#2549 - Jared Diamond

The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Very nice meeting you.

It's a pleasure. Great pleasure. Thank you. I really enjoyed Duns, Germs and Steel and I just got into this yesterday and today I started reading a 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. I'm at home in my wife's study on my wife's tail 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 in the Pacific theater and that there was always the question why did it happen and if it hadn't been for Hitler, there still had 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?

Because 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 that as well as good people make a difference. Also, my wife is posed for last of my family in Europe, disappeared in the whole cause. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz. She survived, but all of a sudden 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 a chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department who, when a pump, water pump that I had been operating, blew overnight and it flooded my lab room, but it also flooded the lab room baloney. 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, 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 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. 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's always these battles for lack of better terms, good and evil.

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

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 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 evil ways, he encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet did in Chile.

His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile's a small country. And Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of population. But the torches that he implied. The two, they were far worse than anything that 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 Dime doesn't get simple answers.

But they're about, I can boil it down to four or five things. A leader has to be at the right time and place. Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place and they seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of popular electronics with the Intel 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. Then Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France. He recognized that it was the right time and place.

Here 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 a particularly good year. So leaders, some leaders choose the time and place to go all dead. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it.

And some leaders, such as Mark Zu and Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. And yet there were other people who tried by the Battle of the Han and Timor, the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well, within the last 10 years, students of tree rings have figured out that on the Mongolian step, the wettest time in the last 2000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth.

If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan. We haven't even born at the right time and place because with all that rain that meant hey, defeat sheep and goats to feed mongrel babies and also meant hey to feed mongrel 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 in the last decade. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace.

If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right, JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website like an AI enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links.

Head to squarespace.com slash Rogan for a free trial and when you are ready to launch, use the offer code Rogan to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's interesting but you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful because he was obviously a brilliant strategist and he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions. So he accepted all religions and it was one of his strengths is that he didn't care. I'll take you all in.

Everybody gets to come in here and the way he would attack these cities is 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? Absolutely.

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. As of other time and place we wouldn't know anything about him so you are correct.

At a given time and place that may be the occasion for someone to emerge but who emerges depends upon the personal qualities, for example, to take religion. The first century AD of the Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later because the Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia. So Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then but the Roman Empire was 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.

He knew his followers and any idea that 15 centuries later the religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then was spread around the world. It was the right time and place but there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who very quickly got killed by the Romans. The six candidates Christ was most successful but Christ also to found a religion.

You have to be charismatic number one. You have to be an outstanding organizer. Christ died too early. It was Saint Paul who was the outstanding organizer and often religions also need a great general.

In some cases the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer from the Republic of Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic. He was a great organizer, he was a great general. The Māori of the Sudan who established this empire in East Africa. Fantastic general and organized and incredibly charismatic but the Māori 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 and where Christianity did.

The Paul thing is very interesting because the more I read about the Bible and the construction of it, the more it just gives you pause. Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity because he never met Jesus. Jesus never spoke to him. Jesus never wrote anything down.

When Paul has this vision on the road to Damascus and he has this whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus. We're taking the entire religion that's based on this guy saying I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them when no one wrote it down and I never met him. So it's really Paul. Yes and it was two people.

It was Jesus and it was Paul. Yes, Paul was a 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 that Jesus never wrote anything down.

So when Paul's talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history. Which is really strange. An oral history that it takes 20 years before this guy says this is what Jesus said and then we all go on that. Right.

What's thought to be the first of the 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 he wrote things down. It would make things more certain.

In the case of Mohammed, it was two centuries before things got written down. So we know even less about Mohammed. That's right. Then 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 Pichman's power. Why on earth did Saudi Arabia produce a world religion then? Because of that as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia. Was 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 arms. We don't have the weather information about Arabia. So we don't know why.

We don't know whether we infer that probably 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. It's like we know there was a man that existed during that time and he became this religious leader. The religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas essentially. Of course written down hundreds of years later.

It's just incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system. These religious systems where someone becomes the person who has all the rules and everyone follows those rules or your 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, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian science. Why have the Mormons been so successful?

It's because of Joseph Smith's teachings. We do respect to the Mormons. The religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merit. But the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young and the social features of the Mormon religion.

Their optimism, their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy and they're expecting every Mormon. If you are Mormon you tie with yourself. You don't fill out a 1040 income tax form. Christians are expected to devote 10% of their income to the church and they calculate themselves.

That's a big commitment. So the Mormon religion I would say has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology but of course he was charismatic and because Brigham Young was an outstanding leader. This episode is brought to you by Key Tone 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. Key Tones used to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only used by super elite people. But now thanks to a $6 million research contract with the military, Key Tone IQ had a breakthrough and you can finally get Key Tones online on Amazon or at Target for $5 a shot. They don't taste good.

But damn do they work. Trust me, if you rely on your brain for your day to day success like I do, take Key Tone 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 Key Tones. Go to ketone.com.com.com.com.com.com for 30% off your subscription order or find Key Tone 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. I mean it's kind of shocking.

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

With Durer's back to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and a sense to heaven is stretching. Yeah. Scientific understanding. And I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in virgin birth was a major factor of repelling Christianity.

Instead, there were many things that were propelled 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.

It was frequent abortion, whereas Christianity, from the early Christianity, did you 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 started out as maybe a few dozen people under Jesus. And even in St. Paul's time, what, maybe 100 people, Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire.

On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism, emphasized writing. And so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, all these literate Christians, and the pagans were not literate. So Christianity had reasons for its success that would do respect nothing to do with virgin birth. Yeah, of course.

And so when you're writing 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 argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam.

That 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 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 indecisive. They don't really know why they're here, they don't really know what life is for, existential angst, society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite life span, something that you can join where everyone is all in, and they're very locked in and disciplined, and that discipline, you know it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day.

It takes a lot where everyone agrees. We're all going to play music and pray five times a day, and we're a part of a team. 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. 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. I think that confidence is a weird, charismatic confidence, is a weird aspect of human beings and that we follow those people, like universally.

We follow charismatic, confident people, universally and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system. 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 of the 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, about two years to proselytize, 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. So Mormonism is done well with spreading in Europe in the Pacific. It's one other thing that I'd like to say here, and that is that people often ask me, Jared Gunster, of steel, neglects individual people.

It's about things that happen over the last 10,000 years, and Gunster and Steel, the different outcomes of societies and different continents. It has nothing to do with any individual. We would say have you written a book about leaders, about individuals, how do you reconcile Gunster and Steel with leaders? And my first response would be to say that Gunster and Steel is about entire continents for 10,000 years, where one person doesn't make a difference, whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the short term.

But the one case that I can think of where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion, the beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Mohammed. 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 Gunster 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 work together hand-in-hand. But those leaders wouldn't have been able to do what they did without all 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.

