#2549 - Jared Diamond

Joe Rogan, boy, cast, check it out.

The Joe Rogan, experience.

Dramed by day, Joe Rogan podcasted my night all day.

Very nice to meet you, sir.

That's a pleasure.

Great question to make you.

I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel.

And I just got into this yesterday.

And today, I started reading your new book.

Awesome.

Awesome so far.

Fast nitting.

I have so many questions.

But my first one is, have you done podcasts before?

I've done podcasts, quite a few podcasts at home

in my wife's study on my wife's tele screen.

And I've done face to face interviews like with you.

Oh, okay.

Cool.

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

Why did I write this book?

A short answer is I was born in 1937,

which means that I grew up in the Second World War

under the shadow of Hitler.

Every day, there was something going on with the war.

My father paced it up on the wall, my bedroom,

a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater.

And there was always the question, why did it happen?

And if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome?

Then I moved to Europe.

I lived in England.

I lived in Germany.

I love German music.

I love the German language.

Why?

And then I moved to Chile.

I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America.

Before Pinotché, nobody saw what was coming with Pinotché,

his own fellow generals didn't see it coming.

And so there's been throughout my life this question,

and do that as well as good people make a difference.

Also my wife was post, the last of my family in Europe,

disappeared in the whole cause.

Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz.

She survived, but others of the family didn't survive.

And so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question.

And then leaders have made a difference in my life.

There was a chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department,

when a pump, a water pump that I had been operating,

blew overnight, and it flooded my lab room,

but it also flooded the lab room below me.

And that was a poor choice of lab room to flood,

because it belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner,

the father of father and law of my thesis supervisor,

and the master of my college at Cambridge,

not a good choice.

Oh no.

The chairman of the department called me in.

I thought I'm going to be thrown out.

He said, you know, that was sloppy.

You have to be careful with water pumps,

and be more careful in the future.

That permitted my scientific career to continue.

Other people might have thrown me out.

So leaders have made a difference in my life.

Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world,

and one of the things that really terrifies me is,

Nazi Germany was not that long ago,

and there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed

that that could never happen again,

that that type of scenario where a group of people

are completely other to the point where they're not human anymore,

that a nation goes along with it.

Like that, we thought we were done with that forever.

I don't believe that anymore.

As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is,

and that there is always these battles for lack of better terms,

good and evil, good leaders who generally just want something good

for their people, and they want to leave a mark and be remembered

to someone who made a difference,

and then leaders who just want to take over all the systems

and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country and change it.

And you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance

and about all these different factors that lead to leaders

either having successful runs or not successful.

There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration.

You opened the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident,

and what would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving?

One was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind,

perfect impact, dead Hitler, now what?

Yeah.

What would the world look like?

There's so many instances that would have JFK didn't get shot.

What if Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get shot?

There's so many different moments in history where you go,

how would culture look, how would society, how would civilization look?

If just a few things had been off.

There are so many things to say about what you've just said.

So growing up after World War II, we thought never again.

And yet in Cambodia, Paul Pot killed about one quarter of the Cambodian population.

In either way, he encouraged children to kill their parents.

Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet did in Chile.

His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile is a small country.

And Pinochet did not set out to exterminate large fractional population.

But the torches that he implied are simply the tooths that were far worse than anything that the Nazis did.

And he surprised his fellow generals.

So all of that is a surprise.

As for leaders can do either good or bad or they can do nothing.

If you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference,

Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers.

But I can boil it down to four or five things.

A leader has to be at the right time and place.

Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place and they seize it.

Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of popular electronics with the Intel 8080 chip.

Bill Gates said to Steve Allen,

now is the time we got to start now building my computer because we don't do it.

Somebody else will.

So Bill Gates recognized that the time was right.

Winston, and he made the time right.

Winston Churchill recognized that the time was right.

When Winston Churchill was appointed Prime Minister, he said,

I knew that this was the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation.

But he didn't manufacture it.

Winston Churchill became Prime Minister because Germany invaded France.

And Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France.

He recognized that he was in the right time and place.

There are other leaders who are at the right time and place.

But they don't know it.

Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think in 2004.

As a result of 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 some leaders choose the time and place to go all dead.

Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place,

although they didn't manufacture it.

Winston Churchill did.

And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan,

the largest land empire in world history all the way from China to Poland.

And yet there were other people who tried by the Battle of the Hanan and Timur the Turk.

Why did Genghis Khan succeed?

Well, within the last ten years,

students of tree rings have figured out that on Mongolian steps,

the wetest time in the last two thousand years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth.

If he had been born ten years later or two hundred miles further away,

we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan.

But he happened to have been born at the right time and place because with all that rain,

that meant hey to feed sheep and goats to feed Mongol babies.

And it also meant hey to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle.

So Genghis Khan was someone at the right time and place,

but he had no idea.

And we didn't have any idea until the tree ring study of the last decade.

That's interesting.

But you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful?

Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist.

And he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different groups of people together,

particularly people of different religious persuasions.

So he accepted all religions.

And it was one of his strengths is that he didn't care.

I'll take you all in.

Everybody gets to come in here.

And the way he would attack these cities,

there's also the strategy of they never settled down.

They always were intense.

And they would camp out in front of cities and just wait them out.

I mean, there was a lot to it other than just resources, right?

Absolutely.

He was 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 extraordinary person at some other time and place,

we wouldn't know anything about him.

So you are correct.

At a given time and place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge.

But who emerges depends upon the personal qualities, for example, to take religion.

The first century AD of the West, of the Roman Empire, was the perfect time and place to find

what would become the world religion 15 centuries later.

Because the Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia.

And so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then.

But the Roman Empire was basically the father of the European countries

that spread around the world 15 centuries later.

Now Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was born.

Neither he nor his followers had any idea that 15 centuries later.

The religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then would spread around the world.

It was the right time and place.

But there were other candidates besides Christ.

The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans.

Of the six candidates, Christ was most successful.

But Christ also, to found religion, you have to be charismatic number one.

You have to be an outstanding organizer. Christ died too early.

It was St. Paul who was the outstanding organizer.

And all religions also need a great general.

In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer

from Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic.

He was a great organizer, he was a great general.

The moddy of the Sudan who established the Sampyran in East Africa.

Fantastic general and organizer and incredibly charismatic.

But the moddy, 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.

Where is Christianity, Tim?

The Paul thing is very interesting.

Because the more I read about the Bible and the construction of it, the more it just gives you pause.

Like Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity.

Because he never met Jesus.

So Jesus never spoke to him and Jesus never wrote anything down.

And so when Paul has this vision, when he's on the road to Damascus and he has this, whatever it is,

some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus.

Like we're taking the entire religion is based on this guy saying that I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them,

when no one wrote it down and I never met him.

So it's really Paul.

Yes, and it was two people.

It was Jesus and it was Paul.

Yes, Paul was the great organizer.

Jesus of those various other rival messiahs.

Jesus had some advantages with his message.

It was a universal message.

It was not directed just to the Romans.

It was not directed just to men.

It was aimed at everybody.

So of the candidate messiahs then, Jesus had a particularly good message.

But it took good messages and enough.

It took St. Paul as the organizer.

But it's fascinating that Paul never met him and that Jesus never wrote anything down.

So when Paul's talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history.

Right.

It's really strange.

An oral history that it takes 20 years for this guy says this is what Jesus said.

And then we all go on that.

Right.

What's thought to be the first of the gospels, gospel according to Mark,

is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus.

So we have no first person accounts of Jesus.

It would be really nice if we wrote things down.

It would have made things more serving.

In the case of Muhammad, it was two centuries before things got written down.

So we know even less about Muhammad.

That's great.

And we do about Jesus.

Or a difference also between Muhammad and Jesus is that Jesus we know was at the right place and right time.

The Western Roman Empire, we know was at the peak of its power.

Why on earth did Saudi Arabia produce a world religion then?

Was it that as with Genghis Khan and Mongolia, was it that at the time of Muhammad's birth was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly wet time,

which meant lots of people, which meant lots of harm.

We don't have the weather information about Arabia.

So we don't know why.

We don't know whether we infer that probably Muhammad was at the right place and right time.

But we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we can with Jesus.

It's interesting too because Muhammad was essentially a prophet.

He wasn't a child.

He wasn't the son of God.

We know there was a man that existed during that time.

And he became this religious leader.

The religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas essentially.

Of course, written down hundreds of years later.

It's just incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system, these religious systems,

where someone becomes the person who has all the rules and everyone follows those rules or you're ostracized from the kingdom.

