#2549 - Jared Diamond

[MUSIC] >> Very nice to meet you, sir. >> That's a pleasure. >> Great question. >> Thank 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 tele 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 paced it up on the wall, 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. And so, there's been throughout my life this question, do bad as well as good people make a difference. Also, my wife was post, the last of my family in Europe, disappeared in the whole cause. 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, a 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 Cambridge, not a good choice. Oh, no. The chairman of the department called me in. I thought I'm going to be thrown out. He said, you know, 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, and there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again, that that type of scenario where a group of people are completely other to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it. 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 for lack of better terms, good and evil. Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people, and they want to leave a mark and be remembered to someone who made a difference. And then leaders who just want to take over all the systems and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country and change it. And you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs or not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration. You open the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident. And what would the world have looked like? If these cars had just been moving, one was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler, now what? 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, Paul Pot killed about one quarter of the Cambodian population. In even ways, he encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet did in Chile. His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile is a small country. And Pinochet did not set out to exterminate large fractional population. But the torches that he implied, I think the tooth, 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 I can boil it down to four or five things. A leader has to be at the right time and place. Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place and they seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of popular electronics with the Intel 8080 chip. Bill Gates said to Steve Allen, "Now is the time. We got to start now building my computer because we don't do it. Somebody else will." So Bill Gates recognized that the time was right. 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 us having been born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart social media because there had been some before and some afterwards. But the changes in the internet made 2004 particularly good year. So leaders, some leaders choose the time and place to go all dead. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill did. And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland, and yet there were other people who tried by the Battle of the Han and Timor the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well, within the last ten years, students of tree rings have figured out that on Mongolian steps, the wettest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. If he had been born ten 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 the tree rings started the last decade. That's interesting, but you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist. And he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions. So he accepted all religions and it was one of his strengths is that he didn't care. I'll take you all in. Everybody gets to come in here. And the way he would attack these cities, there's also the strategy of they never settled down. They always were intense and they would camp out in front of cities and just wait them out. I mean, there was a lot to it other than just resources, right? He's kind of an extraordinary individual. It took two 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 in place. We wouldn't know anything about him. So you are correct. At a given time in place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge, but who emerges depends upon the personal qualities, for example, to take religion. The first century AD of the West, of the Roman Empire, was the perfect time in 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 in place, but there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who very easily got killed by the Romans, of the six candidates Christ was most successful, but Christ also, to found 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 orphan religions also need a great general. In some cases the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer from Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic. He was a great organizer, he was a great general. The Maddie of the Sudan who established the Sampyran in East Africa, a fantastic general and organizer, an incredibly charismatic, but the Maddie, 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 Christianianity 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. So it's really Paul. Yes, it was two people, it was Jesus and it 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 men. It was aimed at everybody. So of the candidate messiahs, then Jesus had a particularly good message, but it took good messages and enough. It took St. Paul as the organizer. But it's fascinating that Paul never met him and then 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 for this guy says this is what Jesus said and then we all go on that. Right. What's thought to be the first of the Gospels, Gospels according to Mark, is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus. So we have no first person accounts of Jesus. It would be really nice if we wrote things down. It would have made things more serving. In the case, in the case of Mohammed, it was two centuries before things got written down. So we know even less about Mohammed. That's great. And we do about Jesus. Or a difference also between Mohammed 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 Mohammed's birth was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly wet time which meant lots of people which meant lots of harm. We don't have the weather information about Arabia. So we don't know why. We don't know weather. We infer that probably Mohammed was at the right place and 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 Mohammed was essentially a prophet. He wasn't a child. He wasn't the son of God. 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. And there's so many of them and the thing is we know some of the people who created it like Mohammed or like Jesus or like Joseph Smith. Like there's some weird ones. And it's just it's a very strange pattern that comes up over and over and over again. I don't know how all of them can be correct. You know without any judgments on religion someone's got to be wrong. If you have all have completely different origin stories. But it's so fascinating to me in particular that people want to have this sort of a structure. It gives them comfort 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 five religions that have gone around the world. Mormon religion, seven-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian science. Why have the Mormons been so successful? Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings? Would do respect to the Mormons. The religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merits. But the Mormons were very well organized under Brickham Young and the social features of the Mormon religion. Their optimism, their emphasis on living the fulfilling life, on being happy. And they're expecting every Mormon. If you are a Mormon, you tie yourself. You don't fill out a 1040 income tax form. Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their income to the church and they calculate it themselves. So that's a big, big commitment. So the Mormon religion I would say has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic and because Brickham Young then was an outstanding leader. This episode is brought to you by Keytone IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years it's been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in and that's key tones. And energy molecule, our brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Keytones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now thanks to a six million dollar research contract with the military, Keytone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get Keytones online on Amazon or at target for five dollars 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 Keytone 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 Keytones. Go to Keytone.com/rogan for 30% off your subscription order or find Keytone 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, You know, it would make you really be interested in like, what's going on here? Like, seems like these guys haven't nailed other than, you know, the Nine Wives and all that other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the original idea. With dures, with dures back to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and a sent to heaven is stretching. It's a scientific understanding and I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major fact to propel in Christianity. Instead, there were many things to propel Christianity. This gets interesting. The questions 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 a high prestige. They were 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, 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, maybe a hundred people, Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire. On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism, emphasize writing, and so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, all of these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate, so Christianity had reasons for its success that would do respect to 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, I would not, Muslim might argue, I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs, I see as the reason behind Islam's spread. 