#2549 - Jared Diamond

>> The Joe Rogan experience.

“>> Join my day Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.”

[MUSIC] >> Very nice meeting you, sorry. >> That's a pleasure to be here. >> Great pleasure to meet you. >> I really enjoyed guns, germs, and steel,

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

>> I've done podcasts quite a few podcasts at home in my wife's study on my wife's tell screen, and I've done face-to-face interviews like with you. >> Okay, cool. >> So, first of all, why do you write this book?

>> Why do 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 in the war. My father paced up on the war, my bedroom,

a map of the European theater, in the Pacific theater,

and there was always the question, why it happened,

“and it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome?”

Then, I moved to Europe, I lived in England. I lived in Germany, I love German music, I love the German language, why, and then I moved to Chile. I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America, before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming with Pinochet,

his own fellow generals didn't see it coming, and so there's been throughout my life this question, do bad as well as good people make a difference, also my wife is my wife is post, the last of my family in Europe, disappeared in the whole course,

Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz, she survived, but offensive of family didn't survive, and so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question, and then leaders have made a difference in my life. There was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department,

who, when a pump wared a pump that I've 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 there was lobby, you have to be careful with water pumps,”

and be more careful in the future, that permitted my scientific career to continue, other people might have thrown me out, so leaders have made a difference in my life. Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world,

and one of the things that really terrifies me is, Nazi Germany was not that long ago, and there was a time in my life where I think most people

generally agreed that that could never happen again,

that that type of scenario where a group of people are completely other to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it, that we thought we were done with that, forever. I don't believe that anymore.

As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is, and that there is always these battles for lack of better terms, good and evil, good leaders who generally just want something good for their people, they want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone who made a difference, and then leaders who just want to take over all the systems,

and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country, and change it, and you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders, either having successful runs or not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration,

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

There's so many instances what if JFK didn't get shot, what if Martin Luther King Jr didn't get shot? There's so many different moments in history where you go, how would culture look, how would society, how would civilization look,

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 a Cambodian population. In even ways, he encouraged children to kill their parents, Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet didn't kill a, his body count wasn't nowhere near, Hitler's body count because Chile's a small country,

and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate large fractional population, but the torches that he implied, I said, two, they were far worse than anything that the Nazis did, and he surprised his fellow generals,

so all that is a surprise, as for leaders can do either good or bad,

or they can do nothing, if you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference, Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers, but they're about, I can boil it down to four or five things, a lead has to be at the right time in place, some leaders recognize that it's the right time in place and they see it,

Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of popular electronics with the Intel ADAD chip, Bill Gates said to Steve Allen, "Now is the time, we got to start now," building my crew 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 pointed Prime Minister, he said, "I knew that this was the occasion for which my whole life was 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 in place. There are other leaders who are at the right time in 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 they had been some before and some afterwards, but the changes in the internet made 2004 particularly good year. So leaders, some leaders choose the time in place to go all dead,

some leaders find themselves on the right time in place of what they did in manufacturer, Winston Churchill did, and some leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, and Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland, and yet there were other people who tried

by the Battle of Holland and Timor, the Turk, whited Genghis Khan's succeed, well, within the last 10 years, students of treorings have figured out that on the Mongolian step, the wetest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away,

we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan, but he happened to been born at the right time in place, because with all that rain, that meant hay, to feed sheep and goats, to feed Mongol babies, and it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle.

So Genghis Khan was someone at the right time in place, but he had no idea, and we didn't have any idea until the streering study of the last decade. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website,

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What a British aristocrat, a family name, a country, a family, and when you're the Duke of Hellstead, a canterbism period, and with it, you can also invest in the empire in the western region. There are only one species, Italy, and the city of Borsal, the island of Ungarn, the gentlemen, Staffel II, now on the island.

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 I 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.

It's also the strategy of they never settled down, they always were in tents, and they

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

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

Absolutely. He's kind of an extraordinary individual. It took two things together. The second thing, the first thing was that he was at the right time in place, but he also had to be an extraordinary person.

If he had been an equally extraordinary person at some other time in place, we wouldn't know anything about him. So you are correct at a given time in place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge, but who emerges depends upon the personal qualities, for example, to take to take religion. The first century AD of the wealth of the Roman Empire was the perfect time in place to

found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later.

It was the Roman Empire, was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia, and so Christianity

was founded in the Roman Empire then, but the Roman Empire was the 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 father had any idea that 15 centuries later, the religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then was spread around the world.

It was the right time in place, but there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who veryically got killed by the Romans, of the six candidates, Christ was most successful, but Christ also, to found a religion,

“you have to be charismatic number one, you have to be an outstanding organizer, Christ died”

to early, it was saying Paul, who was the outstanding organizer, and Orhan religions also need a great general. In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader, and the organizer in the general. From Mohammed was an outstanding, he was charismatic, and he was a great organizer, he was a great general, the moddy of the Sudan, who established the empire in East Africa, fantastic, general,

and organiser, 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, to establish East Africa just didn't have the technology and the demographics at where his Christianity did. The Paul thing is very interesting, because the more I read about the Bible and the construction

of it, the more it just gives you pause, like Paul was really kind of the creator of Christianity,

because he never met Jesus, so Jesus never spoke to him, and Jesus never wrote anything down,

and so when Paul has this vision, on the road to Damascus, and he has this, whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus, we're taking the entire religion is based on

“this guy saying that I think he set all these things 20 years after he set him, 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's fascinating that Paul never met him, and Jesus never wrote anything down, so when Paul's

“talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history, which is really strange,”

an oral history that it takes 20 years 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, the gospel according to Monarch, is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus. Yeah, so we have no first person accounts of of Jesus. It would be really nice if we wrote things down. It would have made things more certain.

In the case, in the case of Mohamed, it was two centuries before things got written down, so we know even less about Mohamed. That's great. And we do about Jesus. Or a difference also between Mohamed 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 Ganges Khan and Mongolia? Was it that

at the time of Mohamed'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 Mohamed was at the right place and right time, but we can't nail it down the way we can with Ganges Khan and the way we

“can with Jesus. It's interesting, too, because Mohamed was essentially a prophet, right?”

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 were someone becomes the person who has all the rules and everyone follows those rules or your ostracized from the kingdom, like, and there's so many of them. 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. 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

without any judgments on religions. Someone's got to be wrong. If you have all have completely different origin stories, but it's so fascinating to me in particular that people want to have this sort of a structure. It gives them comfort. You can get entire populations to go along with it. Right. One might say that the religious teachings are secondary. In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to five religions that have gone around

the world. Mormon religion, seven-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian science.

“Why have the Mormons been so successful? Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings?”

We do respect to the Mormons. The religious teachings of Jehovah's Joseph Smith are of modest merits, but the Mormons were very well organised under Brigham Young, and the social features of the Mormon religion. Their optimism, their emphasis on living the fulfilling life on being happy, and they're expecting every Mormon. If you are Mormon, you tie to yourself.

You don't fill out a 1040 income tax form. Mormons are expected to devote 10 percent of their

income to the church and they calculate themselves. That's a big commitment. So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic, and because Brigham Young then was an outstanding leader. This episode is brought to you by Keytoon IQ. I've tried a lot of supplements, but for years have been one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my brain locked in and that's Keytoons.