All those factors all have to be in place. It's not either or, right? So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1,500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests. But behind these convincing, devoted priests were European guns during the steel, European smallpox, European measles that killed far more Native Americans than did European guns and horses.

So religion, to become world-wide, religion needs what one can call an economic and demographic engine, the mottie of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him, of his being incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general, his small troops with sticks and stones never wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with machine guns and then his organizational ability. But so the mottie was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world. Yeah. A lot of factors have to be in place, sometimes the chips all align perfectly.

Right. Let's think of- Keep that microphone up too, folks. Sorry. Sorry.

Sorry. First off. I'm going to talk about everything aligning 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 had the business, no-how, on the computer skills to fan personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time.

And again, Jeff Bezos, he was- he retinized that it was the right time. He went to the head of the company that hired him and he said the internet has multiplied by 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 retinized that the time was right.

Yeah. And imagine what had happened if you tried to do that. It's like what he did was really fascinating because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea, like sell books, sell books online. Like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes and Noble, you can get books anywhere.

There was bookstores everywhere. It was kind of easy to get books. And then the whole, you can buy toothpaste too and everything like, and just one click, like all that revolution. It all appealed to our laziness.

And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, TikTokki, 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.

Brilliant. Right. In the case of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to set up an online bookstore. It was his goal in- his goal in life was to set up an everything store.

And- but he retinized that everything store has to start out with something. Really? He started out with book because he retinized 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 at 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 Jared Darmon's profits. Every copy is the same. So Jeff Bezos retinized- the books are a good thing to start out with. Having started out with books.

He then reasoned what a good thing to move on to. Then 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. 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. Yeah. Before Jeff Bezos.

eBay operates in a different way. And after Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on coupled to a brick and mortar store. Whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning was his everything store was going to be an online store.

So here's an example that 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. When you have an account, your credit card's listed, you need one-click. Toilet paper on the way arrives by 4 PM. 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, it was raised that Jeff Bezos was strategic out of 340 million Americans. If Jeff Bezos hadn't done it, maybe somebody else would have done it. But what we know for sure is that there were and before and there were afterwards other ways to develop an everything store. What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell with whether the investors are satisfied with their stock returns.

He didn't care about that. He prioritized customer satisfaction. So he developed something that would have happened, that did happen and 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 and no one invented it. What would the world look like? 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 a 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 a stock market, if we hadn't developed, we would have developed. Stock markets would have developed, namely, it seems a unique way of doing things and it didn't take a person or it didn't take an accident.

A stock market is as logical 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. But 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's a fascinating engine for growth.

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

They were on the phone. I had a Motorola start-track back in the day. I was on the phone that my wife and son forced me to get. I used it to do my email and that's all that I used to.

You don't get on TikTok? Doing dances? No. No memes?

I'll send you some memes. Whatever meme. I'm techno phobe. So cell phones certainly would have emerged.

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

Another thing that he did was to say the product should look good and be simple. Only a couple of buttons on it. The contrast case is that the television set that we have at home has 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 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 call up Josh and that because there are so many buttons. Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has one, two, 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 rehabbing showed me before that some of us on that iPhone, there's a volume control device but I didn't know what it was.

But yesterday I saw that on the left side there were two things. I tried pushing one and the volume went up. It was the upper one. How do you not know that?

I wasn't born with a 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 have like a little thing. Will you press it for the volume when it goes up? Possibly but I would record it.

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

That's so funny. I tried pushing the upper one. I got a loud volume. Now I know that.

Well then there's a button above that too that silences the phone or makes the ringer go on. 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 the phone call then I push it back in a long hour. I'll do 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 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 are saying here. It is an insanely complicated thing. From childhood onwards I've always been technophobe. Why?

I'm just incompetent at it in my school in I think the second year in my middle school we were all told to build these make-it-yourself radios and they were saying I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. My father then got my father was a physician side. He got someone in his lab to put my phone together.

When I went to Cambridge England to get my PhD in physiology they were various organs I could have worked on. I could have worked on the electric organ of electric eels. I could have worked on muscle but I had no idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions but when a lecturer in my beginning physiology called said the gallbladder is a sack. The gallbladder is a sack coming out of the bile coming out of the liver.

It's just a simple sack and it absorbs salt and water but we don't know how. I thought my god that's my god I can do that because to measure water transport by the gallbladder didn't require micro pipe hetsum technology didn't require chamber. All it required was that I put a little plastic can in the mouth of the gall and then I waited on a balance but there was a balance in my lab. 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 the gallbladder precisely because I could not build a hand radio. I can't nor can I figure out my iPhone nor can I do any other technology without that. That's fascinating. I've got to reverse to it.

You don't like it. There's something about technology that it just almost repulses you. That's true. Why does it repel me because I'm incompetent at it and I feel lousy and frustrated when I try to do it.

Instead I try to do everything in the simplest way possible. So one of my secrets was successful. Let me show you this is behold 0.7 millimeter pencil. One device I advanced and lead advances.

My books I write my books by hand. Really? Yup. After I've written them by hand I then correct the draft by hand and once I've cleaned up the draft then I dictated into my iPhone and my secretary cleans it up.

I really recommend dispensing. So you write in pencil and then do you edit by erasing? Yes. I edit more by crossing out.

I do some editing by erasing. Yesterday I flew in to Houston on Sunday and yesterday was a damn time for me. I had an event in the evening. I spent yesterday revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of the Wondomin 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 of their birds. So yesterday I was working on paper on the birds of Wondomin mountains. I used, ah, behold. And eraser.

And eraser. I used my 0.7mm 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.

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? Yes, 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 write all the edits by hand again. If I have to rewrite it massively then I will retype it. But if you will type it. Oh yeah.

Okay so you're not averse using a typewriter or a keyboard? No. When I was about, when I was about 80 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 time, the bottom three rows but I cannot touch time for the top row.

That's hilarious. I'm a faster typist than any secretary that I've ever had. Really? 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 long hand and they like to write 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 row by typing but what I find is that my style, my English row 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. So you're typing it's like so quick that maybe you put some extra stuff in there that you didn't need to because you didn't have a time to really as you're writing each word out you're thinking what's the correct word after this what's the proper way to phrase this. You have more time. You're right.

Typing is faster and so typing reflects better. Instincting. 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. I want to mention one other great advantage of iPhone I don't know if you've discovered this but at the bottom of my iPhone there's an icon which looks like a microphone that icon when I press that icon it allows me to dictate another languages so the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German I do my correspondence on my iPhone in Italian and German because of this little device now this little when my wife forced me to get the iPhone there are 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 and so I learned and I do my correspondence German and Italian 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 have 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 real bad voice. Mr. Diamond wants to know instead of that you would get your actual voice which is you know we're getting close to like Tower of Babel type stuff here like universal language the ability to instantaneously translate everything all the time so everybody knows what everybody's saying it's a very unique time.