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 Muslims, there's a large population of them that are very religious, and that population is very, I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people, because most people are very undecisive. They don't really know why they're here, they don't really know what life is for, existential angst, society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan, something that you can join where everyone is all in, and they're very locked in and disciplined, and that discipline, you know it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day. It takes a lot where everyone agrees, where I'm going to play music and pray five times a day, and we're a part of a team. And if you leave, the punishment is death, so if you decide that you don't want to be a part of this anymore, and you don't believe anymore, and you announce that, they can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like, you're all in, and you're all in for life, and we all support each other, and it's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people. 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, 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've got all these other people that are part of this strong belief system, there's a compelling force that makes you want to join. Something of that is also true of Mormonism, although in some different ways. Right, it's less militant, but it's very compelling that 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 two years to proselytizing, and if you don't have much money, you go 70 miles away, and if you do have money, you go to the Pacific Ocean, or to Europe, with a result that Europe, but these people take it seriously, and so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe and the Pacific. It's one other thing that I'd like to say here, and that is that people often ask me, Jared Gunn's germs and steel, neglects individual people, and it's about things that happen over the last 10,000 years, and Gunn's germs and steel, the different outcomes of societies and different continents, has nothing to do with any individual. Where it's here, you've written a book about leaders, about individuals, how do you reconcile Gunn's germs and steel with leaders? And my first response would be to say that Gunn's 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. 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 a politician or a business person who has had an effect 2,000 years later. Well, I think Gunn's germs and steel highlighted all the factors that have to be in place for these types of changes to take place. It's not mutually exclusive that leaders aren't important as well. It seems like they both worked 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. It's not either or, right? Yeah, so the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests, but behind these convincing devoted priests were European guns' germs and steel. European smallpox, European measles that killed far more Native Americans than did European guns and horses. So, religion to become worldwide, religion needs what one can call an economic and demographic engine, the moddy of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are of us 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 moddy 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 places, sometimes the chips all align perfectly. Right. Let's keep that microphone up to your face. My apologies. So we examine. of everything, everything of mining in the business world. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, out of 340 million Americans today, 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched. It's impossible to make an argument that nobody except Bill Gates and the business know how and the computer skills to fan 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 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 tried to do that. It's like what he did was really fastening because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea, like sell books. 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 just one click, like all that revolution. And it all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, tick tocky, 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. In the case of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to set up an online bookstore. 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? 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 a different time. 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 and stores, they're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of "Jaradarmist Profits" profits. Every copy is the same. So Jeff Bezos' written, explicit 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 whatever else he moved on to. He was strategic. Yeah, but 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. And after Jeff Bezos' Walmart has set up its own everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on a couple of brick and mortar store. Whereas Jeff Bezos' 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 it 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. Toil paper on the way arrives by 4 p.m. Let's go. You have to go to the store. And now you get groceries delivered too. And eventually it's going to be robots showing up at your house delivering these things. Which is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right? Yeah. This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic at a 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 were, and before and there were afterwards, other ways to develop and 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. He prioritized 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 hurt, no one invented it. 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 have stock in publicly traded companies where there's 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 as possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders. Interesting question. My guess is that if we didn't have, 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 accent. A stock market is as logical as the internet. Interesting. Well, it certainly makes for more businesses being able to be funded. That's for sure. It certainly makes more people invest in businesses and then more people who are just investors who don't do anything in business at all except buying trade stocks, which is a very odd position in society. That all encourages growth. 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 a fascinating engine for growth. Right. It raises the question are some things inevitable and some broad form, but some individual places a stamp on the board. For example, cell phones. There were cell phones before iPhones and Steve Jobs. There was, I think, the Korean Samsung. I had a Motorola star tag back in the day. I have a cell phone that my wife and son forced me to get it. 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. Nothing? No memes? I'll send you some memes. Whatever the name. I'm techno foe. So cell phones certainly would have emerged. But Steve Jobs put a distinctive face on cell phones and that he cared a lot about parents 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 brought back and when Steve Jobs brought back, one of the first things he did was to say there were too many products. We should have just four products and concentrate on them. Another thing that he did was to say the product should look good and be simple. The only couple of buttons on it, the contrast case is that the television set that we have at home has 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 us on 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 up Josh on that because there are so many buttons. Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has one, I think it's got four buttons. Last night I discovered an essential button. I didn't realize on the left side the most recent conversation that I had. with my iPhone. The sound quality was very poor. And I knew from re-having showed me before that somewhere on that iPhone there's a volume controlled device, but I didn't know what it was. But yesterday I saw that on the left side there were two things I tried pushing one and the volume went up. It was the upper one. How do you not know that? How did 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 when you press it for the volume and it goes up? Possibly but I'd recall. Certainly with my iPhone Marie did explain to me when she forced me to get the the iPhone. She showed me that of these four buttons to these lengthy things on the left of volume controls, but I didn't remember whether the lower one increased or the lower one decreased the volume. I didn't de-attach them because I was afraid that I would ruin the device and was only yesterday that I tried pushing the upper one and I got loud of 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. Do 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. So my device is always on orange and if I push it back on the rear 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 from from from childhood onwards. I've always been been technophobe. Why? I'm just incompetent at it. In my school, I think the second year in my middle school, we were all told to build these naked yourself radios and I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. My father then got my father was a physician inside. 