And there's so many of them.

And the thing is we know some of the people who created it, like Muhammad or like Jesus or like Joseph Smith.

Like there's some weird ones.

And it's just, it's a very strange pattern that comes up over and over and over again.

I don't know how all of them can be correct.

You know, without any judgments on religions, someone's got to be wrong.

You have all have completely different origin stories, but it's so fascinating to me in particular that people want to have this sort of a structure.

It gives them comfort.

And you can get entire populations to go along with it.

Right.

One might say that the religious teachings are secondary.

In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to five religions that have gone around the world.

Mormon religion, seven-day Adventists, Jovus witnesses, and Christian science.

Why have the Mormons been so successful?

Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings?

Would do respect to the Mormons.

The religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merits.

But the Mormons were very well organized under Brickham Young.

And the social features of Mormon religion, their optimism, their emphasis on living the fulfilling life, on being happy.

And they're expecting every Mormon.

If you are a Mormon, you tie yourself.

You don't fill out a 1040 income tax form.

The Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their income to the church and they calculate it themselves.

So that's a big commitment.

So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic.

And because Brickham Young then was an outstanding leader.

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They've also done an excellent job of instilling a sense of community amongst fellow Mormons that I think is...

I don't think there's another religion that quite has reached that level. They are the nicest people.

Like I have yet to run into an asshole that's a Mormon. It's kind of shocking.

If the whole origin story wasn't so as the kids say, sus, it would make you really be interested in what's going on here.

It seems like these guys haven't nailed other than the Nine Wives and all that other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the original idea.

With dures, with dures back to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a virgin birth and a sense to heaven is stretching.

It's a scientific understanding. I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major fact of propelling Christianity.

There were many things to propel Christianity. This gets interesting. The Christians outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire.

Because Roman religion had a low view of women. Children did not have a high prestige. They were frequent abortion.

Whereas Christianity from the early Christianity did give a high role to women compared to Roman religion. Christianity favored having babies.

Christianity emphasized taking care of the sick. And so when you look at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, Christians lived longer.

They were less likely to die than were pagans. The result was that Christianity that started out as maybe a few dozen people under Jesus. Even in St. Paul's time, what maybe a hundred 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 of these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate.

So Christianity had reasons for its success that would do respect have nothing to do with the virgin birth.

Yeah, of course. It's really interesting the way you just outlined the reason why Christianity was successful. You could say that that same pattern is being mirrored by Muslims.

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

That's true. Yeah, with Muslims as with Christianity, I would not, I would not, I would not, I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam.

Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs, I see as the reason behind Islam spread.

Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of constructing it, the way it's practiced today, the people that are, our Muslims are devoutly Muslims. There's a large population of them that are very religious.

And that population is very, I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people because most people are very undecisive. They don't really know why they're here. They don't really know what life is for.

Because for existential angst society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan, something that you can join where everyone is all in. And they're very locked in and disciplined. And that discipline, you know, it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day.

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

So if you decide that you don't want to be a part of this anymore and you don't believe anymore and you announce that, they can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like, you're all in and you're all in for life and we all support each other.

And it's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people. Like, it doesn't appeal to me like I want to join it. But when I watch these people give speeches and I watch them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they have is something that is very attractive to people.

And I think that confidence is a weird, that charismatic confidence is a weird aspect of human beings in that we follow those people like universally, like we follow charismatic, confident people, universally and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system.

And you got all these other people that are part of the strong belief system. There's a compelling force that makes you want to join.

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

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

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

And if you don't have much money, you go 70 miles away. And if you do have money, you go to the Pacific Ocean or to Europe with a result that Europe.

But these people take it seriously. And so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe in the Pacific.

It's one other thing that I'd like to say here. And that is that people often ask me, Jared Gunsdrums is still neglects individual people.

It's about things that happen over the last 10,000 years. And Gunsdrums still, the different outcomes of society is in different content.

Has nothing to do with any individual. Where it's here you've written a book about leaders, about individuals. How do you reconcile Gunsdrums still with leaders?

And my first response would be to say that Gunsdrums still is about entire continents for 10,000 years. Where one person doesn't make a difference.

Whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the short term. But the one case that I can think of, where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion.

The beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad, those individuals had a long lasting effect. And so far it looks as if the beliefs of Joseph Smith, he's been gone for what 200 years now.

But the prospects are that Joseph Smith again will have a long lasting influence. Whereas I can't think of a politician or a business person who has had an effect 2,000 years later.

Well, I think Gunsdrums and Steel highlighted all the factors that have to be in place for these types of changes to take place.

It's not like mutually exclusive that leaders aren't important as well. It seems like they both worked together hand in hand. But those leaders wouldn't have been able to do what they did without all of the innovation, without the industry, without the infrastructure that these places had, without the wet season that the Genghis Khan and the Mongols had fortunately arrived in.

Like all those factors kind of all have to be in place. It's not either or, right?

Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests.

But behind these convincing devoted priests were European guns, Genghis, and Steel, European smallpox, European measles that killed far more Native Americans than did European guns and horses.

So religion to become worldwide, religion needs what one should call an economic and demographic engine, the moddy of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are of us being incredibly charismatic.

And his military success as a general, his small troops with sticks and stones, nevertheless wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with machine guns and then his organizational ability.

But so the moddy was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world.

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

Right.

Keep that microphone up to your face.

My apologies.

So examples of everything, everything of lining 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 know how and the computer skills to fan personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time.

And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized that it was the right time. He went to the head of the company that had hired him.

And he said the internet has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year.

This is the perfect time to set up an everything store based on the internet.

So he recognized that the time was right.

Yeah. And imagine what would have happened if you tried to do that.

It's like what he did was really fast in it because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea like sell books.

So books online like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes & Noble. You can get books anywhere. There was bookstores everywhere.

It was kind of easy to get books, but then the whole you can buy toothpaste too and everything and just one click like all that revolution.

And it all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and more lazy and more and more short attention span, tick tocky, it became the perfect way to buy things.

One click. It was like all the green lights. He was driving down the boulevard and every light turned green right when he got to it. It was brilliant.

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 explicit. His goal in life was to set up an everything store. And but he recognized that and everything store has to start out with something.

Really? So he started out with books. He started out with books because he recognized that books were an ideal thing to start out with.

All books are uniform. It's not that you buy a diamond and 78. They're a different time. Every all the books are uniform.

And there are there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could get books and customers and stores.

They're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared, our diamonds, profits, profits. Every copy is the same.

So Jeff Bezos, written, explicit that books are a good thing to start out with. Having started out with books. He then reasoned what are good things to move on to.

And he moved on to perfume and jewelry. He waited quite a while to move on to move on to whatever else he moved on to.

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

That yeah, that's a that's a great example. There was online. Sorry, there was there were everything stores. But not to that level.

Not to that level before Jeff Bezos before Jeff Bezos. There was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. And after Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store.

But Walmart's everything store is based on couple two brick and mortar store. Whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning was his everything store was going to be online store.

Here's an example that indicates that without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've got Walmart and and we've got eBay. But Jeff Bezos put his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making it online.

Everything store also being the first to figure out the whole one click thing. Yeah, where you have an account, your credit cards listed. You know what you need? Bam one click. Toil paper on the way arrives by 4 p.m. Let's go.

That's right. You have to go to the store and I get groceries delivered to look. It's and eventually it's going to be robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right?

Yeah. Yeah. This again, it was grace that Jeff Bezos was strategic. Yeah.

That 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 they're there, they were and before and there were afterwards other ways to develop and everything store.

What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell with whether the investors are satisfied with their stock returns.

He didn't care about that. He prioritized customer satisfaction. So he developed something that would have happened that did happen 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 hurt, 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.

You do do everything you can to save as much money possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders.

Interesting question. My guess is that if we didn't have a stock market hadn't developed, stock markets would have developed. Namely, it seems a unique way of doing things.

It didn't take a person or it didn't take an accent. A stock market is as logical as is 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. 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 in 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. There were all these cell phones.

It's had a Motorola start tack back in the day. I have a cell phone that my wife and son forced me to get it. I use it to do my email. That's all that I use before.

You don't get on TikTok? Do any dances? Nothing? No. Nothing? No memes? I'll send you some memes. Whatever meme. I'm techno foe.

So cell phones certainly would have would have emerged. Yeah. But Steve Jobs put a distinctive face on cell phones and that he cared a lot about appearance and he cared a lot about simplicity, simplicity, including simplicity of the gadget, but simplicity also of the overall business.