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So go ahead and take your shot. They've also done an excellent job of instilling a sense of

“community amongst fellow Mormons that I think is, I don't think there's another religion that”

quite has reached that level. They are the nicest people. Like I have yet to run into an asshole that's a Mormon. It's kind of shocking. 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 have it nailed other than the nine wives and all that other jazz, but that seems like an offset of the original idea. With Dures back to the theology of Christianity, the idea of a

virgin birth and a sense of heaven is stretching. It's hard to understand. I don't think it could be claimed that the belief in a virgin birth was a major fact of propelling Christianity. Instead,

“there were many things that propelled Christianity. This gets interesting. The questions”

outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, because Roman religion

had a low view of women. Children did not have a high prestige. There was frequent abortion where 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. When you look at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, Christians lived long, and they were less likely to die than were pagans. The result was

that Christianity started out as a few dozen people under Jesus and even in Saint Paul's time.

“What, maybe 100 people, Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire.”

On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism, emphasized writing and so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, all of these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate. Christianity had reasons for its success that would do respect to nothing to do with the virgin birth. Yeah, of course. It's really interesting. The way you just outlined the reason why Christianity was successful, you could say that that same pattern is being

mirrored by Muslims that they strict adherence to religion, they emphasize having many children, and they take care of the community. And their populations are rising while a lot of secular people, their populations are dropping off. That's true. With Muslims as with Christianity, I would not, I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social

connections, and maybe, although we don't know something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs, I see as the reason behind Islam's spread. Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of constructing it, the way it's practiced today, the people that are Muslims are devoutly Muslims. There's a large population of them that are very religious, and that population is very, I think that whole

They don't really know why they're here. They don't really know what life is for,

existential angst, society seems pointless, the constant pursuit of material possessions with finite lifespan, something that you can join where everyone is all in, and they're very locked in and disciplined, and that discipline, you know it takes a lot to agree, to pray five times a day. It takes a lot where everyone agrees, where I'm going to play music and pray five times a day, and we're a part of a team, and if you leave, the punishment is death. So if you decide that you

don't want to be a part of this anymore, and you don't believe anymore, and you announce that,

they can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like you're all in, and you're all in

“for life, and we all support each other. And it's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people.”

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, and that we follow those people like universally, like we follow charismatic, confident people, universally, and charismatic

confident people that have a very strong belief system, and you got all these other people that are part of this strong belief system, there's a compelling force that makes you want to join. Something that is also true of Mormonism, although in somewhat 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. Yes. And so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe in the Pacific. There's one other thing that I'd like to say here.

And that is that people often ask me, Jared Gonsderm's steel neglects individual people. It's about things that happen over the last 10,000 years, and Gonsderm's steel, the different outcomes of societies and 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 Gonsderm's steel with leaders? And my first response would be to say

that Gonsderm's steel is about entire continents for 10,000 years. We have 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, we are an individual, makes a difference. 2000 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 200 years now, but the prospects are that Joseph Smith again will have a long lasting influence. Whereas I can't, I can think of a politician or a business person who has

“had an effect 2000 years later. Well I think Gonsderm's steel highlighted all the factors that”

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

have to be in place. They're not, it's not either or, right? Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing, convincing priests and devoted priests, but behind these convincing, devoted priests were European Gonsderm's steel, European smallpox, European measles that killed Farmo and Native Americans, then did European

economic and demographic engine, the moddy of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are

“of has been incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general, his small troops”

with sticks and stones, never wiped out British led Egyptian armies with machine guns and then

his organizational ability, but so the 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, and sometimes the chips all align perfectly. Right, let's keep that microphone up to you, face. My apologies, sorry. My apologies, you have the reverse officer. So examples of everything, everything aligning in the business world,

Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs out of 340 million Americans today were 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 in 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 fact 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 had happened, if you tried to do that, what he did was really fascinating, because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea, like cell books, cell books online, like okay, but you can get books at Barnes and Noble, you can get books anywhere. There was bookstores everywhere. It was kind of easy to get books, but then the whole, you can buy toothpaste too, and 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, Tik Tokki, 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 laugh that his goal and life was to set up an online bookstore. It was his goal and

explicit his goal and life was to set up an everything store, but he recognized that and everything store has to start out with something. Really? So he started out with books. He started out with book because he recognized that books were ideal thing to start out with, or books are uniform. It's not that you buy a diamond and 78. There are different types. All the books are uniform. And there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could

get books and customers and stores are not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared Darwin's profits profits. Every copy is the same. Jeff Bezos regularly explicit that books are a good thing to start out with, having started out with books. He then reasoned what a good thing to move on to. Then he moved on to perfume and jewelry. He waited quite a while

to move on to whatever else he moved on to. So he was a strategic. Yeah. It's kind of amazing because

“if it didn't take place, what would online shopping look like? Would somebody else have figured that out?”

I wonder. That's a great example. There was online. Sorry. There were everything stores. But not to that level. Not to that level before Jeff Bezos. Before Jeff Bezos. There was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. And after Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on couple to a brick and mortar store. Whereas Jeff Bezos

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

stores by making an online. Also being the first to figure out the whole one-click thing.

When you have an account, your credit cards listed, you know what you need? Bam, one-click,

“toilet paper on the way, arrives by 4pm. Let's go. That's right. You have to go to the store.”

And now you get groceries delivered too. And eventually it's going to be robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right? Yeah. Yeah. This again illustrates

that Jeff Bezos was strategic at a 340 million Americans. If Jeff Bezos hadn't done it,

maybe somebody else would have done it. But what we know for sure is that there were and before

“and there were afterwards other ways to develop and everything store, which 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 it did happen afterwards. But he did it in a distinctive way. What is a British aristocrat? A family name. A country. A family.

And when you're the Duke of Hellstead, you're a little bit of an empire and you're with it. But even though there are now some of the empire in WAX, it's just Italy. There are only one Italian mafia bossial business partner, the artist Ungang Tile. The gentleman, Staffel II, now Anzien. Only on Netflix. I often think what would society look like if there wasn't a stock market.

If the concept of investing in other people's businesses was just never discussed, never heard, no one invented it.

What would the world look like? 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 this obligation to your shareholders to make more money, which makes you more ruthless, cut more corners, pay people less, do everything you can to save as much money possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders. If we didn't have stock markets hadn't developed, stock markets would have developed, namely it seems a unique way of doing things and it didn't take a person or didn't take an accident.

A stock market is as logical as, 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. That all encourages growth. It makes us uncomfortable because it's unchecked growth sometimes and we worry about people getting too big and people getting pushed aside.

But it is a fascinating engine for growth. Right. It raises the question, are some things inevitable on some broad form, but some individual places a stamp on the board, for example, cell phones.

“There were cell phones before iPhones and Steve Jobs. There was, I think, the Korean Samsung.”

I had a Motorola start tag back in the day. I have a cell phone that my wife and son forced me to get in. I use it to do my email and that's all about it. You don't get on TikTok? Do any dances? Nothing. Nothing. No memes. I'll send you some memes.

He cared a lot about parents and he cared a lot about simplicity, including simplicity, the gadget, but simplicity also with the overall business.

“When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, then went downhill for a decade until Steve Jobs would brought back.”

And when Steve Jobs would brought back, one of the first things he did was to say, there were too many products. We should not have 100 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 song Joshua and Max to talk us through. And I wrote it down. And when I wrote it down, I still didn't get it right. So I still call up Josh and that because there are so many buttons.

Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. My iPhone has one too. I think it's got four buttons. Last night, I discovered an essential button. I didn't realize that on the left side, the most recent conversation that I had with my iPhone, the sound quality was very poor. I knew from rehabbing 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? 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 where you press it for the volume and it goes up. Possibly, but I would call that way. Certainly with my iPhone, the read did explain to me when she forced me to get the the iPhone. She showed me that of these four buttons. And two, these lengthy things on the left of volume control. But I didn't remember when the lower one increased the volume. I didn't do a touch of them because I was afraid that I would ruin the device. That was only yesterday that I tried pushing the upper one.

