Latest / The Joe Rogan Experience / #2549 - Jared Diamond

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#2549 - Jared Diamond · The Joe Rogan Experience

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: Very nice to meet you, sir.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure. Great pleasure to meet you.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I just
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: got into this yesterday, and today I started reading your
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: new book. Awesome. Awesome so far. Fascinating. I have so
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: many questions. But my first one is, have you done
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: podcasts before?
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I've done podcasts... Quite a few podcasts. I'm at home
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: in my wife's study on my wife's screen, and I've
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: done face-to-face interviews like with you.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Cool. So, first of all, why did you
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: write this book?
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: Why did I write this book? A short answer is
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I was born in 1937, which means that I grew
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: up in the Second World War under the shadow of Hitler.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Every day there was something going on with the war.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: My father pasted up on the wall of my bedroom
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And there was always the question, why did it happen?
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: And if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: have been that outcome? Then I moved to Europe. I
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: lived in England. I lived in Germany. I love German music.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: I love the German language. Why? And then I moved
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: to Chile. I lived in Chile, the most democratic country
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: of South America. Before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: with Pinochet. His own fellow generals didn't see it coming.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: And so there's been throughout my life this question, do
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: bad as well as good people make a difference? Also,
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: my wife is Polish. The last of my family in
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: Europe disappeared in the Holocaust. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: She survived, but others in the family didn't survive. And
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: And then leaders that made a difference in my life,
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: there was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department who,
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: when a pump, water pump that I had been operating,
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: blew overnight and it flooded my lab room, but it
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: also flooded the lab room below me and that was
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: a poor choice of lab room to flood because it
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner, the father-in-law of
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: my thesis supervisor, and the master of my college at Cambridge.
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  Speaker 1: Not a good choice. Oh, no. The chairman of the
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: department called me in. I thought I'm going to be
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: thrown out. He said, that was sloppy. You have to
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: be careful with water pumps and be more careful in
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: the future. That permitted my scientific career to continue. Other
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: people might have thrown me out. So leaders have made
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  Speaker 1: a difference in my life.
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  Speaker 2: Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: And one of the things that really terrifies me is
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Nazi Germany was not that long ago. And there was
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: a time in my life where I think most people
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: generally agreed that that could never happen again. That that
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: type of scenario where a group of people are completely
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: other to the point where they're not human anymore, that
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  Speaker 2: a nation goes along with it, like that, we thought
• 3:40
  Speaker 2: we were done with that forever. I don't believe that anymore.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: As I've gotten older, I realized how fragile civilization really
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: is and that there is always these these battles of,
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: for lack of better terms, good and evil. Good leaders
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: who generally just want something good for their people. They
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: who made a difference. And then leaders who just want
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: to take over all the systems and make sure they
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: can't be contested and want to dominate the country and
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: change it. And you make some really compelling cases in
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: your book about circumstance and And about all these different
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs or
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: not successful. There's a lot of factors that we don't
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: take into consideration. You opened the book with a story
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: about how Hitler almost died in a car accident. And
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: what would the world have looked like if these cars
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: had just been moving? One was two seconds ahead. One
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  Speaker 2: was two seconds behind. Perfect impact. Dead Hitler. Now what?
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: What would the world look like? There's so many instances.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: What if JFK didn't get shot? What if Martin Luther
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: King Jr. didn't get shot? There's so many different moments
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: in history where you go, how would culture look? How
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: would society, how would civilization look if just a few
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: things had been off?
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  Speaker 1: There are so many things to say about what you've
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: just said. So growing up after World War II, we
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: thought– never again. And yet, in Cambodia, Pol Pot killed
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: about one quarter of the Cambodian population. In evil ways,
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: he encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: what Pinochet did in Chile. His body count was nowhere
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: near Hitler's body count because Chile is a small country,
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: fraction of the population. But the tortures that he implied,
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: there were far worse than anything that the Nazis did.