When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, Apple then went downhill for a decade until Steve Jobs brought back. And when Steve Jobs brought back, one of the first things he did was to say, there are too many products. We should have just four products and concentrate on them.

Another thing that he did was to say the product should look good and be simple. 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 our son Joshua and Max to talk us through. And I wrote it down. And when I wrote it down, I still didn't get it right. So I still call call up Josh on that because there are so many buttons. Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has one to, I think it's got got four buttons last night.

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

How do you not know that? How did I wasn't born with 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 when you press it for the volume and it goes up.

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

I was only yesterday that I tried pushing the upper one and I got loud of 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'll correct 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 meat. And if I push it back on the rare occasions when I'm expecting a phone call, then I push it back and it's no longer orange.

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

When everybody knows how to do the things you're saying here. It is an insanely complicated thing from another plan from childhood onwards. I've always been been technopop. 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 to build these these naked 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 inside. He got someone in his lab to put my phone together.

When I went to came to England to get my PhD in physiology, they were various organs I could have worked on. I could have worked on the electric, electrical organ of electric yields.

I could have worked on muscle, but I had no idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions.

But when a lecture in my beginning physiology course said the gallbladder is a sack. The gallbladder is a sack coming out of a biola coming out of a liver.

It's just a simple sack and it absorbs salt and water, but we don't know how. I think my gut, that's my or I can do that because to measure water transport by the gallbladder didn't require micro pipettes and technology didn't require a chamber.

All it required was that I put a little plastic cannula into the mouth of the gall. And then I waited on a balance, but there was a balance in my lab.

So I picked that organ because it was technologically so simple. It turns out that the gallbladder does what the kidney and intestine and more important organs do, but the gallbladder is much more convenient to study.

And so I made my reputation as a physiologist with a gallbladder precisely because I could not build the ham radio. I can't nor can I figure out my iPhone nor can I do any other technology without the fascinating.

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

That's true. Why does it repel me because I'm incompetent at it and I feel, feel lousy and frustrated when I try to do it. Instead I try to do everything in the simplest way possible.

So one of my secrets for success, let me show you. This is behold 0.7 millimeter pencil. It has one device. I advanced it and the lead advances.

And my books, I write my books by hand. Really?

And after I've written my hand, I then correct the draft by hand. And once I've cleaned up the draft, then I dictated into my iPhone, my three or four button iPhone and my secretary, I'm cleansed up. But I really recommend this pencil.

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

Yes. I edit more by crossing out. I do some editing by, for example, yesterday I flew in, flew into Houston on Sunday. And yesterday was a down time for me. I had an event, I had an event in the evening.

I spent yesterday revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of the one, Dom and Peninsula of New Guinea. New Guinea, the island and 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'm inventory their birds. So yesterday I was working on paper on the birds of one, Dom and mountains.

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

racer 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?

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

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

You will type it. Oh, yeah. Okay. So you will. You're not averse to using a typewriter or a keyboard. No. When I was about eight years old, I had chickenpox. And I stayed home from school for two weeks.

During those two weeks, I learned to use a typewriter. But I got cured of chicken pox after I had done the first three rows. So I can touch type the bottom three rows. But I cannot touch type the top row.

That's hilarious. I'm a faster typist than any secretary that I've ever had. Really? Wow. And only touch typing the first three rows. That's right. That's hilarious.

There's a lot of people that I know that write longhand. And they like to write 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.

So some things I produce the first draft by typing. But what I find is that my style, my English pro style is different if I type it. Then if I write it, when I type it, I notice that my style is more wordy. Whereas if I write it down, my style is more simplified and compressed.

Interesting because it takes longer to write a word than it does to type it or say it. So as you're writing the word, you have more time to think and you have more time to analyze whether or not you need extra words or you can sort of focus more on the structure of the sentence.

Rather than if you're typing, it's like so quick that maybe you put some extra stuff in that you didn't need to because you didn't have a time to really as you're writing each word out, you're thinking, what's the correct word after this? What's the proper way to phrase this? You have more time.

You're right. Typing is faster. So typing reflects better.

It's a team.

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

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

I want to mention one other great advantage of iPhone. I don't know if you've discovered this but at the bottom of my iPhone there's an icon which looks like a microphone.

When I press that icon, it allows me to dictate in other languages. So the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I do my correspondence on my iPhone in Italian and German because of this little device.

Now this little when my wife forced me to get the iPhone, there were a few buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about.

Then a high school classmate of mine who married a French woman showed me on my iPhone. There's this little icon and he said that icon Jared will permit you to do your dictation in German and Italian.

So I learned and I do my correspondence German and Italian. Now, not never by hand. I always do it on the iPhone.

That's pretty amazing. With AI now, they have, I think Google was the first to do this. I think Samsung phones definitely had this where you could have someone speak to you and it would translate their words in real time.

So you could have a real honest conversation with someone in another language. I guess they would have to put on headsets as well and you would be able to talk back and forth and it would absolutely change. And in the future, they're going to have it set up where it'll do it in your voice.

So you will say something in English. It'll translate it perfectly in Spanish and it'll translate it as Jared Diamond instead of like some 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. Very unique time.

This has a very interesting history in which I was secondarily involved in the 1970s, Xerox Park in Palo Alto. Got the idea of, got the idea of automatic translation.

And so 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.

And they failed. It was a couple of decades later. The reason was there were two things that were complicated that were not understood in the 1970s. One was, we didn't understand enough about the structure of language. I'll give you an example of that.

And the other thing we didn't understand was 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 of technology to translate this into Russian. And then from Russian to translated it back into English. And so they said, they said, out of sight, out of mind, the device translated into Russian, the Russian translated it back into English. And out of sight, it out of mind came back invisible idiot.

But it took a couple of decades to overcome that.

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

Right. The beginning of the gospel according to St. John in the beginning was the word and the word was with God word. So the St. John was not written in English. It was written in Greek or translated into Greek. And the Greek word for word is walkus.

The Greek word walkus means word, but it also means rational system. And so when you translate the first line of the St. John gospel in the beginning was the word.

There was much more in the beginning was a system and organization, not just a word. That's an example of the difficulties of translating to one language into it. Let me give you another example.

The last foreign language that I learned was Italian and right now we do Italian every day, but in Italian there are two words that mean I love. In English there's only one word that means I love.

In Italian you can either say, Ammo or Voliobene. Voliobene literally means I wish you well. Surprisingly to me in Italian physical love, sexual love is Voliobene where is Ammo, which is literally the word love. Ammo is the root for the amateur.

It's the root for love and other languages. That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love. So Italian has these two words for love. Another example.

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

For say, Desiderio, desire.

Desire. So they don't use the term love like we do. We have a bunch of different versions of love, even ironic love.

Oh, I love it when that happens. When something stupid happens, you break your shoelace. Oh, I love it when that happens. We have a lot of uses of that word love.

That illustrates the difficulty of translating for one language to another. So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake of saying her to her Tiamo and I didn't say Tvoiobene, I would be thrown out.

A German example is that the German language has two words meaning meaning to eat. Essen and Fressen. Essen is eat referring to humans and Fressen is eat referring to animals, but a person who gobbles up a lot of stuff.

You say that person is Fressen, or I'll give you an example from the only New Guinea language that I made much progress learning, the Foray language of Papua New Guinea.

In the Foray language, the verb to be in English, we have just one verb to be. In Foray, there were two verbs to be. There's Mindia and Windia. Windia is to be of something inanimate.

This sweet potato tastes good. This sweet potato is good. Windia. But Mindia is to be referring to an animal.

The first sentence of Foray that I learned on my second day in the Foray area was there was a frog in a creek and I already learned the word for water, which is Dacuo, Wani, Wani in the Foray.

Dacuo was word for that sort of frog. So I was practicing the Foray that I just learned. I said to a Foray man, Dacuo, Wunde, Wunde, and he shook his head severely.

Wunde, Wunde, because I used the inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog when I should have used the inanimate word to be. English does not make that.

The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference. That is such a giant difference. So this is a giant difference in what it means.

And unfortunately, when you just have the term word, it leaves so much to interpretation. There's so much spin that a pastor or someone who's like relaying this can say what it actually means is.

If they don't know the original language of it, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a researcher, a very fascinating guy. He learned ancient Hebrew over the course of 16 years. He self taught himself ancient Hebrew so that he could read the Bible in its original form.

