Transcript of #2549 - Jared Diamond New

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night! All day!

Very nice to meet you, sir.

It's a pleasure to meet you. Great pleasure to meet you.

I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and 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?

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.

Oh, okay.

Cool.

So, first of all, why did you write this book?

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? 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.

Right.

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. 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 of— father-in-law of my thesis supervisor and the master of my college at Oxford. Cambridge, not a good choice.

Oh no.

But the chairman of the department called me in. I thought I'm going to 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.

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.

Mmhmm.

And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again.

Mmhmm.

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 always these battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil.

Mm-hmm.

Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people and 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 tested 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.

Mmhmm.

There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration. Like 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 2 seconds ahead, one was 2 seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler. Now what?

Yeah.

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.

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. 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 is a small country and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of the population. 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 there are about— I can boil it down to 4 or 5 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 COVID of Popular Electronics with the Intel 8080 chip, Bill Gates said to Steve Allen, now is the time.

We got to 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. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think in 2004. As a result of his having been born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg—

1984.

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. De Gaulle did. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill did. And some leaders— such as Mongke Suqba and Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland, and yet there were other people who tried, Attila the Hun and Timur the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well, within the last 10 years, students of tree rings have figured out that on the Mongolian steppe, 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 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 ring study of the last decade.

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. jorogan.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, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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 in tents, 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?

Absolutely.

He was kind of an extraordinary individual.

It took 2 things together. The second thing— the first thing was that 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 are correct. At a given time and place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge, but who emerges depends upon the personal qualities. To take religion. The 1st century AD of the Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later because 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 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 6 messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans. Of the 6 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. For example, Muhammad was an outstanding— he was charismatic. He was a great organizer. He was a great general. The Mahdi of the Sudan who established this empire 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 technology and the demographics, whereas Christianity did.

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 that, I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them, when no one wrote it down, and I never met him.

Yeah.

So, it's really Paul.

Yes and no. It was 2 people. It was Jesus and there was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus, of those various other rival messiahs, 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 It was aimed at everybody. So of the candidate messiahs then, Jesus had a particularly good message, but it took— a good message isn't enough. It took St. Paul as the organizer.

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.

Right.

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.

Right. 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.

Yeah.

have no first-person accounts of Jesus.

It would be really nice if he wrote things down.

It would have made things more certain. In the case of Muhammad, it was 2 centuries before things got written down.

Wow.

So we know even less about Muhammad—

That's crazy.

—than we do about Jesus. 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—

Yeah.

Muhammad was at the right place at the right time, but we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we can with Jesus.

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, 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. 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 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.

Mm-hmm.

You know, without any judgments on religion, someone's got to be wrong if you 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 you can get entire populations to go along with it.

Right. One might say that the religious teachings are secondary. In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to 5 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 the social features of the Mormon religion, their optimism, their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy, and they're expecting every Mormon— if you are 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— That's a big deal. Big commitment. So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic and because Brigham Young then was an outstanding leader.

This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years there'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. 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. 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, seems like these guys have it nailed. Other than, you know, the 9 wives and all that other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the original idea.

With due respect to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and ascent to heaven is stretching scientific understanding.

Yeah.

And I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major factor propelling Christianity. There were many things that propelled Christianity. This gets interesting. The Christians outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire because Roman religion had a low view of women. Children did not have high prestige.

Right.

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 Empire, you 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.

Right.

And so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, there were all these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate. So Christianity had reasons for its success that, with due respect, have nothing to do with the virgin birth.

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— strict adherence to religion, they emphasize having many children, and they take care of the community. And their populations are rising while a lot of secular people, their populations are dropping off.

That's true. With Muslims as with Christianity, 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 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 indecisive. 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. 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 5 times a day.

Yeah.

It takes a lot where everyone agrees We are all going to play music and pray 5 times a day and we are a part of a team. And if you leave, the punishment is death.

Mm-hmm.

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 is also in the religion, which is like you are all in and you are all in for life and we all support each other. It is a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people. 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 the strong belief system. There's a compelling force that makes you want to join.

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

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

That's right. And it's compelling that 18-year-olds, every 18-year-old Mormon man is expected to go devote 2 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.

Yes.

And so Mormonism has done well. 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 in different continents 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 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, whereas I can't think of of a politician or a businessperson who has had an effect 2,000 years later.

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?

Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, there 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 European guns and horses.

Mm-hmm.

Religion to become worldwide, religion needs what one could 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 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 economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world.

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

Right. Let's think—

Keep that microphone up to your face.

My apologies.

Sorry.