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  Speaker 1: And he surprised his fellow generals. So all of that
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: is a surprise. As for leaders can do either good
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: or bad or they can do nothing. If you want
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers. But I can boil
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: it down to four or five things. A leader has
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: to be at the right time and place. Some leaders
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: recognize that it's the right time and place and they
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Popular Electronics with the Intel 8080 chip, Bill Gates said
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: to Steve Allen, now is the time. We've got to
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: start now building a microcomputer because if we don't do it,
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: somebody else will. So Bill Gates recognized that the time
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: was right. And he made the time right. Winston Churchill
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: recognized that the time was right. When Winston Churchill was
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: appointed prime minister, he said, I knew that this was
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation,
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: but he didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill became prime minister
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: because Germany invaded France, and Churchill did not cause Germany
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: to invade France. He recognized that he was in the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: right time and place. There are other leaders who are
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: at the right time and place, but they don't know it.
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: think in 2004. As a result of us having been
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: of his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: jumpstart social media because there had been some before and
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: some afterwards. But the changes in the Internet made 2004
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: a particularly good year. So some leaders choose the time
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: and place to go all dead. Some leaders find themselves
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Winston Churchill did. and some leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: and Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: world history, all the way from China to Poland, and
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: yet there were other people who tried, Adel of the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: Han and Timur the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well,
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: within the last 10 years, students of tree rings have
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: figured out that on the Mongolian steppe The wettest time
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  Speaker 1: in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis
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  Speaker 1: Khan's birth. If he had been born 10 years later
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  Speaker 1: or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: Genghis Khan. But he happened to have been born at
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: the right time and place because with all that rain,
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: that meant hay to feed sheep and goats to feed
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  Speaker 1: Mongol babies. And it also meant hay to feed Mongol
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  Speaker 1: horses to ride into battle. So Genghis Khan was someone
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: at the right time and place, but he had no idea,
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: and we didn't have any idea until this tree ring
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  Speaker 1: study of the last decade.
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  Speaker 2: That's interesting, but you think that's the primary reason why
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  Speaker 2: he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist,
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  Speaker 2: and he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different
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  Speaker 2: groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions.
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  Speaker 2: So he accepted all religions, and it was one of
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  Speaker 2: his strengths is that he didn't care. I'll take you
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  Speaker 2: all in. Everybody gets to come in here. And the
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: way he would attack these cities, there's also the strategy
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  Speaker 2: of they never settled down. They always were in tents,
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  Speaker 2: and they would camp out in front of cities and
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: just wait them out. I mean, there was a lot
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  Speaker 2: to it other than just resources, right?
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  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 2: He was kind of an extraordinary individual.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. It took two things together. The second thing, the
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  Speaker 1: first thing was that he was at the right time
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  Speaker 1: and place, but he also had to be an extraordinary
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  Speaker 1: person if he had been an equally extraordinary person at
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  Speaker 1: some other time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him.
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  Speaker 1: So you are correct. At a given time and place,
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  Speaker 1: that may be the occasion for someone to emerge. But
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: who emerges depends upon the personal qualities. For example, to
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  Speaker 1: take religion seriously. The first century AD of the Roman
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  Speaker 1: Empire was the perfect time and place to found what
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  Speaker 1: would become the world religion 15 centuries later, because the
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: And so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: but the Roman Empire was the basically the father of
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  Speaker 1: the European countries that spread around the world 15 centuries later. Now,
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was born.
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  Speaker 1: Neither he nor his followers had any idea that 15
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: centuries later, the religion that grew up in the Roman
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  Speaker 1: Empire then would spread around the world. It was the
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: right time and place, but there were other candidates besides Christ.
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  Speaker 1: The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got
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  Speaker 1: killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was
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  Speaker 1: the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion,
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  Speaker 1: you have to be charismatic, number one. You have to
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  Speaker 1: be an outstanding organizer. Christ died too early. It was St.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: Paul who was the outstanding organizer. And often religions also
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: need a great general. In some cases, the same person
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  Speaker 1: is the charismatic leader and the organizer. Muhammad was an outstanding,
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  Speaker 1: he was charismatic, he was a great organizer, he was
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: a great general. The Mahdi of the Sudan who established
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  Speaker 1: this empire in East Africa, fantastic general and organizer and
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: incredibly charismatic. But the Mahdi, he was in the right
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: place to establish an empire in East Africa. But he
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: wasn't in the right place to establish a world empire
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  Speaker 1: because East Africa just didn't have the technology and the
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  Speaker 1: demographics whereas Christianity did.