And he's like, I highly recommend that I'm like, well, that's a lot. You're asking a lot. But he felt like the only way he could really understand what they were saying, what it really meant was to really truly understand the language.

And be able to read and speak it.

The same is true of every language. Languages, one translates languages. But there's lots of stuff lost in translation because of the words and the grammar.

For example, the Iliad, Homer's Iliad, the English text of the Iliad will begin by saying something like, I sing of the wrath of Achilles, the terrible wrath that destroyed so many Greeks.

So that's how it comes out comes out in English. The original Greek is main in Aida. So the first word in the Iliad 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 Peleus.

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

I wonder if AI could reinterpret certain books that have been translated and do so in a way that accurately reflect the context and what they were saying.

Like instead of sticking to the original translations of these books like the Iliad or any old book that's written in different languages, if there could be a way where it could analyze what the correct way of phrasing it in the English language would be with whatever extra words we would have to use or whatever different ways you would have to phrase it.

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

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

My understanding is that with Hebrew at least originally the so-called Semitic, Afro-Aziatric languages, the vowels were non-essential. A word root was specified just by the consonant.

And so the early texts of the Bible and of safe Phoenician had just the consonants, not the vowels.

The vowels, there wasn't ambiguity if you omitted the vowels. Nowadays my understanding is that Hebrew does have lines in the corner and amharic the language of Ethiopia, which is Afro-Aziatric language, also has lines in the corner that convey the vowels.

But there's a lot with those languages that you can convey without specifying the vowels at all. Whereas with English you can't dispense with the vowels.

That is so interesting. It's so interesting that different languages evolved like that. 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 was so my books get translated into lots of languages, the Gundhjermanns, you've been translated into 45 languages, one thing that I can see. I see how, because I've got all of you to, I see how thick of the editions.

The German edition is always the thickest. The Italian edition is the next thickest. The English edition is thinner. It just takes more words to say something in German than it does to say the same thing in English.

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

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and no. German grammar is distinctive. The German vocabulary is distinctive. So when you ask, is it the same? Any linguists would say, no, it's not the same.

We attempt to come up with an approximation, but we know that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into another language.

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

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

I've corresponded with him.

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

In New Guinea, New Guinea is the most language rich part of where there are a thousand languages, not dialect, but a thousand languages in New Guinea. And most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, especially Lutheran missionaries who are highly trained linguists, who are sent out there.

Their purpose is to translate the Bible into a language, but local languages. They start out. Of course, there was no writing in New Guinea.

So a Lutheran linguist will be dropped into an area. He just listens to what they're saying. He has to figure out what they're saying.

And it's figure out the sounds. One example of that is that in 1990, I was in the late plains of in the New Guinea. Next to a tribe called the Fowy Yao being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language.

The Fowy Yao language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese has either five tones, mainland and Mandarin and six tones, Cantonese or vice versa. This woman linguist, she had been living for 15 years with the Fowy Yao.

And she had already identified 12 tones. She thought they might be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't, wasn't sure of that. But among the Fowy Yao, you have to get the tone right. The syllables are mostly the immuno syllable like they, but they, you can pronounce in 12 different, they, they, they, they.

And one of those berries means sweet potato and another bay means snake and another day means delicious and another bay means feces. And then there's another bay that means mother-in-law.

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

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

A consequence of that is this, this, this, this linguist noticed that when little kids are going round the Fowy village with, with their mother, there's not a back and forth conversation.

And said the mother says something and the kid repeats the same thing and the mother may correct the kid. So it's mother and then repetition. Why? Because with the Fowy Yao, if you, if you get the pronunciation slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother-in-law into feces drop-he 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.

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 so, what's called kuneiform, the wedge, wedge shape symbols.

It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end. And so, so the writing was done, kuneiform writing was done with a stylus.

Kuneiform was used to write many different languages. It was used first to write, I believe, Akkadian, which was the language of the first empire of the fertile crescent.

And kuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey, which is the oldest, most distinct, Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in kuneiform.

So, kuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems. Just as the English alphabet, or the Roman alphabet, is used to write German and Swedish.

And it's used to write for the New Guinea language that I work with. The Phoenician, the Phoenicians, the first Greek writing was linear B of Homer's, Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system.

And then the Greeks lost writing for a couple centuries and then they lost it totally.

They became illiterate. So, the whole culture.

Right. At the time of the Trojan War, the Greeks wrote in linear B this syllabic writing system. And then writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries.

It came back around 800 BC, but the writing that came back was not this syllabic linear B system. It was instead derived from the Phoenician alphabetical writing.

It was not syllabic, but it was alphabetical. And the Greeks added vowels, the Phoenicians, because it was a Afro-Asianic language, did not have symbols for vowels.

In Greek, if you, in Phoenician, if you drop the vowels, you can still understand. In Greek, you have to specify the vowels otherwise it's not comprehensible.

So, the first, what we call alphabet was the Greek alphabet of ADA-100, which then got modified slightly into the Atraskin alphabet in Italy.

And the Greek alphabet then got modified into the Roman alphabet for Latin, which is modified again to the alphabet that we've got today.

So, the first writing system then was, was, with the Stau, Coneiform, and then there were syllabic writing systems. And then came alphabet.

So, the 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 Diamon-Odo.

So, Japanese doesn't put two consonants together. So, my name comes out Diamond, the neither of these two writing systems. Japanese also has a third writing system, which is basically Chinese derived, the country. And then a fourth writing system, which is the Roman writing system.

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

I already speak about the Korean language, it's the best language.

It's the best writing system in the world. What the Koreans do is they take their letters and they group their letters into syllables.

So, if you look at Korean writing, you'll see that there are several things pushed together in a little box. That box is a syllable. And the result is that Koreans, when they read, they read not letter by letter, but they read by syllables.

And so Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world. It was this wonderful writing system.

One of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols in Genghis Khan is the book, the lost history of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish.

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

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

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 read. The Etruscans, the people of Italy, whom the Romans eventually conquered.

So, the Etruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly. We have some Etruscan writing in stone.

The longest, but all the Etruscan books got burned to lost. The longest Etruscan text that we've got, there was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia.

And this linen shroud was used to wrap something, but the linen shroud was evidently a piece of Etruscan writing because there's a long Etruscan text on it.

The shroud was then reused to wrap someone's book. The result is that we can pronounce Etruscan writing. We can read it because it's Greek letters, but we don't know the meaning of the words for the most part.

There are rosetta stones for Etruscan. The closer that we come to it is that dices, these six-sided dices have been found in Etruscan areas.

And on the dices, there are six symbols. So, evidently, the six symbols must mean one, two, three, four, five, six.

And people have figured out one or two of those, but they haven't figured out the others. So, we know the Etruscan symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six.

But we don't know which one of them is six, and which one is three, and which one of them is four.

You've ever seen the Easter Ireland language that they can't translate? I'm sure you have. That's fascinating. That's a beautiful one, too. It's really interesting the way they write.

Right. It's quite mysterious. There are only a few samples of Easter writing, Easter Island writing, no. They're all in wood. The first European visitor.

Yes, or right. The first European visitor to Easter Island, of whom we have a record, was the Dutch Rogovine in, I think, 1722.

And he did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Island in the 1770s.

There's a suspicion that the Easter Islanders might have invented writing when the Spaniards came as the second visitor to Easter Island in 1770.

These writers may have seen Spaniards with wooden sticks, looking at the wooden sticks and doing things. And that may have given the Easter Islanders the idea to invent a writing system of their own.

So it's possible that it was a late invention inspired by the Spaniard. But a case where we know that happened, the Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas, no Native Americans had a writing system in North America, the Maya, yes, but not in North America.

There was a Cherokee Indian called Sequoia who had a store. And he noticed that when Europeans came into his store, they had, they were scribble things on paper, they were talked to each other, and they got a lot of power.

They were able to communicate with each other. So he realized that they were writing down words, but he had no idea about what the writing system was. He didn't know whether it was an alphabet. He didn't know whether it was, he didn't know about alphabet, so syllabaries.

He tried different writing system. He spent about 10 years doing it. And he finally ended up with a syllabary where the symbols are for syllables, not letters. The Cherokee syllabary has 80 signs for 80 different syllables.

And Sequoia convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having two Cherokees at the opposite end of like a football field. And he had one Cherokee say something to him, which he then wrote down on paper.

And then he went to the other end of the football field and handed that piece of paper to another Cherokee, to whom he is taught his writing system, and that other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the Cherokee at the other end of the football field.

At the field had said, so Sequoia in that way convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing.