My apologies. You have very soft spoken. So examples of everything aligning. In the business world, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, out of 340 million Americans today or 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched, it's impossible to make an argument that nobody except Bill Gates had the business know-how and the computer skills to found personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time. And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized that it was the right time. He went to the the head of the company that had hired him and 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 on the internet. So he recognized that the time was right.

Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you try 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 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 everything, like in just one click, like all that revolutionized it. It all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, TikTok-y. It became the perfect way to buy things. One click. It was like all the green lights. He was driving down the boulevard and every light turned green right when he got to it. It was brilliant.

Right. 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, but he recognized That an everything store has to start out with something.

Really? So he started out with books?

He started out with books because he recognized that books were an ideal thing to start out with. All books are uniform. It's not that you buy a diamond and 78— they're different diamonds. All the books are uniform and there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could get books and customers in stores, they're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Prophet's Prophets. Every copy is the same. So Jeff Bezos recognized explicitly that books are a good thing to start out with. Having started out with books, he then reasoned what are good things to move on to and he moved on to perfume and jewelry. He waited quite a while to move on to move on to whatever else he moved on to.

To pay—

He was strategic.

Yeah. 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.

Yeah. That's a great example. There was online— sorry. There were everything stores.

But not to that level.

Not to that level before Jeff Bezos. Before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. Oh, yeah. 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 indicates that Without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've got Walmart and we've got eBay, but Jeff Bezos put his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making an online everything store.

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

Yeah.

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 PM. Let's go.

That's right.

You don't have to go to the store. And now you can get groceries delivered too? Like it's— and eventually it's gonna 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?

Yeah, yeah. This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic. 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 were before and there were afterwards other ways to develop an everything store. What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction. To hell with whether the investors are satisfied with their stock returns. He didn't care about that. customer satisfaction. So he developed something that would have happened, that did happen before and did happen afterwards, but he did it in a distinctive way.

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

Mm-hmm. Interesting question. My guess is that if we didn't have a stock— if stock markets hadn't developed, 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 Interesting.

Well, it certainly makes for more businesses being able to be funded. That's for sure.

Yeah.

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 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— it's a fascinating engine for growth.

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

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

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

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

No. No.

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

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

Yeah.

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 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 100 products. We should have just 4 products and concentrate on them. Another thing that he did was to say the product should look good. and be simple, only a couple of buttons on it. The contrast case is that the television set that we have at home has a— one of these push-button devices with 49 buttons. When my wife and I wanted to watch the World Cup, we had to call up our son Joshua and Max 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. I'll call up Josh on that because there are so many buttons.

Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has 1, 2— I think it's got 4 buttons. Last night, I discovered an essential button. 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. I knew from Marie having showed me before that somewhere on that iPhone, there's a volume control device, but I didn't know what it was. But yesterday, I saw that on the left side, there were 2 things. I tried pushing one, and the volume went up. It was the upper one.

How do you not know that?

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

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?

I did have an old flip phone.

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

Possibly, but I don't recall. Certainly with my iPhone, Marie did explain to me when she forced me to get the iPhone, she showed me that of these 4 buttons, 2, these lengthy things on the left, are volume controls, but I didn't remember whether the lower one increased or the lower one decreased the volume. I didn't dare touch them because I was I was afraid that I would ruin the device. That's so funny. And it was only yesterday that I tried pushing the upper one and I got louder volume. So now I know that.

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

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

Right. Silence.

So, my device is always on orange.

Me too.

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.

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.

It is an insanely complicated thing. Alex, are you serious? From another— from childhood onwards, I've always been technophobe.

Why?

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 these make-it-yourself radios and they were— I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. My father then got— my father was a physician scientist. He got someone in his lab to put my phone together. When I 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 The electric organ of electric eels. 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 2 solutions. But when a lecturer in my beginning physiology course said the gallbladder is a sac— the gallbladder is a sac.

A sac.

Coming out of the bile duct, 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. All it required was that I put a little plastic cannula into the mouth of the gallbladder and then I weighed it on a balance. But there was a balance in my lab. So I picked that organ because it was technologically so simple. And 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 do— nor can I figure out my iPhone, nor can I do any other technology.

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 almost repulses you.

That's true. Why does it repel me? Because I'm incompetent at it and I feel lousy and frustrated when I try to do it. Instead, I try to do everything in the simplest way possible. So, one of my secrets for success, let me show you. This is— behold, 0.7 millimeter pencil. It has one device. I advance it and the lead advances. My books, I write my books by hand.

Really?

Yup. And 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 iPhone, my 3 or 4 button iPhone, and my secretary cleans it up. But I really recommend this pencil.

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

Yes. I edit more by crossing out. I do some editing by erasing. For example, Yeah. Yesterday, I flew into 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. So yesterday, I was working on a paper on the birds of Wandamen Mountains. I used— behold.