This has a very interesting history in which I was secondarily involved. In the 1970s Xerox Park in Palo Alto 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 and the other thing we didn't understand was the technology of simultaneous translation the example of not understanding enough about the structure of language was that in the initial trial runs of Xerox Park they had a sentence the phrase out of sight out of mind and they had their attempt at technology to translate this into Russian and then from Russian to translate it back into English and so they said they said out of sight out of mind but vice translated into Russian the Russian translated back into English and out of sight 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 of all's 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 slash 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 how weird do things get right the beginning of the gospel according to Saint John in the beginning was the word and the word was with God word so the Saint John was not written in English it was written in Greek or translated into Greek and the Greek word for word is vlogos the Greek word vlogos means word but it also means rational system and so when you translate the first line of the Saint John gospel in the beginning was the word there was much more in the beginning was a system and organization not just word that's an example of the difficulties of translating from one language let me give you another example the last foreign language that I learned was Italian right now we're Italian every day but in Italian there are two words that mean I love in English there's only one word that means I love in Italian you can either say amo or vogobene or vogobene literal means I wish you well surprisingly to me in Italian physical love sexual love is vogobene with amo which is literally the word love amo is the root amateur it's the root for love in 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 or like not and not personal not friendly like a thing like love like love race car driving um four days a day of desire desire so they don't use the term love like we do we have it we have a bunch of different versions of love even ironic love oh I love it when that happens you know when something stupid happens you know you break your shoelace oh I love it when that happens we have a lot of uses of that word love right that that was raised the difficulty of translating from one language to another so if if if I were to have an Italian girlfriend would have a little bit if I were to have an Italian girlfriend and if I made the mistake of saying her to her to her to amo and I didn't say tivoyo benet I would be I would be thrown out I beat your ass a German example is that the German language has two words meaning meaning to eat asin and fresen and asin is eat referring to humans and fresen is eat referring to animals but a person who gobbles up a lot of stuff you say that person is fresen or I'll give you an example from from the the only nugini language that I made much progress learning the foreign language of in the foreword 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 and so the first sentence of foreword that I learned on my second day in the foreword area was there was a frog in a creek and I'd already learned the word for water which is one in foray and dakwoa's word for that sort of frog and so I said to I was practicing the foreword that I just learned I said to a foreign man dakwoa one in the windia and he shook his head severely windia because I'd use the inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog when I should have used the anemode word to be English does not make that wow the example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos the difference that that is such a giant difference so it's a giant difference in what it means and unfortunately it leaves when you just have the term word it leaves so much to interpretation there's so much spin that a pastor or someone who's like relaying this can say what it actually means is if they don't know the original language of it my friend rick strassman he's a researcher a very fascinating guy he learned ancient Hebrew over the course of 16 years he's self-taught himself ancient Hebrew so that he could read the bible in its original form and he's like I highly recommended him like well that's a lot you're asking a lot but he felt like the only way he could really understand what they were saying what it really meant was to really truly understand the language and be able to read it and speak it yeah um the same 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 ilead homers ilead the the english text of the ilead 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 comes out in english um the original greek is main in ada so the first word in the ilead is wrath main in the second word is aida sing the third word is goddess so literally it's wrath sing goddess and then wrath of Achilles son of pilius um the the ilead 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 accurately reflect reflects the context and what they were saying like instead of sticking to the original translations of these books like the ilead or any any old book 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 to get the meaning with more lengthy prose but one would lose the the the power the condensation of the ilead to be able to be really have to be able to read it in greek yes yeah and the weirder stuff is with ancient hebrew the numbers that also letters also double as numbers and words have numeric value that's kind of wild yeah my understanding is that that with with Hebrew at least at least originally the so-called semitic afro-asianic languages um the vowels were non-essential a word root was just by the consonant and so so the the early text of the bible and of say Phoenician had just the consonants not the vowels um the vowels um the the wasn't ambiguity if you were omitted of the vowels nowadays my understanding is that the Hebrew does have have um lines in the corner and m-hark the language we feel which is a afro-asianic language also has lines in the corner that convey the vowels but there's a lot with those languages that you convey without specifying the vowels at all whereas with with english you can't dispense with vowels that's so it's so interesting it's so interesting that different languages evolved like like that they have so many variables that just don't exist in the english language and then for us to try to understand exactly what they were saying the power in their words is almost impossible an example is so my books get translated into lots of languages that conjure them to seal up and translate into into forty-five languages and one thing that I can see I see how because I've got all the I see how thick of the editions um the the German German edition is always the thickest the Italian edition is the next thickest the English edition is is thinner it just takes more words to say something in German than it does to say the same thing in English is it saying the exact same thing though like in their language the way they interpret it is it the same um yes yes yes and yes and yes and no um German grammar is is distinctive the German vocabulary is distinctive um so when you ask is it the same um any linguist would say no it's not the same we we attempt to come up with an approximation but we know that that that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into another language I had a fascinating guy in here the other day that spent eight years of his life living with the pita ha people in the amazon jungle and learning their language was this yes Daniel Everett yeah if you've spoken to him before i'm i've corresponded with him really guy and such a fascinating conversation i mean utterly fascinating that he had no writing no no studies nothing to go by and he had to construct their language and write it down over the course of years and years of learning how to say things with them yeah um in nugini of nugini is the most language rich part of work there are a thousand languages not dial but a thousand languages in nugini and most of our understanding of nugini languages comes from missionaries especially Lutheran missionaries who are the trained linguists who are sent out there their purposes to translate the bible into a language but local languages um they start out of course there was no writing in nugini 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 um and let's figure out the sounds one example of that is that in 1990 i was in the late plains of indonesian nugini um next to a tribe called the faui yao being studied by an american woman who was devoting her life to understand this the faui yao language is a tonal language like chinese chinese has either five tones mainland and mandarin and six tones cantonese or vice versa um this this woman linguist um she had been living for 15 years with the faui yao and she had already identified 12 tones she thought there might be a 13th tone but after a dozen years she didn't wasn't sure of that but among the faui you have to get the tone right the syllables almost like the immodernosable like bay but bay you can pronounce in 12 different bay bay bay bay bay bay and one of those bays means um sweet potato and another bay means snake and another bay means delicious and another bay means feces and then there's another bay that means mother-in-law and so if so if um if a linguist or if a young child learning faui yao 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 dropped the bay and said rise in the bay what comes out what comes out is vile snake let me give you this feces feces to eat oh my god oh my god oh my god a consequence of that is this link this link this link was noticed that when little kids are going around the faui village with with their mother um there's not a back and forth conversation instead the mother says something and the kid repeats the same thing and mother may correct the kid um so it's mother and then repetition why because with the faui yao 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 what you're saying as you're walking out the door yeah that's not what i said no no no i said beloved mother-in-law that's hilarious what was the first truly literate society oh that that we know the first writing was in the fertile crescent of the middle east it was what's called cuneiform the wedge wedge shape symbols it was written with a stylus that that had different forms at the end and so