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  Speaker 2: The Paul thing is very interesting because the more I
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: read about the Bible and the construction of it, the
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  Speaker 2: more it just gives you pause. Like Paul was really
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  Speaker 2: kind of the creator of Christianity because– He never met Jesus.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: So Jesus never spoke to him and Jesus never wrote
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  Speaker 2: anything down. And so when Paul has this vision, when
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: he's on the road to Damascus and he has this,
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: met Jesus. Like we're taking the entire religion is based
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: on this guy saying that I think he said all
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: these things 20 years after he said them when no
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: one wrote it down and I never met him. So
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  Speaker 2: it's really Paul.
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  Speaker 1: Yes, it was two people. It was Jesus and it
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus, of
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: those various other rival messiahs, Jesus had some advantages with
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: his message. It was a universal message. It was not
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: directed just to the Romans. It was not directed just
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: to men. It was aimed at everybody. So, of the
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: candidate messiahs then, Jesus had a particularly good message. But
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: a good message isn't enough. It took St. Paul as
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the organizer.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: But it's fascinating that Paul never met him and that
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: Jesus never wrote anything down. So when Paul's talking about this,
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  Speaker 2: this is literally just from verbal history.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 2: Which is really strange. An oral history that it takes
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: 20 years before this guy says, this is what Jesus said.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: And then we all go on that.
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  Speaker 1: Right. What's thought to be the first of the Gospels,
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: the Gospel according to Mark, is estimated to have been
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus. Yeah.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: So we have no first-person accounts of Jesus.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: It would be really nice if he wrote things down.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: It would have made things more certain. In the case
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: of Muhammad, it was... two centuries before things got written down.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So we know even less about Muhammad than we do
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: about Jesus. Or a difference also between Muhammad and Jesus
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: is that Jesus, we know, was at the right place
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: and right time. The Western Roman Empire, we know, was
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: at the peak of its power. Why on earth did
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia produce a world religion then? Was it that,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia, was it that at
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: the time of Muhammad's birth, was Saudi Arabia undergoing a
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: particularly wet time, which meant lots of people, which meant
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: lots of arms. We don't have the weather information about Arabia,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: so we don't know why. We don't know whether. We
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: infer that probably Muhammad was at the right place at
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: the right time, but we can't nail it down the
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: can with Jesus.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: It's interesting, too, because Muhammad was essentially a prophet, right?
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: He wasn't a child. He wasn't the son of God.
• 15:41
  Speaker 2: It's like we know there was a man that existed
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: during that time and he became this religious leader. The
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas, essentially,
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: of course, written down hundreds of years later. It's just
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system,
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: these religious systems where someone becomes the person who has
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: all the rules. And everyone follows those rules or you're
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: ostracized from the kingdom. And there's so many of them.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: And the thing is, we know some of the people
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: who created it, like Muhammad or like Jesus or like
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: Joseph Smith. Like there's some weird ones. And it's just
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: it's a very strange pattern that comes up over and
• 16:28
  Speaker 2: over and over again. I don't know how all of
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: them can be correct, you know, without any judgments on religion.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Someone's got to be wrong. All have completely different origin stories,
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: but it's so fascinating to me in particular that people
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: want to have this sort of a structure. It gives
• 16:46
  Speaker 2: them comfort, and you can get entire populations to go
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: along with it.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Right. One might say that the religious teachings are secondary.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: In the case of 19th century American history, the United
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: States gave rise to five religions that have gone around
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: the world. Mormon religion, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian science.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Why have the Mormons been so successful? Was it because
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: of Joseph Smith's teachings? With due respect to the Mormons,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: the religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merit,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: but the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young,
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: and the social features of the Mormon religion, their optimism,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: and they're expecting every Mormon. If you are a Mormon,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: you tithe yourself. You don't fill out a 1040 income
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: tax form. Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: income to the church, and they calculate it themselves. So
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: that's a Big, big commitment. So the Mormon religion, I
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: but because he was charismatic and because Brigham Young then
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: was an outstanding leader.
