#2549 - Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond, PhD, is a professor, scientist, historian, and author of several books, including “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” “Collapse,” and “Why Is Sex Fun?” His latest book, “Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,” is available now.www.harpercollins.com/products/profits-prophets-coaches-and-kings-jared-diamondwww.jareddiamond.org Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. Visit https://ketone.com/Rogan for 30% OFF, or find Ketone-IQ at Target nationwide. Get 30% off + 2 free gifts at https://ARMRA.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  Very nice to meet you, sir.

• 0:13Speaker 03

  It's a pleasure, great pleasure to meet you.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  I really enjoyed Guns, Germs & Steel, and I just got into this yesterday, and today I started reading your new book. Awesome, awesome so far, fascinating, I have so many questions, but my first one is, have you done podcasts before?

• 0:31Speaker 03

  I've done podcasts, quite a few podcasts, at home in my wife's study, on my wife's screen, and I've done face-to-face interviews, like with you.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, cool. So, first of all, why'd you write this book?

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Why did I write this book? A short answer is, I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the Second World War, under the shadow of Hitler. Every day, there was something going on with the war. My father pasted up on the wall of my bedroom, a map of the European Theater and the Pacific Theater, and there was always the question, why did it happen? And if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome? Then, I moved to Europe, I lived in England, I lived in Germany, I love German music, I love the German language, why?

• 1:32Speaker 03

  And then I moved to Chile, I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America. Before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming with Pinochet, his own fellow generals didn't see it coming. And so, there's been, throughout my life, this question, do bad as well as good people make a difference? Also, my wife is Polish, the last of my family in Europe, disappeared in the Holocaust. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz, she survived, but others of the family didn't survive. And so, ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question. And then, leaders have made a difference in my life.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  There was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department, who, when a pump, water pump that I had been operating, blew overnight, and it flooded my lab room, but it also flooded the lab room below me. And that was a poor choice of lab room to flood, because it belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner, the father-in-law of my thesis supervisor, and the master of my college at Cambridge, not a good choice.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  The chairman of the department called me in, I thought I'm gonna be thrown out. He said, that was sloppy, you have to be careful with water pumps, and be more careful in the future. That permitted my scientific career to continue, other people might have thrown me out. So, leaders have made a difference in my life.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world, and one of the things that really terrifies me is Nazi Germany was not that long ago. And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again. That that type of scenario, where a group of people are completely othered to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it, like, that, we thought we were done with that, forever. I don't believe that anymore. As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is, and that there is

• 3:51Speaker 02

  always these battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil. Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people, they want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone who made a difference. And then leaders who just want to take over all the systems, and make sure they can't be contested, and want to dominate the country, and change it. And you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance, and about all these different factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs, or not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  You open the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident. And what would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving, one was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler, now what?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  What would the world look like? There's so many instances, what if JFK didn't get shot? What if Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get shot? There's so many different moments in history, where you go, how would culture look? How would society, how would civilization look, if just a few things had been off?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  There are so many things to say about what you've just said. So, growing up, after World War II, we thought, never again. And yet, in Cambodia, Pol Pot killed about one-quarter of the Cambodian population. In evil ways, he encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet did in Chile. His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count, because Chile's a small country, and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of the population.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  But the tortures that he implied are simply too, they were far worse than anything that the Nazis did. And he surprised his fellow generals. So, all of that is a surprise. As for, leaders can do either good, or bad, or they can do nothing. If you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference, Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers, but they're about, I can boil it down to four or five things. A leader has to be at the right time and place. Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place, and they seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of Popular Electronics with the Intel 880 chip, Bill

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Gates said to Steve Allen, now is the time, we gotta start now, building a microcomputer, because if we don't do it, somebody else will. So, Bill Gates recognized that the time was right. Winston, and he made the time right. Winston Churchill recognized that the time was right. When Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister, he said, I knew that this was the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation, but he didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill became Prime Minister because Germany invaded France, and Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France. He recognized that he was in the right time and place. There are other leaders who are at the right time and place, but they don't know it.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think in 2004. As a result of us having been born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart social media, because there had been some before and some afterwards, but the changes in the internet made 2004 a particularly good year. So, leaders, some leaders choose the time and place to go all dead. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it, Winston Churchill did. And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg, and Genghis Khan.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. And yet, there were other people who tried, Adel of Hannon, and Timur the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well, within the last 10 years, students of Tree Rings have figured out that on Mongolian step, the wettest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. If he had been born 10 years later, or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan. But he happened to have been born at the right time and place, because with all that

• 8:42Speaker 03

  rain, that meant hay to feed sheep and goats, to feed Mongol babies, and it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle. So, Genghis Khan was someone at the right time and place, but he had no idea, and we didn't have any idea, until this Tree Rings study of the last decade.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have little things we do to save ourselves time, like shopping online, or paying kids from the neighborhood to rake up all those leaves sitting in the front yard. Or if you're hiring, you rely on ZipRecruiter. They match you with qualified candidates as soon as you post your job. Now that's how you save time. Try it yourself for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. It's rated the number one hiring site based on G2 for a reason. Because on top of the qualified candidates, it also shows you the most interested ones first. Save time and meet great candidates sooner with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who

• 9:45Speaker 02

  post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, joe rogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch,

• 10:30Speaker 02

  use the offer code ROGAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. The football season is heating up and every week feels bigger with DraftKings Sportsbook, the number one sportsbook for live betting. Plus, get extra protection with early exit opt-in. And if your player leaves the game with an eligible injury in the first half, your bet is protected. No matter which game you're watching, you're always connected and in on the action with one app. New DraftKings customers, sign up with code ROGAN, spend $5 to get $150 in total bonuses within 14 days. That's code ROGAN. In partnership with DraftKings, the crown is yours.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  If you or somebody you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-MYRESSET. 21 and over, Virginia only. Eligibility restrictions apply. $50 in non-withdrawable bonus bets issued every seven days via click to claim for 14 days. Bonus bets expire seven days after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see sportsbook.draftkings.com/promos. Limited time offer.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  That's interesting, but you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist. And he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions. So he accepted all religions, and it was one of his strengths, is that he didn't care. I'll take you all in. Everybody gets to come in here. And the way he would attack these cities, there's also the strategy of, they never settled down. They always were intense. And they would camp out in front of cities and just wait them out. I mean, there was a lot to it, other than just resources, right?

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  He's kind of an extraordinary individual.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  It took two things together. The second thing, the first thing was that he was at the right, he was at the right time and place. But he also had to be an extraordinary person. If he had been an equally extraordinary person at some other time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him. So you're correct. At a given time and place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge. But who emerges depends upon the personal qualities. For example, to take, to take religion. The first century AD of the, of the Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later. Because

• 13:00Speaker 03

  the Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia. And so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then. But the Roman Empire was the, basically, the father of the European countries that spread around the world 15 centuries later. Now, Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was, he was born. Neither he nor his followers had any idea that 15 centuries later, the religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then would spread around the world. It was the right time and place. And, but there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messias who variously

• 13:45Speaker 03

  got killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion, you have to be charismatic, number one. You have to be an outstanding organizer. Christ died too early. It was St. Paul who was the outstanding organizer. And often religions also need a great general. In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer and the general. Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic. He was a great organizer, was a great general. The Mahdi of the Sudan

• 14:26Speaker 03

  who established this empire in, in East Africa. Fantastic, general and organizer and incredibly charismatic. But the Mahdi, he was in the right place to establish an empire in East Africa. But he wasn't in the right place to establish a world empire, because East Africa just didn't have the, the technology and the demographics where Christianity did.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  The, the Paul thing is very interesting, because the more I read about the Bible and the construction of it, the more, it just gives you pause. Like, Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity. Because he never met Jesus. So Jesus never spoke to him. And Jesus never wrote anything down. And so when Paul has this vision, when he's on the road to Damascus, and he has this, whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus. Like, we're taking, the entire religion is based on this guy saying, I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them, when no one wrote it down, and I never met him. So it's really Paul.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yes, and it was two people. It was Jesus, and it was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus of those various other rival messias. Jesus had some advantages with his message. It was a universal message. It was not directed just to the Romans. It was not directed just to men. It was, it was aimed, aimed at everybody. So of the candidate messias then, Jesus had a particularly good message. But it took, a good message isn't enough. It took St. Paul as, as the organizer.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  But it's fascinating that Paul never met him, and that Jesus never wrote anything down. So when Paul's talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Which is really strange. An oral history, that it takes 20 years before this guy says, this is what Jesus said. And then we all go on that.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Right. The, the, what's thought to be the first of the Gospels, Gospel according to Mark, is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus. So we have, have no first-person accounts of, of Jesus.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  It would be really nice if he wrote things down.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  It would have made things more certain. In the case, in the case of Muhammad, it was two centuries before things got written down. So we know even less about Muhammad

• 17:14Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  than we do about Jesus. Or a difference also between Muhammad and Jesus is that Jesus, we know, was at the right place and right time. The Western Roman Empire, we know, was at the peak of its power. Why on earth did Saudi Arabia produce a world religion then? Was it that, as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia, was it that, at the time of Muhammad's birth, was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly wet time, which meant lots of people, which meant lots of arms? We don't have the weather information about Arabia. So we don't know why, we don't know whether. We infer that probably Muhammad was at the right place and right time. But we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan, and the

• 18:00Speaker 03

  way we can with Jesus.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  It's interesting, too, because Muhammad was essentially a prophet, right? He wasn't a child, he wasn't the son of God. It's like, and we know there was a man that existed during that time, and he became this religious leader. The religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas, essentially. Of course, written down hundreds of years later. The, it's just incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system, these religious systems, where someone becomes the person who has all the rules, and everyone follows those rules, or you're ostracized from the kingdom. Like, and there's so many of them. And it,

• 18:44Speaker 02

  it, the thing is, we know some of the people who created it, like Muhammad, or like Jesus, or like Joseph Smith. Like, there's some weird ones. And it's just, it's a very strange pattern that comes up over and over and over again. I don't know how all of them can be correct. You know, without any judgments on, on religion, someone's got to be wrong. If you have, all have completely different origin stories. But it's so fascinating to me, in particular, that people want to have this sort of a structure. It gives them comfort. They, and there, you can get entire populations to go along with it.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  Right. One might say that, that the, the religious teachings are secondary. In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to five religions that have gone around the world. Mormon religion, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science. Why have the Mormons been so successful? Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings? With due respect to the Mormons, the religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merit. But the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young, and...

• 20:04Speaker 03

  The social features of Mormon religion, their optimism, their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy, and they're expecting every Mormon, if you're Mormon, you tithe yourself, you don't fill out a 1040 income tax form. Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their income to the church, and they calculate it themselves. So that's a big, big commitment. So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread, not because of Joseph Smith's theology,

• 20:46Speaker 03

  but because he was charismatic, and because Brigham Young then was an outstanding leader.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years, it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with, to keep my brain locked in, and that's ketones, an energy molecule our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Ketones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot, and were only used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a $6 million research contract with the military, Ketone IQ had a breakthrough, and you can finally get ketones online, on Amazon, or at Target for $5 a shot. They don't taste good, but damn, do they work. Trust me, if you rely on your brain for your day-to-day success like I do, take Ketone IQ. I take it, and I love it.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I feel sharper, I make better decisions, I have faster memory recall, and I'm more productive. Your brain thrives on ketones. Go to ketone.com/rogan for 30% off your subscription order, or find Ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide, in the protein and electrolyte aisle, and get your first shot free. They're so confident in it that they even offer a 60-day money-back guarantee. So go ahead and take your shot. They've also done an excellent job of instilling a sense of community amongst fellow Mormons that I think is, I don't think there's another religion that quite has reached that level. They are the nicest people. Like, I have yet to run into an asshole that's a Mormon.