I got a lot of volume. Now I know that. Well, then there's a button above that too that silence is the phone or makes the ringer go on. You know what that? That one I know. There's this tiny device. And if I push it to the right, the tiny device looks orange. And that means that I will not be disturbed.

So my device is always on orange.

And if I push it back on the rear occasions when I'm expecting the phone call, then I push it back and it's no longer orange. It's all due respect. It is so fascinating to me that a man so brilliant is 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. What everybody knows how to do the things you're saying here. It is an insanely complicated thing from another planet from from childhood onwards. I've always been been technical.

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, make it yourself radios.”

And they were, I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. My father then got, my father was a physician inside. He got someone in his lab to put my phone together. When I, when I went to, went to Cambridge England to get my PhD in physiology, they were various organs I could have worked on. I could have worked on the electric organ of electric yields. I could have worked on muscle, but I had no idea how to build the plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions. But when a lecturer in my beginning physiology court 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.

All it required was that I put a little plastic annual 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, and it turns out that the gallbladder does what the kidney and intestine and more important organs do, but the gallbladder is much more convenient to study.

So I made my reputation as a physiologist with a gallbladder precisely because I could not build the ham radio. I can't, nor can I figure out my iPhone, nor can I do any other technology.

That's fascinating. So it's like you're averse to it. Like it, you don't like it. There's something about technology that it just, almost repulses you. That's true. I'm incompetent at it, and I feel a few lousy and frustrated when I try to do it. Instead, I try to do everything in the simplest way possible. So one of my secrets was successful. Let me show you what this is. The whole 0.7mm pencil. It has one device. I advanced it and the lead advances. My books, I write my books by hand. Really? Yep. And after I've written my hand, I then correct the draft by hand. And once I've cleaned up the draft, then I dictated into my iPhone, my 3, 4, but 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 a racing?”

Yes. I had more by crossing out. I do some editing by a racing. For example, I flew into Houston on Sunday, and yesterday was a damn time for me.

I had an event in the evening. I spent yesterday revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of the One Dom and Peninsula of New Guinea. New Guinea, the island of New Guinea, has ten isolated mountain ranges on the North Coast, and I personally have explored ten of those and for many of them. I've discovered the highest peak and I've inventoryed their birds. So yesterday I was working on a paper on the birds of One Dom and Mountains. I used a behold and a racer and a racer. I used a racer and I used my 0.7 millimeter pencil. I cleaned up my hand written 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. When you edit the draft, when she types up a draft and you edit it, are you just writing on it, writing on the printed draft?

“Yeah, is there another way to do it? Well, rewrite it again. That's what I'm worried about.”

I'm worried you're saying you're writing all the edits by hand again. If I have to rewrite it massively, then I will retipe it. But if you will type it. Oh, yeah. Okay, so you're not averse using a typewriter or a keyboard. No, when I was about 80, when I was about 80 years old, I had chickenpox and I stayed home from, I had to stay home from school for two years.

I, during those two weeks, I learned to use a typewriter, but I got cured of chickenpox after I had done the first three rows.

So I can touch type the bottom three rows, but I cannot touch type the top row. That's hilarious. I'm a faster type than any secretary that I've ever had. Really? Wow. And only touch typing the first three rows. That's right. That's hilarious. I, there's a lot of people that I know that write long hand, and they, they like to write like with a pen on paper, whether it's a book or anything, songs, a lot of songwriters, like most songwriters that I know,

they write on pieces of paper or they improvise it and then write it down as they're improvising it.

“But it's so much easier and quicker to type. That's what drives me nuts.”

Like, I know that I remember things much better when I write them down physically, but I can type pretty quickly, and I don't have to look at the keys. I touch type.

is that my, my style, my English pro style, is different if I type it, than if I write it.

When, when I type it, I notice that, that my style is more wordy. We're, as if I write it down, my style is more simplified and, 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,

or then if you're typing, it's like so quick that maybe put some extra stuff in that

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 writing, typing is faster, and so, so typing reflects better. It's not my thinking. Whereas if I'm writing, it takes longer for me to, to write a word than to type it, and so I have to think a little more. When I'm writing, I'm doing more of the organization, then 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, that icon, when I press that icon, it allows me to dictate in other languages, so the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I do my correspondence on my iPhone, in Italian and German, because of this little device. Now, this little, when my, by force me to get the iPhone, there were a few buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about,

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

So I learned, and I do my correspondence during an Italian, never, never by hand, I always do it on the iPhone.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing.

“With AI now, they have, I think Google was the first to do this, I think Samsung phones definitely had this,”

where you could have someone speak to you, and it would translate their words in real time. So you could have a real honest conversation with someone in another language. I guess they would have to put on headsets as well, and you would be able to talk back and forth, and it would absolutely change. And in the future, they're going to have it set up where it'll do it in your voice. So you will say something in English, it'll translate it perfectly in Spanish, and it'll translate it as Jared Diamond.

Instead of like some robot voice, Mr. Diamond wants to know, instead of that, you would get your actual voice, which is, you know, we're getting close to like tower of Babel type stuff here, like universal language. The ability to instantaneously translate everything all the time, so everybody knows that everybody's saying, very unique time.

“This has a very interesting history in which I was secondarily involved in the 1970s.”

Zerox Park in Palo Alto, got the idea of got the idea of automatic translation, and so that they set up a research group, a well-founded research group. I had a close friend who was a member of that research group, and the goal of zerox Park, which was well-founded, was to develop a device that would do. So I'm obtaining a translation. They failed. It was a couple of decades later. The reason was there were two things that were complicated that were not understood in the 1970s. One was, we didn't understand enough about the structure of language, and 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 zerox Park, they had a sentence. The phrase "out of sight out of mind" and they had their attempted technology to translate this into Russian, and then from Russian to translated back into English.

But it took a couple of decades to overcome that.

This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week there's some new wellness hack that people swear by, and after a while you start thinking, "Why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies?"

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I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this. If you want to try Armra is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts, go to armra.com/rogan. Well, which brings us back to religious texts, which is 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 the things get.

Right, the beginning of the Gospel, according to Saint John, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, word.

So, the Saint John was not written in English. It was written in Greek or translated into Greek, and the Greek word for word is "logos". The Greek word "logos" means word, but it also means rational system, and so when you translate the first line of the Saint John Gospel in the beginning was the word.

“There was much more. In the beginning was a system and organization, not just a word, but that's an example of the difficulties of translating the whole language.”

Let me give you another example. The last foreign language that I learned was Italian, and I now read Italian every day, but in Italian there are two words that mean "I love". In English there's only one word that mean "I love". In Italian you can either say "I'm Mo", or "Volio Bené", "Volio Bené", literal means "I wish you well". Surprisingly, to me, in Italian physical love, sexual love is "Volio Bené", which is literally the word "love".

I'm always the root of the amateur. It's the root for love and other languages. That's a friendly love, rather than a sexual love. So we're having these two words for love. Another example.

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

For say, "Dais de Rio", but 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. You know, when something stupid happens, you know, you break your shoelace. Oh, I love it when that happens. We have a lot of uses of that word "love". That's right. That illustrates the difficulty of translating for one language or another. So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, I'm happily mad. If I were to have an Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake of saying her to her "T amo", and I didn't say "Tvoio Bené", I would be thrown out.