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 electrical organ of electric heels. I could have worked on muscle, but I had no idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions, but when a lecture in my beginning physiology course said the gallbladder is a sac. The gallbladder is a sac coming out of a biola coming out of a liver. It's just a simple sac and it absorbs salt and water, but we don't know how. I think my gut, that's my, I can do that because to measure water transport by the gallbladder didn't require micro pipettes and technology, didn't require chambers. All it required was that I put a little plastic cannula into the mouth of gall and then I waited on a balance, but there was a balance in my lab. So I picked that organ because it was technologically so simple. 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 a gallbladder precisely because I could not build the ham radio. I can't, nor can I figure out my iPhone, nor can I do any other technology. That's fascinating. So it's like you're a verse to it. You don't like it. There's something about technology that it just, it almost repulses you. That's true. Why does it repel me? Because I'm incompetent at it and I feel, 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, and 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? Yep. And after I've written my hand, I then correct the draft by hand. And once I've cleaned up the draft, then I dictated into my iPhone, my three or four 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, for example, I'm yesterday. I flew in, flew into Houston on Sunday, and yesterday was a downtime for me. I had an event, I had an event in the evening. I spent yesterday revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of the one Dom and Peninsula of New Guinea. New Guinea, the island of New Guinea has ten isolated mountain ranges on the north coast, and I personally have explored ten of those, and for many of them, I've discovered the highest peak, and I've inventory their birds. So yesterday I was working on a paper on the birds of one Dom and Mountains. I used behold an eraser, an eraser. I used the eraser, and I used my 0.7 millimeter pencil. I cleaned up my handwritten draft, which I will give to my secretary. My secretary will then type it up, and then I will edit the draft again with my eraser and pencil. Erasing 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-- You will type it. Oh, yeah. Okay, so you will. You're not averse using a typewriter or a keyboard. No, when I was about eight years old, I had chickenpox, and I stayed home from-- I had to stay home from school for two weeks. During those two weeks, I learned to use a typewriter, but I got cured of chickenpox after I had done the first three rows, so I can touch type the bottom three rows, but I cannot touch type the top row. But I-- 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 three rows. That's right. That's hilarious. There's a lot of people that I know that write longhand, and they like to write like with a pen on paper, whether it's a book or anything songs, a lot of songwriters, like most songwriters that I know, they write on pieces of paper, or they improvise it and then write it down as they're improvising it, but it's so much easier and quicker to type. That's what drives me nuts. Like, I know that I remember things much better when I write them down physically, but I can type pretty quickly, and I don't have to look at the keys. I touch type. Some things I produce the first raft by typing, but what I find is that my style, my English pro 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 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 more my thinking. Whereas if I'm writing, it takes longer for me to write a word than to type it, and so I have to think a little more. When I'm writing, I'm doing more of the organization than when I'm typing, which can be more of a free flow. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I'd like to mention one other great advantage of Hi from. I don't know if you've discovered this, but at the bottom of my iPhone there's an icon which looks like a microphone, that icon, when I press that icon, it allows me to dictate in other languages. So the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I do my car respondents 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 car respondents German and Italian. Now, not a never by hand, I always do it on the iPhone. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. With AI now, they have, I think Google was the first to do this. I think Samsung phones definitely had this, where you could have someone speak to you and it would translate their words in real time. So you could have a real honest conversation with someone in another language. I guess they would have to put on headsets as well and you would be able to talk back and forth and it would absolutely change. And in the future, they're going to have it set up where it'll do it in your voice. 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 babble 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 Park in Palo Alto got the idea of, got the idea of automatic translation and so that 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 Park, 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 two things that were complicated that were not understood in the 1970s. One was we didn't understand enough about the structure of language. I'll give you an example of that. And the other thing we didn't understand was technology of simultaneous translation. The example of not understanding enough about the structure of language was that in the initial trial runs of Xerox Park, 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 translated 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 sighted, out of mind came back invisible idiot. But it took a couple of decades to overcome that. This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week there's some new wellness hack that people swear by and after a while you start thinking, why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armra Colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these 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, Armra is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to armra.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 Vorgas. The Greek word Vorgas 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, but that's an example of the difficulties of translating to one language. Let me give you another example. The last foreign language that I learned was Italian and I now read Italian every day, but in Italian, there are two words that mean I love. In English there's only one word that means I love. In Italian you can either say Ammo or Voliobene. Voliobene literally means I wish you well. Surprisingly to me, in Italian, physical love, sexual love is Voliobene with Ammo, which is literally the word love. Ammo is the root for the amateur. It's the root for love and other languages. That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love. So, Italian has these two words for love. Another example. Can I ask you one more question? Does Italian have a word for love for things that aren't sexual and not personal, not friendly, like a thing, like love race car driving? For say Desiderio, desire. Desire. So, they don't use the term love like we do. We have a bunch of different versions of love. Even ironic love. Oh, I love it when that happens. When something stupid happens, you break your shoelace. We have a lot of uses of that word love. That illustrates the difficulty of translating for one language to another. So, if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake, of saying her to her "ti amo", and I didn't say "ti voglio bene", I would be thrown out. I'd beat your ass. A German example is that the German language has two words meaning "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". Well, I'll give you an example from the only New Guinea language that I made much progress learning. The Foray language of Papua New Guinea. In the Foray language, the verb "to be" in English, we have just one verb "to be". In Foray, there were two verbs to be. There's "mindia" and "windia". Windia 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. The first sentence of Foray that I learned, my second day in the Foray area was, there was a frog and a creek, and I already learned the word for "water" which is "wani" in In Foray, and "dakwo" is word for that sort of frog. So I said to, I was practicing the Foray that I just learned. I said to a Foray man, "dakwo" "wundia" and he shook his head severely. "wundia" "mindia" because I had used the inanimate word "to be" to refer to this frog when I should have used the "animate" word to be. English does not make that to us. Wow. The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference. That is such a giant difference. So this is a giant difference in what it means. And, unfortunately, 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. On my friend Rick Strossman, he's a researcher of a very fascinating guy. He learned ancient Hebrew over the course of six years. 16 years, you self-taught himself, ancient Hebrew, so that he could read the Bible in its original form, and he's like, I highly recommend that 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 and speak it. 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. 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 the first word in the Iliad is wrath, meaning the second word is Iida, sing, the third word is goddess, so literally it's wrath, sing goddess, and then wrath of Achilles son of Helius. 