• 22:23Speaker 02

  And it's kind of shocking, you know? If the whole origin story wasn't so, as the kids say, sus, you know, it would make you really be interested in like, what's going on here? Like, it seems like these guys have it nailed, other than, you know, the nine wives and all that other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the original idea.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  With due respect to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and ascent to heaven is stretching scientific understanding. And I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major factor propelling Christianity. Instead, what, there were many things to propel Christianity. This gets interesting. The Christians outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire,

• 23:22Speaker 03

  because Roman religion had a low view of women. Children did not have a high prestige. There was frequent abortion, whereas Christianity, from the early Christianity, did give a high role to women compared to Roman religion. Christianity favored having babies. Christianity emphasized taking care of the sick. And so, when you look at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the Roman

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Empire, Christians lived longer, and they were less likely to die than were pagans. And the result was that Christianity that started out as maybe a few dozen people under Jesus, and even in St. Paul's time, what, maybe 100 people? Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire. On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism emphasized writing. And so, when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, there were all of these literate Christians, and the pagans were not literate. So Christianity had reasons for its success, with due respect, had nothing to do with a virgin birth.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. It's really interesting, the way you just outlined the reason why Christianity was successful. You could say that that same pattern is being mirrored by Muslims, that they are strict adherents to religion, they emphasize having many children, and they take care of the community.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  And their populations are rising, while a lot of secular people, their populations are dropping off.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  That's true. Yeah. With Muslims, as with Christianity, I would not, I would not, Muslims might argue, but I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know, something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those, rather than theological beliefs, I see as the reason behind Islam's spread.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of constructing it, the way it's practiced today, the people that are Muslims are devoutly Muslim, there's a large population of them that are very religious. And that population is very, I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people, because most people are very undecisive. They don't really know why they're here, they don't really know what life is for, existential angst, society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Something that you can join, where everyone is all in, and they're very locked in and disciplined, and that discipline, you know it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day. It takes a lot, where everyone agrees, we're all gonna play music and pray five times a day, and we're a part of a team. And if you leave, the punishment is death. So if you decide that you don't want to be a part of this anymore, and you don't believe anymore, and you announce that, they can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like, you're all in, and you're all in for life, and we all support each other. And it's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Like, it doesn't appeal to me like I want to join it, but when I watch these people give speeches, and I watch them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they have is something that is very attractive to people. And I think that confidence is a weird, that charismatic confidence is a weird aspect of human beings, in that we follow those people, like universally, like we follow charismatic, confident people universally, and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system, and you got all these other people that are part of this strong belief system. There's a compelling force that makes you want to join.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  Something of that is also true of Mormonism, although in somewhat different ways.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Right, it's less militant, but it's very compelling that they're so, they believe so much.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  That's right, and it's compelling that 18-year-olds, every 18-year-old Mormon man is expected to go devote two years to proselytizing. And if you don't have much money, you go 70 miles away. And if you do have money, you go to the Pacific Ocean, or to Europe, with the result that you're, but these people take it seriously.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  And so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe and the Pacific. There's one other thing that I'd like to say here, and that is that people often ask me, Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel neglects individual people, it's about things that happened over the last 10,000 years, and Guns, Germs, and Steel, the different outcomes of societies and different content, has nothing to do with any individual. Whereas here, you've written a book about leaders, about individuals, how do you reconcile Guns, Germs, and Steel with leaders? And my first response would be to say that Guns, Germs, and Steel is about entire continents

• 29:20Speaker 03

  for 10,000 years, where one person doesn't make a difference, whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the short term. But the one case that I can think of, where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later, is in religion, the beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad. Those individuals had a long-lasting effect. And so far, it looks as if the beliefs of Joseph Smith, he's been gone for, what, 200 years now? But the prospects are that Joseph Smith, again, will have a long-lasting influence.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Whereas I can't, I can't think of a politician or a business person who has had an effect 2,000 years later.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Well, I think Guns, Germs, and Steel highlighted all the factors that have to be in place for these types of changes to take place. It's not like mutually exclusive that leaders aren't important as well. Like, it seems like they both work together, hand in hand, but those leaders wouldn't have been able to do what they did without all of the innovation, without the industry, without the infrastructure that these places had, without the wet season that the Genghis Khan and the Mongols had fortunately arrived in. Like, all those factors kind of all have to be in place. They're not, it's not either or, right?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests, but behind these convincing devoted priests were European guns, germs, and steel, European smallpox, European measles, that killed far more Native Americans than did, than did European guns and horses. So...

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Religion to become worldwide, religion needs what one would call an economic and demographic engine, the Mahdi of the Sudan. The accounts that we have of him are of his being incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general, his, his small troops with sticks and stones, nevertheless wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with machine guns and then his organizational ability. But, so the Mahdi was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the, the economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of factors have to be in place and sometimes the chips all align perfectly.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Keep that microphone up to your face.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  My apologies.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  You have very soft spoken.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  So examples of, of everything, everything aligning. In the business world, Jeff Bezos and, and Steve Jobs, out of 340 million Americans today, 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were, were getting launched, it's impossible to make an argument that, that nobody except Bill Gates had the business know-how and the computer skills to, to found personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  And again, Jeff Bezos, he was, he recognized that it was the right time. He went to the, the head of the company that had hired him and he, he said, "The internet has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year. This is the perfect time to set up an everything store based, based on the internet." So he recognized that, that the time was right.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you tried to do that. It's like, what he did was really fascinating because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea, like sell books, sell books online, like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes and Noble, you can get books anywhere, there was bookstores everywhere. It was kind of easy to get books. But then the whole, you can buy toothpaste too and, and everything, like in just one click, like all that revolutionized and it all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, Tik Tok-y, it became the perfect way to buy things, one click. He was, it was, it was like all the green lights, he was driving down the boulevard

• 34:21Speaker 02

  and every light turned green right when he got to it. Brilliant.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Right. In the case, in the case of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to set up an online bookstore, it was his goal, explicitly, his goal in life was to set up an everything store and, but he recognized that an everything store has to start out with something.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Really? So he started out with books?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  He started out with books because he recognized that books were a, a ideal thing to start out with. All books are uniform. It's not that you buy a diamond in 78, they're a different time, every, all the books are uniform and there are, there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could get books and customers in the stores, they're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Prophet, prophets. Every copy is the same. So, so Jeff Bezos recognized explicitly that, that books are a good thing to start out with.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Having started out with books, he then reasoned what a good things to move on to and he moved on to perfume and jewelry. He, he waited quite a while to move on to, move on to whatever else he moved on to.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Toothpaste.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  He was strategic.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's, it's kind of amazing because if it didn't take place, what would online shopping look like? Would somebody else have figured that out? I wonder.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  That, yeah, that's a, that's a great example. There was online, sorry, there was, there were everything stores.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  But not to that level.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Not to that level.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Before Jeff Bezos, before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. And after Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store, but Walmart's everything store is based on coupled to a brick and mortar store, whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning was his everything store was going to be an online store. So here's an example that, that indicates that without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've got Walmart and, and we've got eBay, but Jeff Bezos put his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making an online everything store.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Also being the first to figure out the whole one click thing.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Where you have an account, your credit card's listed, you know what you need, bam, one click, toilet paper on the way, arrives by 4:00 PM, let's go.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  You don't have to go to the store and now you can get groceries delivered too. Like it's, and eventually it's going to be robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right?

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Out of 340 million Americans, if Jeff Bezos hadn't done it, maybe somebody else would have done it, but what we know for sure is that there, there, there were and before and there were afterwards, other ways to develop an everything store. What Jeff Bezos did was to, to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell with whether the investors are satisfied with their, their, their stock returns. He didn't care about that. He prioritized customer satisfaction. So he, he developed something that would have happened, that did happen before and did happen afterwards, but he did it in a distinctive way.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Traeger. Food cooked over real wood is just on another level and that's why Traeger is such a game changer. Their grills run on real hardwood pellets, so everything gets that legit wood-fired flavor. Whether you're grilling steaks, smoking ribs, cooking chicken, or even baking a pizza, you just set your temperature, put your food in and let Traeger handle the rest. It's simple. If you like food that tastes like it came off a real fire without all the work, check out Traeger grills. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term partner, BetterHelp, insurance

• 38:49Speaker 02

  options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And with World Mental Health Day on the 10th, now's the perfect time to give it a try. In fact, don't even wait until the 10th because all that stress you feel, it's not waiting around. So instead of letting it build up, sign up for a therapy session and unload at any time, not just on World Mental Health Day. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside of the United States? You can still get 10% off your first month.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better, H E L P dot com. I often think what would society look like if there wasn't a stock market? If the concept of investing in other people's businesses was just never discussed, never heard, no one invented it? What would the world look like if it was just a bunch of businesses selling things individually with people either owning a business or not owning a business, but you don't, you don't have stock in publicly traded companies where there's a, there's this obligation to your shareholders to make more money, which makes you more ruthless, cut more corners,

• 40:17Speaker 02

  pay people less, do, do, do everything you can to save as much money possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Interesting question. My, my guess is that, that if we didn't, if we didn't have, if we didn't have a stock, if stock markets hadn't developed.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Stock markets would have developed, namely, it seems a unique way of doing things. And it didn't take a person, or it didn't take an accident. A stock market is as logical as, say, as is the internet.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Interesting. Well, it certainly makes for more businesses being able to be funded. That's for sure. It certainly makes more people invest in businesses, and then more people who are just investors, who don't do anything in business at all, except buying trade stocks, which is a very odd position in society. But that all encourages growth. You know, it's, uh, makes us uncomfortable because it's unchecked growth sometimes. And we worry about things getting too big and people getting pushed aside. But it is, uh, it's a fascinating engine for growth.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Right. It, it, it raises the question, are some, some things inevitable in some broad form, but some individual places a stamp on the broad form. For example, cell phones. There were cell phones before iPhones and Steve Jobs. There was, I think, the Korean Samsung.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Sure, I had a phone. I had a Motorola StarTAC back in the day.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  I have a cellphone that my wife and son forced me to get, and I use it to do my email, and that's, that's all that I use it for.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  You don't get on TikTok? Do any dances? Nothing?

• 42:11Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Nothing? No memes? I'll send you some memes.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Whatever meme. I, I, I, I'm, I'm technophobe, and I'm, I'm, I'm, so, cell phones certainly would have, would have emerged.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  But Steve Jobs put a distinctive face on cell phones, and that he cared a lot about appearance, and he cared a lot about simplicity. Simplicity, including simplicity of the gadget, but simplicity also of the overall business. When Steve Jobs was, was fired from Apple, Apple then went downhill for a decade until Steve Jobs was brought back. And when Steve Jobs was brought back, one of the first things he did was to say, there are too many products. We should not have a hundred products. We should have just four products and concentrate on them. Another thing that he did was to say, the product should look good and be simple.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Only a couple of buttons on it. The contrast case is that the television set that we have at home has a, you know, one of these push-button devices with, with forty-nine buttons. When my wife and I wanted to watch the World Cup, we had to call up our son Joshua and Max to, to talk us through. And I wrote it down, and when I wrote it down, I still didn't get it right. So I still called, called up Joshua and Max, because there are so many buttons. Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has one, two, I think it's got, got four buttons. Last night, I discovered an essential button.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  I didn't realize that on the left side, the most recent conversation that I had with my iPhone, the sound quality was very poor. And I, I knew from Marie having showed me before, that somewhere is on that iPhone, there's a volume control device, but I didn't know what it was. But, but yesterday, I saw that on the left side, there were two things. I tried pushing one, and the volume went up. It was the upper one.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  How do you not know that?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  How did I? I wasn't born with the knowledge.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  That seems so alien to me. But I mean, those things existed even on old flip phones. Did you ever have an old flip phone?