so the writing was done cuneiform writing was done with the stylus cuneiform was used to write many different languages it was used first to write up with acadian which was the language of the first empire of the fertile crescent and cuneiform the hit-tight language of of turkey which is the oldest most distinct Indo-European language hit-tight was also written in in cuneiform so cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems just as the the english alphabet with roman alphabet is used to write German and swedish and it's used to write four-ray the nugini language that i work with the the um the phoenicians the phoenicians the first greek writing was lineab of homus homus troy it was a salabic writing system and around then the greek lost writing for a couple centuries and then they lost it totally they became illiterate so the whole culture right at the time the at the time of the Trojan war um the greek's wrote in lineab this salabic writing system and then writing disappeared from greek for several centuries it came back around 800 bc but the writing that came back was not this salabic linear b system it was instead derived from the phoenician alphabet so it was an alphabetical writing that it was not salabic but it was alphabet alphabet and the greek's added vowels the phoenicians because it was afro-asiatic language did not have symbols with vowels in greek if you in phoenician if you drop the vowels you can still understand in greek you have to specify the vowels otherwise it's not comprehensive so the first what we call alphabet was the greek alphabet of ad 800 which then got modified slightly into the Etruscan alphabet in Italy and the greek alphabet then got modified into the the roman alphabet for latin which is modified again to the alphabet that we've got today so so the first writing system then was was came with the conniform and and then there were salabic writing systems and then then came alphabet 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 diammono doe because japanese doesn't put two consonants together so my name comes out diammono doe neither of these two writing systems japanese also has a third writing system which is basically chinese drive to the congii and then 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 rydive i flew from korea i already speak about the korean language that it's the best language it's 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 they read not letter by letter but they read by syllables and so koreans can read fast enough anybody else in the world because that's a wonderful writing system uh one of the more interesting things about the history of the mongols and gingis conn is the book the lost history of the mongols they initially thought was gibberish right because it wasn't written like it was written phonetically like the mongolian language but in chinese is that what it was is that how they did it one of my um um classmates at harvard um joe flatter was the person who who rediscovered that mongol book and figured out how to how to read it really that wasn't until the early 1960s that's insane but there are of course there are writing systems that we still can't can't read the atruscans um the people of italy who the romans eventually conquered um so the atruscans took the greek alphabet and modified it slightly um we have some atruscans writing in stone the longest but all all trust books got burnt lost the longest the trust and text that we got there was a linensch roud that turned up in eugus lavia and this linensch roud was used to rap something but the linensch roud was was evidently a piece of the trust once a piece of trust in writing because there's a long trust in text on it and the shroud was then reused to to to wrap someone's book um the result is that we can pronounce a trust in writing we can read it because it's greek greek letters but we don't know the meaning of the words for the most part um they're on rosetta stones for a trust gun the closest we come to it is that dies dices these six six sided dices um have been found in across the areas and on the dices there are there are six symbols so evidently the six symbols must mean one two three four five six um and people have figured out one or two of those but they haven't figured out the others so we know the the trust can symbol 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 uh language that they can't translate? of course yeah that's fascinating yeah that's a beautiful one too right it's really interesting the way they write right there it's quite mysterious um it's there are only there are few samples of easter writing easter ireland writing known they're all in wood um the first european visitor here it is right there yes all right um the first european visit to east roiland of whom we have a record was the dutch rogevein in i think 1722 and he did not observe writing the first mention of writing was by the third or fourth european visitor to east roiland in the 1770s there's a suspicion that the easter irelanders might have invented writing when the spannians came as the second visitor to east roiland in 1770 these riles may have seen spannians with wooden sticks looking at the wooden sticks and doing things and that may have given the easter ireland as the idea to invent a writing system of their own so it's possible that it was laid invention inspired by the spannan but a case where we know that happened um the Cherokee Indians of of the carolinas no native americans had a writing system um in in north america the mario yes but not in north america um 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 scribbled 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 he realized that they were writing down words but he had no idea of what the writing system was he didn't know whether it was an alphabet he didn't know about alphabesic syllabaries he tried different writing system he spent about ten years doing it then he finally ended up with a syllabary where the symbols are for syllables not letters the Cherokee syllabary has um eighty signs for eighty different syllables and um sequoia convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having two Cherokees at the the opposite end of like a football field and he had one Cherokee say something to him which he then wrote down on paper and then he went to the other end of the football field and handed that piece of paper to another Cherokee to whom he had taught his writing system and that other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the Cherokee at the other end of the football field was at the field had said so sequoia in that way convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing wow that's fascinating like knowing the origin of a culture is written language and learning it from others well they all had to originally have learned it most likely from someone else that they saw something being written down I mean or did they all come up with it at the same time like when did we know if you've seen the the newest discovery I go back to tepi where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing that predates cuneiform by five or six thousand years um no I've not seen that it's really recent it's over the last couple of weeks okay it is the chain chamois pulled up it's it's a very weird way of uh writing did daniel ever discuss this with us? yes i brought this up i found it on that podcast i was watching with laks in uh Irving it is the case with cuneiform although we think of cuneiform as having arisen around 3500 BC um Irving Finkel that's it this is a did Irving Finkel find ancient writing and go back to tepi we know that cuneiform there were they were marks going back several thousand years and there's a debate among linguists whether those marks are the earliest proto writing it's it's suspected that the the marks were used to count sheep they function as numerals they might have had had word for sheep but um what what's clear is every writing system other than the first writing one has to ask might it have been copied from the first writing but the first writing had to be a new invention right and there are at least three writing systems that we are sure are independent of cuneiform because it was the first writing system you 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 mire also had writing salabic writing the mire had lots of books which Bishop Lander burnt all of them except for but the mire writing um rose independently of cuneiform because there was no contact between between the old world and new and then chinese writing chinese writing is first attested around 1300 BC chinese writing is totally different from cuneiform or anything else in the furtal crescent at the time so it's suspected that the that the chinese developed writing independently of the furtal crescent which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing they could be furtal crescent mexican writing and then chinese writing and then possibly e-droidal 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 um it was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of the the bronze age so bronze age cultures this this was just as iron was emerging bronze was the the main metal used in the middle east in in turkey um bronze age cultures included joy or homeless joy crete um so the island of crete had linear b which was the earliest the the 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 we don't have enough text it's a spectrum that linear a recorded the menoan language of no one crete whatever that language is we don't know know the language um that would have been might have been another independent right but anyways um the bronze age encompassed crete and greece and cypress and the levand from from palace or palace dine up to lebanon and then then anatolia turkey um 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 there were this greek pottery that turned up in the fertile crescent making one suspect that there was a mass invasion and mass invasion destroyed the brown sage civilization of crete and cypress and turkey and the and the hit tie it tied 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 we don't know why why we don't know whether it was an invasion um so writing Egyptian writing 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 a mention of new weapons it's just insane that they could completely lose their language and then come up with a whole new way of writing yeah yeah i'm trying to okay other examples of it um let's see india the so called