A German example is that the German language has two words meaning meaning to eat. Essen and Fresson. Essen is eat referring to humans, and Fresson is eat referring to animals, but a person who gobbles up a lot of stuff. You say that person is Fresson. I'll give you an example from the only New Guinea language that I made much progress learning, the four-ray language of Papabua New Guinea. In the four-ray language, the verb to be, in English we have just one verb to be. In four-ray 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 Windia is to be referring to an animal.

I'd already learn the word for water, which is Dr. Juaní, Juaní, and in four-ray, and Dr. Juan was word for that sort of frog.

“So I said to, I was practicing the four-ray that I just learned. I said to a four-ray man, "Dr. Juan, Windia."”

And he shook his head severely. Windia, because I'd use the inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog when I should have used the animal. And it would be English does not make that worse. Wow.

The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference.

That is such a giant difference. So it's 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. Well, my friend Rick Straussman, 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 and it's original form.

And he's like a highly recommended, I'm like, "Well, that's a lot. You're asking a lot."

“But he felt like the only way he could really understand what they were saying, what it really meant was to really truly understand the language and be able to read it and speak it.”

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. You're, for example, the illiet, Homer's illiet. The English text of the illiet will begin by saying something like, "I sing of the wrath of Achilles, the terrible wrath, the destroyed so many Greeks."

So that's how it comes out in English. The original Greek is "main and aid." So the first word in the illiet is "rath."

Mainan, the second word is "I aid it, sing the third word as goddess." So literally it's "rath, sing goddess." And then then the wrath of Achilles, son of Pelius, the illiet as it was written in Greek, that is a great first line. And it loses its power and translation. Hmm. I wonder if AI could reinterpret certain books that have been translated and do so in a way that accurately reflects the context and what they were saying. Like instead of sticking to the original translations of these books, like the illiet, 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 illiet to be able to really have to be able to read it in Greek. Yes, 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, as least originally, the so-called Semitic Afro-Asiatica languages, the vowels were non-essential, a word root was specified just by the consonant.”

And so the early texts of the Bible, and of, say, Phoenician, had just the consonants, not the vowels, the vowels, it wasn't ambiguity.

Where is with English? You can't dispense with the vowels.

That's 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 that for us to try to understand exactly what they were saying, the power in their words is almost impossible. And, for example, my books get translated into lots of languages, the Conservatives, you have been translated into 45 languages, and one thing that I can see.

I see how, because I've got all of you to, I see how thick of the additions, the German and German edition is always the thickest.

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

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

Yes, yes, yes, and German grammar is distinctive. The German vocabulary is distinctive.

So when you ask, is it the same? Any language 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 Peter Ha, people in the Amazon jungle, and learning their language.

“Was this Daniel ever? Yes, Daniel ever? Yeah. Have you spoken to him before?”

I've corresponded with him. Brilliant guy. And such a fascinating conversation. I mean utterly fascinating that he had no writing, no studies, nothing to go by, and he had to construct their language and write it down over the course of years and years of learning how to say things with them. So in New Guinea is the most language rich part of where there are a thousand languages, not dialogue, 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 purposes 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 Lake Plains of in the New Guinea, next to a tribe called the Faui Yao, being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understand this language. The Faui Yao language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese has either five tones, mainland and Mandarin and six tones, Cantonese or vice versa.

This woman linguist, she had been living for 15 years with the Faui Yao, and she had already identified 12 tones.

“She thought there might be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't, wasn't sure that, but among the Faui Yao, you have to get the tone right.”

The syllables are mostly, they're mono syllable, like Bae, but Bae, you can pronounce in 12-do, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, Bae, and one of those Bae means sweet potato and another Bae means snake and another Bae means delicious and another Bae means feces and then there's another Bae that means mother and law. And so if a linguist or if a young child learning Faui Yao says something with Bae and gets the tone wrong and you want to say beloved mother and law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato and you drop the Bae instead of rising the Bae.

Oh my God, but a consequence of that is this link, this link was noticed that when little kids are going around with Faui village, with their mother, there's not a back and forth conversation.

It says 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 Faui Yao, if you get the pronunciation slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother and law into feces dropping snake. How did those two get so close? That seems to me 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 to not be able to catch what you're saying as you're walking out the door?”

No. That's not what I said. No, no, no, I said beloved mother and law. That's hilarious. What a British lawyer is so close to an ordinary woman. A man is a man. And if you're the one who is a man, a little bit of a period and you're talking about it.

But even though there's only one person in the period, there's a little bit of a Italy. Italy's mafia boss, as well as the artist, Ungang Tile. The gentleman, Staffel 2, now on the scene. Just on Netflix.

“Where are the white roses from Athens? And where do they get roses for me?”

Of course, in Europe, Sarium is a house with the greatest roses in the world. Many thousand roses were made on them, with the bright and beautiful flowers.

What was the first truly literate society?

That we know. The first writing was in the fertile crescent of the Middle East. It was what's called Cuneiform. The wedge shape symbols. It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end. So the writing was done. Cuneiform writing was done with a stylus. Cuneiform was used to write many different languages. It was used first to write a cadian, which was the language of the first empire of the fertile crescent. And Cuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey, which is the oldest, most distinct, Indo-European language.

Hittite was also written in Cuneiform. So Cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems. Just as the English alphabet or the Roman alphabet is used to write German and Swedish and it's used to write four-ray the New Guinea language that I work with.

The Phoenicians. The first Greek writing was linear B of Homer's Homer's Troy.

It was a slab of writing system and around then the Greek lost writing for a couple of centuries, and then they lost it totally. They became illiterate. So the whole culture, at the time the Trojan War, the Greeks wrote in linear B this slab of 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 labic linear B system. It was instead derived from the Phoenician alphabet. So it was alphabetical writing. That it was not so labic, but it was alphabetical alphabetic.

And the Greeks added vowels, the Phoenicians, because it was Afro-Aziatic 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 AD800, which then got modified slightly into the Etruscan alphabet in Italy, and the Greek alphabet then got modified into the Roman alphabet for Latin.

So the first writing system, then, was, was, killing the Phoenician form, and then there were syllabic writing systems.

“And then came alphabet. Japanese is the world's most complicated writing system, because it's really four writing systems.”

Japanese has two syllabaries, for example, my name, Diamond, the Japanese writing into diamond no dough. Because Japanese doesn't put two consonants together, so my name comes out diamond no dough, the need 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 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 boxes 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. How is this wonderful writing system?

“One of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols, and Genghis Khan, is the book, the Lost History of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish, right?”

Because it wasn't written, like it was written phonetically like the Mongolian language, but in Chinese, is that what it was? Is that how they did it? One of my classmates at Harvard, Joe Flecher, was the person who rediscovered that Mongol book and figured out how to read it? Really? That wasn't till they were early 1960s. That's insane. But there are, of course, the writing system that we still can't read, the atruscans, the people of Italy, whom the Romans eventually conquered. So, the atruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly. We have some atruscans writing in stone. The longest, but all, all-truscans books got burnt or lost.

The longest atruscans 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 a truss. It was a piece of a truss handwriting because there's a long atruscans text on it, and the shroud was then reused to wraps up someone's book. The result is that we can pronounce a truss handwriting. We can read it because it's Greek letters, but we don't know the meaning of the words for the most part.

They're aren't rosetta stones for atruscans. The closest we come to it is that dyes, dices, six, six-sided dices have been found in atruscans 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 truss can symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six, but we don't know which one of them is six and which one is three and which one of them is four.