• 18:24
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  Speaker 2: your shot. They've also done an excellent job of instilling
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: a sense of community amongst fellow Mormons that I think is,
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: I don't think there's another religion that quite has reached
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: that level. They are the nicest.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: People.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Like I have yet to run into an asshole that's
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: a Mormon. And it's kind of shocking. You know, if
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: the whole origin story wasn't so, as the kids say, sus,
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: you know, it would make you really be interested in like,
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: what's going on here? Like, it seems like these guys
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: have it nailed. other than, you know, the nine wives
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: and all that other jazz. But that seems like an
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: offset of the original idea.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: With due respect to the theology of Christianity, the idea
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: of a virgin birth and ascent to heaven is stretching
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: scientific understandings. And I don't think it could be claimed
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: that the belief in a virgin birth was a major
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: factor propelling Christianity. Instead, there were many things that propelled Christianity.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: This gets interesting. The Christians outbred pagans in the first
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: couple of centuries of the Roman Empire. because Roman religion
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: had a low view of women. Children did not have
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: high prestige. There was frequent abortion, whereas Christianity, from early Christianity,
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: did give a high role to women compared to Roman religion.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Christianity favorite having babies. Christianity emphasized taking care of the sick.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: And so when you look at tombstones from the first
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, Christians lived longer
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: and they were less likely to die than were pagans.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: And the result was that Christianity that started out as
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: maybe a few dozen people under Jesus And even in St.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Paul's time, what, maybe 100 people, Christianity grew to be
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire. On top
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: of that, Christianity derived from Judaism emphasized writing. And so
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, there were all
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate. So
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: Christianity had reasons for its success that would, due respect,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: have nothing to do with the virgin birth.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course. It's really interesting the way you just
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: outlined the reason why Christianity was successful. You could say
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: that that same pattern is being mirrored by Muslims, that
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: they strict adherence to religion. They emphasize having many children
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: and they take care of the community. And their populations
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: are rising while a lot of secular people, their populations
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: are dropping off.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: That's true. With Muslims, as with Christianity, Muslim, I would
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: in the spread of Islam. Instead, the organization, the motivation
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe,
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: although we don't know something about the weather in Saudi
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs I
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: see as the reason behind Islam's spread.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: constructing it the way it's practiced today, the people that
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: are Muslims are devoutly Muslim. There's a large population of
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: them that are very religious. And that population is very,
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: I think that whole very strong belief system is very
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: attractive to people because most people are very undecisive. They
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: don't really know why they're here. They don't really know
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: what life is for, existential angst. Society seems pointless. constant
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan, something that
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: you can join where everyone is all in and they're
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: very locked in and disciplined. And that discipline, you know,
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: it takes a lot to agree to pray five times
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: a day. It takes a lot where everyone agrees. We're
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: all going to play music and pray five times a day.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: And we're a part of a team. And if you leave,
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: the punishment is death. So if you decide that you
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: don't want to be a part of this anymore and
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: you don't believe anymore and you announce that, they can
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: you're all in and you're all in for life and
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: we all support each other. And it's a very strong
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: sentiment that I think appeals to people. Like it doesn't
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: appeal to me like I want to join it, but
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: when I watch these people give speeches and I watch
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: have is something that is very attractive to people. And
• 25:01
  Speaker 2: I think that confidence is a weird, that charismatic confidence
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: is a weird aspect of human beings in that we
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: follow those people like universally, like we follow charismatic, confident
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: people universally and charismatic, confident people that have a very
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: strong belief system. And you got all these other people
• 25:24
  Speaker 2: that are part of the strong belief system. compelling force
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: that makes you want to join.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: Something of that is also true of Mormonism, although in
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: somewhat different ways. Right.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: It's less militant, but it's very compelling that they believe
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: so much.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: That's right. And it's compelling that 18-year-olds, every 18-year-old Mormon
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: man is expected to go devote two years to... to proselytizing.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: And if you don't have much money, you go 70
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: miles away. And if you do have money, you go
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: to the Pacific Ocean or to Europe with the result
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: that you're... But these people take it seriously. Yes. And
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe and
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: the Pacific. There's one other thing that I'd like to
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: say here, and that is that people often ask me,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: Jared Gunstrom's deal... neglects individual people. It's about things that
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: happened over the last 10,000 years. And Guns, Germs, and Steel,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: the different outcomes of societies and different content, has nothing
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: to do with any individual. Whereas here, you've written a
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: book about leaders, about individuals. How do you reconcile Guns, Germs,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: and Steel with leaders? And my first response would be
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: to say that Guns, Germs, and Steel is about entire
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: continents for 10,000 years. where one person doesn't make a difference,
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: short term. But the one case that I can think
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: of where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: is in religion. The beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: of Muhammad, those individuals had a long-lasting effect. So far,
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: it looks as if the release of Joseph Smith, he's
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: been gone for, what, 200 years now. But the prospects
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: are that Joseph Smith, again, will have a long-lasting influence.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: Whereas I can't think of a politician or a business
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: person who has had an effect 2,000 years later.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: Well, I think guns, germs, and steel highlighted all the
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: factors that have to be in place for these types
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: of changes to take place. It's not like mutually exclusive
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: that leaders aren't important as well. It seems like they
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: both work together hand in hand, but those leaders wouldn't
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: have been able to do what they did without all
• 28:04
  Speaker 2: of the innovation, without the industry, without the infrastructure that
• 28:09
  Speaker 2: these places had, without the wet land. season that the
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: Genghis Khan and the Mongols had fortunately arrived in, like
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: all those factors kind of all have to be in place.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: It's not either or, right?