harapan civilization of india and pakistan in the in the indus valley there was a high civilization called harapan civilization um between about three thousand two thousand bc and they had writing um we have their seals of their rings that we used to to to stamp with wax but we don't have any wrong texts the longest text on one of these rings is only three or four symbols there are several hundred different symbols um we can't read it um harapan writing disappeared and then writing re-emerged in india with al-xanda the great when when al-xanda of nasa-dun invaded india um after al-xanda evacuated india right he came back in india but it's a completely different writing system the the progenitor of modern indian writing system so there's another case of writing disappearing the harapan writing and then two thousand years later 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's that is really interesting so kuneiform emerged roughly say 3400 bc Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3000 bc hieroglyphs have absolutely nothing to do with kuneiform we can read kuneiform we can read read hieroglyphs um but it's suspicious that um hieroglyphs emerged only a few centuries after kuneiform um this is an example of what's well idea diffusion um it's not that the writing system itself it's not the kuneiform writing spread to egypt but the idea of writing is read similarly with sequoia this um 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 furtogrescent and then they developed their own writing system and it makes sense if you think about how complex and beautiful and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are and then you look at how complex and beautifully constructed ancient egyptian society was i mean they were operating on a completely different creative and engineering level than anyone else in the world and of course their writing is going to be pretty wild too kind of makes sense right it's a clear example of a writing system um being invented not gradually involving but bang the earliest hieroglyphics are full hieroglyphics um very strange right up there's another example korean writing okay so korean writing but korean writing had gold which groups letters into syllables um this is not a writing system that's gradually evolved instead a king of korea called king sejong around roughly the year 1430 until then koreans wrote with chinese a chinese based writing system and king sejong has a famous proclamation which koreans learned by memory king sejong's proclamation says it grieves me that that our people write the korean language with chinese like writing when the sounds of and the words of the chinese language are not similar to the korean writing therefore all king sejong 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 hand gold of king sejong invented hand gold himself at a bang there was no precedent of art that's an excellent example of how one individual one leader can radically transform a society that's right that's right and it's all it's also an example of a leader i'm coming up with an invention that has lasted already for six hundred years a leader not doing something ephemeral but gets replaced but a leader devising the writing system that has carried on you know there's an interesting thing with the Mormons when you were talking about how they've 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 like conscription for all young people to do a certain amount of time in the military that's a very common thing i 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 that they have mandatory military service you have to do that um that's an interesting question is it the case that national identity universally depended upon a draft um um fynland so fynland has a strong national identity um fynland was a province of the russian empire fynland did not become independent until 1918 so there was no there was no finished draft at the time of finish independence instead the the anchor for fynland's national identity is the finished language which it's a very distinctive language the fynland is a proud of their language it's a poetic singing language um it's related somewhat distantly to to Hungarian but i mentioned it as as a counter you you probably right in in many cases that national identity was fostered by the draft in italy the unification of italy in 1862 um the the development of atalian national identity um depended heavily on a national school system but also on a national army um so i have a talent conversation once a week with my talent teacher she explained to me that the national identity of atalian's had lots of dialects hundred dialects mutually incomprehensible in nugini we would say that they're different languages um in even today there are different dialects in in italy that different atalian's can not understand in contrast to you know my grandparents speaking dialect okay yeah right and if you just spoke classic atalian that you learned in college you would have no idea what they were talking about because they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect right yeah interestingly um my first trip to dialects were far more developed in europe um 60 years ago my first and that's true in italy germanian 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 the doctor and beckles um so my parents and their friends were we're talking and my sister and i were bored so we we wandered off into the into the town um 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 grandfam hills so we asked a man on the street in american english how to get back to the house of the grandfam and he said something which he thought was that we couldn't understand a word of it um that's just an example of how strongly differentiated dialects were in 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 suddenly when we got back to the house and we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying then the grandfam hill says you know well that's the local dialect but similarly in germany when i lived in germany in 1961 i lived in in unit capital of bavaria and bavarias have have a strong strong dialect um um instead of saying i'm baiar un diqab i'm a bavarian and i have a thick skin they would say yb o bai so close to each other that's what's so strange about it right but again in in italy um cecilian is um it's often regarded as a separate language there's as you know there there are books written in in cecilian um modern literary and government atalian is the is the close to the dialect of florans but there are dozens and dozens of atalian dialects which persistent to after world war two and were mutually incomprehensible but those dialects now have been fading because of universal universal education plus the draft wow when did you start learning atalian um i started learning atalian um it was april 1999 and i can plot that i can date it because um um my wife and i and our kids had been to on a vacation in atalian switzerland and us on max fell and he heard his leg so we had to go to a hospital none of us knew atalian but my wife knew that the atalian word for where was dove dove um dove lost the dialect um and so when we we were scheduled to have a family vacation in italy in may may 1999 i thought dove that's it well i can learn that um why don't i learn learn enough atalian but i can ask where the bathroom is and i can order meals and restaurants so i studied atalian grammar for six weeks and we were scheduled to go to germany on mail and my father died that morning so we aboard a the atalian trip but after the atalian trip i think i've spent six weeks learning learning much of the grammar let's put in other six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar so i put in other six weeks i've learned the rest of the grammar and having learned the grammar i've learned the grammar um let's now read some atalian so i began reading atalian and then after after eight months so i've been reading atalian i said why don't i speak it UCLA has an atalian department so i put up a notice in the atalian department of saying i would like to hire atalian graduate students to come speak atalian to me and and someone an atalian woman answered the ad she came she came to my office and here i had been dealing with atalian for for eight months and here is a live atalian speaking atalian um to me for the for the first time it's like like knowing of knowing of something and then you suddenly have the experience the closer parallel i can think of as is having heard of sex and then you have your first sexual experience so so so i so i then arranged for atalian speakers to come every week to talk atalian with me and then since then the two atalian speakers who who came and talked atalian 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 um but i in effect did um marital therapy in atalian for two years i i talked through with my atalian teachers i said that the horrible relationship they the parents had and their boyfriend's parents had didn't necessarily need to be the model for for any marriage you could you could they can make a relationship about their role so both of them are not married they're boy they're still married and it's now it's now 27 years later i still every week um i i talk to ranschesska um for um two hours um every two weeks um francesca is the person with whom i talk the most and i have the widest range of conversation of anyone in anybody in the world except for my wife and my Australian companion on my nugini expert because i'm not kind of i say we talk about everything wow that's so how many languages do you know um in my life i've dealt with 13 languages three of them i only read never spoke re-clattened and dutch i never spoke i just read them um i i'm still i can the languages that i can give lectures in now are english, atalian, german and nugini talk bishop um i used to be fluent in spanish and russian but my russian got driven out by indonesian when i started working in indonesian finish i learned enough to hitchhike um and what else and in the four-way language i can speak rudimentary four-way and those are my languages that's incredible how do you not mix them up in your head i do mix them up in my head i would imagine i can keep i'm sorry i can keep straight nugini talk pigeon and english and mostly i can keep straight atalian and german because they're so different from each other yeah they they're they're they're different um so i can keep them straight when i started learning atalian i've been fluent in spanish atalian grow out