“Have you ever seen the Easter Ireland language that they can't translate?”

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

Right, it's quite mysterious. There are only few samples of Easter Ireland writing note. They're all in wood. The first European visitor.

There it is, right there. Yes, all right. The first European visitor to Easter Ireland, of whom we have a record, was the Dutch Rogovine in, I think, 1722. And he did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Ireland in the 1770s.

These May have seen Spaniards with wooden sticks, looking at the wooden sticks and doing things, and that may have given the Easter Ireland as the idea to invent writing system of their own.

“So it's possible that it was laid invention inspired by the Spaniard, but a case where we know that happened.”

The Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas, no Native Americans had 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 would talk to each other, and they got a lot of power. They were able to communicate with each other. So he realized that they were writing down words, but he had no idea about what the writing system was. He didn't know where there was an alphabet, he didn't know about alphabet, he tried different writing system.

He spent about ten years doing it, and he finally ended up with a syllaberry, where the symbols are for syllables, not letters.

The Cherokee syllaberry, as 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 headed that piece of paper through another Cherokee to whom he is taught as writing system. And that other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the Cherokee, the other end of the football field at the field had set.

So Sequoia, in that way, convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing. Wow, that's fascinating, like knowing the origin of a culture of 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?

“When did we know, if you've seen the news discovery on a go-backly tap-a, 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 chameleon 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. It is the case with Cunia form, although we think of Cunia form as having a written round 3500 BC. Irving the Finkel. That's it.

“This is a did Irving Finkel find ancient writing and go-backly tap-a.”

We know that Cunia form, they were marks going back several thousand years. And they had to debate among Mingling with whether those marks are the earliest proto-writing. It's suspected that the marks were used to count sheep, they function as numerals, they might have had word for sheep.

But what's clear is every writing system of them, the first writing, one has to ask,

"My did have been copied from the first writing, but the first writing had to be a new invention." Right. And there are at least three writing systems that wish we are sure are independent of Cunia form because it was the first writing system we know of. The second word 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 had writing, syllabic write. The Maya had lots of books which Bishop Blanda 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 1,300 BC.

So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently, the fertile crescent,

“which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing.”

Then we Cunia form in the fertile crescent, Mexican writing, and then Chinese writing. And then possibly, Eastern 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.

“So the Ireland of Crete had Linear B, which was the earliest 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 tax. It's suspected that Linear A recorded the non-language of the non-crete, whatever that language is.

We don't know the language.

That would have been, might have been another independent venture writing. But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete, and Greece, and Cyprus, and the Levant from Palestine, up to Lebanon, and then Anatolia, Turkey, all that Bronze Age civilisation 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 civilisation of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey, and the Hittite empire.

And 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 civilisation in the whole eastern Mediterranean, and we don't know why, why we don't know whether it was an invasion, writing a Egyptian writing at the time, talks of sea peoples, people came by the sea, and fought with the Egyptians, so we don't know whether of the collapse of the Bronze Age

was because of invaders from the sea, or whether it was because of climate change, or whether it was because of the mention of new weapons. It's just insane that they could completely lose their language, and then come up with a whole new way of writing. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to, okay, other other examples of it.

Let's see, India, the so-called Harapun civilization of India and Pakistan, in the Indus Valley, there was a high civilization called Harapun civilization, between about 3,000, 2000 BC, and they had writing. We have their seals, their rings that we used to stamp with wax, but we don't have any wrong texts, the longest text on one of these rings

is only three or four symbols, there are several hundred different symbols. We can't read it, Harapun writing disappeared, and then writing reemerged in India with Alexander the Great, when Alexander of Macedon invaded India after Alexander evacuated into 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 Harapun writing, and then 2000 years later completely different writing system emerged.

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 higher glyphs emerged about 3,000 BC. Higher glyphs have absolutely nothing to do with Kuneiform. We can read Kuneiform, we can read higher glyphs, but it's suspicious that higher glyphs 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 higher glyphs 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 beautiful,”

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

It kind of makes sense. Right, it's a clear example of a writing system being invented,

not gradually involving, but bang the earliest higher glyphics of full higher glyphics.

Very strange. Right, there's another example of Korean writing. Okay, so Korean writing, the Korean writing had gold, which groups letters into syllables. This is not a writing system that gradually evolved.

“Instead, a king of Korea called King Sae Jong,”

around roughly the year 1430. Until then, Koreans wrote with Chinese based writing system. And King Sae Jong had a famous proclamation, which Koreans learned by memory. King Sae Jong's proclamation says,

"It greaves me that our people write the Korean language with Chinese like writing when the sounds of the words of the Chinese language are not similar to the Korean writing. Therefore, I, King Sae 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 was hand-gull of King Sae Jong invented hand-gull himself at a bang. There was no precedent. That's an excellent example of how one individual, one leader, can radically transform a society.

What a British historian, to be a family name, a country, a family, and when you are the Duke of Hellstead, you can now understand the importance of the empire. There are only one heart. Italy's mafia bossial business partner, the German, the German. The German, two, now the German.

Only on Netflix. Where does the Western Russian know about it? And where does the Western Russian know about it? Of course, in a European Russian language, with the greatest Russian population of the world.

Many thousand Russian people were waiting for it, with the spread of the south and the west. The Italian Prosarium D.E. 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 of them role, but gets replaced. But a leader devising the writing system that has carried on. Yeah, there's an interesting thing with the Mormons, when you're talking about how they figured out a way to get people very invested

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

I think about Israel, for instance.

Israel, very nationalistic, very proud society. People that are from Israel, you meet them. They're very proud of being from Israel. We as another example of that. They have mandatory military service.

You have to do that. That's an interesting question.

“Is it the case that national identity universally dependent upon a draft?”

Finland has a strong national identity. Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918. So there was no finished draft at the time of Finnish independence. Instead, the anchor for Finland's national identity is the Finnish language.

It's a very distinctive language.

The Fins are proud of their language. It's a poetic singing language. It's related somewhat differently to Hungarian. But I mentioned it as a country. You're probably probably right in many cases.

That national identity was fostered by the draft in Italy. The unification of Italy in 1862. The development of Italian national identity. Dependent heavily on a national school system, but also on a national army. So I have a talent conversation once a week with my talent teacher.

“She explained to me that the national identity,”

Italians had lots of dialects, 100 dialects. Mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea, we would say that they're different languages. Even today, there are different dialects in Italy. Different Italians cannot understand.

In contrast to... Yeah, my grandparents had speaking dialects. Okay, right. And if you just spoke classic Italian, that you learned in college, you would have no idea what they were talking about.

Because they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.

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 the doctor in Beckles. So my parents and their friends were talking. And my sister and I were bored. So we wanted to off into the town. And 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 Grand Thames. So we asked a man on the street in American English. How to get back to the house of the Grand Thames. And he said something.

Which he thought was that we couldn't understand a word of it. That's just an example of how strongly differentiated dialects were in England as recently as 1950 when I was a student in England in 1985. 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 it was when we got back to the house. And we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying.

Then the Grand Thames. That's the local dialect. But it's similarly in Germany when I lived in Germany in 1961. I lived in Munich, capital of Bavaria. And Bavaries have a strong, strong dialect instead of saying,

"I've been a buyer. I wouldn't have a dick out. I'm a Bavarian and I have a thick skin." They would say he'd be a Bavarian. He'd hop with a dick out.

So when I was traveling around with a friend of mine from Northern German from the Rhine land, where they speak what is closest to Hockdoich-literary German. And we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria. And asked me to build up with gas. Because I lived in Munich, I understood what the guy was saying.