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: 1500 onwards, yes, they were convincing priests and devoted priests,
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: but behind these convincing devoted priests was were European guns, germs,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: and steel, European smallpox, European measles that killed far more
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: Native Americans than did European guns and horses. So religion,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: to become worldwide, religion needs what one can call an
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: economic and demographic engine. The Mahdi of the Sudan, the
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: accounts that we have of him are of his being
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general. His
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: small troops with sticks and stones nevertheless wiped out British-led
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Egyptian armies with machine guns and then his organizational ability.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: So the Mahdi was able to set up an empire
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: in East Africa, but he didn't have the economic and
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: demographic push to spread his religion around the world. Yeah.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: A lot of factors have to be in place, and
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: sometimes the chips all align perfectly.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: Keep that microphone up to your face.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: My apologies. You have very soft spoken. So examples of
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: everything aligning. In the business world, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: out of 340 million Americans today, 320 million when Jeff
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched, it's impossible to
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: make an argument that Nobody except Bill Gates had the
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: business know-how and the computer skills to found personal computers,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: but he was there at the right place and right time.
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized that it was the
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: right time. He went to the head of the company
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: that had hired him, and he said the Internet was—
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: This is the perfect time to set up an everything
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: store based on the Internet. So he recognized that the
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: time was right.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you tried
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: to do that. It's like what he did was really
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: fascinating because he started off with what I thought was like,
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: an okay idea, like sell books, sell books online. Like, okay,
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: but you can get books at Barnes and Noble. You
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: can get books anywhere. There was bookstores everywhere. It was
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: kind of easy to get books, but then the whole,
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: you can buy toothpaste too. And, and everything like in
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: just one click, like all that revolution. And it all
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: more lazy and more and more short attention span, Tik Toky,
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: It became the perfect way to buy things. One click.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: It was like all the green lights. He was driving
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: down the boulevard and every light turned green right when
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: he got to it. It was brilliant.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: Right. In the case of Jeff Bezos. It was not
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: that his goal in life was to set up an
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: online bookstore. It was his goal– explicitly his goal in
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: life was to set up an everything store. But he
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: recognized that an everything store has to start out with something.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Really? So he started out with books?
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: He started out with books because he recognized that books
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: were an ideal thing to start out with. All books
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: are uniformed. It's not that you buy a diamond and 78,
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: they're a different time. All the books are uniform. And
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: there are a couple of warehouses for books where he
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: could get books and anybody else could get books. And
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: customers in stores, they're not going to look around to
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Prophets.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Every copy is the same. So Jeff Bezos' retina explicitly
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: that Books are a good thing to start out with.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Having started out with books, he then reasoned what are
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: good things to move on to, and he moved on
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: to perfume and jewelry. He waited quite a while to
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: move on to whatever else he moved on to. He
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: was strategic. Yeah.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: It's kind of amazing because if it didn't take place—
• 33:20
  Speaker 2: What would online shopping look like? Would somebody else have
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: figured that out? I wonder.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: That's a great example. There was online. Sorry. There were
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: everything stores.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: But not to that level.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: Not to that level. Before Jeff Bezos. Before Jeff Bezos,
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: there was eBay. eBay operates in a different way. And
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: after Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: but Walmart's Everything Store is based on coupled to a
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: brick-and-mortar store, whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: was his Everything Store was going to be an online store.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: So here's an example that indicates that without Jeff Bezos,
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: we would still have Everything Stores. We've got Walmart and
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: we've got eBay, but Jeff Bezos put his distinctive stamp
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: on everything stores by making an online everything store.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: Also being the first to figure out the whole one-click thing.