my spanish completely um 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 russian word russian and indonesian they're completely different from each other but i felt that it's as if i have what four channels for for languages i can keep straight english atalian german and a fourth language but a fifth language if i attempt to bring back a fifth language i'll confuse that and so indonesian and russian although they're totally different once i started indonesian to drove out my russian that's crazy it is crazy so do you think that if you lived in russian for a little bit you pick it back up again i think so and i will have a test soon because of our two we have twin sons and of our twin sons one of them is engaged to a wonderful russian woman and they're getting married in a garden and so when anastasia comes over for dinner once or twice a week i tried out some elementary some elementary phrases of russian i agreed in russian um procracenia procracenia gracenia gracenia beautiful citizeness i would like to bring back more more russian but i'm afraid that if i brought back my russian i'd drive out my German or whatever i don't know whether i'll do it you only have a certain amount of hard drive space yeah yeah i've run into that problem all the time just with the various interviews that i do like fascinating conversations that i have i completely forget because it's just there's no room in there anymore i can 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 it is now written um it's very very interesting it's of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language so new guinea talk pigeon it sounds like baby talk me talk on you you grasp on you and tap on you go finish keep on you all right i go on you but i'll look like you okay so that's a sample of pigeon what did you say oh i said i said that the the here on your head is somewhat sparse and you brown eyes and grass along you e-liklikliklikl that's all that wow but i don't know so um 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 um new guinea has these thousand different languages but the Germans had to communicate with them and the Germans hired or kidnapped new guineans belonging to many different language groups the Germans had to communicate with the their workers and the workers had to communicate with each other um so it's not that anybody invented something the Germans began speaking a stripped down easy German and the guineans began picking up some elementary German words but they also picked up words from other guinea languages this this first language was called a pigeon language it's very simple it's not adequate to express the range of human motion 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 children from pigeon speaking parents of different native languages children are starting to communicate with each other this stripped down language that's enough to talk about coconuts but it's not enough to talk about the gamut of human motion the children themselves within a decade um modified spontaneously not consciously modified pigeon to become a full language with with grammar and tenses and future tense and prepositions over how long a decade a decade a decade um the the best the information we have about how and these pigeon languages these Creole languages which are more complex ones with prepositions have developed all around the world um our best information about the development of Creole language comes from Hawaii because of Hawaii plantations plantation workers were brought in from Japan and China and various other places so again workers are thrown together on a plantation they have to communicate with English speaking um plantation owners and they 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 sugar cane but the children of these these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal life the pigeon language is not adequate and the children spontaneously made the pigeon more complex within a decade the children um um invented prepositions and they invented future tense and they invented plurals and this is somewhat documented because the newspapers of missionaries in Hawaii in the decade from 1890 to 1900 every now and then the newspapers would quote something funny that the Hawaiian said on a plantation and would be an example of Creole as of 1892 and then you can see from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated Creole got in 1894 so a new guinea talk vision 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 um new guinea and some new guinea and government lead they are more fluent usually in Creole than they are in in English so in parliament in happening guinea um the the language of parliament is either English or talk vision and then there's one other other Creole language when I started out out in New Guinea the first thing that I learned was was was talk vision because I could pick it up very quickly um and not a panel some block along walking 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 would say and was there anything written about the language before you got there was was it possible to study it and when they wrote it down did they write it using English alphabet that's right yeah there are there are books there are grammars of new guinea pigeon I learned new guinea pigeon initially which is a Creole language with prepositions and I learned it by talking with new guineans um and then eventually I acquired um one or two of these um pigeon grammars and a pigeon dictionary and was able to make my pigeon more complex wow just as an example um thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science but to demonstrate that you can say anything into occupation um I've I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in into occupation you got one pale man man's out into my name on saga on saga you got this polite um you talk along hot to us um no this fellow hot to us any term dynamics no this fellow unsarca you got strong protein now imimakum rule number two belong belong sorry belong tinted long heart any second law of thermodynamics so what did you just say what I said what I said is that a swede called law's unsarca um developed the second law of thermodynamics which is thermodynamics is about heat and unsarca developed the thermodynamics of um rates of reactions and so I explain dispell unsarca imimakum 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 unsarkey got this fellow strong skeleton tinton unsarkey's got his smart man have you talked to someone in this pigeon talk pigeon where they what you could explain something like that and they could relay it to you like they understand what you're talking about yeah yeah with with new guineans um so in my work in papa nugini um in indonesian nugini they don't use pigeon in papa nugini they do use pigeon and with nuginians um they and I can discuss anything in pigeon um I can I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of taste of human human red meat and human human human fat you can say anything to our patient yeah that's a weird part of their culture right that they can differentiate the taste between human red meat and human fat well they say that the human human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary the big lifeless bird like this which we were as human fat they say it's like the like the the fat of pigs I was never orphaned and I never I wouldn't have accepted because the place in new guinean where I began my work was the forre area the forre with people who had kuru um which is basically mad cow disease they were the people who were dying of of kuru and they were the people that I worked with for the first 8 years and who were they eating oh they were rude um there's what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism is meeting is eating your dead enemies new keel and war endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives um when the Australian government came in it was easy for bad cannibalism and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the the tribe was being eaten complaining to the government and the government told the people who were eating the other people you can't do that anymore but endocannibalism in new guine traditionally um you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother as you or I would just throw away throw away the body of our dead mother um they were precise rules about who gets to eat eat what but but in general um the relatives eat eat the body and their rules about what part of body we um in 1965 I had working my camp with me a new guinean who did not speak pigeon and we were in a remote camp on a mountain one we were getting no visitors because it was remote and one day into camp came a man sat down with with this guy who didn't speak talk vision 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 workers daughter you make down payment when a girl was young so there was a young man who made a down payment my workers 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 so but it's true my work was expected to eat the forearm and so he quit his work quit his work with me and walked away he would he would there's no way that that he would fail to eat the forearm of his perspective son-in-law any more than that you or I would throw our mother's body into the ditch so he quit working with you because of that 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 perspective son-in-law has died and the funeral feast is going to take place three years three days in the future so you better come out come now so that you're there before the body starts that's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about how the pita ha deal with their debt 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 for you to understand because in the area where my worker quit in order to it's a warm hard area about three thousand feet and the body a dead body is put is was it's government is larger put it down the body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats on it and underneath the platform is a bucket so sorry you ask the body putifies and the flesh turns to liquid and then rips through the slats on the platform down into the bucket you then dip your sweet potato in the bucket of this putrid fluid and then you eat this this week that's what I'm told I was not offered I would not have accepted it for but I was told told by the missionary in the area and by nukinians themselves that's what they do with that. Is there a scenario where they would have encouraged you or required you to consume someone?