Now that's fascinating, like knowing the origin of a culture's written language and learning it from others. Well they all had to originally have learned it most likely from someone else that they saw something being written down.

Or did they all come up with it at the same time? Like when did, well we know, if you've seen the news discovery on a Gobekli Tepi where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing,

that predates Cunia form by five or six thousand years. No, I've not seen that. It's really recent. It's over the last couple of weeks.

Okay, it is the same. Jamie will pull it up. It's a very weird way of writing. Did Daniel ever discuss this with us?

Is there a thing I have on the screen? Yes. I brought this up because I found it on that podcast I was watching with Lex.

And Irving is his name. It is the case with Cunia form, although we think of Cunia form as having a risen around 3500 BC.

Irving Finkl, that's it. So this is it. Did Irving Finkl find ancient writing at Gobekli Tepi?

We know that the Cunia form, there were marks going back several thousand years. And there's a debate among linguists.

The other of those marks are the earliest proto writing. It's suspected that the marks were used to count sheep. They function as numerals. They might have had word for sheep.

But what's clear is every writing system of them, the first writing, one has to ask might it have been copied from the first writing.

But the first writing had to be a new invention. And there are at least three writing systems that we assure our independent Cunia form because it was the first writing system we know of.

The new world was isolated from the old world. And yet Mexican Indians developed writing. The earliest writing Mexico is something like 700 BC or 900 BC.

And then the Maya also had writing, syllabic writing. The Maya had lots of books which Bishop Amanda burned to all of them except for, but the Maya writing arose independently of Cunia form because there was no contact between the old world and the new world.

And then Chinese writing, Chinese writing is first attested around 1300 BC. Chinese writing is totally different from Cunia form or anything else in the fertile crescent of the time.

So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently, the fertile crescent, which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing, namely Cunia form in the fertile crescent, Mexican writing and then Chinese writing.

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

It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing. It was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of the Bronze Age. So Bronze Age cultures, this was just as I was emerging.

Bronze was the main metal used in the Middle East, in Turkey.

Bronze Age cultures included Troy, Homer's Troy, Crete. So the island of Crete had Linear B, which was the earliest, the syllabic O Greek writing system.

But Linear B was derived from another writing system called Linear A, which we can't read yet. We don't have enough text.

It's suspected that Linear A recorded the manoeun language of manoeun Crete, whatever that language is. We don't know the language.

That might have been another independent invention. But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and Greece and Cyprus and the Levant from Palestine up to Lebanon.

And then Anatolia, Turkey, all of that Bronze Age civilization collapsed roughly around the time of the Trojan War.

So the Trojan War may have had something to do with collapse of Troy itself. But the Trojan War certainly didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of Linear B writing from all of Crete and from all of Greece.

There were this Greek pottery that turned up in the fertile crescent, making one suspect that there was a mass invasion and the mass invasion destroyed the Bronze Age civilization of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey and the Hittite Empire.

But then just to go back to Troy, the fall of Troy was the fall of Troy and that's all. But there was a much broader collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the whole Eastern Mediterranean.

And we don't know why. We don't know whether it was an invasion, a Egyptian writing at the time, talks of C peoples, people came by the C and fought with the Egyptians.

So we don't know whether the collapse of the Bronze Age was because of invaders from the C or whether it was because of climate change or whether it was because of the tension of new weapons.

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

Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to... Okay. Other examples of it. Let's see. India.

The so-called Harappan civilization of India and Pakistan in the Indus Valley. There was a high civilization called Harappan civilization.

Between about 3,000, 2,000 BC and they had writing. We have their seals, their rings that we use to stamp with wax.

But we don't have any long text. The longest text on one of these rings is only three or four symbols. There are several hundred different symbols.

We can't read it. Harappan writing disappeared and then writing re-emerged in India with Alexander the Great when Alexander of Macedon invaded India.

After Alexander evacuated India, writing came back in India. But it was a completely different writing system, the progenitor of modern Indian writing system.

So there's another case of writing disappearing, the Harappan writing, and then 2,000 years later a completely different writing system emerged.

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

Again, that is really interesting. So Kuneiform emerged roughly say 3,400 BC. Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3,000 BC.

Hieroglyphs have absolutely nothing to do with Kuneiform. We can read Kuneiform. We can read hieroglyphs. But it's suspicious that hieroglyphs emerged only a few centuries after Kuneiform.

This is an example of what's called idea diffusion. It's not that the writing system itself is not that Kuneiform writing spread to Egypt, but the idea of writing spread.

Similarly with Sequoia, this Cherokee Indian, it's not that Sequoia copied English writing. It's that he got the idea of writing and then he invented the writing system itself.

So we suspect that hieroglyphs were idea diffusion that Egyptians got the idea of writing from the fertile crescent and then they developed their own writing system.

And it makes sense if you think about how complex and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are. And then you look at how complex and beautifully constructed ancient Egyptian society was.

I mean they were operating on a completely different creative and engineering level than anyone else in the world. And of course their writing is going to be pretty wild too. It kind of makes sense.

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

Very strange.

There's another example of Korean writing. Korean writing had goal which groups letters into syllables.

This is not a writing system that gradually evolved. Instead a king of Korea called King Se Jong around roughly the year 1430.

Until then Koreans wrote with Chinese Chinese based writing system. And King Se Jong had a has a famous proclamation which Koreans learn by memory.

King Se Jong's proclamation says it grieves me that our people write the Korean language with Chinese like writing when the sands of the words of the Chinese language are not similar to the Korean writing.

Therefore I King Se Jong have devised a new writing system which I wish all of my subjects to learn my writing system is matched to the Korean language. And that that was hand goal of King Se Jong invented hand goal himself at a bang. There was no precedent.

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

That's right.

It's also an example of a leader coming up with an invention that has lasted already for 600 years. A leader not doing something a themeral that gets replaced but a leader devising a writing system that has carried on.

There's an interesting thing with the Mormons when you're talking about how they figured out a way to get people very invested in being a Mormon in one of the ways is by being a missionary that you have to be a missionary.

One of the things societies have figured out is to get people to be deeply nationalistic. You almost have to have them serve. It's like a conscription for all young people to do a certain amount of time in the military.

That's a very common thing. Like think about like Israel for instance. Israel is very nationalistic, very proud society. People that are from Israel you meet them. They're very proud of being from Israel. Korea is another example of that. They have mandatory military service. You have to do that.

That's an interesting question. Is it the case that national identity universally depended upon a draft?

Finland has a strong national identity. Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918. There was no finished draft at the time of Finnish independence.

Instead the anchor for Finland's national identity is the Finnish language. It's a very distinctive language. The Finns are proud of their language. It's a poetic singing language. It's related somewhat distantly to Hungarian.

I mentioned it as a counter. You probably write in many cases that national identity was fostered by the draft in Italy. The Unification of Italy in 1862. The development of Italian national identity depended heavily on a national school system but also on national army.

I have Italian conversation once a week with my Italian teacher. She explained to me that the national identity Italians had lots of dialects, like 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea we would say that there are different languages.

Even today there are different dialects in Italy that different Italians cannot understand in contrast to...

My grandparents were speaking dialects.

If you spoke classic Italian and learned in college you would have no idea what they were talking about. They were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.

Interestingly my first trip to dialects were far more developed in Europe 60 years ago. My first and that's true in Italy, Germany and England. My first trip to England was at the age of 12 in 1950. My sister and I were taken by my parents to a small town on the east coast of England called Beckles. My father was a doctor and was visiting a doctor in Beckles.

My parents and their friends were talking and my sister and I were bored so we wanted to off into the town. We wanted to off only about two blocks but we made several turns and we couldn't figure out how to get back to the house of this family, the Grantham Hills.

We asked a man on the street in American English how to get back to the house of Grantham and he said something which he thought we couldn't understand a word of it.

That's just an example of how strongly differentiated dialects were in England as recently as 1950 when I was a student in England in 1950.

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

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

But it was a form of English.

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

Similarly in Germany when I lived in Germany in 1961 I lived in Munich, capital of Bavaria and Bavarians have a strong dialect.

Instead of saying I'm a Dicke out, I'm a Bavarian and I have a thick skin.

They would say Ibe-Uboi-Hop-Bacicke out.

So when I was traveling around with a friend of mine from Northern German, from the Rheinland where they speak what is closest to Hockdorch-Literer-Lerige-German,

and we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria and asked to be filled up with gas.

Because I understood what the guy was saying but my friend Joseph from the Rheinland, what did he say?

He couldn't understand the Bavarian at all.