• 44:36Speaker 03

  I did have an old, old flip phone.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Didn't it have like a little thing where you press it for the volume and it goes up?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Possibly, but I don't recall. Certainly with my iPhone, Marie did explain to me, when she forced me to get the, the iPhone, she showed me that of these four buttons, two, these lengthy things on the left are volume controls. But I didn't, didn't remember whether the lower one increased or the lower one decreased the volume. I didn't dare touch them, because I was afraid that I would, I would ruin the device.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  That's so funny.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  And it was only yesterday that I tried pushing the upper one, and, and I got louder volume. So now I know that.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Well, then there's a button above that, too, that silences the phone, or makes the ringer go on. Did you know about that?

• 45:21Speaker 03

  You're correct.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm correct.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  That, that, that one I know. There's, there's this, there's this tiny device, and if I push it to the right, the tiny device looks orange, and that means that, that I will not be disturbed.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  So my device is always on orange.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Me, too.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  And if I push it back, on the rare occasions when I'm expecting a phone call, then I push it back, and it's no longer orange.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  With all due respect, it is so fascinating to me, that a man so brilliant as you, who knows so much about history, is talking about a phone like as if it's some, like insanely complicated thing from another planet that you're trying to back-engineer to figure out how it works, when everybody knows how to do the things you're saying here.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  It is an insanely complicated thing.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's so easy.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  From another pla, from, from childhood onwards, I've always been, been technophobe.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Why?

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I'm just incompetent at it. In my school, in, I think, the second year in my middle school, we were all told to build, to build these, these make-it-yourself radios. And they were, I tried to do it, I couldn't do it. My, my father then got, my father was a physician, so he got someone in his lab to put my phone together. When I, when I went to, went to Cambridge, England, to get my PhD in physiology, there were various organs I could have worked on. I could have worked on the electric, electric organ of electric eels.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  I could have worked on muscle, but I had no idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions. But when a lecturer in my beginning physiology course said, "The gallbladder is a sac," the gallbladder is a sac coming out of the bile, coming out of the liver, it's just a simple sac, and it absorbs salt and water, but we don't know how. I then thought, my God, that's my, I can do that, because to measure water transport by the gallbladder didn't require micropipettes and technology, didn't require chambers.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  All it required was that I put a little plastic handle into the mouth of gall, and then I waited on a balance. But there was a, there was a balance in my lab. So I, I picked that organ because it was technologically so simple. And it turns out, it turns out that the gallbladder does what the kidney and intestine and more important organs do, but the gallbladder is much more convenient to study. And so I made my reputation as a physiologist with the gallbladder, precisely because I could not build the ham radio, I can't, nor can I figure out my iPhone, nor can I do any other technology, without that one.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  That's fascinating. So it's like you're averse to it. Like it, you don't like it. There's something about technology that it just, it almost repulses you.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  That's true. Why does it repel me? Because I'm incompetent at it, and I feel, feel lousy and frustrated when, when I try to do it. Instead, I try to do everything in, in the simplest way possible. So one of my secrets for success, and let me show you. This is. Behold, zero-point-seven-millimeter pencil. It has one device. I advance it, and the LED advances. My books, I write my books by hand.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Really?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yep. And after, after I've written them by hand, I then correct the draft by hand, and once I've cleaned up the draft, then I dictate it into my, my iPhone, my three or four-button iPhone, and my secretary cleans it up. But I really recommend.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  So you write in pencil and then do you edit by erasing?

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Yes. I edit more by crossing out. I do some editing by erasing. For example, yesterday, I flew in to Houston on Sunday and yesterday was a downtime for me. I had an event in the evening. I spent yesterday revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of the Wandaman Peninsula of New Guinea. New Guinea, the island of New Guinea, has 10 isolated mountain ranges on the north coast and I personally have explored 10 of those and for many of them, I've discovered the highest peak and I've inventoried their birds.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  So yesterday, I was working on a paper on the birds of Wandaman Mountains. I used a behold.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  An eraser.

• 50:22Speaker 03

  An eraser.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Kind of nice big high school eraser.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  I used the eraser and I used my 0.7 millimeter pencil. I cleaned up my handwritten draft, which I will give to my secretary. My secretary will then type it up and then I will edit the draft again with my.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Eraser and pencil.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  Eraser and pencil.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  So when you edit the draft, when she types up a draft and you edit it, are you just writing on it, writing on the printed draft?

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, is there another way to do it?

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Well, rewrite it again. That's what I'm worried about. I'm worried you're saying you're going to write all the edits by hand again.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  If I have to rewrite it massively, then I will retype it.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  You will type it?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so you will. You're not averse to using a typewriter or a keyboard?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  No. When I was about eight years old, I had chicken pox and I stayed home from, I had to stay home from school for two weeks. During those two weeks, I learned to use a typewriter, but I got cured of chicken pox after I had done the first three rows. So I can touch type the bottom three rows, but I cannot touch type the top row.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  That's hilarious.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  I'm a faster typist than any secretary that I've ever had.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Really?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Wow. And only touch typing the first three rows?

• 51:49Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  That's hilarious. There's a lot of people that I know that write longhand and they like to write like with a pen on paper, whether it's a book or anything, songs, a lot of songwriters. Like, most songwriters that I know, they write on pieces of paper or they improvise it and then write it down as they're improvising it. But it's so much easier and quicker to type. That's what drives me nuts. Like, I know that I remember things much better when I write them down physically, but I can type pretty quickly and I don't have to look at the keys. I touch type.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Some things, I produce the first draft by typing, but what I find is that my style, my English prose style, is different if I type it than if I write it. When I type it, I notice that my style is more wordy, whereas if I write it down, my style is more simplified and compressed.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Interesting, because it takes longer to write a word than it does to type it or say it. So as you're writing the word, you have more time to think and you have more time to analyze whether or not you need extra words or you can sort of focus more on the structure of the sentence, rather than if you're typing, it's like so quick that maybe you put some extra stuff in there that you didn't need to because you didn't have a time to really, as you're writing each word out, you're thinking, what's the correct word after this? What's the proper way to phrase this? You have more time.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  You're right. Typing is faster. And so typing reflects better.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Instantaneous.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  My thinking.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Whereas if I'm writing, it takes longer for me to write a word than to type it. And so I have to think a little more. When I'm writing, I'm doing more of the organization than when I'm typing, which can be more of a free flow.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  I want to mention one other great advantage of iPhone. I don't know if you've discovered this, but at the bottom of my iPhone, there's an icon, which looks like a microphone. That icon, when I press that icon, it allows me to dictate in other languages. So the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I do my correspondence on my iPhone in Italian and German because of this little device. Now, this little, when my wife forced me to get the iPhone, there were a few buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  And then a high school classmate of mine, who married a French woman, showed me on my iPhone, there's this little icon. And he said, that icon, Jared, will permit you to do your dictation in German and Italian. And so I learned, and I do my correspondence, German and Italian, never by hand. I always do it on the iPhone.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's pretty amazing. With AI now, they have, I think Google was the first to do this, and I think Samsung phones definitely had this, where you could have someone speak to you and it would translate their words in real time. So you could have a real, honest conversation with someone in another language. I guess they would have to put on headsets as well and you would be able to talk back and forth and it would absolutely change. And in the future, they're going to have it set up where it'll do it in your voice.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  So you will say something in English, it'll translate it perfectly in Spanish and it'll translate it as Jared Diamond, instead of like some robot voice, Mr. Diamond Wants To Know. Instead of that, you would get your actual voice, which is, you know, we're getting close to like Tower of Babel type stuff here, like universal language, the ability to instantaneously translate everything all the time. So everybody knows what everybody's saying. It's a very unique time.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  This has a very interesting history in which I was secondarily involved. In the 1970s, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto got the idea of automatic translation. And so they set up a research group, a well-funded research group. I had a close friend who was a member of that research group. And the goal of Xerox PARC, which was well-funded, was to develop a device that would do simultaneous translation. They failed. It was a couple of decades later.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  The reason was, there were two things that were complicated, that were not understood in the 1970s. One was, we didn't understand enough about the structure of language. And I'll give you an example of that. And the other thing we didn't understand was the technology of simultaneous translation. The example of not understanding enough about the structure of language was that in the initial trial runs of Xerox PARC, they had a sentence, the phrase, "out of sight, out of mind." And they had their attempted technology to translate this into Russian and then from Russian to translate it back into English.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  And so they said, "out of sight, out of mind." The device translated it into Russian, the Russian translated it back into English. And "out of sight and out of mind" came back, "invisible idiot." But it took a couple of decades to overcome that.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week, there's some new wellness hack that people swear by and after a while, you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armra colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and it has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this. If you want to try, Armra is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to Armra.com/Rogan.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Well, which brings us back to religious texts, which is, I mean, the Bible, the Old Testament, there's versions of it in Aramaic and the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the books. And then there's the ancient Greek version of it, the ancient Hebrew version of it, the translations to all these different languages and how much is lost in those translations and how weird do things get?

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Right. The beginning of the Gospel according to St. John, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God." Word. So St. John was not written in English. It was written in Greek or translated into Greek. And the Greek word for word is logos. The Greek word logos means word, but it also means rational, system. And so when you translate the first line of the St. John Gospel, "In the beginning was the Word."

• 59:32Speaker 03

  There was much more. In the beginning was a system and organization, not just a word. That's an example of the difficulties of translating

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  From one language into another. Let me give you another example. The last foreign language that I learned was Italian, and I now read Italian every day. But in Italian, there are two words that mean "I love." In English, there's only one word that means "I love." In Italian, you can either say "amo" or "volubene." "Volubene" literally means "I wish you well." Surprisingly to me, in Italian, physical love, sexual love is "volubene," whereas "amo," which is literally the word "love." "Amo" is the root for "amateur." It's the root for love in other languages.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love. So Italian has these two words for love. Another example.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Can I ask you one more question? Does Italian have a word for love for things that aren't sexual or like not personal, not friendly, like a thing, like love race car driving?

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Forse desiderio, desire.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  Desire, so they don't use the term "love" like we do. We have it, we have a bunch of different versions of love, even ironic love. Oh, I love it when that happens, you know, when something stupid happens, you know, you break your shoelace, oh, I love it when that happens. We have a lot of uses of that word "love."

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  Right. That illustrates the difficulty of translating

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  From one language to another. So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, which I'm happily aware, if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake of saying to her "ti amo," and I didn't say "ti volubene," I would be thrown out.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  She'd probably beat your ass.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  A German example is that the German language has two words meaning to eat, essen and fressen. Essen is eat referring to humans, and fressen is eat referring to animals. But a person who gobbles up a lot of stuff, you say that person is fressen. Or I'll give you an example from the only New Guinea language that I made much progress in learning, the Foray language of Papua New Guinea. In the Foray language, the verb "to be," in English, we have just one verb, "to be." In Foray, there are two verbs to be. There's "mindia" and "windia."

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Windia is to be of something inanimate. This sweet potato tastes good. This sweet potato is good.