An eraser.

An eraser.

You got a nice big high school eraser.

I used the eraser and I used my 0.7 millimeter 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—

Eraser and pencil?

Eraser and pencil.

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?

Yeah. Is there another way to do it?

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.

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

But you will type it?

Oh, yeah.

OK. So you will— you're not averse to using a typewriter or a keyboard?

No. When I was about 8 years old, I had chickenpox and I stayed home from— I had to stay home from school for 2 weeks. During those 2 weeks, I learned to use a typewriter, but I got cured of chickenpox after I had done the first 3 rows. So I can touch type the bottom 3 rows, but I cannot touch type the top row.

That's hilarious.

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

Really?

Yeah.

Wow. And only touch typing the first 3 rows?

That's right.

That's hilarious. I— there's a lot of people that I know that write longhand, and they, 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.

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.

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.

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

Instantaneous.

—my thinking, whereas if I'm writing, it takes longer for me to 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.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

I want to mention one other great advantage of iPhone. I don't know if you've discovered But at the bottom of my iPhone, there's an icon—

Right.

—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. 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. So I learned and I do my correspondence in German and Italian now, never by hand. I always do it by dictation.

That's great. 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.

Yeah.

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 changed. And in the future, they're gonna have it set up where it'll do it in your voice.

Yeah.

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.

This has a very interesting history in which I was secondarily involved. In the 1970s, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto got the idea of 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. The reason was there were 2 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. And so they said, out of sight, out of mind. The device translated into Russian.

The Russian translated 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.

This episode is brought to you by Amra. 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 Amra Colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these special Specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, etc. 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, Armoura is offering my listeners 30% off plus 2 free gifts. Go to armoura.com/rogan. 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?

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, There was much more. In the beginning was a system, an organization, not just a word. That's an example of the difficulties of translating from one language into another.

Yes.

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 2 words that mean I love. In English, there's only one word that means I love. In Italian, you can either say amo or voglio bene. Voglio bene literally means I wish you well. Surprisingly to me, in Italian, physical love, sexual love is voglio bene, whereas amo, which is literally the word love, amo is is the root for amateur. It's the root for love in other languages. That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love. So Italian has these 2 words for love. Another example—

Can I ask you one more question?

Please.

Does Italian have a word for love for things that aren't sexual or like— and not personal, not friendly, like a thing, like love race car driving?

Forse desiderio, desire.

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.

Right. That illustrates the difficulty of translating from one language to another. So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, which I'm happily married, but 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 voglio bene, I would be thrown out.

She'd probably beat your ass.

A German example is that— The German language has 2 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 I made much progress learning the Fore language of Papua New Guinea. In the Fore language, the verb to be— in English we have just one verb to be. In Fore there are 2 verbs to be. There's mindiya and windiya. Windiya is to be of something inanimate. This sweet potato tastes good. This sweet potato is good. Windia. But mindia is to be referring to an animal. And so—

Oh.

The first sentence of Fore that I learned on my second day in the Fore area was, there was a frog in a creek, and I'd already learned the word for water, which is dakwa wani, wani in Fore, and dakwa was the word for that sort of frog. And so I said to— I was practicing the Fore that I just learned. I said to a Fore man, dakwo wunimdi wundia, and he shook his head severely, wundia, mindia, because I had used the inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog when I should have used the animate word to be. English does not make that distinction.

Wow. The example that you brought about the word in biblical Scripture and logos, the difference. That is such a giant difference.

Yeah.

It's such 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.

Mm-hmm.

And he's like, I highly recommend it. I'm like, well, that's a lot. 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.

Yeah. 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. The original Greek is— Menen aede thea. So the first word in the Iliad is wrath, menon. 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. The Iliad as it was written in Greek, that is a great first line and it loses its power in translation.

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

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 of the Iliad.

Yes. You really have to be able to read it in Greek.

Yes. Yeah.

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.

Yeah. My understanding is that with Hebrew, at least originally, the so-called Semitic, Afro-Asiatic languages. The vowels were nonessential. 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. 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 the vowels.

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 then for us to try to understand exactly what they were saying, the power in their words is almost impossible.

An example is— so my books get translated into lots of languages. Guns, Germs and Steel has 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.

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

Yes, yes, yes, and no. German grammar is distinctive. The German vocabulary is distinctive. So when you ask Is it the same? Any linguist would say, no, it's not the same. We attempt to come up with an approximation but we know that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into another language.

I had a fascinating guy in here the other day that spent 8 years of his life living with the Pirahã people in the Amazon jungle. And learning their language.

Was this Daniel?

Yes. Daniel Everett.