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

It's often regarded as a separate language. As you know there are books written in Sicilian.

Modern literary and government Italian is close to dialect of Florence but there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects which persisted until after World War II.

And we're mutually incomprehensible but those dialects now have been fading because of universal education plus the draft.

Wow. When did you start learning Italian?

I started learning Italian.

It was April 1999 and I can date it because my wife and I and our kids had been to anification in Italian Switzerland and our son Max fell and he heard his leg.

I went to a hospital, none of us knew Italian but my wife knew that the Italian word for where it was Dove.

So when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in Italy in May 1999, I thought Dove, that's simple. I can learn that.

Why don't I learn learn learn enough Italian that I can ask where the bathroom is and I can order meals and restaurants.

I studied Italian grammar for six weeks and we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11 and my father died that morning so we abored the Italian trip.

But after the Italian trip I spent six weeks learning much of the grammar. Let's put another six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar.

I've learned the grammar. Let's now read some Italian so I began reading Italian and then after eight months I've been reading Italian.

Why don't I speak it? UCLA has an Italian department so I put up a notice in the Italian department saying I would like to hire Italian graduate students to come speak Italian to me and someone and Italian woman answer the ad.

She came to my office and here I have been dealing with Italian for eight months and here is a live Italian speaking Italian to me.

For the first time it's like knowing of knowing of something and then you suddenly have the experience.

The closest barrel I can think of is having heard of sex and then you have the first sexual experience.

So I then ranged for Italian speakers to come every week to talk Italian with me and then since then the two Italian speakers who came and talked Italian with me.

Both of them had American boyfriends. Both of them had difficult relationships. They couldn't decide whether to marry the American boyfriend or not.

But I in effect did marital therapy in Italian for two years. I talked through my Italian teachers.

I said that the horrible relationship they had parents had and the boyfriends parents had didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage.

They can make a relationship by their own. So both of them were married. They're still married and it's now 27 years later.

I still, every week I talked with Francesca for two hours, every two weeks. Francesca is the person with whom I talk the most and I have the widest range of conversation of anyone in the world except for my wife and my Australian companion on my New Guinea expedited because in our conversation we talk about everything.

Wow. How many languages do you know?

In my life I've dealt with 13 languages. Three of them I only read and I've spoken Greek, Latin and Dutch. I just read them.

I can, the languages that I can give lectures in now, English, Italian, German and New Guinea talk, I used to be fluent in Spanish and Russian, but my Russian got driven out by Indonesian when I started working in Indonesia.

I've been in the finish, I've learned enough to hitchhike and what else. And then the 4-A language, I can speak rudimentary 4-A and those are my languages.

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

I do mix them up in my mind.

I would imagine.

I can keep straight New Guinea talk, English and mostly I can keep straight Italian and German because they're so different from each other.

They're different.

So I can keep them straight. When I started learning Italian, I've been fluent in Spanish, Italian grow out my Spanish completely.

Russian, I used to be fluent in Russian when I started to learn Indonesian and I was initially struggling with Indonesian and I couldn't find a word.

I could come to Russian and Indonesian, they're completely different from each other, but I felt that it's as if I have four channels for languages.

I can keep straight, English, Italian, German and a fourth language, but a fifth language, if I attempt to bring back a fifth language, I'll confuse that language.

And so Indonesian and Russian, although they're totally different, once I started an Indonesian, I drove out my Russian.

That's crazy.

It is crazy.

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

I think so and I will have the test soon because of our two, we have twin sons and of our twin sons.

One of them is engaged to a wonderful Russian woman, Anastasia, they're getting married in our garden and so when Anastasia comes over for dinner once or twice a week, I tried out some elementary phrases of Russian.

I grew into Russian, procrastinia, procrastinia, gradistan, gradistanka, beautiful citizens.

I would like to bring back more of my Russian, but I'm afraid that if I brought back my Russian, my drive out my German or whatever, I don't know whether I'll do it.

You only have a certain amount of hard drive space.

Yeah.

I run into that problem all the time just with the various interviews that I do, like fascinating conversations that I have, I completely forget.

Because there's just no room in there anymore.

And I could imagine like keeping, I want to talk about pigeon.

I want to talk about pigeon talk, new guinea pigeon talk.

Is that a written language?

Yeah, it is now written.

It's very interesting.

It's an enormous significance for understanding the development of human language.

So, new guinea talk pigeon, it sounds like baby talk.

Me talk about you, you grasp along you and tap along, you go finish, keep along you or I belong to you, but I'm like, look like you.

Okay, so that's a sample of a pigeon.

What did you say?

I said, I said, the here on your head is somewhat sparse and you were brown eyes.

Grapes belong to you, we lick lick.

I sold out.

Wow.

So, here's how new guinea talk pigeon arose.

And it's a model for how similar pigeon languages have arisen all around the world, dozens or hundreds of times.

When German colonial administrators came to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand different languages, but the Germans had to communicate with them.

And the Germans hired or kidnapped, New Guinea's belonging to many different language groups.

The Germans had to communicate with their workers and the workers had to communicate with each other.

So, it's not that anybody invented something.

The Germans began speaking a script down, easy German.

And the New guineans began picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked up words from other New Guinea languages.

This first language was called a pigeon language.

It's very simple.

It's not adequate to express the range of human emotion, but it's enough to discuss plantation agriculture.

And it was enough for adults who had another, had their own main language, and were using the pigeon language just to discuss the coconut plantation.

We, a 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.

And are starting to communicate with each other.

This script down language that's enough to talk about coconuts, but is not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion.

The children themselves within a decade modified spontaneously, not consciously, modified pigeon to become a full language with a grammar and tenses.

And future tenses and prepositions.

Over how long?

A decade.

Wow.

A decade.

The best 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.

The best information about the development of Creole language comes from Hawaii, because Hawaii plantations, plantation workers were brought in from Japan and China and various other places.

So again, workers are thrown together on a plantation.

They have to communicate with English speaking plantation owners.

And they spontaneously develop this really stripped down so-called pigeon language that doesn't have prepositions and doesn't have tenses.

But it's adequate for discussing what you can do with the sugar cane.

But the children of these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal wife.

The pigeon language is not adequate.

And the children spontaneously made the pigeon more complex within a decade.

The children invented prepositions and they invented future tenses 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 set on a plantation.

And it would be an example of Creole as of 1892.

And then you can see from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated Creole got in 1894.

So New Guinea talk pigeon which is actually what's called the Creole language is a full complex language with prepositions.

You can say anything.

It's the government language.

New Guinea and some New Guinea and government lead.

They are more fluent usually in Creole than they are in English.

So in parliament in Papua New Guinea the language of parliament is either English or talk pigeon and mem is one of the Creole language.

When I started out in New Guinea the first thing that I learned was talk pigeon because I could pick it up very quickly.

And not a panel of some belong, belong, Malcolm, belong you.

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

I picked it up as I was there.

And was there anything written about the language before you got there?

Like was it possible to study it?

And when they wrote it down did they write it using English alphabet?

That's right. Yeah. There are books. There are grammars of New Guinea pigeon.

I learned New Guinea pigeon initially which is a Creole language with prepositions.

I learned it by talking with New Guinea and then eventually I acquired one or two of these pigeon grammars and a pigeon dictionary and was able to make my pigeon more complex.

Wow. Just as an example, thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science.

But to demonstrate that you can say anything in talk pigeon, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in talk pigeon.

He got one fellow man, man, man, say, what's the name?

Ansar, Ansar, he got this fellow.

He talked long, hard to must, this fellow hard to must, any thermodynamics, this fellow Ansar, he got strong militant.

Now, he, he, he, Malcolm, rule number two, belong, belong, sorry, belong, Tintin, belong, hot, any second law of thermodynamics.

So what did you just say?

What I said, where I said is that a sweet call laws on saga developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is thermodynamics is about heat and on saga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions.

So I explain dispelling on saga, he come up, he, he, Malcolm, rule number two, long, long, savvy, belong, heat, savvy, belong, heat literally knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics, rule number two, long, savvy, belong, heat.

Ansar, he got this fellow strong militant and Ansar, he's got his smart man.

Have you talked to someone in this pigeon, talk pigeon, were they, were you could explain something like that and they could relate to you.

Like they understand what you're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, with, with New Guinea's, so in my work in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use pigeon, in Papua New Guinea, they do use pigeon.

And with New Guinea's, they and I can discuss anything in pigeon.

I 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 a pigeon.

Yeah, that's a weird part of their culture, right?