• 1:02:35Speaker 03

  Windia. But "mindia" is to be referring to an animal. And so the first sentence of Foray that I learned on my second day in the Foray area was, there was a frog in a creek, and I had already learned the word for water, which is "dakwo wanin" in Foray. And dakwo is a word for that sort of frog. And so I said to, I was practicing the Foray that I'd just learned, I said to a Foray man, "dakwo wanin windia." And he shook his head severely. Windia, mindia, because I had used the inanimate word for "to be" to refer to this frog when

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  I should have used the animate word "to be." English does not make that distinction.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference, that is such a giant difference. So there's a giant difference in what it means, and unfortunately, it leaves, when you just have the term "word," it leaves so much to interpretation. There's so much spin that a pastor or someone who's like relaying this can say what it actually means is. If they don't know the original language of it, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a researcher, a very fascinating guy, he learned ancient Hebrew over the course of 16 years. He self-taught himself ancient Hebrew so that he could read the Bible in its original form. And he's like, I highly recommend it. I'm like, wow, that's a lot.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  You're asking a lot. But he felt like the only way he could really understand what they were saying, what it really meant, was to really, truly understand the language and be able to read it and speak it.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  The same is true of every language. Languages, one translates languages, but there's lots of stuff lost in translation because of the words and the grammar. Yeah, for example, the Iliad, Homer's Iliad. The English text of the Iliad will begin by saying something like, "I sing of the wrath of Achilles, the terrible wrath that destroyed so many Greeks." So that's how it comes out in English.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  The original Greek is "menen aeda thea." So the first word in the Iliad is wrath, "menen." The second word is "aeda," sing. The third word is goddess. So literally, it's wrath, sing, goddess. And then wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  The Iliad, as it was written in Greek, that is a great first line, and it loses its power in translation.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Hmm. I wonder if AI could reinterpret certain books that have been translated and do so in a way that accurately reflects the context and what they were saying. Like, instead of sticking to the original translations of these books, like the Iliad, or any old book that's written in different languages, if there could be a way where it could analyze what the correct way of phrasing it in the English language would be, with whatever extra words we would have to use, or whatever different ways you would have

• 1:06:30Speaker 02

  to phrase it, but instead of just going with word for word the way we did it now.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  If that could be done, one might be able to get the meaning with more lengthy prose, but one would lose the power, the condensation

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Of the Iliad.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you really have to be able to read it in Greek.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  And the weirder stuff is with ancient Hebrew, the numbers, that also, letters also double as numbers, and words have numeric value. That's kind of wild.

• 1:07:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, my understanding is that with Hebrew, at least originally, the so-called Semitic, Afro-Asiatic languages, the vowels were non-essential. A word root was specified just by the consonant. And so the early texts of the Bible and of, say, Phoenician, had just the consonants, not the vowels.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  The vowels, there wasn't ambiguity if you omitted the vowels. Nowadays, my understanding is that Hebrew does have lines in the corner. And Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, which is an Afro-Asiatic language, also has lines in the corner that convey the vowels. But there's a lot with those languages that you can convey without specifying the vowels at all, whereas with English, you can't dispense with vowels.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  That is so, it's so interesting. It's so interesting that different languages evolved like that, that they have so many variables that just don't exist in the English language. And that for us to try to understand exactly what they were saying, the power in their words, is almost impossible.

• 1:08:41Speaker 03

  An example is, so my books get translated into lots of languages. The Guns, Germs, and Steel have been translated into 45 languages. And one thing that I can see, I see how, because I've got all the, I see how thick are the editions. The German edition is always the thickest. The Italian edition is the next thickest. The English edition is thinner. It just takes more words to say something in German than it does to say the same thing in English.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Is it saying the exact same thing, though? Like, in their language, the way they interpret it, is it the same?

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Um, yes, yes, yes, and, um, y- y- yes, and yes and no. Um, German grammar is, is distinctive, the German vocabulary is distinctive. Um, so when you ask, is it the same, um, any linguist would say, no, it's not the same. We, we attempt to come up with an approximation, but we know that, that, that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into another language.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  I had a fascinating guy in here the other day that, uh, spent eight years of his life living with the Pirahua people in the, uh, Amazon jungle and learning their language.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Was this Daniel?

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Yes, Daniel Everett? Yeah. Have you spoken to him before?

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Um, I've corresponded with him.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Brilliant guy and such a fascinating conversation. I mean utterly fascinating that he had no writing, no, no studies, nothing to go by, and he had to construct their language and write it down over the course of years and years of learning how to say things with them.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, so i- in, in New Guinea, uh, New Guinea is the most language-rich, uh, part of the world. There are a thousand languages, not dialect, but a thousand languages in New Guinea, and most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, um, especially Lutheran missionaries, who are highly trained linguists, who are sent out there. Their purpose is to translate the Bible into a language, but the local languages, um, they start out, the, of course, there was no writing in New Guinea, so a Lutheran linguist will be dropped into an area, he just listens to what they're saying.

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  He has to figure out what they're saying, um, and it's figure out the sounds. One example of that is that in 1990, um, I was in the Lakes Plains of Indonesian New Guinea, um, next to a tribe called the Thawiyao, being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language. The Thawiyao language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese, um, has either five tones, mainland and Mandarin, and six tones, Cantonese or vice versa. Um, this, this woman linguist, um, she had been living for 15 years with the Thawiyao,

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  and she had already identified 12 tones. She thought there might be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't, wasn't sure of that. But in, among the Thawiyao, you have to get the tone r- r- right. The, the syllables are mostly, they're monosyllable, like bay, but bay, you can pronounce in 12 different, bay, bay, bay, bay, bay, bay, and one of those bays means, um, sweet potato, and another bay means snake, and another bay means delicious, and another bay means feces, and then there's another bay that means mother-in-law.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  And, and so, so if, um, if a linguist, or if a young child learning Thawiyao says something with word bay and gets the tone wrong, and you want to say, beloved mother-in-law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato, and you drop the bay instead of rising the bay, what comes out, what comes out is, vile snake, let me give you this fec- feces to eat.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  A consequence of that is, is this ling- this, this linguist noticed that, um, when little kids are going around the Thawiyao village with, with their mother, um, there's not a back and forth conversation. Instead, the mother says something, and the kid repeats the same thing, and the mother may correct the kid. Um, so it's mother and then repetition. Why? Because with the Thawiyao, if you, if you get the pronunciation slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother-in-law into feces-dropping snake.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  How did those two get so close? That seems to me not be a coincidence.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  That's their problem.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  It is their problem, but it's also very telling.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  It's a big problem.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  What did you do? It's almost like they left the door open to people with bad hearing to not be able to catch what you're saying as you're walking out the door.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  That's not what I said. No, no, no. I said beloved mother-in-law. That's hilarious. This episode is brought to you by The Farmer's Dog. Here's a fun fact. Research shows that dogs who maintain a healthy weight can live up to two and a half years longer on average than dogs who are overweight. Isn't that wild and also kind of obvious at the same time? So why is feeding vague scoops of ultra-processed kibble still the status quo for most dog owners? Healthy alternatives exist, and trust me, I know. I buy one, The Farmer's Dog. I use it for both my dogs. They love it, they eat it up quick, it smells good to them, it smells good to me, it's human-grade food.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  The Farmer's Dog makes fresh food for dogs, and my dogs love it. Their recipes are made with real meat and fresh vegetables that are gently cooked to retain vital nutrients. They also portion out the meals to your dog's nutritional needs, which helps avoid overfeeding and makes weight management easier. And isn't getting more time with our four-legged best friends something every dog owner wants? The answer to that is yes, obviously. So try The Farmer's Dog today and get 50% off your first box of fresh, healthy food. Plus, get free shipping. Just go to thefarmersdog.com/rogan. This offer is for new customers only. This episode is brought to you by Chime.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee-free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee-free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high, it's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan. Takes a few minutes to sign up.

• 1:16:13Speaker 02

  Chime is a fintech, not a bank, banking services and Chime card, provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. When was the first, uh, truly, uh, literate society?

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Oh, that, that we know. The first writing was in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It was, so, what's called cuneiform, these wedge, wedge-shaped, um, symbols. It was written with a stylus that, that had different forms at the end. And so, so the writing was done, cuneiform writing was done with a stylus. Cuneiform was used to write many different languages. It was used first to write, I believe, Akkadian, which was the, the language of the first empire

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  of the Fertile Crescent, and cuneiform, the Hittite language of, um, of Turkey, um, which is the oldest and most distinct Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in, in cuneiform. So, um, cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems, just as the, the, um, English alphabet or the Roman alphabet is used to write German and Swedish, and it's used to write foray, the New Guinea language that I, that I work with.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  Um, the, the, um, Phoenician, the, the Phoenicians, the first Greek writing was Linear B of Homer's, Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system, and around, eh, then the Greeks lost writing for a couple of centuries, and then-

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  They lost it totally.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  They became illiterate, so-

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  The whole culture.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Right. At the time, at the time of the Trojan War, um, the Greeks wrote in Linear B, this syllabic writing system, and then writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries. It came back around 800 B.C., but the writing that came back was not this syllabic Linear B system. It was instead derived from the Phoenician alphabet, so it was alphabetical writing, um, that, it was not syllabic, but was alphabet, alphabetic. And the Greeks added vowels. The Phoenicians, because it was Afro-Asiatic, um, language, did not have symbols for vowels.

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  In Greek, if you, in Phoenician, if you drop the vowels, you, you can still understand. In Greek, you have to specify the vowels, otherwise it's not comprehensible. So the, the first, what we call alphabet, was the Greek alphabet of AD 800, which then got modified slightly into the Etruscan alphabet in Italy, and the Greek alphabet then got modified into the, the Roman alphabet for Latin, which is modified again to the, to the alphabet that we've got today. So, so the first writing system then was, was, um-

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Cuneiform. Cuneiform. And then there were syllabic writing systems. And then then came alphabets. Japanese is the world's most complicated writing system because it's really four writing systems. Japanese has two syllabaries. For example, my name, Diamond, the Japanese writing into Diamondo. Because Japanese doesn't put two consonants together. So my name comes out Diamondo in either of these two writing systems. Japanese also has a third writing system, which is basically Chinese derived, the kanji. And then a fourth writing system, which is the Roman writing system.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  So Japanese is the most complicated writing system in the world. I just come from Korea. Last Friday, I flew from Korea.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  I heard you speak about the Korean language, that it's the best language.

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  It's the best writing system in the world. What the Koreans do is they take their letters and they group their letters into syllables. So if you look at Korean writing, you'll see that there are several things pushed together in a little box. That box is a syllable. And the result is that Koreans, when they read, they read not letter by letter, but they read by syllables. And so Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world. Because of this wonderful writing system.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  One of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols and Genghis Khan is the book, The Lost History of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Right? Because it wasn't written, like, it was written phonetically, like the Mongolian language, but in Chinese. Is that what it was? Is that how they did it?

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  One of my classmates at Harvard, Joe Fletcher, was the person who rediscovered that Mongol book and figured out how to read it.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. That wasn't until the early 1960s.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  That's insane.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  But there are, of course, there are writing systems that we still can't read. The Etruscans, the people of Italy whom the Romans eventually conquered. So the Etruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly. We have some Etruscan writing in stone. The longest, but all Etruscan books got burnt or lost. The longest Etruscan text that we've got, there was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia. And this linen shroud was used to wrap something. But the linen shroud was evidently a piece of Etruscan writing, because there's a long

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  Etruscan text on it. And the shroud was then reused to wrap someone's book. The result is that we can pronounce Etruscan writing. We can read it because it's Greek letters. But we don't know the meaning of the words, for the most part. There aren't Rosetta Stones for Etruscan. The closest we come to it is that dices, these six-sided dices, have been found in Etruscan areas. And on the dices, there are six symbols.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  So evidently, the six symbols must mean one, two, three, four, five, six. And people have figured out one or two of those, but they haven't figured out the others. So we know the Etruscan symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six. But we don't know which one of them is six and which one of them is three and which one of them is four.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Have you ever seen the Easter Island language that they can't translate? I'm sure you have.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  That's fascinating.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  That's a beautiful one, too, right? It's really interesting, the way they write.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Right. It's quite mysterious. There are only, there are few samples of Easter writing, Easter Island writing now. They're all in wood. The first European visitor.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  There it is, right there.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Yes, all right. The first European visitor to Easter Island, of whom we have a record, was the Dutch Rogervine in, I think, 1722. And he did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Island in the 1770s. There's a suspicion that the Easter Islanders might have invented writing when the Spaniards came as the second visitor to Easter Island in 1770. The Easter Islanders may have seen Spaniards with wooden sticks, looking with wooden sticks and doing things. And that may have given the Easter Islanders the idea to invent a writing system of their own.