Yeah.

Have you spoken to him before?

I've corresponded with him.

Brilliant guy and such a fascinating conversation. I mean, utterly fascinating that he had no writing, 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 —of how to say things with them.

Yeah. In New Guinea— New Guinea is the most language-rich part of the world. There are 1,000 languages, not dialects, but 1,000 languages in New Guinea and most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, 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, they start out— 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. He has to figure out what they're saying and has to figure out the sounds. One example of that is that in 1990, I was in the Lakes Plains of Indonesia and New Guinea next to a tribe called the Thaueaiao being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language. The Thaueaiao language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese has either 5 tones, mainland Mandarin, and 6 tones, Cantonese, or vice versa. This woman linguist, she had been living for 15 years with the Faua'i Yao 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 among the Faua'i Yao, you have to get the tone right. The syllables are mostly— they're monosyllables. like bay, but bay you can pronounce in 12 different— bay, bay, bay, bay, bay, bay. And one of those bays means 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. And so, if— If a linguist or if a young child learning Thao Yi Yao says something with the word bei 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 bei instead of rising the bei, what comes out is, vile snake, let me give you this feces to eat.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

A consequence of that is this linguist noticed that when little kids are going around the Fauí village with their mother, 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. So it's mother and then repetition. Why? Because with the Fau Yi Yao, if you get the pronunciation slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother-in-law into feces-dropping snake.

How did those 2 get so close? That seems to me to not be a coincidence.

That's their problem.

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

It's a big problem.

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

Yeah.

That's not what I said. No, no, no. I said beloved mother-in-law. That's hilarious. What was the first truly literate society?

Oh, that we know. The first writing was in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It was what's called cuneiform. These wedge-shaped symbols. It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end, and 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 language of the first empire of the Fertile Crescent, and cuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey, which is the oldest and most distinct Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in cuneiform. So cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems just as The English alphabet or the Roman alphabet is used to write German and Swedish and it's used to write Fore, the New Guinea language that I work with. The Phoenician— the Phoenicians— the first Greek writing was Linea B of Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system and around— then the Greeks lost writing for a couple of centuries and then—

They lost it totally?

They became illiterate. So—

The whole culture?

Right. At the time of the Trojan War, the Greeks wrote in Linear B, this syllabic writing system, and then writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries. It came back around 800 BC, 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. It was not syllabic, but it was alphabet— alphabetic. And the Greeks added vowels. The Phoenicians, because it was Afro-Asiatic language, did not have symbols for vowels. In Greek, if you— in Phoenician, if you drop the vowels, you can still understand. In Greek, you have to specify the vowels. Otherwise, it's not comprehensible. So 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 Roman alphabet for Latin, which is modified again to the alphabet that we've got today. So the first writing system then was—

Cuneiform.

Cuneiform. And then there were syllabic writing systems and then came alphabets. Japanese is the world's most complicated writing system because It's really 4 writing systems. Japanese has 2 syllabaries. For example, my name, Diamond, the Japanese write in 2, Diamonodo, because Japanese doesn't put 2 consonants together. So my name comes out Diamonodo in either of these 2 writing systems. Japanese also has a 3rd writing system. which is basically Chinese-derived, the kanji, and then a 4th writing system, which is the Roman writing system. So Japanese is the most complicated writing system in the world. I just come from Korea last Friday. I flew from Korea.

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

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. Wow.

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, 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?

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

Really?

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

That's insane.

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 burned or lost. The longest Etruscan text that we've got, There was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia. This linen shroud was used to wrap something, but the linen shroud was evidently a piece of Etruscan writing because there's a long 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 that we come to it is that dice, these 6-sided dice, have been found in Etruscan areas, and on the dice, there are There are 6 symbols. So evidently, the 6 symbols must mean 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and people have figured out 1 or 2 of those, but they haven't figured out the others.

So we know the Etruscan symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but we don't know which one of them is 6 and which one of them is 3 and which one of them is 4.

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

Yes. Yeah.

That's fascinating.

Yeah.

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

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

There it is right there.

Yes. All right. The first European visitor to Easter Island of whom we have a record was the Dutch Roggeveen in I think 1722 and he did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was by the 3rd or 4th 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 at the wooden sticks and doing things, and that may have given the Easter Islanders the idea to invent a writing system of their own. So it's possible that it was a 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 Sequoyah who had a store and he noticed that when Europeans came into his store, they had 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.

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. He 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 Sequoyah convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having 2 Cherokees at the opposite end of like a football field 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 was— at the field had said. So Sequoyah in that way, convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing.

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 Göbekli Tepe where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing that predates cuneiform by 5,000 or 6,000 years?