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 reflect the context and what they were saying. Instead of sticking to the original translations of these books like the Iliad or any old book that's written in different languages, if there could be a way where it could analyze what the correct way of phrasing it in the English language would be, with whatever extra words we would have to use or whatever different ways you would have 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, to be able to read it in Greek. And the weirder stuff is with ancient Hebrew, the numbers, that letters also double as numbers and words have numeric value. That's kind of wild. My understanding is that with Hebrew, at least originally, the so-called Semitic, Afro-Aziatic languages, the vowels were not essential, a word root was specified just by the consonant, and so the early texts of the Bible and of safe Phoenician had just the consonants, not the vowels, the vowels, it 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 a Afro-Aziatic 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 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 and their words is almost impossible. An example was, so my books get translated into lots of languages, the guns, the Siegel have been translated into 45 languages, one thing that I can see. I see how, because I've got all of you to, I see how thick of 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 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, yes, and no. German grammar is distinctive, the German vocabulary is distinctive. But 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 eight years of his life living with the Pitaha people in the Amazon jungle and learning their language. Is this Daniel Everett? Yes. Yeah. 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 how to say things with them. So in New Guinea, New Guinea is the most language rich part of the world. There are a thousand languages, not dialect, but a thousand languages in New Guinea. And most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, especially Lutheran missionaries, who are highly trained linguists, who are sent out there. Their purpose is to translate the Bible into a language. But 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 it's figure out the sounds. One example of that is that in 1990, I was in the lace planes of Indonesian New Guinea books to a tribe called the Thou-E-E-O, being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language. The Thou-E-E-O language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese has either five tones, mainland and Mandarin and six tones, Cantonese or vice versa. This woman linguist, she had been living for 15 years with the Thou-E-E-O. She had already identified 12 tones. She thought they might be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't, wasn't sure of that. But among the Thou-E-O, you have to get the tone right. The syllables are mostly, they're mono-syllable, like Bay. But Bay, you can pronounce in 12 different, Bay, Bay, Bay, Bay, Bay. And one of those Bay's 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 a linguist or if a young child learning Thou-E-E-O says something with word Bay and gets the tone wrong, and you want to say beloved mother-in-law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato, and you drop the Bay and said rise in the Bay, what comes out is vile snake. Let me give you this feces, feces, too eat. Oh my god. But oh my god. A consequence of that is this linguist noticed that when little kids are going around Thou-E-Village with their mother, there's not a back-and-forth conversation, and said 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 a Thou-E-O, if you get the pronunciation slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother-in-law into feces dropping snake. How did those two get so close? That seems to be 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, did people with bad hearing not be able to catch which we're using. saying as you're walking out the door, 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 Kuneiform, the wedge shape symbols. It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end, and so the writing was done. Kuneiform writing was done with a stylus. Kuneiform 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 Kuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey. Which is the oldest and most distinct Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in Kuneiform. So Kuneiform 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 foray the New Guinea language that I work with. The Phoenician's, the first Greek writing was linear B of Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system, and then the Greeks lost writing for a couple of centuries, and then they lost it totally. They became illiterate. So, the whole culture, 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 alphabetical writing, that it was not syllabic, but it was alphabetical alphabetical, and the Greeks added vowels, the Phoenicians, because of the Afro-Asianic language, did not have symbols for vowels in Greek. In Phoenician, if you drop the vowels, you can still understand. In Greek, you have to specify the vowels, otherwise it's not compressible. So the first, what we call alphabet, was the Greek alphabet of ADA-100, 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 we've got today. So the first writing system, then, was with the Kuneiform, and then there were syllabic writing systems, and then came alphabets. Japanese is the world's most complicated writing system because it's really four writing systems. Japanese has two syllabaries. For example, my name, Diamond, the Japanese writing into Diamond No Do, because Japanese doesn't put two consonants together. So my name comes out Diamond No Do, and even these two writing systems. Japanese also has a third writing system, which is basically Chinese derived, the country, and then a fourth 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. Why don't you speak about the Korean language? 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. So Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world. It was this wonderful writing system. One of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols in Genghis Khan is the book, the lost history of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish, because it wasn't written, it was written fanatically like the Mongolian language, but in Chinese, is that what it was? Is that how they did it? One of my classmates at Harvard, Joe Fletcher, was the person who rediscovered that Mongol book and figured out how to read it. That wasn't until their early 1960s. That's insane. But there are, of course, their 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. But all Etruscan books got burnt and lost. The longest Etruscan text that we've got. There was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia, and this linen shroud was used to wrap something, 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. They were on Rosetta's stones for Etruscan. The closer that we come to it is the dyes, dices, these six-sided dices have been found in Etruscan areas. On the dices, there are six symbols. So evidently, the six symbols must mean one, two, three, four, five, six. People have figured out one or two of those, but they haven't figured out the others. So we know the Etruscan symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six, but we don't know which one of them is six and which one is three and which one of them is four. Have you ever seen the Easter Ireland language that they can't translate? I'm sure you have. That's fascinating. That's a beautiful one too, right? It's really interesting the way they write. Right. It's quite mysterious. There are only a few samples of Easter writing, Easter Ireland writing, no. They're all in wood. The first European visitor. There it is right there. Yes, all right. The first European visitor to Easter Ireland of whom we have a record was the Dutch Rogovine in I think 1722 and he did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Ireland 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 Ireland 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 it was a late invention inspired by the Spaniard, 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 there was a Cherokee Indian called Sequoia who had a store and he noticed that when Europeans came into his store they had piece of they were scribble things on paper. They would talk to each other and they 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 system. He spent about 10 years doing it and he finally ended up with a syllabary where the symbols are for syllables, not letters. The Cherokee syllabary has 80 signs for 80 different syllables. And Sequoia convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having two Cherokee. 