• 1:24:59Speaker 03

  So it's possible that it was late invention, inspired by the Spaniards. But a case where we know that happened, the Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas. No Native Americans had a writing system in North America. The Maya, yes, but not in North America. There was a Cherokee Indian called Sequoia who had a store. And he noticed that when Europeans came into his store, they had pieces, they would scribble things on paper, they would talk to each other. And they got a lot of power. They were able to communicate with each other.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  So he realized that they were writing down words, but he had no idea about what the writing system was. He didn't know whether it was an alphabet, didn't know whether it was, he didn't know about alphabets or syllabaries. He tried different writing systems. He spent about 10 years doing it. And he finally ended up with a syllabary, where the symbols are for syllables, not letters. The Cherokee syllabary has 80 signs for 80 different syllables. And Sequoia convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having two Cherokees at the opposite end of, like a football field.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  And he had one Cherokee say something to him, which he then wrote down on paper. And then he went to the other end of the football field and handed that piece of paper to another Cherokee, to whom he had taught his writing system. And that other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the Cherokee at the other end of the football field, at the field, had said. So Sequoia, in that way, convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Wow. That's fascinating. Like, knowing the origin of a culture's written language and learning it from others. Well, they all had to originally have learned it, most likely, from someone else, that they saw something being written down. I mean, or did they all come up with it at the same time? Like, when did, we know, have you seen the newest discovery out of Gobekli Tepe? Where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing that predates Cuneiform by five or 6,000 years?

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  No, I've not seen that.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  It's really recent. It's over the last couple of weeks.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  Okay. It is the.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  Jamie will pull it up. It's a very weird way of writing. Did Daniel Everett discuss this with us?

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Was he talking about the thing I have on the screen?

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  I brought this up because I found it on that podcast I was watching with Lex. And Irving is his name.

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  It is the case with Cuneiform, although we think of Cuneiform as having arisen around 3,500 B.C.

• 1:28:04Speaker 02

  Irving Finkel, that's it. So this is, did Irving Finkel find ancient writing in Gobekli Tepe?

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Uh huh. We know that for Cuneiform, there were marks going back several thousand years. And there's a debate among linguists whether those marks are the earliest proto-writing. It's suspected that the marks were used to count sheep. They functioned as numerals. They might have had word for sheep. But what's clear is, every writing system other than the first writing, one has to ask, might it have been copied from the first writing? But the first writing had to be a new invention.

• 1:28:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  And there are at least three writing systems that we assure are independent. Cuneiform, because it was the first writing system we know of. The New World was isolated from the Old World, and yet Mexican Indians developed writing. The earliest writing in Mexico is something like 700 B.C. or 900 B.C. And then the Maya also had writing, syllabic writing. The Maya had lots of books, which Bishop Blanda burnt all of them except four. But the Maya writing.

• 1:29:27Speaker 03

  arose independently of cuneiform because there was no contact between the Old World and New World. And then Chinese writing. Chinese writing is first attested around 1300 B.C. Chinese writing is totally different from cuneiform or anything else in the Fertile Crescent of the time. So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently of the Fertile Crescent, which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing, namely cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent, Mexican writing, and then Chinese writing, and then possibly Eastern Ireland writing.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  The thing you were talking about with Greece is so fascinating, that a war, the Trojan War, can be so catastrophic that the entire culture becomes illiterate for hundreds of years.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing. It was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of the Bronze Age. Bronze Age cultures, this was just as iron was emerging. Bronze was the main metal used in the Middle East, in Turkey. Bronze Age cultures included Troy, Homer's Troy, Crete. So the island of Crete had Linear B, which was the earliest, the syllabic Old Greek writing system.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  But Linear B was derived from another writing system called Linear A, which we can't read yet. We don't have enough texts. It's suspected that Linear A recorded the Minoan language of Minoan Crete, whatever that language is. We don't know the language. That would have been, might have been another independent invention of writing. But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and Greece and Cyprus and the Levant from

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Palestine up to Lebanon, and then Anatolia, Turkey. All of that Bronze Age civilization collapsed roughly around the time of the Trojan War. So the Trojan War may have had something to do with collapse of Troy itself, but the Trojan War certainly didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of Linear B writing from all of Crete and from all of Greece. There were this Greek pottery that turned up in the Fertile Crescent, making one suspect

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  that there was a mass invasion, and the mass invasion destroyed the Bronze Age civilization of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey and the Hittite Empire. But then, just to go back to Troy, the fall of Troy was the fall of Troy, and that's all. But there was a much broader collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the whole eastern Mediterranean, and we don't know why. We don't know whether it was an invasion. Egyptian writing at the time talks of sea peoples, people who came by the sea and fought with the Egyptians. So we don't know whether the collapse of the Bronze Age was because of invaders from

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  the sea, or whether it was because of climate change, or whether it was because of invention of new weapons.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  It's just insane that they can completely lose their language and then come up with a whole new way of writing.

• 1:33:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to, okay. Other examples of it. Let's see. India. The so-called Harappan civilization of India and Pakistan. In the Indus Valley, there was a high civilization called Harappan civilization between about 3000, 2000 B.C. And they had writing. We have their seals, their rings that we use to stamp with wax, but we don't have any long texts.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  The longest text on one of these rings is only three or four symbols. There are several hundred different symbols. We can't read it. Harappan writing disappeared, and then writing reemerged in India with Alexander the Great. When Alexander of Macedon invaded India, after Alexander evacuated India, writing came back in India, but it was a completely different writing system, the progenitor of modern Indian writing system.

• 1:34:31Speaker 03

  So there's another case of writing disappearing, the Harappan writing, and then 2000 years later, a completely different writing system emerged.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  It's so extraordinary. And then you have the hieroglyphs, which is a totally different way of writing that the Egyptians came up with.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Again, that is really interesting. So cuneiform emerged roughly, say, 3400 B.C. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3000 B.C. Hieroglyphs have absolutely nothing to do with cuneiform. We can read cuneiform. We can read hieroglyphs. But it's suspicious that hieroglyphs emerged only a few centuries after cuneiform. This is an example of what's called idea diffusion. It's not that the writing system itself, it's not that cuneiform writing spread to Egypt, but the idea of writing spread.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  Similarly with Sequoia, this Cherokee Indian. It's not that Sequoia copied English writing. It's that he got the idea of writing, and then he invented the writing system himself. So we suspect that hieroglyphs were idea diffusion, that Egyptians got the idea of writing from the Fertile Crescent, and then they developed their own writing system.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  And it makes sense if you think about how complex and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are. And then you look at how complex and beautifully constructed ancient Egyptian society was. I mean, they were operating on a completely different creative and engineering level than anyone else in the world. And of course, their writing is going to be pretty wild, too. Kind of makes sense.

• 1:36:25Speaker 03

  Right. It's a clear example of a writing system being invented, not gradually evolving, but bang, the earliest hieroglyphics are, full hieroglyphics.

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  Very strange.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Right. There's another example, Korean writing. Okay. So Korean writing, Korean writing had Go, which groups letters into syllables. This is not a writing system that gradually evolved. Instead, a king of Korea called King Sejong around roughly the year 1430. Until then, Koreans wrote with Chinese, a Chinese-based writing system. And King Sejong has a famous proclamation, which Koreans learn by memory.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  King Sejong's proclamation says, "It grieves me that our people write the Korean language with Chinese-like writing when the sounds and the words of the Chinese language are not similar to the Korean writing. Therefore, I, King Sejong, have devised a new writing system, which I wish all of my subjects to learn. My writing system is matched to the Korean language." And that was Hangul. King Sejong invented Hangul himself at a bang. There was no precedent.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Wow. That's an excellent example of how one individual, one leader, can radically transform a society.

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It may be hard to believe, but identity theft is the number one crime in America. Right now, millions of people are dealing with stolen accounts, fraudulent loans, and the exhausting process of proving who they are to banks, creditors, and credit bureaus. LifeLock helps you fight back. They monitor your personal and financial information, alerting you when something looks suspicious. And if identity theft does happen, LifeLock has live, U.S.-based experts who step in and fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Don't fight that battle alone. Get LifeLock identity theft protection.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Visit lifelock.com and save up to 30% your first year with promo code JRE. That's promo code JRE, or go to lifelock.com/jre for 30% off. Terms apply. This episode is brought to you by Visible. As fall hits, we enter another season of change. Time to shift gears, drop the dead weight, and upgrade the wardrobe for the drop in temperature. But one thing that doesn't need to change? Your phone. The smartest upgrade this season isn't a new phone. It's a better wireless plan. Switch to Visible, the ultimate wireless hack. You get unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  month. That means keeping the phone you already have, ditching your overpriced phone bill, and pocketing some savings for yourself. All the perks of big wireless for half the cost. Switch today at visible.com. The Visible plan starts at just $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.

• 1:40:02Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah. And it's also an example of a leader coming up with an invention that has lasted already for 600 years, a leader not doing something ephemeral that gets replaced, but a leader devising a writing system that has carried on.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's an interesting thing with the Mormons, when you were talking about how they figured out a way to get people very invested in being a Mormon, and one of the ways is by being a missionary, that you have to be a missionary. One of the things societies have figured out is to get people to be deeply nationalistic, you almost have to have them serve, like conscription for all young people to do a certain amount of time in the military. That's a very common thing. Like, think about, like, Israel, for instance. Israel, very nationalistic, very proud society. People that are from Israel, you meet them, they're very proud of being from Israel. Korea is another example of that. They have mandatory military service.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  You have to do that.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  That's an interesting question. Is it the case that national identity universally depended upon a draft? Finland, so Finland has a strong national identity. Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918. So, there was no Finnish draft at the time of Finnish independence. Instead, the anchor for Finland's national identity is the Finnish language, which is a very distinctive language. The Finns are proud of their language.

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  It's a poetic singing language. It's related somewhat distantly to Hungarian, but I mentioned it as a counter, you're probably right. In many cases, that national identity was fostered by the draft. In Italy, the unification of Italy in 1862, the development of Italian national identity depended heavily on a national school system, but also on a national army. So, I have Italian conversation once a week with my Italian teacher.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  She explained to me that the national identity, Italians had lots of dialects, like 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea, we would say that they're different languages. Even today, there are different dialects in Italy that different Italians cannot understand, in contrast to...

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialects.

• 1:43:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  And if you just spoke classic Italian that you learned in college, you would have no idea what they were talking about, because they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.

• 1:43:10Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Interestingly, my first trip to, dialects were far more developed in Europe 60 years ago. My first, and that's true in Italy, Germany, and England, my first trip to England was at the age of 12 in 1950. My sister and I were taken by my parents to a small town on the east coast of England called Beckles. My father was a doctor, and he was visiting a doctor in Beckles. So, my parents and their friends were talking, and my sister and I were bored, so we wandered off into the town.

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  And we wandered off only about two blocks, but we made several turns, and we couldn't figure out how to get back to the house of this family, the Grantham Hills. So, we asked a man on the street, in American English, how to get back to the house of Grantham. And he said something, which he thought was, we couldn't understand a word of it. That's just an example of how strongly differentiated dialects were in England as recently as 1950, when I was a student in England in 1950.