No, I've not seen that.

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

Okay. It is the case—

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

Are you talking about the thing I have on the screen? Yes.

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

It is the case with cuneiform, although we think of cuneiform as having arisen around 3500 BC.

Irving Finkel, that's it. So this is it. Did Irving Finkel find ancient writing at Göbekli Tepe?

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 function 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.

Right.

And there are at least 3 writing systems that we're sure 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 BC or 900 BC and then the Maya also had writing, syllabic writing. The Maya had lots of books which Bishop Landa burnt all of them except 4, but the Maya writing arose independently. of cuneiform because there was no contact between the Old World and the New World. And then Chinese writing. Chinese writing is first attested around 1300 BC. Chinese writing is totally different from cuneiform or anything else in the Fertile Crescent at the time. So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently of the Fertile Crescent, which would mean that we have 3 independent inventions of writing.

Right.

Namely cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent, Mexican writing, and then Chinese writing, and then possibly Easter Island writing.

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

It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing. It was a much broader phenomenon called the the collapse of the Bronze Age. So 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 Linea B, which was the earliest, the syllabic Old Greek writing system, but Linea B was derived from another writing system called Linea A, which we can't read yet. We don't have enough texts. It's suspected that Linea A recorded the Minoan language of Minoan Crete, whatever that language is. We don't know. know the language. That would have been— might have been another independent invention, right? But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and Greece and Cyprus and the Levant from Palestine up to Lebanon and then—

Egypt.

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. Right. And there were this Greek pottery that turned up in the Fertile Crescent, making one suspect 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 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. Writing, 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 the sea. Or whether it was because of climate change or whether it was because of invention of new weapons.

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

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 BC and they had writing. We have their seals, their rings that were used to stamp with wax. But we don't have any long texts. The longest text on one of these rings is only 3 or 4 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. So there's another case of writing disappearing, the Harappan writing, and then 2,000 years later, a completely different writing system.

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

Again, that is really interesting. So cuneiform emerged roughly say 3400 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3000 BC. 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 Writing spread. Similarly with Sequoyah, this Cherokee Indian, it's not that Sequoyah copied English writing. It's that he got the idea of writing and then he invented the writing system himself.

Mm-hmm.

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 And it makes sense if you think about how complex and beautiful 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.

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

Very strange.

Right. There's another example, Korean writing, okay? So Korean writing, the Korean writing Hangul, which groups letters into syllables, this is not a writing system that gradually evolved. a king of Korea called King Sejong around roughly the year 1430. Until then, Koreans wrote with Chinese-based writing system.

Mm-hmm.

And King Sejong has a famous proclamation which Koreans learn by memory. King Sejong's proclamation says, it grieves me that our people write the Korean language with Chinese-like writing when the sounds of 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 Han-gul. King Sejong invented Han-gul himself at a bang. There was no precedent going forward.

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

Yeah. 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.

You know, 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 Yeah. 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. You have to do that.

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 Finland 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 it's a very distinctive language. The Finns are proud of their language. It's a poetic singing language. It's related somewhat distantly to Hungarian. 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. She explained to me that the national identity— Italians had lots of dialects, maybe 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—

Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialect.

Okay.

Yeah.

Right.

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.

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 was visiting a doctor in Beckles, so my parents and their friends We're talking and my sister and I were bored, so we wandered off into the town. And we wandered off only about 2 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 do we get back to the house of the Granthams? 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.

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

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

But it was a form of English.

Presumably because this was an English colony. 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.

Wow!

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, I bin a 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. Because I had 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 understand the Bavarian at all.

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

Right. But again, in Italy, Sicilian is— it's often regarded as a separate language. There are, in fact, 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 Wow!

When did you start learning Italian?

I started learning Italian. It was April 1999 and I can— Pull up the— 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 l'ospedale. And so when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in Italy in May—

2015.

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? So I studied Italian grammar for 6 weeks and we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11th and my father died that morning. So we aborted the Italian trip. But after the Italian trip, I think I've spent 6 weeks learning much of the grammar. Let's put in another 6 weeks and learn the rest of the grammar. So I put in another 6 weeks. I 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 8 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. Someone, an Italian woman, answered the ad. She came to my office and here I had been dealing with Italian for 8 months and here is a live Italian speaking Italian to me for the first time.

It's like 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 2 Italian speakers who came and talked Italian with me, 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 2 years. I talked through with 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. They can make a relationship of their own. So both of them got married. They're still married and it's now 27 years later. I still— every week, I talk to Francesca for 2 hours, every 2 weeks. Francesca is the person with whom I 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.