That they can differentiate the taste between human red meat and human fat.

Well, they say that the human, human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big, flightless bird like a mouse, where it's human fat, they say it's like the, like the, the fat of pigs.

I, I was never offered and I never, I wouldn't have accepted because the place in New Guinea where I began my work was the foray area, the foray where the people who had Kuru,

which is basically mad cow disease, they were the people who were dying of, of, of Kuru, and they were the people that I worked with for the first eight years.

And who were they eating?

Oh, they were rude.

There's what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism.

Exocannibalism is meeting, is eating your dead enemies whom you kill and war.

Endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives.

When the Australian government came in, it was easy for, they for bad cannibalism and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the, the tribe that was being eaten, complained to the government.

And the government told the people who were eating the other people, you can't do that anymore, but endocannibalism.

In New Guinea, traditionally, you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother as you are, I would just throw away, throw away the body of our dead mother.

There were precise rules about who gets to eat, eat what, but, but in general, the, the, the relatives eat, eat the body.

And there were rules about what part of the body you eat.

In 1965, I had working my camp with me, a, a, a, a, a, a, New Guinea, who did not speak pigeon and we were in a remote camp on a mountain.

One, we were getting no visitors cause it was, it was remote.

And one day into camp came a man sat down with, with this guy who didn't speak talk vision, talk with him.

And then the man, 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 on my workers daughter.

And, and that young man had died. He was the prospective son of law of my worker.

And because he was the prospective son of law, my worker was expected.

But it's true. My worker was expected to eat the forearm.

And so he quit his work, quit his work with me and walked away.

He would, he would, there's no way that, that he would fail to eat the forearm of his prospective son of law any more than that you are.

I would throw on mother's body into the ditch.

So he quit working with you because of that?

Because, because the funeral feast was, was going to the son of law just died.

This guy walked into camp, had brought the news to my worker that your prospective son of law has died.

And the funeral feast is going to take place three, three, three days in the future.

So you better come, come now so that you, you are there before the body rots.

That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about,

how the, the Pita Ha deal with their dead. It's very similar.

Like the same, but the thing is the amount of time they have to wait before you eat them is also similar.

Which is, I don't understand totally.

Did they have an explanation for that?

No, and it's hard for me to, for you and me to understand because in the area where my work, I'm quit in order to,

it's a warm heart area at about 3,000 feet.

And the body, dead body is put, is was, it's, it's, it's the government is,

the government is, who ought to put it down, the body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats on it.

And underneath the platform is a bucket.

So, I'm sorry you asked me, the, the body, putifies and the flesh turns to liquid,

the liquid then rips through the slats and the platform down into the bucket.

You then dip your sweet potato in, in, in the bucket of this, this putrid fluid.

And then you, you eat this, the sweet potato.

That's, that's what I'm told.

I, I, I was not offered, I would not accept it if off, but I was told, told by the missionary in the area and by New Guinea 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, um, endocannibalism, they were precise rules about,

right, who gets to eat with body.

But if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and you decided to get married and you married someone of the tribe and then that person died,

would you have had to eat them?

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

But, but according to their rules, would you have?

Um, probably, um, what would you do?

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

Yeah.

I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I, I were the, the foray tribe, they were the people who had Kuru,

which had basically mad cow disease.

Yeah.

And the commonest cause of death among the foray when I was there was Kuru, mad cow disease,

the transmission of the kind of brain tissue, right?

That's right.

Eating the uncooked brain.

Well, even if you cook it, it's, it's a pre-on disease, correct?

It's a pre-on disease.

Pre-on survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying.

A couple hundred degree, not thousand, but they certainly survive.

This is probably a couple hundred degrees.

I thought it was a lot more than that.

I thought there 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 it?

Let's put it into perplexity.

I would, I would like to know like at what temperature do, uh, pre-ons get destroyed because I think it's extraordinarily high.

Maybe there's different pre-ons and different ones of different temperatures.

Maybe it's 600 degrees.

I didn't, because I didn't think it was just raw brain.

I think the issue is any brain tissue of the same species as you is where this disease comes from, which is why cows get it for meeting brain tissue of cows.

And then those pre-ons are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue.

That is true.

That, that's true.

And in fact,

it's not a real good concise answer.

Pre-ons can survive temperatures that kills most microbes, boiling, ordinary cooking, and standard steam sterilization and not reliably sufficient.

Resistance also varies by pre-on strain, what we're talking about, yeah.

And whether the materials wet, dried, or embedded, uh, boiling, 212 degrees, not, uh, dependable, 1,000 degrees.

So, yeah, it's Celsius.

Celsius.

Yo, what is that Fahrenheit?

Reported to destroy pre-on ineffective, infectively.

Uh, this is the level associated with effective incineration.

Yeah, you gotta get, this looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit, so you agreed upon that.

At least for a few hours, is reliably destructive?

Wow.

But even 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours.

Even that's, yeah, well done, doesn't it?

Cooking, yeah, well done cooking does not reliably destroy pre-on.

Uh, what a crazy disease.

A disease you only get from eating each other.

It's almost like nature doesn't want you to eat each other.

Um, the, the reconstructed history of the, why on earth did the foray have this, basically mad cow disease, has the commonest cause of death?

Um, in humans, there's a disease called, quite spelled, yuck-up.

Yes.

Um, which is a spontaneous mutation, and usually spontaneous mutation, it dies out because nowadays, we, we, we need each other.

Each other.

But what's thought to have happened in the foray area, Croixville-Yahkabah rises, really is a spontaneous mutation.

And guess is that someone in the foray area around 1910, developed Croixville-Yahkabah and died, but the foray were practicing endocannibalism.

Um, um, the women would cut up the, the brain, cut up the skull, and the babies with the women would be playing there with a mother.

And this, this soft tissue, the brain that's fun to play with, so the babies would, would play with the brain and then lick their fingers.

So the transmission was by cannibalism, particularly to, to babies, at the time of, and, and it's all thought to have arisen with, with one foray person who had Croixville-Yahkabah and died of it in around 1910, but was then eaten by others, who were in turn eaten still by others.

So that, Kuru, Croixville-Yahkabah, then exploded among the foray.

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, how they kind of hide it. They don't, they don't have that disease.

That makes sense because Croixville-Yahkabah is rare.

Even among cannibals.

Oh, among everybody, Croixville-Yahkabah, it's a rare mutation, like one in 10,000, one in 100,000.

It's pure chance that, that one Croixville-Yahkabah mutation arose in the foray and not in some, and not in any other tribe in New Guinea.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that the, poranah, whatever the name is, didn't have Croixville, didn't have Kuru because nobody in the world, no human population in the world had Kuru except for the foray as a result of that accident of one person with Croixville-Yahkabah evidently getting eaten around 1910.

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

It exists in cows. It exists in sheep and goats. There's a disease of sheep and goats called Scrapey, which is basically, it's a prion disease, and it was Scrapey that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the foray area.

That, when I arrived in the foray in 1964, Kuru was completely mysterious. It affected only the foray.

If a foray went down to Port Morseby, the foray might still develop Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the foray environment.

Forrano, who came into the foray, I didn't develop Kuru. Other Nuginians who came into foray area didn't develop Kuru. The only people who developed Kuru were the foray, but the symptoms of foray of Kuru were, of course, a disease in the outgone, or similar to the symptoms of Scrapey.

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 Kuru, and the doctor managed to get dry eyes shipped into the foray area in order to freeze the foray.

He got shipped back to the National Institute of Health. He did a couple of days, but it was frozen in dry eyes, and he then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the the animal most likely to be able to be infected with human Kuru would be a chimpanzee.

It took three years, I saw that chimpanzee in a cage, and after three years, finally the chimpanzee had been completely healthy, after three years the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of Kuru and died of Kuru, and then that chimpanzee's brain was injected into the brain of other chimpanzees.

The time for infection was shorter. The last death due to Kuru was in 2009. The last funeral feast was 1959, after that the Australians imposed control and banned funeral feast of the last four funeral feast was 1959.

That then would have been the last transmission of Kuru, and the last death was then in 2009, which was 50 years later. So the latency took 50 years for that person who had been infected by eating or licking the brain in 1959.

The next last death was 2005, and the last death was 2009.

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

They were infected in 1959.

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

Very unlikely, because the four are a year year, by the time I got there in 1964, there were missionaries.

You watched them do this thing, were they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified, petrified, putrified?

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

But you knew that they were engaging in this?

Yeah.

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

I was not offered the opportunity to watch.