But my friend Joseph from the Rhine land. He could not understand the Bavarian at all. That's wild. That's wild because they're so close to each other. That's what's so strange about it.

Right. But again, in Italy, Sicilian is often regarded as a separate language.

Modern literary and government Italian is the close to dialect of Florence.

“But there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects.”

And which persisted until after World War II. And were mutually incomprehensible, but those dialects now been fading. Because of universal education, plus the draft. Wow. When did you start learning Italian?

I started learning Italian. It was April 1999. But I can date it. Because my wife and I and my kids had been to anification in Italian Switzerland. And our son Max fell and he heard his legs.

So we had to go to a hospital. But my wife knew that the Italian word for where was Dove. Dove. Dove lost the dialect.

And 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 do I learn to learn enough Italian?

“But I can ask where the bathroom is and I can learn.”

So I studied Italian grammar for six weeks. And we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11th. And my father died that morning. So we aborted the Italian trip. But after the Italian trip, I've spent six weeks learning much of the grammar.

Let's put it another six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar. So I put it another six weeks. I've learned the rest of the grammar and having learned the grammar. I've learned the grammar. Let's now read some Italian.

So I began reading Italian. And then after eight months. So I've been reading Italian. Why do I speak it? UCLA has an Italian department.

So I put up an notice on the Italian department. I'm saying I would like to hire Italian graduate students to come and speak Italian to me.

“And someone and the Italian woman answered the ad.”

She came. 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 something.

And then you suddenly have the experience. The closest parallel 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 Italians, because 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 boyfriends or not.

But I, in fact, did marital therapy in Italian for two years. I talked through my Italian teachers. I said that the horrible relationship they, their parents had. And the boyfriends parents had. Didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage.

You could, they can make a relationship by their own. So both of them are married. They're still married. And it's now, it's now 27 years later. I still, every week, I talk to Francesca for two hours.

Every, every two weeks. Francesca is the person with whom I talk the most. And I have the widest range of conversation of anyone in anybody in the world, except for my wife. And my Australian companion on my New Guinea ex.

Because in our conversation, we talk about everything. Wow. That's so, how many languages do you know? In my life, I've dealt with 13 languages. Three of them I only read.

I've spoken Greek Latin and Dutch. I've just read them. I'm still, I can, the languages that I can give lectures in now. English, Italian, German, and New Guinea talk patient. I used to be fluent in Spanish and Russian.

But my Russian got driven out by Indonesian when I started working. And when I started working in Indonesia. Finish. I learned enough to hitchhike. And what else?

And then the 4-ray language. I can speak rudimentary 4-ray. And those are my languages. That's incredible. How do you not mix them up in your head?

I would imagine. I can keep, I'm sorry. I can keep straight. New Guinea talk patient. And English.

“And mostly I can keep straight Italian and German.”

That's a so different from each other.

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

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 the Russian word. Russian and Indonesian, they're completely different for each other.

But I felt 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.

And so Indonesian Russian, although they're totally different.

Once I started an Indonesian, it drove out my Russian. That's crazy. It is crazy.

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

I think so. And I will have the test soon because of our two, we have twin sons. And of our twin sons. One of them is engaged to a wonderful Russian woman. Anastasia, they're getting married in our garden in Tum.

And so when Anastasia comes over for dinner once and twice a week, I try to out some elementary phrases of Russian. I agree to in Russian. Perkrasnia, Perkrasnia, Greshdan, Greshdanka. Beautiful citizenous.

I would like to bring back more in my Russian. But I'm afraid that if I brought back my Russian, my drive out my German. I don't know whether I'll do it. You only have a certain amount of hard drive space. Yeah.

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.

“This is just there's no room in there anymore.”

And I can imagine like keeping, I want to talk about pigeon. I want to talk about pigeon talk. New Guinea pigeon talk. Is that a written language? Yeah.

It is now written. It's very interesting in its of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language. So, New Guinea talk pigeon. It sounds like baby talk. Me talk on you.

You grasp along you and tap along. You go finnish. Keep along you or I. I don't know, but I'll look like that. Okay.

So that's a sample of pigeon. What did you say? Oh, I said. I said that the, the, the here on your head is somewhat sparse and you were brown eyes. And grasp along you.

We recollect us all. Wow. But I don't know. So, um, he is how New Guinea talk pigeon arose. And it's a model for how similar pigeon languages have a reason 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, um, hired or kidnapped New Guinea's belong to many different language groups.

The Germans had to communicate with the, the workers. And the workers had to communicate with each other. So, it's not that anybody invented something. The Germans began speaking a script down easy German. And the New Guinea's began picking up some elementary German words.

But they also picked up words from other New Guinea languages.

This, this first language was called a pigeon language.

It's very simple. It's not adequate to express the range of human motion. But it's enough to discuss plantation agriculture. And it was enough for adults who had another had their own main language. And we're using the pigeon language just to discuss the coconut plantation.

We are pigeon became inadequate. Once you get the children of pigeon speaking parents. And the children from pigeon speaking parents of different native languages. Children are starting to communicate with each other. This stripped down language that's enough to talk about coconuts.

But it's not enough to talk about the gamut of human motion. The children themselves within a decade, modified spontaneously, not conjurally modified pigeon to become a full language with a grammar and tensors and future tens and prepositions.

A decade.

The best information we have about how,

“and these pigeon languages, these queer all languages,”

which are the more complex ones with prepositions, have developed all around the world. Our best information about the development of queer all languages 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 tensors. But it's adequate for discussing what you can do with a sugar cane. But the children of these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal life. The pigeon language is not adequate.

And the children spontaneously made the pigeon more complex within a decade. The children invented prepositions and they invented future tens 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 Hawaii and sat on a plantation. And would be an example of Creole as of 1892.

And then you can see it from a newspaper of 1894, how much more complicated Creole got in 1994. 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 elite. 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 then there's one other Creole language.

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

And not a pal, some block, belong, welcome along you.

“Did you have any preparation in the language for 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. 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 Indians. 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.

I've got one pal, man, man, sorry to my name. An answer, I've got this pal, I've got a lot of hot to must, this pal, hot to must, any German dynamics. An answer, I've got a strong pal, I mean, I mean, I mean, I've got a rule number two, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, long, hot. I mean, second law of thermodynamics. So what did you just say?

What I said, where I said is that a sweet call was an answer, I've developed the second law of thermodynamics. of which is thermodynamics is about heat and on saga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions and so I explain. Dispel on saga, he mulled number 2 long, long, savvy born heat, savvy born heat literally knowledge about heat which is thermodynamics. On saga, he mulled number 2 long, savvy born heat. On saga, he got this pelostron pelotent and on saga, he's smart man.

“Have you talked to someone in this pigeon, talk pigeon where you could explain something like that and they could relay it to you?”

Like they understand where you're talking about? Yeah. With New Guinea's, so in my work in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea that don't use pigeon, in Papua New Guinea they do use pigeon.

I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of human, human red meat and 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 red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird like that. Where it's human fat they say is like the fat of pigs.

I was never offered and I'd never, I wouldn't have accepted because the place in New Guinea where I began my work was the 4-ray area.

The 4-ray with the people at Kuru, which is basically mad cow disease. They were the people who were dying of Kuru. And they were the people that I work for the first eight years. And who were they eating? Oh.

They were rude. There's what's called endocanibalism and exocanibalism.

“Exocanibalism is eating your dead enemies, whom you kill in war.”

Endocanibalism is eating your dead relatives.