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 is 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. It was at the field, that's it. So Sequoia 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 have 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. - Well, we know, if you've seen the news discovery on a Gobekli Tepe, where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing that predates Cunia form by five or six thousand years. - No, I've not seen that. - It's really recent. It's over the last couple of weeks. - Okay. It is the. - Jamie, I'll pull it up. It's a very weird way of writing. Did Daniel Everett discuss this with us? - Is there a thing I have on the screen? - Yes. I brought this up, kind of, founded on that podcast I was watching with Lex. - Any in Irving, is his name? - It is the case with Cunia form, although we think of Cunia form as having a risen around 3500 BC. - Irving Finkel, that's it. - So this is it? Did Irving Finkel find ancient writing at Gobekli Tepe? - We know that Cunia form, 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 of them, 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. And there are at least three writing systems that we assure our independent Cunia form 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, 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 Amanda burned to all of them except for, but the Maya writing arose independently of Cunia form 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 Cunia form or anything else in the fertile crescent at the time. So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently the fertile crescent, which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing, namely Cunia form in the fertile crescent, Mexican writing, and then Chinese writing. And then possibly East, Ryland writing. The thing you were talking about with Greece is so fascinating that a war, the Trojan War can be so catastrophic that the entire culture becomes illiterate for hundreds of years. It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing. It was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of the Bronze Age. So Bronze Age cultures, this was just as Ian was emerging. Bronze was the main metal used in the Middle East in Turkey. Bronze Age cultures included Troy, Homer's Troy. Crete-- so the island of Crete had Linear B, which was the earliest-- the syllabic O Greek writing system. But Linear B was derived from another writing system called Linear A, which we can't read yet. We don't have enough text. It's suspected that Linear A recorded the manoeun language of manoeun Crete, whatever that language is. We don't know the language. That 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 Anatolia, Turkey, all of that Bronze Age civilization collapsed roughly around the time of the Trojan War. So the Trojan War may have had something to do with collapse of Troy itself. But the Trojan War certainly didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of Linear B writing from all of Crete and from all of Greece. There were this Greek pottery that turned up in the fertile crescent, making one suspect that there was a mass invasion. And the mass invasion destroyed the Bronze Age civilization of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey and the Hittite Empire. But then just to go back to Troy, the fall of Troy was the fall of Troy, and that's all. But there was a much broader collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the whole Eastern Mediterranean. And we don't know why. Why? We don't know whether it was an invasion. Riding, Egyptian riding at the time, talks of sea peoples. People 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 the tension 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-- OK. 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 3,000, 2,000 BC. And they had writing. We have their seals, their rings that we use to stamp with wax. But we don't have any long text, the longest text on one of these rings is only three or four symbols. There are several hundred different symbols. We can't read it. Harappan riding disappeared. And then writing re-emerged 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 emerged. 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 Kuneiform emerged roughly, say, 3,400 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3,000 BC. Hieroglyphs have absolutely nothing to do with Kuneiform. We can read Kuneiform. We can read hieroglyphs. But it's suspicious that hieroglyphs emerged only a few centuries after Kuneiform. This is an example of what's called idea diffusion. It's not that the writing system itself is not the Kuneiform writing spread to Egypt, but the idea of writing spread. Similarly with Sequoia, this Cherokee Indian, it's not that Sequoia copied English writing. It's that he got the idea of writing, and then he invented the writing system itself. So we suspect that hieroglyphs were idea diffusion, that Egyptians got the idea of writing from the fertile crescent, and then they developed their own writing system. And it makes sense, if you think about how complex and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are. And then you look at how complex and beautifully constructed ancient Egyptian society was. I mean, they were operating on a completely different creative and engineering level than anyone else in the world. and of course their writing is going to be pretty wild too. It kind of makes sense. Right. It's a clear example of a writing system being invented not gradually involving but bang the earliest hieroglyphics off full hieroglyphics. Very strange. Right. There's another example Korean writing. Okay. So Korean writing, the Korean writing had goal which groups letters into syllables. This is not a writing system that gradually evolved. Instead a king of Korea called King Se Jong around roughly the year 1430 until then Koreans wrote with Chinese Chinese based writing system and King Se Jong had a has a famous proclamation which Koreans learn by memory. King Se Jong's proclamation says it grieves me that that our people write the Korean language with Chinese like writing when the sands of and the words of the Chinese language are not similar to the Korean writing. Therefore our King Se Jong have devised a new writing system which I wish all of my subjects to learn my my writing system is matched to the Korean language and that that was handglow of King Se Jong invented handglow himself at a bang there was no precedent. That's an excellent example of how one individual one leader can radically transform a society. That's right. And it's it's also an example of a leader I'm coming up with an invention that has lasted already for 600 years. A leader not doing something of them rule that gets replaced but a leader devising a writing system that has carried on. Yeah. There's an interesting thing with the Mormons when you're talking about how they figured out a way to get people very invested in being a Mormon in one of the ways is by being a missionary that you have to be a missionary. One of the things societies have figured out is to get people to be deeply nationalistic. You almost have to have them serve it like a 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 dependent upon a draft? Finland so Finland has a strong national identity. Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918. So there was no finished draft at the time of Finnish independence. Instead the 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 but I mentioned it as a counter. You're probably 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 dependent heavily on a national school system but also on a national army. So I have a Italian conversation once a week with my Italian teacher. She explained to me that the national identity Italians had lots of dialects, like hundred dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea we would say that there are different languages. Even today there are different dialects in Italy that different Italians cannot understand in contrast to her. Yeah my grandparents had speaking dialects. Right. And if you just spoke classic Italian that you learn 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 were talking and my sister and I were bored so we wandered off into the town and we wandered off only about two blocks but we made several turns and we couldn't figure out how to get back to the house of this family, the grandson of Hills. So we asked a man on the street in American English. How do we get back to the house of Anthem and he said something which he thought was that 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 I can't reproduce any of it or I can tell you it was completely incomprehensible but it was a form of English, presumably because there's really when we got back to the house and we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying then the grandfather mill said yeah well that's the local dialect 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 I've been a buyer and I have a dick out. I'm a Bavarian and I have a thick skin. They would say he'd be a boy or he'd be hot but dick out. So when I was traveling around with a friend of mine from Northern Germany, from the Rhineland where they speak what is closest to Hockdorch 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 Joseph from the Rhineland, what did he say? He couldn't 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 books written in Sicilian. Modern literary and government Italian is close to the dialect of Florence but there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects which persisted until after World War II and were mutually incomprehensible but those dialects now have been fading because of universal education plus the draft. Wow. When did you start learning Italian? I started learning Italian. It was April 1999 and 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 heard 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 it was Dovet. Dovet, Dovet, Los Patale and so when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in Italy in May 1999 I thought, Dovet, that's simple. I can learn that. Why don't I learn learn enough Italian that I can ask where the bathroom is and I can order meals and restaurants. So I studied Italian grammar for six weeks and we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11 and my father died that morning so we abored the Italian trip but after the Italian trip I've spent six weeks learning much of the grammar. Let's put another six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar so I put another six weeks. I've learned the rest of the grammar and having learned the grammar. I've learned the grammar. Let's now read some Italian so I began reading Italian and then after eight months so I've been reading Italian. Why don't I speak it? UCLA has an Italian department so I put up a notice in the Italian department saying I would like to hire Italian graduate students to come speak Italian to me and someone and Italian woman answer the ad. She came to my office and here I have been dealing with Italian for eight months. And here is 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 barrel I can think of is having heard of sex, and then you have