• 1:44:21Speaker 02

  What did it sound like? Did it sound like a totally different language?

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  I can't, I can't reproduce any of it. All I can tell you was that it was completely incomprehensible.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  But it was a form of English?

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  Presumably, because this was the, when we got back to the house, and we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying, then the Grantham Hills said, yeah, well, that's the local dialect.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  But similarly, in Germany, when I lived in Germany in 1961, I lived in Munich, capital of Bavaria, and Bavarians have a strong, strong dialect. Instead of saying, "Ich bin ein Bayer und ich habe eine dicke Haut." I'm a Bavarian and I have a thick skin. They would say, "Ich bin ein Bayer und ich habe eine dicke Haut." So, when I was traveling around with a friend of mine from northern Germany, from the Rhineland, where they speak what is closest to Hochdeutsch, literary German, and we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria, and asked to be filled up with gas.

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  Because I'd been living in Munich, I understood what the guy was saying, but my friend Josef from the Rhineland, what did he say? He could not, he couldn't understand the Bavarian at all.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  That's wild. That's wild, because they're so close to each other. That's what's so strange about it.

• 1:45:42Speaker 03

  Right. But, again, in Italy, Sicilian is, it's often regarded as a separate language. There are, as you know, there are books written in Sicilian. Modern literary and government Italian is close to the dialect of Florence, but there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects, which persisted until after World War II, and were mutually incomprehensible. But those dialects now have been fading because of universal education, plus the draft.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Wow. When did you start learning Italian?

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  I started learning Italian, it was April 1999, and I can...

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Pull up that.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  I can date it, because my wife and I and our kids had been to, on a vacation, in Italian Switzerland, and our son Max fell and he hurt his leg, so we had to go to a hospital. None of us knew Italian, but my wife knew that the Italian word for where was dove, dove, dove ospedale. And so, when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in Italy in May, May 1999, I thought, dove, that's simple, I can learn that. Why don't I learn enough Italian that I can ask where the bathroom is and I can order meals in restaurants?

• 1:47:22Speaker 03

  So, I studied Italian grammar for six weeks, and we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11, and my father died that morning, so we aborted the Italian trip. But after the Italian trip, I've spent six weeks learning, learning much of the grammar. Let's put in another six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar. So, I put in another six weeks, I've learned the rest of the grammar. And having learned the grammar, I said, I've learned the grammar, let's now read some Italian. So, I began reading Italian. And then, after, after eight months, so I've been reading Italian, I said, why don't I speak it? UCLA has an Italian department, so I put up a notice in the Italian department saying, I would like to hire Italian graduate students to come speak Italian to me. And someone, an Italian woman, answered the ad.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  She came, she came to my office, and here, I had been dealing with Italian for eight months, and here is a live Italian, speaking Italian to me for the first time. It's like, like, knowing of, knowing of something, and then you suddenly have the experience. The closest parallel I can think of is, is having heard of sex, and then you have your first sexual experience. So, I then arranged for Italian speakers to come every week to talk Italian with me. And then, since then, the two Italian speakers who, who came and talked Italian with me,

• 1:48:52Speaker 03

  both of them had American boyfriends, both of them had difficult relationships, they couldn't decide whether to marry the American boyfriend or not. But I, in effect, did marital therapy in Italian for two years. I talked through my Italian teachers. I said that the horrible relationship their parents had, and their boyfriend's parents had, didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage. You could, they can make a relationship of their own. So, both of them are married, their boyfriend, they're still married, and it's now, it's

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  now 27 years later, I still, every week, I talk to Francesca for two hours, every two weeks. Francesca is the person with whom I talk the most, and I have the widest range of conversation of anybody in the world, except for my wife and my Australian companion on my New Guinea expedition, because in our conversation, we talk about everything.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  Wow. That's so, how many languages do you know?

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  In my life, I've dealt with 13 languages. Three of them I only read, never spoke, Greek, Latin, and Dutch, I never spoke, I just read them. I'm still, I can, the languages that I can give lectures in now are English, Italian, German, and New Guinea Talk Pidgin. I used to be fluent in Spanish and Russian, but my Russian got driven out by Indonesian when I started working in Indonesia. Finnish, I've learned enough to hitchhike, and what else? And then the foray language, I can speak rudimentary foray.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  And those are my languages.

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  That's incredible. How do you not mix them up in your head?

• 1:50:51Speaker 03

  I do mix them up.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  I would imagine.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  I can keep, I'm sorry, I can keep straight New Guinea Talk Pidgin and English. And mostly, I can keep straight Italian and German.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  Because they're so different from each other.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  They're, they're, they're, they're different.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  So I can keep them straight. When I started learning Italian, I had been fluent in Spanish. Italian drove out my Spanish completely.

• 1:51:26Speaker 03

  Russian, I used to be fluent in Russian. When I started to learn Indonesian, and I was initially struggling with Indonesian, and I couldn't find a word, out would come the Russian word. Russian and Indonesian, they're completely different from each other. But I felt that it's as if I have, what, four channels for languages. I can keep straight English, Italian, German, and a fourth language. But a fifth language, if I attempt to bring back a fifth language, I'll confuse that. And so Indonesian and Russian, although they're totally different. Once I started Indonesian, it drove out my Russian.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  It is crazy.

• 1:52:07Speaker 02

  So do you think that if you lived in Russia for a little bit, you'd pick it back up again?

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  I think so, and I will, I will have the test soon because of our two, we have twin sons, and of our twin son, one of them is engaged to a wonderful Russian woman, Anastasia. They're getting married in our garden in two months. And so when Anastasia comes over for dinner, once or twice a week, I trot out some elementary, some elementary phrases of Russian. I greet her in Russian. Prokrastnya, prokrastnya, grajstan, grajstanke, beautiful citizeness.

• 1:52:40Speaker 03

  I would like to, to

• 1:52:42Speaker 02

  Regain it, yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  Bring back more of my Russian. But I'm afraid that if I brought back my Russian, my drive out my German. So I don't know whether I'll do it.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  You only have a certain amount of hard drive space.

• 1:52:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've, I've run into that problem all the time, just with the various interviews that I do, like fascinating conversations that I have, I completely forget. Because it's just, there's no room in there anymore. And I could imagine, like, keeping, I want to talk about pidgin. I want to talk about pidgin talk, New Guinea pidgin talk. Is that a written language?

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  It, it, yeah, it, it is now written. It's, it's very, very interesting, and it's of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language. So, New Guinea Talk Pidgin, it sounds like baby talk. Me talk long you, you, you grasp along you, and top long, long head belong you, you go finish, teeth belong you, or right, eyebrow you, but I'm, lick, lick, yeah. Okay, so that's a sample of pidgin.

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  What did you say?

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I said, I said that, that, the hair on your head is somewhat sparse, and you have brown eyes, and grasp along you, you lick, lick, I saw.

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  So, here's how New Guinea Talk Pidgin arose, and it's a model for how similar pidgin languages have arisen all around the world, dozens or hundreds of times. When German colonial administrators came to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand different languages, but the Germans had to communicate with them. And the Germans hired or kidnapped New Guineans belonging to many different language groups. The Germans had to communicate with the, their workers, and the workers had to communicate with each other. So it's not that anybody invented something. The Germans began speaking a stripped-down, easy German.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  And the New Guineans began picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked up words from other New Guinea languages. This, this first language was called a pidgin language. It's very simple. It's not adequate to express the range of human emotion, but it's enough to, to discuss plantation agriculture. And it was enough for adults who had another, had their own main language, and were using the pidgin language just to discuss the coconut plantation. Where pidgin became inadequate was, once you get the children of pidgin-speaking parents,

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  and the, the children, children from pidgin-speaking parents of different native languages, children are starting to communicate with each other. This stripped-down language that's enough to talk about coconuts, but is not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion. The children themselves, within a decade, modified spontaneously, not consciously, modified pidgin to become a full language with, with a grammar, and tenses, and future tense, and prepositions.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  Over how long? What period of time?

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  A decade.

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  A decade. The, the, the best information we have about how, and these pidgin languages, these Creole languages, which are the more complex ones, with prepositions, have developed all around the world. Our best information about the development of Creole language comes from Hawaii, because Hawaii plantations, plantation workers were brought in from Japan and China and various other places. So again, workers are thrown together on a plantation. They have to communicate with English-speaking plantation owners. And they, they spontaneously developed this really stripped-down, so-called pidgin language

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  that doesn't have prepositions and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you're going to do with, with a sugar cane. But the children of these, these workers, who now want to talk with each other and have a normal life, the pidgin language is not adequate. And the children spontaneously made the pidgin more complex. Within a decade, the children invented prepositions, and they invented future tense, and they invented plurals. And this is somewhat documented because the newspapers of missionaries in Hawaii, in

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  the decade from 1890 to 1900, every now and then, the newspapers would quote something funny that a Hawaiian said on a plantation, and it would be an example of Creole as of 1892. And then you can see, from a newspaper of 1894, how much more complicated Creole had gotten in 1894. So, New Guinea Talk Pidgin, which is, is actually what's called the Creole language, is a full, complex language with prepositions. You can say anything. It's the government language. New Guineans, the New Guinean government leader, they are more fluent, usually, in

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Creole than they are in, in English. So in parliament, in Papua New Guinea, the, the language of parliament is either English or Talk Pidgin, and then there's one other, other Creole language. When I started out, out in New Guinea, the first thing that I learned was, was, was Talk Pidgin, because I could, I could pick it up very quickly. And not a pair of something belong, belong, mark them along you.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Did you have any preparation in the language before you went there? Or did you try to pick it up as you were there?

• 1:58:42Speaker 03

  I picked it up as I was there.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  And was there anything written about the language before you got there? Like, was, was it possible to study it? And when they wrote it down, did they write it using English alphabet?

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah. There are, there are books, there are grammars of New Guinea pidgin. I learned New Guinea pidgin initially, which is a Creole language with prepositions. I learned it by talking with New Guineans. And then eventually, I acquired one or two of these pidgin grammars, and a pidgin dictionary, and was able to make my pidgin more complex.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  Just as, just as an example, thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science. But to demonstrate that you can say anything in Talk Pidgin, I've, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in, in Talk Pidgin. He got one pair of man, man savvy too much, name of long, Ansaga, Ansaga he got dispel it. He talk long hot too much, nah, dispel hot too much, I mean thermodynamics, nah, dispel Ansaga, he got strong pair of tintin, nah, I mean, I mean mark him, rule number two, belong, belong, sign, belong tintin, belong hot, I mean second law of thermodynamics.

• 2:00:00Speaker 02

  So what did you just say?

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  What I said, what I said is, that a Swede called Loz Ansaga developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is, thermodynamics is about heat. And Ansaga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions. And so I explain, dispel Ansaga, he come up, he, he mark him, rule number, rule number two, long, long savvy, belong heat, savvy belong heat, literally, knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics. Rule number two, long savvy, belong heat, Ansaga he got this pair of strong pair of tintin, Ansaga he's got, he's a smart man.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  Have you talked to someone in this pidgin, Talk Pidgin, where they, where you could explain something like that, and they could relay it to you? Like, they understand what you're talking about?

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. With, with New Guineans. So in my work in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use pidgin. In Papua New Guinea, they do use pidgin. And with New Guineans, they and I can discuss anything in pidgin. I can, I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics, and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of, taste of human, human red meat and hu, human, human fat. You can say anything in Talk Pidgin.

• 2:01:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a weird part of their culture, right? That they can differentiate the taste between human red meat and human fat?