When the Australian government came in, it was easy for their cannibalism. And quickly exocanibalism disappeared because the tribe would be needing to complain to the government. And the government told the people who were eating the other people, you can't do that anymore. But endocanibalism, in New Guinea traditionally, you would assume fail to eat your dead mother. As you or I would just throw away the body of our dead mother.

They were precise rules about who gets to eat eat what. But in general, the relatives eat the body. And there rules about what part of body we eat.

In 1965, I had working my camp with me on New Guinea and who did not speak pigeon.

“And we were in a remote camp on a mountain.”

When we were getting no visitors because it was remote. And when they into camp came a man sat down with the sky. Who didn't speak talk pigeon, talk with him and then the man got up. And his friend said to me, "This man is quitting his work with you. Why he is quitting his work with you because the young man who made a damn payment on my worker's daughter.

You make damn payment when a girl is young. And that young man had died. He was the perspective of my worker. Because he was the perspective of someone. My worker was expected.

But his true. My worker was expected to eat the forearm. So he quit his work. He quit his work with me and walked away. He was there's no way that he would fail to eat the forearm of his perspective.

Suddenly, any more than you or I would throw our mothers body into the ditch. So he quit working with you because of that? Yeah, because the funeral feast was going to the sun lower just now. The sky walked into camp. It had brought the news to my worker that your perspective sun lower has died.

And the funeral feast is going to take place three or three days in the future. So you'd better come now so that you're there before the body rods. That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about. But how they beat a hot deal with their dad, it's very similar. But the thing is, the amount of time they have to wait before you eat them is also similar.

Which is, I don't understand totally. Did they have an explanation for that? No, and it's hard for me to, for you and me to understand because in the area where my worker quit in order to, it's a warm heart area about 3,000 feet. And the body, the dead body, is put, is, was, it's, it's, it's the government.

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 the body, put your eyes and the flesh turns to liquid. The liquid then rips through the slats and the back 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 when I'm told. Yeah, I, I was not offered, I would not have accepted it for, but I was told, but by the missionary in the area,

“and by the unionism cells, that's what they do with that.”

It's glute. Is there a scenario where they would have encouraged you or required you to consume someone? Never. Not when you were there.

Absolutely never because, um, endo cannibalism, there are precise rules about, right?

Who gets equal? What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there, and you decided to get married, and you married someone of the tribe, and then that person died, would you have had to eat them? Um, I do not know. I never put it to the test.

But, but according to their rules, would you have? Um, probably, um, why would you do? Probably, probably, yes, husbands, husband and wives, I expected to eat the other person. Yeah, I would. I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I worked, the, the four-rate tribe, they were the people who had

Kuro, which are basically mad cow disease, and the communist cause of death among the four-rate, when I was there, was Kuro mad cow disease.

That's made me kind of brain tissue, right? That's right. Eating the uncooked brain. Cool.

“Wait, even if you cook it, it's, it's a pre-on disease, correct?”

That's a pre-on disease. Pre-on survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying. A couple hundred degree, not, not thousands, but they certainly survived. This five, 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 like to know, like, what temperature do pre-ons get destroyed because I think it's extraordinarily high. Maybe there's different pre-ons and different ones of different temperatures?

Maybe it's six hundred degrees. I don't know, because I didn't think it was just raw brain.

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

And then those pre-ons are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue. That's true. 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, but we're talking about, yeah. And whether the materials wet, dried, or embedded, boiling, 200-12 degrees, not dependable, 1000 degrees Celsius. Celsius. Yo, what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy pre-on ineffective, infectively.

This is the level associated with effective incineration. Yeah, you've got to get it. It says it looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's agreed upon that, at least for a few hours, it's reliably destructive. Wow, 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-ons.

What a crazy disease. A disease you only get from eating each other. It's almost like nature doesn't want to eat each other.

The reconstructed history of the Mayan Earth did the four-ray have this, basically mad cowardice, has the commonest cause of death.

In humans, there's a disease called quite well yak-up, which is a spontaneous mutation, and usually spontaneous mutation, it dies out because, nowadays, we will need each other. Each other, but what's thought would happen in the four-ray area. Quoteful yak-up arises rarely as a spontaneous mutation. The guess is that someone in the four-ray area around 1910 developed Quoteful yak-up and died, but the four-ray were practicing endocannibalism.

And here's this soft tissue, the grain that's fun to play with.

“So the babies would play with the grain and let their fingers saw the transmission, was by cannibalism, particularly to babies at the time of endocannibalism.”

And it's all thought to have a reason with one four-ray person who had Quoteful yak-up and died in around 1910, but was then eaten by others who were in turn eaten still by others, so that Quoteful yak-up then exploded among the four-ray. What a British aristocrat, a family name, a country, a family, and when you're the Duke of Hellstead, a cannibalism period between the two-ray and the same. But even though there are still some of the imperialists, there's only one heart. Italy's wonderful martial arts partner, the German, the German, two-ray, now on earth.

But it's not a problem.

“Where are the most important reasons from Athens? And where do they find themselves still roting?”

Of course, in Europe, there are a lot of great reasons for their reasons. Many thousands of years ago, they were born with a lot of blood and herbs. The Vivae, the Gosaium D.E. 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. They kind of hide it.

They don't have that disease.

“That makes sense, because Quoteful yak-up is rare.”

Even among cannibals. Oh, among everybody, Quoteful yak-up, it's a rare mutation, like one in 10,000, one in 100,000. It's pure chance that one Quoteful yak-up mutation arose in the four-ray and not in any other tribe in New Guinea. So it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Quran or whatever the name is. I didn't have Quoteful, didn't have Quorew because nobody in the world, no human population in the world had Quorew except for the four-ray.

As a result of that accident of one person with Quoteful yak-up evidently getting eaten around 90-10. That's so fascinating, and also fascinating that it exists in cows. It exists in cows. It exists in sheep and goats.

There's a disease of sheep and goats called Scrappy, which is basically its a prime disease.

And it was Scrappy that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the four-ray area that... So when I arrived in the four in 1964, Quorew was completely mysterious. It affected only the four-ray. If a four-ray went down to Port Moorsby, the four-ray might still develop Quorew. So it couldn't be leaked, leaked, linked to the four-ray environment. Far and us who came into the four-ray, I didn't develop Quorew. Other Nuginians who came into the four-ray area didn't develop Quorew.

The only people who developed Quorew were the four-ray, but the symptoms of Quorew were... Because the disease had now gone, were similar to the symptoms of Scrappy, and so that gave the idea that Quorew might be an infectious disease. So an infectious disease expert managed to get the four-ray to provide him with the brain of a four-ray man who had died of Quorew. And the doctors get dry eyes shipped into the four-ray area in order to freeze the Quorew to get a ship back to the National Institute of Health.

He belongs to that day. A couple of days, but it was frozen in dry eyes, and he then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the animal, most likely, to be able to be infected with human Quorew would be a chimpanzee. It took three years.

I saw that chimpanzee in a cage. After three years, finally, the chimpanzee had been completely healthy. After three years, the chimpanzee then began developing the instability of Quorew.

The time for infection was short. The last death due to Quorew was in 2009. The last funeral feast was 1959.

After that, the Australians imposed control and banned funeral feast of the last four-ray funeral feast was 1959. That then would have been the last transmission of Quorew, 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 looking the brain in 1959. A long latency, the next last death was 2005, and the last death was 2009.

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

They were infected in 1959. Right, but is it possible that they were doing what Daniel Everett feels like the pitahom we're doing, we're lying about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts? Very unlikely, because the four-ray area, by the time I got there in 1964, there were missionaries. You watched them do this thing where they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified petrified. No, no, I haven't. I was told about it.