• 34:23
  Speaker 2: When you have an account, your credit card's listed, you
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: know what you need, bam, one click. Toilet paper on
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: the way, arrives by 4 p.m., let's go. You don't
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: have to go to the store. And now you can
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: get groceries delivered too. And eventually it's going to be
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: now with drones, right?
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: Out of 340 million Americans, if Jeff Bezos hadn't done it,
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: maybe somebody else would have done it. But what we
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: know for sure is that there were and before and
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: there were afterwards other ways to develop an everything store.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: with whether the investors are satisfied with their stock returns.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: He didn't care about that. He prioritized customer satisfaction. So
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: he developed something that would have happened, that did happen
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: before and did happen afterwards, but he did it in
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: a distinctive way.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: I often think what would society look like if there
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: wasn't a stock market? if the concept of investing in
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: other people's businesses was just never discussed, never heard, no
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: one invented it, what would the world look like if
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: it was just a bunch of businesses selling things individually
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: with people either owning a business or not owning a business,
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: but you don't have stock in publicly traded companies where
• 36:08
  Speaker 2: there's this obligation to your shareholders to make more money
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: which makes you more ruthless, cut more corners, pay people less,
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: do everything you can to save as much money possible
• 36:20
  Speaker 2: because you have an obligation to your shareholders.
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: Interesting question. My guess is that if we didn't have...
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: If we didn't have a stock... If stock markets hadn't developed,
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: stock markets would have developed. Namely, it seems a... a
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: unique way of doing things and it didn't take a
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: person or it didn't take an accident. A stock market
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: is as logical as, say, as is the internet. Interesting.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: Well, it certainly makes for more businesses being able to
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: be funded. That's for sure. It certainly makes more people
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: invest in businesses and then more people who are just
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: investors who don't do anything in business at all except
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: buying trade stocks.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: Which is a very odd position in society. But that
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: all encourages growth. It makes us uncomfortable because it's unchecked
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: growth sometimes. And we worry about things getting too big
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: and people getting pushed aside. But it's a fascinating engine
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: for growth.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: Right. It raises the question, are some things... inevitable in
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: some broad form, but some individual places a stamp on
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: the broad form. For example, cell phones. There were cell
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: phones before iPhones and Steve Jobs. There was, I think,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: the Korean Samsung. Sure, I had a phone.
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: I had a Motorola StarTAC back in the day.
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: I have a cell phone that my wife and son
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: forced me to get, and I use it to do
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: my email, and that's all that I use it for.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: You don't get on TikTok? Do any dances? Nothing?
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: No. Nothing?
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: No memes? I'll send you some memes.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Whatever meme. I'm technophobe. So cell phones certainly would have emerged.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: But Steve Jobs put a distinctive face on cell phones
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: in that he cared a lot about appearance and he
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: cared a lot about simplicity. Simplicity. including simplicity of the gadget,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: but simplicity also of the overall business. When Steve Jobs
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: was fired from Apple, Apple then went downhill for a
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: decade until Steve Jobs was brought back. And when Steve
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Jobs was brought back, one of the first things he
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: did was to say, there are too many products. We
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: should not have 100 products. We should have just four
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: products and concentrate on them. Another thing that he did
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: was to say, the product should look good and be simple.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Only a couple of buttons on it. The contrast case
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: is that the television set that we have at home
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: has one of these push-button devices with 49 buttons. When
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: my wife and I wanted to watch the World Cup,
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: we had to call up our son Joshua and Max
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: to talk us through. And I wrote it down. And
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: when I wrote it down, I still didn't get it right.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: So I still called up Joshua and Max because there
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: are so many buttons. Steve Jobs didn't do it that way.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: My iPhone has one, two, I think it's got four
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: buttons Last night, I discovered an essential button. I didn't
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: realize on the left side, the most recent conversation that
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: I had with my iPhone, the sound quality was very poor.