the first sexual experience, so I then ranged for Italian speakers to come every week to talk Italian with me, and then since then, the two 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 fact, did marital therapy in Italian for two years. I talked through my Italian teachers. I said that the horrible relationship they that parents had and the boyfriends' parents had didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage. They can make a relationship on their own, so both of them are married. They're still married, and it's now 27 years later. I still, every week, I talked to Francesca for two hours, every two weeks. Francesca is the person with whom I talk the most, and I have the widest range of conversation of anyone in the world except for my wife, and my Australian companion on my New Guinea expedition, because in a kind of a way, we talk about everything. Wow. How many languages do you know? In my life, I've dealt with 13 languages. Three of them I only read and never spoke Greek, Latin, and Dutch. I never spoke, I just read them. The languages that I can give lectures in now are English, Italian, German, and New Guinea-Talk. I used to be fluent in Spanish and Russian, but my Russian got driven out by Indonesian when I started working in Indonesia. Finish I learned enough to hitchhike, and then the 4-A language. I can speak rudimentary 4-A 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 straight New Guinea-Talk vision and English, and mostly I can keep straight Italian and German, because they're so different from each other. They're different. 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. I would come to the Russian word, Russian and Indonesian. They're completely different from each other, but I felt that it's as if I have four channels for languages. I can keep straight English, Italian, German, and a fourth language, but a fifth language, if I attempt to bring back a fifth language, I'll confuse that line. Indonesian and Russian, although they're totally different, once I started an Indonesian 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 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, and so when Anastasia comes over for dinner once or twice a week, I tried out some elementary phrases of Russian. I grew into Russian. Prakrasnia, Prakrasnia, Grestanka, beautiful citizens. I would like to bring back more of my Russian, but I'm afraid that if I brought back my Russian, my drive out my German or something, I don't know whether I'll do it. You only have a certain amount of hard drive space. Yeah. I 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 there's just no room in there anymore. And I could imagine like keeping, I want to talk about pigeon. I want to talk about pigeon talk. New Guinea pigeon talk. Is that a written language? Yeah, it is now written. It's very, very interesting, and it's of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language. So, New Guinea talk pigeon, it sounds like baby talk. New Guinea talk, New Guinea, you grasp along you and tap along, okay, you go finish, keep along you or write, I belong to you but I'm, okay, so that's a sample of a pigeon. What did you say? I said the hair on your head is somewhat sparse and you were brown eyes. Grasp along you, we lick like that. So, here's how New Guinea talk pigeon arose and it's a model for how similar pigeon languages have arisen all around the world, dozens or hundreds of times. When German colonial administrators came to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand different languages, but the Germans had to communicate with them and the Germans hired or kidnapped, New Guinea's belonging to many different language groups, the Germans had to communicate with the workers and the workers had to communicate with each other. So, it's not that anybody invented something, the Germans began speaking a script down, easy German, and the New Guinea's began picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked up words from other New Guinea languages. This first language was called a pigeon 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 who had another, had their own main language and were using the pigeon language just to discuss the coconut plantation. Where pigeon became inadequate was once you get the children of pigeon speaking parents and the children from pigeon speaking parents of different native languages. Children are starting to communicate with each other, this script down language that's enough to talk about coconuts, but it's not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion. The children themselves within a decade modified spontaneously, not consciously, modified pigeon to become a full language with a grammar and tenses and future tense and prepositions. Over how long? A decade. A decade. The best information we have about how these pigeon languages, these Creole languages, which are the more complex ones with prepositions, have developed all around the world, are best information about the development of Creole language comes from Hawaii. Hawaii plantations, plantation workers were brought in from Japan and China and various other places. So again, there's a throne together on a plantation. They have to communicate with English speaking plantation owners and they spontaneously develop this really stripped down so-called pigeon language that doesn't have prepositions and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you can do with the sugar cane. But the children of these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal wife, the pigeon language is not adequate and the children spontaneously made the pigeon 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 for 1890 to 1900. Every now and then the newspapers would quote something funny that the Hawaiian set 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 Creole got in 1894. So New Guinea talk pigeon, which is actually what's called the Creole language is a full complex language with prepositions. You can say anything, it's the government language. New Guinea and some, New Guinea and government leaders, they are more fluent usually in Creole than they are in English. So in Parliament in Papua New Guinea, the language appallement is easy. either English or talk-pission and then there's one of the Kuyo language. When I started out in New Guinea, the first thing that I learned was talk-pission because I could pick it up very quickly and not a panel of some block, block them along you. Did you have any preparation in the language before you went there? Did you try to pick it up as you were there? I picked it up as I was there. Then was there anything written about the language before you got there? Was it possible to study it? 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 Pigeon. I learned New Guinea Pigeon initially, which is a Kuyo language with prepassage, I learned it by talking with New Guineaans. And then eventually, I acquired one or two of these Pigeon grammars and a Pigeon dictionary and was able to make my Pigeon more complex. Just as an example, thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science. But to demonstrate that you can say anything in talk-pission, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in talk-pition. You got one fellow man, man, Saudi, my name, Ansaga, Ansaga, you got this fellow, he talked along, had to must, this fellow had to must, and he termed dynamics, now this fellow, Ansaga, you got strong fellow, it means welcome. Rule number two, belong to, belong to, belong to, belong to, belong to, I mean second law of thermodynamics. So what did you just say? What I said, what I said is that a sweet call laws Ansaga developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is thermodynamics is about heat and Ansaga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions, and so I explain, dispelling Ansaga, he came up, he mocked him, rule number two long, long, savvy, long heat, savvy, long heat, literally knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics. Rule number two, long, savvy, long heat, Ansaga, he got this fellow, strong fellow, Tintin, Ansaga, he's got, he's smart man. Have you talked to someone in this pigeon, talk pigeon, were they, were you could explain something like that, and they could relate to you, like they understand what you're talking about? With, with New Guinea's, so in my work in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use pigeon, in Papua New Guinea they do use pigeon, and with New Guinea's, they and I can discuss anything in pigeon, I could, I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics, and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of, taste of human, human red meat and human, human, human fat. You can say anything to a pigeon. 