• 2:01:31Speaker 03

  Well, they, they say that the human, human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird like an ostrich. Whereas human fat, they say, is like, like the, the fat of pigs. I, I was never offered, and I never, I wouldn't have accepted, because the place in New Guinea where I began my work was the foray area. The foray were the people who had kuru, which is basically mad cow disease. They were the people who were dying of, of, of kuru. And they were the people that I worked with for the first eight years.

• 2:02:07Speaker 02

  And who were they eating?

• 2:02:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:02:12Speaker 03

  There are rules.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  There's what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism. Exocannibalism is eating your dead enemies whom you kill in war. Endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives. When the Australian government came in, it was easy. They forbade cannibalism and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the tribe who was being eaten complained to the government and the government told the people who were eating the other people, "You can't do that anymore." But endocannibalism, in New Guinea, traditionally, you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother as you or I would just throw away, throw away the body of our dead mother.

• 2:03:01Speaker 03

  There are precise rules about who gets to eat, eat what. But in general, the relatives eat, eat the body. And there are rules about what part of the body you eat. In 1965, I had, working my camp with me, a New Guinean who did not speak pidgin. And we were in a remote camp on a mountain. We were getting no visitors because it was remote. And one day into camp came a man, sat down with this guy who didn't speak talk pidgin, talked with him, and then the man got up.

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  And his friend said to me, "This man is quitting his work with you." Why? He's quitting his work with you because the young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter. You make down payments when a girl is young. So there was a young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter. And that young man had died. He was the prospective son-in-law of my worker. And because he was the prospective son-in-law, my worker was expected... But it's true.

• 2:04:27Speaker 03

  My worker was expected to eat the forearm. And so he quit his work, quit his work with me, and walked away. There's no way that he would fail to eat the forearm of his prospective son-in-law any more than you or I would throw our mother's body into the ditch.

• 2:04:48Speaker 02

  So he quit working with you because of that?

• 2:04:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, because the funeral feast was going to... The son-in-law just died. This guy walked into camp, had brought the news to my worker that your prospective son-in-law has died. And the funeral feast is going to take place three days in the future. So you'd better come now so that you are there before the body rots.

• 2:05:17Speaker 02

  That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about, how the Pirahua deal with their dead. It's very similar, like the same. But the thing is, the amount of time they have to wait before you eat them is also similar, which is, I don't understand totally. Did they have an explanation for that?

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

  No. And it's hard for you and me to understand because in the area where my worker quit in order to... It's a warm, hot area, about 3,000 feet. And the body, a dead body, is put... Is, was, the government has largely put it down. The body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats on it. And underneath the platform is a bucket. So, I'm sorry you asked me. The body putrefies and the flesh turns to liquid.

• 2:06:21Speaker 03

  The liquid then rips through the slats on the platform down into the bucket. You then dip your sweet potato in the bucket of this putrid fluid, and then you eat the sweet potato. That's what I'm told.

• 2:06:37Speaker 02

  Whoa!

• 2:06:38Speaker 03

  I was not offered, I would not have accepted it before. But I was told, told by the missionary in the area and by New Guineans themselves. That's what they do with dead bodies.

• 2:06:51Speaker 02

  Is there a scenario where they would have encouraged you or required you to consume someone?

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  Never.

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  Not when you were there?

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely never because endocannibalism, there are precise rules about who gets to eat which part of the body.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and you decided to get married? And you married someone of the tribe and then that person died? Would you have had to eat them?

• 2:07:18Speaker 03

  I do not know. I never put it to the test.

• 2:07:22Speaker 02

  But according to their rules, would you have?

• 2:07:31Speaker 03

  Probably...

• 2:07:32Speaker 02

  What would you do?

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  Probably, yes. Husbands and wives, I expected to eat the other person.

• 2:07:42Speaker 02

  Yo!

• 2:07:43Speaker 03

  I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I worked, the Foray tribe, they were the people who had kuru, which is basically mad cow disease. The commonest cause of death among the Foray when I was there was kuru, mad cow disease.

• 2:08:01Speaker 02

  That's from eating brain tissue, right?

• 2:08:03Speaker 03

  That's right. Eating the uncooked brain.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  But even if you cook it, it's a prion disease, correct?

• 2:08:10Speaker 03

  It's a prion disease.

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  Prions survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying.

• 2:08:15Speaker 03

  Couple hundred degrees, not thousand.

• 2:08:17Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:08:18Speaker 03

  They certainly survive, they survive a couple hundred degrees.

• 2:08:22Speaker 02

  I thought it was a lot more than that. I thought that was one of the issues with mad cow disease, that no matter how... If you had beef that was infected with these prions, no matter how hot you make it, it doesn't cook it off.

• 2:08:34Speaker 03

  My understanding with...

• 2:08:36Speaker 02

  See, let's put it into perplexity. I would like to know, like, what temperature do prions get destroyed? Because I think it's extraordinarily high. Maybe there's different prions and different ones have different temperatures?

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  Maybe it's 600 degrees.

• 2:08:52Speaker 02

  Because I didn't think it was just raw brain. I think the issue is any brain tissue of the same species as you is where this disease comes from, which is why cows get it from eating brain tissue of cows. And then those prions are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue of those cows.

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  That is true. That's true. And in fact...

• 2:09:14Speaker 05

  It's not a real good concise answer.

• 2:09:17Speaker 02

  Prions can survive temperatures that kills most microbes. Boiling, ordinary cooking, and standard steam sterilization are not reliably sufficient. Resistance also varies by prion strain, what we were talking about, yeah. And whether the material is wet, dried, or embedded. Boiling, 212 degrees, not dependable. 1,000 degrees.

• 2:09:40Speaker 05

  Celsius.

• 2:09:41Speaker 02

  Celsius. Yo, what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy prion infectively. This is the level associated with effective incineration.

• 2:09:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it says it looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit. It's agreed upon that, at least for a few hours, it's reliably destructive.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  Wow, 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours.

• 2:10:04Speaker 05

  Even that, yeah, well done doesn't...

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  Cooking, yeah, well done cooking does not reliably destroy prions. Ugh, what a crazy disease. A disease you only get from eating each other. It's almost like nature doesn't want you to eat each other.

• 2:10:20Speaker 03

  The reconstructed history of why on earth did the Foray have this, basically mad cow disease, as the commonest cause of death. In humans, there's a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob.

• 2:10:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:10:40Speaker 03

  Which is a spontaneous mutation. And usually spontaneous mutation, it dies out because nowadays, we don't eat.

• 2:10:52Speaker 02

  Each other.

• 2:10:53Speaker 03

  Each other. But what's thought to have happened in the Foray area, Creutzfeldt-Jakob arises rarely as a spontaneous mutation. The guess is that someone in the Foray area around 1910 developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob and died. But the Foray were practicing endocannibalism. The women would cut up the brain, cut up the skull. And the babies with the women would be playing there with the mother. And here's this soft tissue, the brain, that's fun to play with. So the babies would play with the brain and lick their fingers.

• 2:11:35Speaker 03

  So the transmission was by cannibalism, particularly to babies at the time of... And it's all thought to have arisen with one Foray person who had Creutzfeldt-Jakob and died of it in around 1910, but was then eaten by others, who were in turn eaten still by others. So that kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, then exploded among the Foray.

• 2:12:02Speaker 02

  What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this disease does not occur with the Pirahua. That they do have endocannibalism, and he thinks they still practice it. He thinks they secretly still practice it. They just don't, you know, they kind of hide it. They don't have that disease.

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  That makes sense because Creutzfeldt-Jakob is rare.

• 2:12:22Speaker 02

  Even among cannibals?

• 2:12:25Speaker 03

  Oh, among everybody. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, it's a rare mutation, like one in 10,000, one in 100,000. It's pure chance that one Creutzfeldt-Jakob mutation arose in the Foray and not in any other tribe in New Guinea. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Pirahua, whatever the name is, didn't have Creutzfeldt, didn't have kuru because...

• 2:12:55Speaker 03

  Nobody in the world, no human population in the world had Kuru, except for the foray as a result of that accident of one person with a questionable yaku evidently getting eaten around 1910.

• 2:13:09Speaker 02

  That is so fascinating, and also fascinating that it exists in cows.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  It exists in cows, it exists in sheep and goats. There's a disease of sheep and goats called scrapie, which is basically, it's a primate disease, and it was scrapie that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the foray area that, so when I arrived in the foray in 1964, Kuru was completely mysterious. It affected only the foray. If a foray went down to Port Moresby, the foray might still develop Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the foray environment.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  Foreigners who came into the foray, I didn't develop Kuru. Other New Guineans who came into the foray area didn't develop Kuru. The only people who developed Kuru were the foray, but the symptoms of Kuru were, because the disease is now gone, were similar to the symptoms of scrapie, and so that gave the idea that Kuru might be an infectious disease. So infectious disease expert managed to get the foray to provide him with the brain of

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  a foray man who had died of Kuru, and the doctor managed to get dry ice shipped into the foray area in order to freeze the Kuru. He got it shipped back to the National Institute of Health.

• 2:14:52Speaker 02

  How long did that take?

• 2:14:54Speaker 03

  Couple of days, but it was frozen in dry ice, and he then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the animal most likely to be able to be infected with human Kuru would be a chimpanzee. And it took three years. I saw that chimpanzee in a cage. After three years, finally, the chimpanzee had been completely healthy. After three years, the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of Kuru and died of Kuru.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  And then that chimpanzee's brain was injected into the brain of other chimpanzees, and the time for infection was shorter. The last death due to Kuru was in 2009. The last funeral feast was 1959. After that, the Australians imposed control and banned funeral feasts. So the last foray funeral feast was 1959. That then would have been the last transmission of Kuru, and the last death was then in 2009, which was 50 years later.

• 2:16:16Speaker 03

  So the latency, it took 50 years for that person who had been infected by eating or licking the brain in 1959. A long latency. The person, the next last death was 2005, and the last death was 2009.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  And so these are people that had been infected decades earlier?

• 2:16:39Speaker 03

  They were infected in 1959.

• 2:16:42Speaker 02

  Right, but is it possible that they were doing what Daniel Everett feels like the Pirahua were doing, or was lying about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts?

• 2:16:52Speaker 03

  Very unlikely, because the foray area, by the time I got there in 1964, they were missionaries.

• 2:16:59Speaker 02

  You watched them do this thing where they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified?

• 2:17:06Speaker 03

  No, no, I have not. I was told about it by the missionary in the area who didn't know what was going on.

• 2:17:14Speaker 02

  But you knew that they were engaging in this?

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  I would have wanted to watch. You didn't want to watch?

• 2:17:20Speaker 03

  I was not offered the opportunity.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  You weren't allowed?

• 2:17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:25Speaker 02

  Right, and you don't want to push? Because didn't, was it one of the Rockefeller's sons that supposedly was consumed by people in New Guinea? He insulted them on a previous trip. He wanted something that was sacred. This was like the lore, and then he returned not knowing that he was in danger. They killed him on the boat, and then they ate him?

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  It's well-known what happened. So this was Michael Rockefeller?

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:52Speaker 03

  Who collected art in the Ballam Valley, and then he wanted to come down to the, did come down to the south coast where there's great art produced in the Asmat area. He was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer, and there was a tidal bore that capsized the boat. The boat was swept out to sea, and so what did he do? What does Michael Rockefeller do? And the Dutch patrol officer do? The Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim. He had no choice. The chances of being picked up and spotted seemed vanishingly low because there wasn't much air, very little airplane traffic, but the Dutch patrol had no choice. He stayed on the boat.