Not when you were there. Absolutely never because endocannalism there were precise rules about what if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and you decided to get married and you married someone to the tribe and then that person died would you have had to eat them? I do not know I never put it to the test but according to their rules would you have? Probably what would you do?

Probably yes husbands as husband and wives I expected to eat the other person. I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I worked the four-eight tribe they were the people who had kuru which are basically mad cow disease and the commonest cause of death among the four-eight when I was there was kuru mad cow disease. That's a brain tissue right? That's right eating the uncooked brain.

They leave it if you cook it it's a pre-on disease correct? It's a pre-on survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying. A couple hundred we had not thousand but they certainly survived this five couple hundred degrees. I thought it was a lot more than that I thought it was one of the issues with mad cow 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 that was put into perplexity. I would like to know like 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.

I didn't think it was just raw brain. I think the issue was any brain tissue of the same species as you is where this disease comes from which is why cows get it from eating brain tissue of cows and then those pre-ons are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue. That is true. That's true.

In fact. It's not a real good concise answer. Pre-ons can survive temperatures kills most microbes, boiling, ordinary cooking and standard steam sterilization are not reliably sufficient. Resistance also varies by pre-on strain what we're talking about yeah and whether the materials wet dried or embedded.

Boiling 212 degrees not dependable. 1000 degrees Celsius. Yo what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy pre-on ineffectively.

This is the level associated with effective incineration. Yeah you gotta go up to this looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit. I've agreed upon that at least for a few hours. It's reliably destructive.

Wow. 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours. Even that's yeah well done doesn't. Cooking yeah well done cooking does not reliably destroy pre-ons.

That's crazy disease. A disease you only get from eating each other. It's almost like nature doesn't want to eat each other. The the reconstructed history that why on earth did the foray have this basically male cowlancy as the commonest cause of death.

In humans there's a disease called Quercville-Yacob 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 Quercville-Yacob arises rarely as spontaneous mutation. The guess is that someone in the foray area around 1910 developed Quercville-Yacob and died but the foray would practice Hindu cannibalism. The women would cut up the brain cut up the skull and the babies with the women would be playing there with the mother and here's this this soft tissue the brain that's fun to play with so that babies would play with the brain and then lick their fingers. So the transmission was by cannibalism particularly took to babies at the time of end of Swarthmore to a reason with one foray person who had Quercville-Yacob and died of it in around 1910 but was then eaten by others who were in turn eaten still by others so that Quercville-Yacob had been exploded among the foray.

This could be your ad reaching a brand new audience on Spotify launch your first campaign in minutes today with Spotify ads manager. What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this disease does not occur with the pita ha that they do have endocannibalism and he thinks they still practice it he thinks they secretly still practice it they just don't know they kind of hide it they don't they don't they don't have that disease. That makes sense because Quercville-Yacob is rare even among cannibals. Oh among everybody Quercville-Yacob it's a rare mutation like one in 10,000 one in 100,000 it's pure chance that one Quercville-Yacob 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 corona whatever the name is didn't have Quercville 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 Quercville-Yacob evidently getting eaten around in 1910.