You were allowed.

Right. And you don't want to push.

One of the Rockefeller's sons that supposedly was consumed by people, a new guinea-headed, insulted them on a previous trip.

He wanted something that was sacred. This was like the lore.

And then he returned, not knowing that he was in danger. They killed him on the boat and then they ate him.

It will moon what happened. So this was Michael Rockefeller, who collected art in the Ballum Valley.

And then he wanted to come down to the south coast with his great art produced in the Asmod area.

He was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer.

And there was a tidal bore that capsized the boat. The boat was swept out to sea.

So what did what did you do? What does Michael Rockefeller do? The Dutch patrol officer do.

The Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim. He had no choice. The chances of being picked up and spotted seem vanishingly low.

Because there wasn't much very little airplane traffic. But the Dutch patrol had no choice.

So Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer. He figured that the chances of 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 misfortune that

as he approached shore, there came a canoe of natives who about five years previously, a Dutch patrol officer,

had come to that village to punish the natives for killing natives of some other village.

And the Dutch patrol officer killed four natives from the village.

So when the natives in that village saw Michael Rockefeller, as far as the natives in concern,

Michael Rockefeller belonged to the same clan of his wife. It was not just, it was not to learn what had happened until some years later.

Because the natives who didn't admit it, they knew that they would be punished.

And did they admit that they consumed him?

I do not know. I think they did that I'm not sure that they certainly killed him.

What is it like hanging around with a group of people who are part of their culture is eating people?

What does it feel like?

I'm not... oh, okay. So the guy who left my camp, he was a nice guy. He was a hard worker. He knew his birds.

Yes, he had this habit which I didn't have, but that's his business.

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

I do weird things that discuss them. So they do weird things that discuss me.

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

I know very... yeah, that was the practice of the Foray and many other tribes with whom I worked.

It was not a rare practice. The way of life there was that each woman, each wife had her own heart.

And the men lived in a communal man's house. The young kids lived with a mother until the boy reached the age of six.

And when the boy reached the age of six, he then moved into the men's house where he developed a homosexual relationship with the adult men.

At teenage, suddenly this boy who's had only men, men relationships, suddenly the tribe has bought for him a girl from the name of tribe.

And he's told that he's supposed to have sex with a woman.

Until then, the boys have been told that women are dirty, defiling. If you touch a woman, you'll be very dirty.

I saw a film made by a medical photographer of two of these small boys the night before they were going to be married to teenage girls.

And the older men were explaining to these 13-year-old boys how you have sex with a woman.

The two boys, they were just disgusted, disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman.

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

What a strange culture.

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 another man's semen as essential to them becoming strong.

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

Well, that's nice. Everyone's allowed their own opinion. I think I'll stick with the way we do it.

When I hear about something like that, I'm always fascinated by how did that ever get started and how did that get universally accepted in a tribe.

My understanding is around the world such relations are not rare.

They're not the rule, but for example, in Central America, there were Native American tribes in Central America, where there were a class of young men who acted as sex partners.

The Spanish, when they came into this area, were utterly disgusted by this practice.

The Spanish had war dogs. These were dogs that were trained to rip people apart.

The Spanish being disgusted by this practice would bring war dogs into an enclosure with these professional sex partners and the war dogs that were then ripped apart.

Oh, God. Well, I don't know if that's how you stand to it, but I have to see their perspective.

Wow. It is so odd how different cultures are that we're all just human beings, but we've agreed on these very, very different ways of behaving all around the world.

As an example of when I was given an opportunity but declined it, I went into an isolated mountain range with three New Guinea's. We were dropped off by helicopter.

I had brought in rice and tinfish and food, but the New Guinea's had brought in some Sego grubs. These are the larvae of a big beetle which the beetle injects its eggs into the Sego palm, and then the larva grows into a large object which looks like a shrimp.

They're fatty and they're high in protein, so the New Guinea's brought in a couple of these Sego grubs, and they offered me a Sego grub.

You didn't want to try it? Part of me was curious, but it just looked so disgusting to see this re- I declined the Sego grub in retrospect.

That makes sense to me out of necessity because it's high in protein and it's just food and they cook it. So there you go, if you cook it it even makes even more sense.

As an example of something that we love, but Paul's New Guinea's, a couple of New Guinea's who lived in the Highlands, I brought down to the coast when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range.

They had never been on the coast. They had never encountered ice cream or anything cold because, of course, they had hot food from cooking, but they had no way of making cold.

So first of all, we stayed in the motel and for the first time in their life they got to sleep in beds. When I asked them the next morning, I had a like sleeping in the bed, one of them said, no good, he had no experience of sleeping in bed.

He rolled out of the bed at night so he didn't like sleeping in the bed. But then I offered him ice cream and one of them 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 New Guinea has never had experience of anything cold.

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

They didn't get it. If I had eaten that say go grub, would I have gotten it?

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

My guess is it tasted like fatty shrimp.

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

No, they cooked them.

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

I personally have not. No, really?

Wow. What have I eaten? I've eaten rattlesnake.

What else have I eaten that's strange?

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

That's right. So in my book, I have a, I have a chapter on Serretti Kama, who is the first president of the African nation of Botswana.

Serretti Kama was the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in Botswana.

But he also was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at the time of independence.

And so he was sent to England for higher education. He got educated. He had higher education at Oxford.

And so he was comfortable in both European and in Native African society. He wore suits. He was a great speaker.

And he graduated law school at Oxford. But in his suit pocket, in his jacket pocket, he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers,

which was standard food in his area of Botswana. And he would offer his guests, his European guests, or his African guests.

Would you like to have a dried grasshopper? And he would pop in the dried grasshoppers.

I have had friends who've eaten dried grasshoppers and they said, they were okay. I could not bring them.

They don't taste, well, I didn't have grasshoppers. I had crickets. They don't taste bad at all.

I ate a live roach once for a fear factor. It didn't taste like much. It was disgusting because it was just the concept of it was disgusting.

But the taste of it was very bland. It was not that bad at all. It's just protein.

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

There was a leader who really made a difference. And that's a case of someone.

He was the only one who could have done it. The reason is, he was the only one who could have made Botswana successful as founding president.

Because he was the chief of the largest, most powerful tribe in Botswana.

When Botswana became independent, they set up a two-house legislature based on the British model.

But the upper house was a house of chiefs. And the house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of the chiefs.

It was a bad idea for Botswana democracy. But Serretti Kama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe, he was the only person in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief.

And the other thing was that Botswana's financial stability has come from diamonds. The diamonds were discovered after independence.

They had been discovered before independence. The British and the beers would have made a deal with the British and the beers.

But in fact, the diamonds were discovered like six months after independence. And they were discovered on the land of Serretti Kama's tribe.

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 Serretti Kama's tribe and Serretti Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana.

And not just his tribe, Serretti Kama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property of the Botswana nation, not of the individual tribe.

So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds and he was the only person who could have undone the power of the chiefs.

Plus, in addition, because he was equally comfortable in European society and in Africans society. And he married a European woman.

He was respected in Europe very successful as a diplomat and he was respected among African countries.

Imagine if that practice had taken place in America where all the resources, all the natural resources were the property of the society of America and not of individuals.

Imagine how different this world would look if the oil and gas, just the oil and gas. And of course the minerals, the rare earth minerals. Imagine if they were just the property of the collective United States.

Good point. And in most African countries, it's as in the United States. So diamonds and emeralds and coal all belong to the tribe on whose land they found but not in Botswana.

And the result is that Botswana is the, I believe they have the second richest country in Africa. The richest country in Africa is the equatorial guinea.

And it's very rich because it's got oil and the average per capita income in equatorial guinea is something like $10 or $20,000.

That's because the president has an annual income of like $500 billion. And everybody else has an annual income of like $100 and you average it out. And that's why equatorial guinea has the highest average income.

That's messing with the numbers. That's messing with the numbers. But in Botswana, the population of the country is only $3 million.

And the money from the diamonds goes, as in the case of Norway, goes into a sinking fund. It's not spent as you go, but it's invested on long term basis.

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

Well, listen, Jared, I just want to thank you for all your work over the years, collapse, guns, germs and steals. You've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in society and in history and made it very entertaining and very consumable.

Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you. I was told in advance that I would enjoy a lot talking with you, provided that I was not an N5, was something that you disprove of, but that otherwise I should look forward to pleasurable experience.

And in fact, my wife got Joshua to send her three snippets of view and, and yes, I anticipated that it would be pleasurable time.

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

Thank you.