• 2:18:35Speaker 03

  And in fact, so Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer. He figured that the chances of being picked up were so low that he swam for shore. A plane did spot the overturned boat and picked up the Dutch patrol officer. Michael Rockefeller swam for shore, and when he got close to shore, he had misfortune that as he approached shore, there came a canoe of natives who, about five years previously, a Dutch patrol officer had come to that village to punish the natives for killing natives of some other village.

• 2:19:17Speaker 03

  And the Dutch patrol officer killed four natives from the village. So when the natives in that village saw Michael Rockefeller, as far as the natives are concerned, Michael Rockefeller belongs to the same clan. And he's white, and they killed him. It was not learned what had happened until some years later, because the natives didn't admit it. They knew that they were going to be punished.

• 2:19:48Speaker 02

  And did they admit that they consumed him?

• 2:19:52Speaker 03

  I do not, I do not, I do not know. I think they did, but I'm not sure. But they certainly killed him.

• 2:20:01Speaker 02

  What is it like hanging around with a group of people where part of their culture is eating people? What does it feel like?

• 2:20:10Speaker 03

  I've not, oh, okay. So the guy who left my camp to eat, he was a nice guy. He was a hard worker. He knew his birds. Yes, he had this habit, which I didn't have, but that's his business.

• 2:20:34Speaker 02

  Well, I get that perspective, and you are there in their culture, in their world, and they've been living like that for a long time.

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do weird things that disgust them, so they do weird things that disgust me.

• 2:20:53Speaker 02

  Well, there's certain tribes in Papua New Guinea that also have a very disturbing practice with young boys, where they, you know that?

• 2:20:59Speaker 03

  I know, yeah, because that was, that was the practice of the foray and many other tribes with whom I worked. It was, it was not a rare practice. The way of life there was that each woman, each wife had her own hut, and the men lived in a communal man's house. The young kids lived with a mother until the boy reached the age, until a boy reached the age of six. And when the boy reached the age of six, he then moved into the men's house, where

• 2:21:42Speaker 03

  he developed a homosexual relationship with the adult men. At teenage, suddenly, this boy who's had only men, men relationships, suddenly, the tribe has bought for him a girl from the Naiming tribe, and he's told that he's supposed to have sex with a woman. Until then, the boys have been told that women are dirty, defiling, if you touch a woman, it'll be very dirty.

• 2:22:16Speaker 03

  I saw a film made by a medical photographer of two of these small boys the night before they were going to be married to teenage girls, and the older men were explaining to these 13-year-old boys how you have sex with a woman. The two boys, they were just palled, disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman.

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  But there's then this sudden transition from the homosexual adult male, young male society to...

• 2:23:09Speaker 03

  Having sex with a woman?

• 2:23:11Speaker 02

  What a strange culture, where they've got this ubiquitous homosexual experience that every young boy has and they think it's essential to their growth. It's essential to like that another man's semen is essential to them becoming strong.

• 2:23:30Speaker 03

  You think that's strange, but you wait till you hear what New Guineans have to say about about our habits.

• 2:23:37Speaker 02

  Well, that's nice. Everyone's allowed their own opinion. I think I'll stick with the way we do it. It just I just when I hear about something like that, I'm always fascinated by like, how did that ever get started? And how did that get universally accepted in a tribe?

• 2:23:57Speaker 03

  My understanding is, sorry, my understanding is around the world, such relations are not, they're not rare, they're not, they're not the rule, but but for example, in Central America, there were Native American tribes in Central America, where, where there were a class of young men who acted as sex partners. The Spanish, when they came into this area, were utterly disgusted by this practice. And so the Spanish, the Spanish had war dogs.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  These were dogs that were trained to rip people apart. And so, so the Spanish, being disgusted by this practice, would, would bring war dogs into an enclosure with these professional sex partners, and the war dogs would then rip them apart.

• 2:24:58Speaker 02

  Oh, God. Well, I don't know, that's how you should handle it, but I kind of see their perspective. Wow. It is so odd how different cultures are, that we're all just human beings, but we've agreed on these very, very different ways of behaving all around the world.

• 2:25:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. As an example of when I was given the, given an opportunity, but, but declined it, I went into an isolated mountain range with, with three New Guineans, we were dropped off by, by helicopter, and I had brought in rice and tin fish and food, and then, but the New Guineans had brought in some Sago grubs. These are the larvae of a big beetle, which the beetle injects its eggs into the Sago palm, and then the larvae grows into a large object, which looks like a shrimp.

• 2:26:02Speaker 03

  And they're fatty, and they're high in protein. So the New Guineans brought in a couple of these Sago grubs, and they offered me a Sago grub.

• 2:26:12Speaker 02

  You didn't want to try it?

• 2:26:14Speaker 03

  Part of me was curious, curious, but it just looked so disgusting to see this. I declined the Sago, Sago grub in retrospect.

• 2:26:24Speaker 02

  Well, that kind of makes sense to me out of necessity, because it's high in protein, and it's just food, and oh, they cook it. So there you go. If you cook it, it makes even more sense.

• 2:26:34Speaker 03

  As an example of something that, that we, we love, but Paul's New Guineans, a couple of New Guineans who lived in the Highlands, I brought down to the coast when, when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range. They had never been on, in the coast. They had never encountered ice cream or anything cold, because, of course, they had hot food from cooking, but they had no way of making cold. And so I, first of all, we stayed in a motel, and, and for the first time in their life, they got to sleep in beds. When I asked them the next morning, I like sleeping in the bed, one of them said, no

• 2:27:16Speaker 03

  good, he, he had no experience of sleeping in bed, he rolled out of the bed at night. So he didn't like sleeping in the bed. But then I offered them ice cream, and, and, and one of them, he rejected the ice cream. He said, it's, it's cold, it hurts my mouth. Well, you and I are accustomed to eating ice cream, we're accustomed to eating cold food, but a New Guinean has never had experience of anything cold.

• 2:27:39Speaker 02

  Well, that makes sense that it'd be odd, because it's an odd sensation, but I would feel like, once they tasted it, they'd be like, oh, I get it.

• 2:27:47Speaker 03

  They didn't get it. Would I, if I had eaten that Sago grub, would I have gotten it?

• 2:27:55Speaker 02

  I bet you would have. I bet it didn't taste like much at all.

• 2:27:59Speaker 03

  Probably would have. My guess is it, it tasted like a fatty shrimp.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, just fat. It's probably just fatty. It probably, I mean, especially if they're cooking it. Were they cooking them? Or were they just eating them raw?

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  No, they, they cooked them.

• 2:28:13Speaker 02

  Probably tasted fine. I mean, I'm sure you've eaten bugs in other countries, right? Grasshoppers, things along those lines, crickets?

• 2:28:21Speaker 03

  I personally have not.

• 2:28:22Speaker 02

  No? Really?

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:28:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:28:26Speaker 03

  What have I, I've eaten rattlesnake.

• 2:28:27Speaker 02

  Mmm.

• 2:28:28Speaker 03

  What else have I eaten that's strange?

• 2:28:31Speaker 02

  When I was in Mexico, they, I stayed at this resort in Puerto Vallarta, and they had these bowls of like, it looked like fried crickets.

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  Oh, that's right. So in my book, I have a, I have a chapter on Siretzi Kama, who was the first president of the African nation of Botswana. Siretzi Kama was the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in Botswana, but he also was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at the time of independence. And so he was sent to, to England for higher education. He got educated, he had higher education at, at Oxford, and so he was comfortable in

• 2:29:22Speaker 03

  both European and in Native African society. He wore, wore suits, he was, he was a great, great speaker, and he graduated law school at Oxford. But in his suit pocket, in his jacket pocket, he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers, which was standard food in this area of Botswana, and he would, he would offer his guests, his European guests, or his African guests, would you like to have a dried grasshopper? And he would pop in the dried grasshoppers. I have had friends who've eaten dried grasshoppers, and they say they were okay. I could not bring myself.

• 2:30:02Speaker 02

  They don't taste, well, I didn't have grasshoppers, I had crickets. They don't taste bad at all. I ate a live roach once for fear factor. Didn't taste like much. It was disgusting, because it was just the, the concept of it was disgusting, but the taste of it was very bland. It was not that bad at all. It's just protein.

• 2:30:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. The Botswana story is fascinating. It's also in your book, where you discuss the transformation of Botswana under this guy's leadership.

• 2:30:32Speaker 03

  There was a leader who, the leader who really made a difference, and that's a case of someone, he was the only one who could have done it. The reason is, he was the only one who could have made Botswana successful as founding president, because he was the chief of the largest, most powerful tribe in Botswana. When Botswana became independent, they set up a two-house legislature based on the British model. But the upper house was a house of chiefs, and a house of chiefs would have perpetuated

• 2:31:15Speaker 03

  the rule of, rule of the chiefs, so it was a bad idea for Botswana democracy. But Siretzi Kama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe, he was the only person in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the chiefs, because he was the most powerful chief. And the other thing was that Botswana's financial stability has come from diamonds. The diamonds were discovered after independence. If they had been discovered before independence, the British and the Beers would have made a deal favoring the British and the Beers. But in fact, the diamonds were, were discovered like six months after independence, and they were discovered on the land of Siretzi Kama's tribe.

• 2:31:55Speaker 03

  Normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found on the land of, of a tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves. But because the diamonds were on the land of Siretzi Kama's tribe, and Siretzi Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all of Botswana, and not just his tribe, Siretzi Kama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property of the Botswana nation, not of the individual tribe. So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds, and he was the

• 2:32:35Speaker 03

  only person who could have undone the power of the chiefs. Plus in addition, because he was equally comfortable in European society and in African society, and he, he married a European woman, he was respected in, in Europe, very successful as a diplomat, and he was respected among African countries.

• 2:33:05Speaker 02

  Imagine if that practice had taken place in America, where all the resources, all the natural resources were the property of the society of America, and not of individuals. Imagine how different this world would look if the oil and gas, just the oil and gas, and this, and of course, the, the minerals, the rare earth minerals. Imagine if they were just the property of the collective United States.

• 2:33:35Speaker 03

  Good point, and in most African countries, it's as in the United States. So diamonds and emeralds and oil-

• 2:33:45Speaker 02

  Cobalt.

• 2:33:47Speaker 03

  ...belong to the tribe on whose land they're found, but not in Botswana.

• 2:33:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:33:53Speaker 03

  And the result is that Botswana is the, I believe they're the second richest country in Africa. The richest country in Africa is, I believe, Equatorial Guinea. And it's very rich because it's got oil. And the average per capita income in Equatorial Guinea is something like $10,000 or $20,000. That's because the president has an annual income of like $500 billion. And everybody else has an annual income of like $100. And you average it out. And that's why Equatorial Guinea has the highest average income.

• 2:34:35Speaker 02

  That's messing with the numbers.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  That's messing with the numbers.

• 2:34:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  But in Botswana, the population of the country is only 3 million. And the money from the diamonds, as in the case of Norway, goes into a sinking fund. It's not spent as you go, but it's invested on a long-term basis.

• 2:34:56Speaker 02

  Wow. And that's an excellent example of a great leader.

• 2:35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:03Speaker 02

  Well, listen, Jared, I just want to thank you for all your work over the years. Collapse, you know, Guns, Germs and Steals. You've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in society and in history, and made it very entertaining and very consumable. So, thank you. And I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really great.

• 2:35:30Speaker 03

  No, I enjoyed a lot talking to you. I was, I did my homework. I was told in advance that I would enjoy a lot talking with you, provided that I was not identified with something that you disapprove of, but that otherwise I should look forward to a pleasurable experience. And in fact, my wife got Joshua to send her three snippets of you. And yes, I anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time, and it is.

• 2:36:05Speaker 02

  It was fantastic. And good luck with learning the iPhone further. And great luck with your book as well. I look forward to finishing it. Thank you so much. Bye, everybody.