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

In my life, I've dealt with 13 languages. 3 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 Tok Pisin. 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 learned enough to hitchhike and what else? And then the Fore language. I can speak rudimentary Fore, and those are my languages.

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

I do mix them up in my head.

I would imagine.

I can keep— I'm sorry. I can keep straight New Guinea Tok Pisin and English, and mostly I can keep straight Italian and German.

Because they're so different from each other.

They're different. So I can keep them straight. When I started learning Italian, I had been fluent in Spanish. Italian drove out my Spanish completely. 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, 4 channels for languages. I can keep straight English, Italian, German, and a 4th language, but a 5th language, if I attempt to bring back a 5th language, I'll confuse that language. And so Indonesian and Russian, although they're totally different, once I started Indonesian, it drove out my Russian.

That's crazy.

It is crazy.

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

I think so and I will have the test soon because of our two— we have twin sons and of our twin sons, one of them is engaged to a wonderful Russian woman, Anastasia. They're getting married in our garden in 2 months and so when Anastasia comes over for dinner Once or twice a week, I trot out some elementary phrases of Russian. I greet her in Russian, Pokrasnaya, Pokrasnaya, grazhdanka, beautiful citizeness. I would like to bring back more of my Russian, but I'm afraid that if I brought back my Russian, it might drive out my German, so I don't know whether I'll do it.

You only have a certain amount of hard drive.

Yeah.

Yeah. 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?

Yeah. It is now written. It's 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 grass belong you and top belong you. Long head belong you. You go finish. Teeth belong you. You go right. Eye belong you. But I don't lick lick. Okay, so that's a sample of Pidgin. What did you say? I said that the hair on your head is somewhat sparse and you have brown eyes and— Grasp along you, you lick lick, I sold out. Wow. 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 1,000 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 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 and the New Guineans began picking up some elementary German words but they also picked up words from other New Guinea languages.

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 discuss plantation agriculture and it was enough for adults. 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 and the 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 a grammar and tenses and future tense and prepositions.

Over how long? What period of time?

A decade.

Wow!

A decade. 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 spontaneously developed this really stripped-down so-called pidgin language that doesn't have prepositions and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you're going to do with the sugarcane, but the children of 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 the decade from 1890 to 1900, every now and then, the newspapers would quote something funny that a Hawaiian said on a plantation and would be an example of Creole as of 1892.

And then you can see from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated Kriol had gotten in 1894. So New Guinea Tok Pisin, which is actually what's called the Kriol language, is a full complex language with prepositions. You can say anything. It's the government language. New Guineans— the New Guinean government elite, they are more fluent usually in Krio than they are in English. So in Parliament in Papua New Guinea, the language of Parliament is either English or Talk Pidgin and then there's one other Krio language. When I started out in New Guinea, the first thing that I learned was Talk Pidgin because I could pick it up very quickly. And not a pedal, some belong— mock 'em along.

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

I picked it up as I was there.

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

That's right, yeah. There are books, there are grammars of New Guinea Pidgin. I learned New Guinea pidgin initially, which is a Creole language with prepositions, et cetera. 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. Wow. Just as an example. Thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science, but to demonstrate that you can say anything in Talk Pidgin, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in Talk Pidgin. He got one pill, man savvy too much name long. Ansaga, ansaga, he got this pill light. He talk long, hot too much. This pill hot too much. Thermodynamics. This fellow, Ansager, he got strong pelletintin. Now, I mean, Malcolm, rule number 2, belong— belong— belong— tintin belong hot. I mean, second law of thermodynamics. So what did you just say? What I said is that a Swede called Lars Ansager developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is thermodynamics is about heat, and Ansager developed the thermodynamic Thermodynamics of rates of reactions. And so I explain, this fellow Ansager, he come up, he mark him rule number 2, long savvy belong heat.

Savvy belong heat, literally knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics. Rule number 2, long savvy belong heat. Ansager got this fellow a strong pellet in tin. Ansager's got— He's smart man.

Have you talked to someone in this pidgin, Tok 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?

Yeah, yeah. 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 explain to them the second law of thermodynamics and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of human red meat and human fat. You can say anything in Tok Pidgin.

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

Well, they say that— That human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird like the ostrich.

Oh, okay.

Whereas human fat, they say, is like the fat of pigs. 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 Fore area. The Fore were the people who had kuru, which is basically mad cow disease. They were the people who were dying of kuru, and they were the people that I worked with for the first 8 years.

And who were they eating?

Oh, there are rules. There's what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism. Exocannibalism is meeting— 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 that 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 the body of our dead mother. There are precise rules about who gets to eat what, but in general, the relatives 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 Tok Pidgin, talked with him and then—

He left.