By the missionary in the area, it didn't know what was going on.

But you knew that they were engaging in this? Yeah. I wouldn't want it to watch. You didn't want to watch? I was not offered the opportunity to-- You weren't allowed.

Right. And you don't want to push. Because it didn't.

“Was it one of the Rockefeller sons that supposedly was consumed by people on New Guinea hit it and salted 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. Well, no, what happened? So, this was Michael Rockefeller, who collected art in the Balam Valley, and then he wanted to come down to the south coast where there's 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 do you do? What does Michael Rockefeller do? The Dutch patrol officer do? The Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim. He had no choice. The chance has been picked up and spotted, seemed vanishingly low,

“because there wasn't much air, very little air plan traffic.”

But the Dutch patrol had no choice. He stayed on the boat, and in fact, and so Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer. He figured that the chance has been picked up were so low that he swam for sure. A plane did spot the overturned boat and picked up the Dutch patrol officer.

Michael Rockefeller swam for sure, and when he got close to sure, he had misfortune that as he approached sure, 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 certain, Michael Rockefeller belongs to the same plan. I mean, he's white, so it's Brawls and they killed him.

It was not learned what had happened until some years later, because the natives who were, didn't admit it, they knew that they were going to be punished. And did they admit that they could swim them? I do not know what I think they did,

that I'm not sure, but they certainly killed them. What is it like hanging around with a group of people, or part of their culture, is eating people? Was it feel like? I'm not, oh, okay, so the guy who left my camp,

he just, he was a nice guy. He was hard worker. He knew his birds. Yes, he had this habit, which I didn't have. That's his business.

Well, I get that perspective,

and they've been living like that for a long time.

Yeah, I do hear things that discuss them. So, they do hear things that discuss me. Well, there are certain tribes in Papua, New Guinea, that also have a very disturbing practice with young boys, where they, you know that.

“I know very, yep, that was the practice of the four, right?”

And many other tribes, with whom I worked. It was not a rare practice.

The way of life there was that,

that each woman, each wife had her own heart, and the man lived in communal, communal man's house. The young kids live with a mother, until the boy reached the age, until the boy reached the age of six. And when the boy reached the age of six,

he then moved into the man's house, where he developed a homosexual relationship with the adult man at teenage, suddenly this boy who's had only men, men relationships. Suddenly, the tribe has brought for him a girl from the name of the tribe.

And he's told that he's supposed to have sex for sex with a woman. Until then, the boys have been told that women are dirty, the filing, if you touch a woman, it'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 old men were explaining to these 13-year-old boys, how they have sex with a woman, the two boys, they were just appalled, disgusted out of their mind 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 where they've got this ubiquitous homosexual experience

that every young boy has and they think it's essential to their growth.

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

“You think that's strange, but why don't you hear what Naganians 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 about how did that ever get started and how did that get universally accepted in a tribe? My understanding is, sorry, my understanding is around the world.

Such relations are not 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. This Spanish, when they came into this area, were utterly disgusted by this practice. And so the Spanish had war dogs.

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

“Well, I don't know if that's how you stand with it, but I kind of see their perspective.”

Wow, it is so odd how different cultures are that we're all just human beings, but we've agreed on these very, very different ways of behaving all around the world. As an example of when I was given the given an opportunity, but declined it, I went into an isolated mountain range with three New Guinea's. We were dropped off by helicopter and I had brought in rice and tin fishing food.

These are the larvae of a big beetle, which the beetle injects its eggs into the say-go palm.

“And then the larva grows into a large object, which looks like a shrimp.”

And they're fatty and they're high in protein. So the New Guinea's brought in a couple of these say-go grubs, and they offered me a say-go grub. They didn't want to try it. Part of me was curious, but it just looks disgusting to see this real. I decline the say-go in retrospect.

Well, that kind of makes sense to me out of necessity, because it's high in protein and it's just food and of all they cook it. So there you go. If you cook it, it makes even more sense. As an example of something that we love, but poor as New Guinea's. A couple New Guinea's lived in the highlands.

I brought down to the coast when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range.

They had never been on the coast.

They had never encountered ice cream or anything cold. Because, of course, they had hot food from cooking, but they had no way of making cold. And so, first of all, we stayed in a motel. And for the first time in their life, they got to sleep in beds. When I asked them the next morning up, like sleeping in bed.

One of them said, "No good." He had no experience of sleeping and he rolled out of the bed at night. So he didn't like sleeping in the bed. But then I walked into my screen. And one of them rejected the ice. It's cold that hurts my mouth.

Well, you and I were accustomed to eating ice cream, we were 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 would be like, "Oh, I get it." They didn't get it.

Would I, if I had eaten that say, "Go, grub, would I have gotten it?" I bet you would have. How bad it didn't taste like much at all. Probably would, my guess is that it tasted like a fatty shrimp. Yeah, just fat. It's probably just fatty.

“It probably, I mean, especially if they're cooking it, were they cooking them?”

Or did they eat them raw? No, they cooked them. Probably tasted fine. I mean, I'm sure you've eaten bugs in other countries, right? Grasshoppers, things along those lines, crickets.

I personally have not. No, really? No. Wow. What have you, I've eaten rattlesnake? Hmm.

What else have I eaten that's strange? When I was in Mexico, I stated this resort in Puerto Vallarta, and they had these bowls of like, looked like fried crickets. Oh, that's right. So in my book, I have a chapter on Serrét Sikama,

who was the first president of the African nation of Botswana.

Serrét Sikama 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. So he was sent to England for higher education. He got educated.

He had higher education at Oxford. And so he was comfortable in both European and in Native African society. He wore suits. He was a great, great speaker. And he graduated law school at Oxford. But in his suit pocket, in his jacket pocket,

he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers, which was a standard food in his area of Botswana. And he would offer his guests as European guests or his African guests.

“Would you like to have a dried grasshopper and he would pop in the dried grasshoppers?”

I have had friends who beaten dried grasshoppers and they said they were okay. I could not bring one. They don't taste, well, I didn't have grasshoppers, I had crickets. They don't taste bad at all. I ate a live roadch once for fear factor.

It didn't taste like much. It was disgusting because it was just the concept of it was disgusting. But the taste of it was very bland. It was not that bad at all. It's just protein.

Yeah. The Botswana story is fascinating. It'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.

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 chiefs. So was a bad idea for Botswana democracy.

But Sretsi 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. 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 land of Sretsi Kama's tribe. Normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found on the land of A tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves. But because the diamonds were on the land of Sretsi Kama's tribe. And Sretsi Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana. And not just Sretsi 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 African society. And he married a European woman.

He was respected in Europe very successful as a diplomat. And he was respected among the 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 second richest country in Africa.

The richest country in Africa is 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.

Because the president has an annual income of like $500 billion.

And everybody else has an annual income like $100.

“And you average it out and that's why Equatorial Guinea has the highest average income.”

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

Wow. And that's an excellent example of a great leader. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, Jared, I just want to thank you for all your work.

Over the years, collapse, you know, guns, germs and steels.

You've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in society and in history.

And made it very entertaining and very consumable. So thank you. And I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really great. I enjoyed a lot talking to you.

I did my homework. I was told in advance that I would enjoy a lot talking with you, provided that I was not identified with something that you just proved up.

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

It was fantastic.

“Good luck with learning the iPhone further.”

And great luck with your book as well.

I look forward to finishing it. Thank you so much. Bye, Rachel. [ Music ]