That's so fascinating and also fascinating that it exists in cows. It exists in cows it exists in sheep and goats there's a disease of sheep and goats called scrapey which is basically a surprise disease and it was scrapey that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the foray area that when I arrived in the four in 1964 Quercville was completely mysterious it affected only the foray if the foray went down to Port Moresby the foreign might still develop kuru so it couldn't be leaked linked linked to the foray environment foreigners who came into the foray I didn't develop kuru other New Guineans who came into the foray era didn't develop kuru the only people who developed kuru were the foray but the symptoms of coru were of course the disease and alcohol 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 died of coru and the doctor managed to get dry ice shipped into the foray area in order to freeze the coru to get ship back to the national institute of health he then was that a couple of days but it was frozen in dry ice 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 coru would be a chimpanzee and it took three years I saw that chimpanzee in a cage after three years finally the chimpanzee had been completely healthy after three years the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of coru and died of coru and then that chimpanzees brain was injected into the brain of other chimpanzees and the time for infection the last death due to coru was in 2009 the last funeral feast was 1959 after that the the australians imposed control and banned funeral feast of the last war if funeral feast was 1959 that then would have been the last transmission of coru 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 have been infected decades earlier they were infected in 1959 right but is it possible that they were doing what Daniel Everett feels like the pita how we're doing we're was lying about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts very unlikely because before a year by the time I got there in 1964 there were missionaries you watch them do this thing where they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified petrified petrified no no I have not I was told about it okay by the missionary in the area who didn't know what was going on but you knew that they were engaging in this yeah I would have wanted to watch you didn't want to watch um I was not offered the opportunity you weren't allowed right that makes and you don't want to push because it didn't um was it one of the Rockefeller sons that supposedly was consumed by people on nugini he had insulted them on a previous trip he wanted something that was sacred this was like the the lore and then he returned not knowing that he was in danger they killed them on the boat then they ate them it's will no one would happen so this was Michael Rockefeller yeah who collected art in the bottom valley and then he wanted to come down to the he did come down to the south coast where there's great art produced in the asthma area um he was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer and there was a tidal bore that capsized the boat the boat was swept out to sea and so what do you what do you do what does Michael Rockefeller do the Dutch patrol officer do the Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim he had no choice the chance of being picked up and spotted seemed vanishingly low because there wasn't much very little airplane traffic but the Dutch patrol had no choice he stayed stayed on the boat and in fact so Michael Rockefeller 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 Rockefeller swam for sure and when he got close to shore he had misfortuned that um as he approached shore there came a canoe of natives um 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 village saw Michael Rockefeller as far as the natives concerned Michael Rockefeller belongs to the same to the same plan and he's white so they killed him um it was not just it was not learned what had happened until some years some years later because the natives didn't admit it they knew that they would be punished and did they admit that they consumed him um i do not i do not know i do not know i think they did then i'm not sure but they certainly killed him what is it like hanging around with a group of people were part of their culture is eating people what does it feel like um i've not oh okay so the guy who left my camp um to eat his that's he was a nice guy he was hard worker he knew he knew his words 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 the world and they've been living like that for a long time yeah i do work i do weird things that that discuss them um so they do weird things that discuss 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 way of life there was that that each woman each wife had her own heart and the man lived in communal a communal man's house the young kids lived with a mother until the boy reached the age until 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 conceptual relationship with the adult man um at teenage suddenly this boy who's had only men relationships suddenly the tribe has bought for bought for him a girl from the naming tribe and he's told that he's supposed to have sex for sex with a woman until then um the boys have been told that women are dirty defiling if you if you touch a woman you'll be very dirty i saw a film made by by a a 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 um boys they were just just poor disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman wow um but there's then this this sudden transition from the homosexual adult male young male society to having sexual woman what a strange culture where they've got this ubiquitous homosexual experience that every young boy has and they think it's essential to their growth it's essential to like that another man seaman is essential to them becoming strong you think that's strange but you you wail you hear what naginians have to say about how it happens well that's nice everyone's allowed their own opinion i think i'll stick with the way we do it it is just i just when i hear about something like that i'm always fascinated 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 um such relations are not they're not rare they're not they're not they're not the rule but for example in central america there were um Native American tribes in central america where there were a class of young men who acted as sex partners the spanish when they came into this area were utterly disgusted by this practice and so the spanish the spanish had war dogs these were dogs that were trained to rip people apart and so so the spanish being disgusted by this practice um would would bring war dogs into enclosure with these professional sex partners and the war dogs within rip and part oh god well i don't know if that's how you should handle it but i kind of see their perspective wow it is so odd and 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 um as an example of when i was given the given an opportunity but but declined um i went into an isolated mountain range with with three new ganians we were dropped off by helicopter and i had brought in rice and tin fish and food um but the new ganians had brought in some sego grubs these are the larvae of a big beetle um which the beetle injects its eggs into the sego palm and then the lava grows into a large object which looks like a shrimp um and they're fatty and they're high in protein so the new ganians brought in a couple of these sego grubs and they all offered me a sego grub um you didn't want to try it part of me was curia curious but it just looks so disgusting to see this real i decline the 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 they go if you cook it it even makes even more sense um as an example of something that we we love but balls and new ganians um a couple of new ganians who lived in the highlands i brought down to the coast when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range they'd never been on the coast um they had never encountered ice cream or anything cold because of course they had hot food from cooking but they had no way of making cold and so i first of all we stayed in a motel and the first time in their life they got to sleep in beds when i asked them the next morning i liked sleeping with dad one of them said no good he had no experience of sleeping with him he rolled out of bed at night so he didn't like sleeping in bed but then i offered them ice cream and and and one of them he rejected the ice he said it's cold it hurts my mouth well you and i are accustomed to eating ice cream we're accustomed to eating cold food but a nuginian hasn't ever had experience of anything cold well that makes sense that it would be odd because it's an odd sensation but i would feel like once they tasted it they'd be like oh i get it they didn't get it would i if i had eaten that segogrub would i have gotten it um i bet you would have i bet it didn't taste like much at all probably would have my guess is it it tasted like a fatty shrimp yeah just fat it's probably just fatty it probably i mean especially if they're cooking it were they cooking them or did 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 credits i personally have no no really no wow what what have i you i mean rattlesnake what else have i eaten the strain when i was in mexico they uh i stayed at this resort in porter by art and they had these bowls of like it looks like fried crickets oh that's right um so in my book i have a bio i have a chapter on siretse kama who is the first president of the african nation of bahtswana siretse kama was um the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in bahtswana but he also was one of only 22 college graduates in bahtswana at the time of independence and so he was sent to to england for higher education um he got educated he had higher education at at Oxford and so he was comfortable in both european and in native african society he wore wore suits he was a great great speaker um and um he graduated law school at at Oxford um but um in his suit pocket in his jacket pocket um he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers who was standing food in his area by siretse kama and he would he would offer his guests as european guests or his african guests would you like to have a dried grasshopper and he would pop in the dried grasshoppers but um i have had friends who eaten dried grasshoppers and they said they were okay i could not bring much they don't taste well i didn't have grasshoppers i had crickets they don't taste bad at all uh i ate a live roach once for a fear factor didn't taste like much it was disgusting because it was just the concept of it was disgusting but the taste of it was very bland it was not that bad at all it's just protein yeah yeah the bat's wanna story is fascinating that's also in your book where you discuss the transformation of bat's wanna under this guy's leadership there was a leader who leader who really made a difference and um that's a case of someone um he was the only one who could have done it um the reason is he was the only one who could have made bat's wanna successful as family president um because he was the chief of the largest most powerful tribe in bat's wanna um when bat's wanna 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 rule of chiefs um so it's a bad idea for bat's wanna democracy but sirezi kama as the chief of the most powerful tribe he was the only person in bat's wanna who could have abolished the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief and the other thing was that bat's wanna um financial stability has come from diamonds the diamonds were discovered after independence if they'd been discovered before independence the british and the beers would have made a deal fade with the british and the beers but in fact the diamonds would were discovered like six months after independence and they were discovered on the land of sirezi kamas tribe um normally in africa when pressure 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 sirezi kamas tribe and sirezi kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all bat's wanna and not just a strike sirezi kama come proclaimed that all underground resources in bat's wanna wherever they are are the property of the batwan nation not of the individual drive 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 african sisak and he married a european woman um he was respected in europe very successful as a diplomat and he was respected among african imagine if that practice had taken place in america where all the resources all the natural resources were the property of the society of america and not of individuals imagine how different this world would look if the oil and gas just the oil and gas and of course the the minerals the rare earth minerals imagine if they were just the property of the collective united states good point and in most african countries um it's as in the united states um so diamonds and emeralds and coal along to the the drive on whose land they found but not in batwan and the result is that that's batwan is the i believe they're the second richest country in africa the richest country in africa is equatorial guinea um and it's it's very rich because it's got oil and the the average per capita income in equatorial guinea is something like 10 or 20 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 hundred dollars and you average it out average it out and that's why equatorial guinea has the highest average income um but that's messing with the numbers that's messing with the number but yeah in in but in but mama 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 uh collapse you know guns germs and steels you've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in in society and in history and made it very entertaining and very consumable so thank you and i really enjoyed talking to it was really great no i enjoyed a lot talking to you i was i did my home i was told in advance that i would enjoy a lot um talking with you a provider that i was not identified with something that you disproved of but that otherwise i look forward to pleasurable experience in fact um my wife um goshawa to center three snippets of of mu and and um yes i anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time and yes 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 bye bye