The man got up 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— my worker was expected to eat the forearm. And so he quit his work, quit his work with me, and walked away. He would— 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.

So he quit working with you because of that?

Yeah, because the funeral feast was going to— the son-in-law had 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 3 days in the future. So you'd better come now so that you're there before the body rots.

That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about, how the Pirahã 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?

No, and it's hard for me to— for you and me to understand because in the area where my work— I quit in order to— it's a warm, hot area at about 3,000 10 feet. And the body, a dead body, is put— is, was, it's— 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— Sorry you asked me. The body putrefies and the flesh turns to— liquid. The liquid then drips through the slats in 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.

Whoa!

I was not offered. I would not have accepted if offered, but I was told by the missionary in the area. And by New Guineans themselves. That's what they do with dead bodies.

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

Never.

Not when you were there?

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

Right. What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and 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?

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

But according to their rules, would you have?

Probably. What would you do?

Probably, yes.

Husbands and wives are expected to eat the other person.

Yo!

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

That's from eating brain tissue, right?

That's right. Eating the uncooked brain.

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

It's a prion disease.

Prions survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying.

A couple hundred degrees, not thousands, but they certainly survive a couple hundred degrees.

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.

My understanding with—

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

Maybe it's 600 degrees.

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.

That is true.

Right.

That's true. And in fact—

It's not a real good concise answer. Prions can survive temperatures that kill 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's wet, dried, or embedded. Boiling 212 degrees, not dependable. 1,000 degrees.

Celsius.

Celsius. Yo, what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy prion ineffective— infectively. This is the level associated with effective incineration. Yeah, you gotta get— it just looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit's agreed upon, that at least for a few hours is reliably destructive. Wow, 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours. Even that's— yeah, well done doesn't— Cooking— yeah, well done cooking does not reliably destroy prions. What a crazy disease. A disease you only get from eating each other. It's almost like nature Nature doesn't want you to eat each other.

The reconstructed history of it, why on earth did the Fore have this basically mad cow disease as the commonest cause of death? In humans, there's a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob, which is a spontaneous mutation. And usually spontaneous mutation, it dies out because nowadays we don't eat—

Each other.

Each other. But what's thought to have happened in the Forêt area, Creutzfeldt-Jakob arises rarely as a spontaneous mutation. The guess is that someone in the Forêt area around 1910 developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob and died Right. But the Fore were practicing endocannibalism of— 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. So the transmission was by cannibalism, particularly to babies at the time of— and it's all thought to have arisen with one Fore 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 Fore.

What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this disease does not occur with the Pirahã. 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.

That makes sense because Creutzfeldt-Jakob is rare.

Even among cannibals?

Oh, among everybody. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, it's a rare mutation, like 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000.

Mm-hmm.

It's pure chance that one Creutzfeldt-Jakob mutation arose in the Fore and not in some— and not in any other tribe in New Guinea. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Korana, whatever their name is, didn't have Creutzfeldt, didn't have Kuru because nobody in the world, no human population in the had kuru except for the Fore as a result of that accident of one person with Kwetswiliyaka evidently getting eaten around 1910.

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

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 prion disease and it was scrapie that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the Fore area that— so when I arrived in the Fore in 1964, kuru was completely mysterious. It affected only the Fore. If a Fore went down to Port Moresby, the Fore might still develop kuru. Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the Fore environment. Foreigners who came into the Fore— I didn't develop kuru. Other New Guineans who came into the Fore area didn't develop kuru. The only people who developed kuru were the Fore, but the symptoms of kuru were— of course, 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 an infectious disease expert managed to get the Fore to provide him with the brain of a Fore man who had died of kuru and the doctor managed to get dry ice shipped into the Fore area in order to freeze the Kuru tissue. He got it shipped back to the National Institutes of Health.

He then— How long does that take? A 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 3 years. I saw that chimpanzee in a cage. After 3 years, finally, the chimpanzee had been completely healthy. After 3 years, the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of Kuru—

Mm-hmm.

—and died of Kuru. 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 Last 4-way 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. So the latency, it took 50 years for that person who had been infected by eating or licking the brain in 1959.

Mm-hmm.

A long latency. The person— the next-to-last death was 2005 and the last death was 2009.

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

They were infected in 1959.

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

Very unlikely because the Foray area By the time I got there in 1964, there were missionaries.

You watched them do this thing where they dipped the sweet potato into the pitrified— petrified— putrefied—

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

But you knew that they were engaging in this?

Yeah.

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

I was not offered the opportunity.

You weren't allowed.

Yeah.

Right. That makes— and you don't want to push because the— didn't— was it one of the Rockefeller 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.

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

Yeah.