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, they say that the human, human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird, like a mouse, we were as human fat, they say is like the, like the, the, the fat of pigs. I, I was never offered, and I never, I wouldn't have accepted because the place in New Guinea where I began my work was the foray area, the foray where the people who had Kuru, which is basically mad cow disease, they were the people who were dying of, of, of Kuru, and they were the people that I worked with for the first eight years. And who were they eating? Oh, you know, they, they were, they were, they, as what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism, kind of, exocannibalism is meeting, is eating your dead enemies who you kill and war. Endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives when the Australian government came in. It was easy for, they for bad cannibalism and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the, the tribe that was being eaten, complained to the government and, and the government told the people who were eating the other people, you can't do that anymore, but endocannibalism is, in New Guinea, traditionally, you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother, as you were, I would just throw away, throw away the body of our dead mother, they were precise rules about who gets to eat, eat what, but, but in general, the, the relatives eat, eat the body and their rules about what part of the body we eat, in 1965, I had working my camp with me, a New Guinea who did not speak pigeon and we were in a remote camp on a mountain. One, we were getting no visitors cause it was, it was remote and one day into camp came a man sat down with, with a sky who didn't speak talk pigeon, talk with him and then 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, he made down payments when a girl was young, so there was a young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter and, 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, 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 that you all, I would throw on 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 just died. This guy walked into camp, had brought the news to my worker that your prospective son-in-law has died and the funeral feast is going to take place three years, three 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 they, the Peter Ha 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 worker quit in order to, it's a warm heart area, about 3,000 feet. The body, a dead body, is put, is, was, it's, it's, it's, the government is obliged to put it down. The body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats in it and underneath the platform is a bucket. So I'm sorry you asked me, the body putrifies and the flesh turns to liquid, the liquid then rips through the slats and the platform down into the bucket. You then dip your sweet potato in, in, in the bucket of this, this putrid fluid and then you, you eat this, the sweet potato, that's, that's what I'm told. Yeah, I, I was not offered, I would not accept it if off, but I was told, told by, by the missionary in the area and by Nuginians themselves, that's what they do with that. 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, right, who gets eat with body. What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and you decided to get married and you married someone of the tribe and then that person died, would you have had to eat them? I do not know, I never put it to the test. But according to their rules, would you have, um, probably, um, what would you do? Probably, yes, husband's, husband's and wife's, I expected to eat the other person. Yeah. I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I were, the, the foray tribe, they were the people who had Kuru, which had basically mad cow disease, and the commonest cause of death among the foray when I was there was Kuru, mad cow disease, and brain tissue, right? That's right. Eating the uncooked brain. Well, even if you cook it, it's, it's a pre-on disease, correct? It's a pre-on disease. Pre-on survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying. a couple hundred to eight, not thousand, but they certainly survive this far of a couple hundred degrees. I thought it was a lot more than that. I thought there was one of the issues with mad count disease that no matter how, if you had beef that was infected with these pre-ons no matter how hot you make it, it doesn't cook it off. My understanding with me, was it, let's put it into perplexity. I would like to know like at what temperature do pre-ons get destroyed because I think it's extraordinarily high. Maybe there's different pre-ons 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 for meeting brain tissue of cows and then those pre-ons are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue. That is true. That is true. That is true, and in fact, it's not a real good concise answer. Pre-ons can survive temperatures that kills most microbes, boiling, ordinary cooking and standard steam sterilization and not reliably sufficient. Resistance also varies by pre-on strain, what we were talking about, yeah. And whether the materials wet, dry, or embedded, boiling, 212 degrees, not dependable, 1,000 degrees Celsius, yo, what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy pre-on infectively. This is the level associated with effective incineration. Yeah, you've got to get it just looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit to agree 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 it? Cooking. And cooking does not reliably destroy pre-ons. What a crazy disease, a disease you only get from eating each other, it's almost like nature doesn't want you to eat each other. The reconstructed history of the, why on earth did the foray have this, basically mad cow disease has the commonest cause of death? In humans there's a disease called Croixville-Jacob, which is a spontaneous mutation and usually spontaneous mutation it dies out because nowadays we need each other, but what's thought to have happened in the foray area, Croixville-Jacob arises really as a spontaneous mutation. The guess is that someone in the foray area around 1910, developed Croixville-Jacob and died, but the foray were practicing endocannibalism of the women would cut up the, the brain, cut up the skull and the babies with the women would be playing there with a 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 and it's all thought to have arisen with one foray person who had Croixville-Jacob and died of it in around 1910, who was then eaten by others who were in turn eaten still by others so that Croixville-Jacob then exploded among the foray. What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this disease does not occur with the pita, that they do have endocannibalism and he thinks they still practice it, he thinks they secretly still practice it, they just don't, they kind of hide it, they don't have that disease. What makes sense because Croixville-Jacob is rare, even among cannibals, among everybody, Croixville-Jacob, it's a rare mutation like one in 10,000, one in 100,000. It's pure chance that one Croixville-Jacob mutation arose in the foray and not in any other tribe in New Guinea. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Croixville-Jacob, whatever the name is, didn't have Croixville, didn't have Kuru because nobody in the world, no human population in the world had Kuru except for the foray as a result of that accident of one person with Croixville-Jacob evidently getting eaten around 1910. It'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 Scrapey which is basically, it's a prime disease and it was Scrapey that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the foray area that, so when I arrived in the foray in 1964, Kuru was completely mysterious, it affected only the foray. If a foray went down to Port Morseby, the foray might still develop Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the foray environment, foreigners who came into the foray, I didn't develop Kuru. Other Nuginians who came into the foray area didn't develop Kuru. The only people who develop Kuru were the foray, but the symptoms of foray of Kuru were, of course, the disease had now gone, were similar to the symptoms of Scrapey and so that gave the idea that Kuru might be an infectious disease, so an infectious disease expert managed to get the foray to provide him with the brain of a foray man who had died of Kuru and the doctor managed to get dry eyes shipped into the foray area in order to freeze the Kuru, you got it shipped back to the National Institute of Health. How long does that take? A couple of days, but it was frozen in dry eyes. And he then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the, the animal most likely to be able to be infected with human Kuru would be a chimpanzee. It took three years, I saw that chimpanzee in a cage, after three years, finally the chimpanzee had been completely healthy. After three years, the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of Kuru and died of Kuru 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 the Australians imposed control and banned funeral feast of the last, last four 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, a long latency, the person, the next 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 pit of how we're doing was lying about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts? Very unlikely because the forer a year, by the time I got there in 1964, there were missionaries. You watched them do this thing where they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified, petrified, putrified? No, no, I haven't. I have not. I was told about it. Well, by the missionary in the area who did 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 off of the opportunity. You were allowed. Yeah. Right. And you don't want to push because one of the Rockefeller's sons that supposedly was consumed by people, a new getting hit, 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 they ate him. It's well known what happened, so this was Michael Rockefeller, who collected art in the bottom valley. And then he wanted to come down to the, did come down to the south coast with his great art produced in the Asmod area. He was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer and there was a tidal bore that capsized the boat. The boat was swept out to sea. And so what did what did you do what does Michael Rockfellow do the Dutch patrol officer do the Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim He had no choice the chances being picked up and spotted seem vanishingly low because there wasn't much very little airplane traffic But the Dutch patrol had no choice. He stayed stayed on on the boat and in fact So Michael Rockfellow was a good swimmer He figured that the chances being picked up were so low that he swam for sure A plane did spot the overturn boat and picked up the Dutch patrol officer Michael Rockfellow swam for sure