguar that was killed and eaten turned out to be sick and starving, which is offered as the reason it attacked. The meat is described as stringy, sinewy and tough. The general rule was to eat whatever they killed, with Tabasco sauce. The children were there the whole time, and the warning given to them was:

just remember who's eating whom out here.

Food preservation sets the group apart. Many groups smoke, salt or dry meat. The Pita Ha know how, but the account says they do it only to trade with Brazilian boats and never preserve meat for themselves. How they learned the technique is left open. One man's explanation shows a system built on sharing, where storage is unnecessary:

oh, I preserve it in the belly of my brother.

The account describes the group as the only humans along almost 300 miles of a winding river, transcribed as the "Mice Sea" or "MISI" River. By U.S. standards it is a relatively large river, "a couple of hundred yards across," and in the rainy season it can reach 75 to 100 feet deep. It once held plenty of fish. The group has lived there "as far as I can tell for almost 300 years." The qualifier marks that figure as an estimate.

The conversation then turns to a recent change. The Brazilian government allowed dams on other rivers, not this one, and according to the account they changed water levels enough to take "most of the fish" out of the group's river. The main dam is dated to "about 10 years ago," and the account says it flooded farmland and settlements upstream. Downriver, the river used to have only a few spots where the bottom showed at the lowest point of the dry season. In the last couple of years it has dropped so low that people can walk across it. The group has never seen the dam. When told that a wall had been built across a river to produce electricity, they asked why. Their only reference point for electricity was a generator, which he did not have for his first 20 years of work with them.

For the first time in their history, they can't be self-sufficient in protein.

The account lists several effects. The group is reported to be starving. Conflict has broken out with nearby Brazilians, and "they've killed a few people stealing food from their farms." The transcript does not say clearly who killed whom. Hunting, which the group does not like, fails even when men go many miles into the jungle instead of one, because the loss of fish and water also drives off game. Communities are breaking apart as some people move to bigger rivers, where Brazilians surround them. Until about five years ago they would never have considered integrating. Near towns they lived in the surrounding jungle, apart from the town. Now hunger is pushing them to integrate and learn Portuguese, which the account calls "a very unfortunate situation for them right now."

The original goal is stated plainly: "to translate the Bible and to plant a church and get everybody believing." The mission organization, the Wycliffe Bible Translators, offered three postings: New Guinea, Mexico or Brazil. In Brazil, two earlier teams had been unable to work out this group's language because "it's not related to any other known living language." Because of his strong linguistics record, he accepted the challenge. The assignment came in 1976, and the first trip was in December 1977.

He arrived knowing "Nothing" of the language. The written record before him was thin. Portuguese explorers made contact in 1784 and recorded only descriptions, which the account says "still fit them today." A German explorer collected a fairly good word list in 1821 with no linguistics training. In 1920 a German-born naturalized Brazilian, called the founder of Brazilian anthropology, collected a larger and "very good" list. None of these sources explained the grammar or marked tone, so he could not tell how the words were pronounced. (An AG1 sponsor read interrupts this part of the conversation.)

Tone is the first big obstacle described. In the transcript, the words for "friend" and "enemy" look the same ("magiay") because only pitch separates them, and the difference is shown by whistling. The words for "me" ("che") and "shit" ("ch'i") differ in the same way, so a wrong tone means "you've called yourself shit" and everyone laughs. Mandarin, Korean (described as "somewhat tonal") and many African languages are given as comparisons. For speakers of European languages, tone is "just really weird" and hard to hear.

The method was basic elicitation using phonetics training. From the first hour he pointed at objects, said the English word, and wrote down what people answered. For example, he dropped a stick and recorded a phrase he understood to mean the stick fell. The account adds a caution, "that's what I thought it meant," admitting that early glosses were guesses. When the conversation describes this as demanding that people teach their language, the account objects: "Well, I didn't demand."

Contact had no advance arrangement. A floatplane landed on the river, and he walked into the middle of the village. Several things helped. He arrived alone, and his bright red hair made people curious. He handed out candy to the children. He brought a long roll of tobacco, about "eight feet, nine feet long" and wrapped in latex, and gave cut pieces to the people who helped him. He also traded canned food for fish. The account believes the group could quickly tell he was no danger, and that "they know how to deal with that very quickly if they sense danger." Clothing in photos shown during the conversation, such as a Ferrari T-shirt, came from riverboats. Without recent boat visits, "they'll all be naked."

After a 10-day scouting trip, he came back with his wife and three children, aged about nine, six and three, and stayed a full year. Both older daughters learned the language fairly quickly. Asked whether bringing small children was hard to decide, the account says it would be today, but at the time "I believed in miracles" and trusted that God would take care of them.

The illnesses are listed in detail. The son had meningitis. Both daughters and he himself had malaria. At University Hospital in San Diego he was told he was the only patient they had seen with all three strains of South American malaria at once. He has had relapses but none for a long time, and he can never give blood. Treatments named include "Daraprim," what the transcript renders as "Primm," and straight quinine. His wife dropped from 115 to 76 pounds, and a doctor told him she would die that night. She survived with blood transfusions and quinine, which caused "several days of just constant retching." A daughter also became "just skin and bones." These are his personal recollections of treatment, not medical guidance.

The evacuation shows how unprepared he was: "I didn't have a boat. I had no idea how to get out of there." A Catholic priest, who had come to see what the Protestant missionaries were doing, lent his narrow aluminum canoe with a six-horsepower Johnson motor and stayed behind in the jungle. The account contrasts the missionary adventure stories he had read with what actually happened:

It was horrific experience, and I just didn't know what was going to happen.

Over the long term, he lived there the whole of 1980, and from 1977 to 2013 he spent three to six months there every year. He got sick on every trip, including typhoid fever, and was "attacked by snakes." The account calls it "a mind-altering experience" and says "Things didn't go the way I thought." The people began questioning him in return, asking why he believed in Jesus and what Jesus was like. This segment sets up, without fully explaining, how he went from missionary to atheist.