—who collected art in the Balam 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 do you do? What does Michael Rockefeller do? 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 patroller had no choice. He stayed on the boat and in fact— So Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer.

Right.

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 the misfortune that as he approached shore, there came a canoe of natives. Who about 5 years previously, a Dutch patrol officer had come to that village to punish the natives for killing natives of some other village and the Dutch patrol officer killed 4 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—

Tribe.

To the same clan. I mean, he's white, so he belongs to this, and they killed him. It was not learned what had happened until some years later because the natives, of course, didn't admit it. They knew that they were going to be punished.

And did they admit that they consumed him?

I do not know. I think they did. That I'm not sure, but they certainly killed them.

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

I've not— oh, okay. So the guy who left my camp to eat his 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.

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.

Yeah. I do weird things that disgust them. So they do weird things to discuss a bit.

Well, there are certain tribes in Papua New Guinea that also have a very disturbing practice with young boys where they— you know that.

I know it very— yeah, because that was the practice of the Fore and many other tribes with whom I worked. 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 communal— a communal man's house. The young kids lived with the mother until the boy reached the age of 6. And when the boy reached the age of 6, he then moved into the men's house.

Yes.

Where 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 neighboring tribe and he's told that he's supposed to have sex for— 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. I saw a film made by a medical photographer of 2 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 2 boys, they were just appalled, disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman.

Wow!

But there's then this This sudden transition from the homosexual adult male, young male society to having sex with a woman.

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.

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

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 How did that ever get started and how did that get universally accepted in a tribe?

My understanding is— sorry. My understanding is around the world, such relations are not— they're not rare. They're not the rule but, for example, in Central America. There were Native American tribes in Central America 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 had war dogs. These were dogs that were trained to rip people apart. And so the Spanish, being disgusted by this practice, would bring war dogs into an enclosure with these professional sex partners and the war dogs would then rip them apart.

Oh, God. Well, I don't know if 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.

Yeah. As an example of when I was given the— given an opportunity but declined it, I went into an isolated mountain range with 3 New Guineans. We were dropped off by helicopter and I had brought in rice and Tin fish and food. 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 larva grows into a large object which looks like a shrimp. 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.

You didn't want to try it?

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

Well, that kind of makes sense to me out of necessity because 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.

As an example of something that we love but— Paul's New Guineans. A couple of New Guineans who lived in the highlands, I brought down to the coast when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range. They had never been on 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, first of all, we stayed in a motel, and for the first time in their life, they got to sleep in beds. When I asked them the next morning, like sleeping in the bed? One of them said, no good. He had no experience of sleeping in bed, and he rolled out of the bed at night, so he didn't like sleeping in bed. in the bed. But then I offered them ice cream and one of them, he rejected the ice cream. He said, 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.

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

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

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

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

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?

No, they cooked them.

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

I personally have not.

No, really? No. Wow.

What have I eaten? I've eaten rattlesnake. Mm-hmm. What else have I eaten that's strange?

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

Oh, that's right. So, in my book, I have a chapter on Seretse Khama, who was the first president of the African nation of Botswana. Seretse Khama was the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in Botswana, but he also was one of only There were only 22 college graduates in Botswana at the time of independence. And so he was sent to England for higher education. He got educated. He had higher education at Oxford. And so he was comfortable in both European and in native African society. He wore suits. 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 his area of Botswana. And 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 to.

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 concept of it was disgusting, but the taste of it was very bland. It was not that bad at all. It's just protein.

Yeah.

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

There was a 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 2-house legislature based on the British model, but the upper house was a house of chiefs and the— a house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of rule of the chiefs. So it was a bad idea for Botswana democracy. But Seretse Khama 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 De Beers would have made a deal favoring the British and De Beers.

Mm-hmm.

But in fact, the diamonds were discovered like 6 months after independence and they were discovered on the land of Seretse Khama's tribe. Normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found on the land of a tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves. But because Because the diamonds were on the land of Seretse Khama's tribe and Seretse Khama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana and not just his tribe. Seretse Khama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property of the Botswana nation, not of the individual tribe.

Mm-hmm.

So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds and he was the 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 married a European woman, he was respected in Europe. Very successful as a diplomat and he was respected among African countries.

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.

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

Cobalt.

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

Wow.

And the result is that Botswana is the— I believe they're the 2nd 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. But—

That's messing with the numbers.

That's messing with the numbers. But in Botswana, the population of the country is only 3 million. And the money from the diamonds go— 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.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, listen, Jared, I just want to thank you for all your work over the years, Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steel. 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.

No, I enjoyed a lot talking to you. I was— I did my homework. I was told I had been 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 3 snippets of you and—

Yes.

I anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time and it is.

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.