and when he got close to sure he had misfortune that As he approached shore there came a canoe of natives who About five years previously a Dutch patrol officer had come to that village To punish the natives for killing natives of some other village and the Dutch patrol officer killed four natives from the village So when the natives in that villa saw Michael Rockfellow as far as The native concern Michael Rockfellow belongs to the same to the same plan. Yeah, he's white So it's princess and they killed him It was not just It was not to learn what had happened until some year some years later because the natives who Didn't admit it. They knew that they would be punished and Did they admit that they consumed him? I do not I do not know I think they did that. I'm not sure they but they certainly killed him What is it like hanging around with a group of people were part of their culture is eating people? Was it feel like Oh, okay, so The guy who left my camp To eat his that's he was a nice guy He was hard worker. He knew he knew his birds. Yes, he had this this habit which I didn't have but that's his business Well, I get that perspective and you are there in their Their culture in their world and they've been living like that for a long time. Yeah, I do work I do we have things that that discuss them So they do we have things that discuss me. Well, there's certain tribes in Papua New Guinea that also have a very disturbing practice with young boys Where they you know that I know very yeah that was that was the practice of the foray and many other tribes with whom I worked it was It was not a rare practice the the the way of life there was that that each woman Each wife had her own heart and the men lived in communal a communal man's house the young kids Live with a mother until the boy reached the age and until a boy reached the age of six and when the boy reached the age of six He then moved into the men's house where 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 bought for him a Girl from the name of the 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 if you touch a woman You it'll be be very dirty. I saw a film film made by a medical photographer of two of these small boys the night before they were going to be married to teenage girls and the older men were explaining to these 13-year-old boys how you have sex with a woman the the two I'm boys They were just Paul disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman. Wow But there's then this this this sudden transition from The homosexual adult male young male society to Having sexual women 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 the that another man seamen is essential to them becoming strong You think that's strange, but you you wait till you hear what Nuginians have to say about 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 I when I hear about something like that I'm always fascinated by like how did that ever get started? And how did that get universally accepted in a tribe? my understanding is Sorry my understanding around the world Such relations are not they're not rare they're not they're not the rule But for example in Central America There were Native American tribes in Central America where we there were Class of young men who acted as sex partners this the Spanish when they came into this area We're utterly disgusted by this practice and so the Spanish this Spanish had War dogs these were dogs that were trained to rip people apart and so so the Spanish being disgusted by this practice would would bring war dogs into and closure with these Professional sex partners and the war dogs within rip them apart. Oh God Well, I don't know if that's how you should handle it, but 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 but declined it I went into an isolated mountain range with with three New Guinea's we were dropped off by by helicopter and I had brought in Rice and tinfish and food and then but the New Guinea's had brought in some Sego grubs of these are the the larvae of a big beetle which The beetle injects its eggs into the Sego palm and then the larva grows into a large object which looks like a shrimp And they're they're fatty and they're high in protein. So the New Guinea's Born in a couple of these Sego grubs and they ordered me a Sego grub. Um, you didn't want to try it? Part of me was curious curious, but it just looked so disgusting to see this I decline the Sego, Sego in retrospect. Well that kind of makes sense to me out of necessity because it's high in protein And it's just food and event. Oh, they cook it. So there you go. If you cook it, it even makes even more sense As an example of something that we we love but new appalls New Guinea's A couple New Guinea's who lived in the highlands. I brought down to the coast when we when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range They had never been on in the coast They had never encountered ice cream or anything cold because of course They had hot food from cooking, but they had no way of making cold and so I First of all, we stayed in the motel and and for the first time in their life They got to sleep in beds when I asked them the next morning. I have like sleeping in the bed One of them said no good. He had no experience of sleeping but he rolled out of the bed at night So he didn't like sleeping in the bed, but then I offered them ice cream and and and one of them rejected the ice he said it's it's cold. It hurts my mouth. Well, you and I are accustomed to eating ice cream Customs eating cold food, but New Guinea has never had experience of anything cold Well, that makes sense that it'd be odd because it's an odd sensation, but I would feel like once they tasted it They'd be like oh, I get it They didn't get it Would I if I had eaten that say go grub would I have gotten it um? I bet you would have I bet it didn't taste like much at all Probably would my guess is it it tasted like 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 they're eating them raw. No, they they cook them probably tasted fun 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? Wow. What have I eaten? I've eaten rattlesnake. What else have I eaten that's strange? When I was in Mexico, I stayed in this resort in Puerto Vallarta and they had these bowls of like, it looked like fried crickets. That's right. So in my book, I have a I have a chapter on Sirretzi Kama who is the first president of the African nation of Botswana. Sirretzi Kama was the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in Botswana but he also was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at the time of independence and so he was sent to 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 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 but I have had friends who've eaten dried grasshoppers and they said they were okay. I could not bring them. 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 a fear factor. It 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 discuss the transformation of Botswana under disguise 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 two house legislature based on the British model but the upper house was a house of chiefs and the house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of the chiefs. It was a bad idea for Botswana democracy but Serretti Kama as the chief of the most powerful tribe. He was the only person in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief and the other thing was that Botswana's financial stability has come from diamonds. The diamonds were discovered after independence. They had been discovered before independence, the British and the beers would have made a deal with the British and the beers but in fact the diamonds were discovered like six months after independence and they were discovered on the land of Serretti Kama 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 the diamonds were on the land of Serretti Kama's tribe and Serretti Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana and not just his tribe. Serretti Kama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana wherever they are are the property of the Botswana nation not of the individual tribe. So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds and he was the only person who could have undone the power of the chiefs plus an addition because he was equally comfortable in European society and in Africans 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 a oil and gas and of course 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 coal all belong to the tribe on whose land they found but not in Botswana and the result is that Botswana is the I believe they have the second richest country in Africa. The richest country in Africa is the equatorial guinea and it's very rich because it's got oil and the average per capita income in equatorial guinea is something like ten or twenty thousand dollars. That's because the president has an annual income of like five hundred billion dollars and everybody else has an annual income like a hundred dollars and you average it 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 three 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 long-term basis. Wow and that's an excellent example of a great leader. Yeah. Yeah. Well listen Jared I just want to thank you for all your work over the years collapse you know 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 home I was told and told in advance that I would enjoy a lot talking with you provided that I was not identified with something that you disprove of but that otherwise I should look forward to pleasurable experience and in fact my wife got Joshua to center three snippets of view and and yes I anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time. It was fantastic and good luck with learning the iPhone further and great and great luck with your book as well I look forward to finishing it thank you so much.