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: And I knew from Marie having showed me before that
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: somewhere on that iPhone, there's a volume control device, but
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: I didn't know what it was. But yesterday I saw
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: that on the left side there were two things. I
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: tried pushing one and the volume went up. It was
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: the upper one.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: How do you not know that?
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: I wasn't born with the knowledge.
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: That seems so alien to me. But, I mean, those
• 40:31
  Speaker 2: things existed even on old flip phones. Did you ever
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: have an old flip phone?
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: I did have an old flip phone.
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: Didn't it have like a little thing where you press
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: it for the volume and it goes up?
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: Possibly, but I don't recall. Certainly with my iPhone, Marie
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: did explain to me when she forced me to get
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: the iPhone. She showed me that of these four buttons, two,
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: these lengthy things on the left are volume controls. But
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: I didn't remember whether the lower one. Increased or the
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: lower one decreased the volume. I didn't dare touch them
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: because I was afraid that I would ruin the device.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: That's so funny. And it was only yesterday that I
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: tried pushing the upper one and I got louder volume.
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: So now I know that.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: Well, then there's a button above that too that silences
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: the phone or makes the ringer go on.
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: You're correct.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: Did you know about that? Yes, I'm correct.
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: That one I know. There's this tiny device and if
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: I push it to the right, the tiny device– looks orange.
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: And that means that I will not be disturbed. So
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: my device is always on orange. And if I push
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: it back on the rare occasions when I'm expecting a
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: phone call, then I push it back and it's no
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: longer orange.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: With all due respect, it is so fascinating to me
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: that a man so brilliant as you, who knows so
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: much about history, is talking about a phone like as
• 41:54
  Speaker 2: if it's some Like insanely complicated thing from another planet
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: that you're trying to back engineer to figure out how
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: it works. When everybody knows how to do the things
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: you're saying here.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: It is an insanely complicated thing from childhood onwards. I've
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: always been technophobe. Why? I'm just incompetent at it. In
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: my school, in I think the second year in my
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: middle school, we were all told to build these make-it-yourself radios.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: And I tried to do it. I couldn't do it.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: My father then got, my father was a physician, a scientist.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: He got someone in his lab to put my phone together.
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: When I went to Cambridge, England to get my Ph.D.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: in Physiology. There were various organs I could have worked on.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: I could have worked on the electric organ of electric eels.
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: I could have worked on muscle. But I had no
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: an electric organ to separate two solutions. But when a
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: lecturer in my beginning physiology course said, the gallbladder is
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: a sac of The gallbladder is a sac coming out
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: of the bile, coming out of the liver. It's just
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: a simple sac, and it absorbs salt and water, but
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: we don't know how. I thought, my God, that's my,
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: I can do that, because to measure water transport by
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: the gallbladder didn't require micropipettes and technology, didn't require chambers.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: All it required was that I put a little plastic
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: cannula into the mouth of the gall, And then I
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: waited on a balance, but there was a balance in
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: my lab. So I picked that organ because it was
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: technologically so simple. And it turns out that the gallbladder
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: does what the kidney and intestine and more important organs do,
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: but the gallbladder is much more convenient to study. And
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: so I made my reputation as a physiologist. with a
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: gallbladder precisely because I could not build the ham radio.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: Nor can I figure out my iPhone. Nor can I
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: do any other technology. That's fascinating.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: So it's like you're averse to it. You don't like it.
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: There's something about technology that it just almost repulses you.
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: That's true. Why does it repel me? Because I'm incompetent
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: at it and I feel lousy and frustrated when I
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: try to do it. Instead, I try to do everything
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: in the simplest way possible. So one of my secrets
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: for success, let me show you. This is, behold, 0.7
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: millimeter pencil. It has one device. I advance it and
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: the lead advances. My books, I write my books by hand. Really? Yep.
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: And after I've written them by hand, I then correct
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: the draft by hand. And once I've cleaned up the draft,
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: then I dictate it into my iPhone, my three or
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: four button iPhone, and my secretary cleans it up. But
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: I really recommend this pencil.
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: So you write in pencil and then do you edit
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: by erasing?
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Yes. I edit more by crossing out. I do some
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: editing by array. For example, yesterday I flew in to
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Houston on Sunday, and yesterday was a down time for me.
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: I had an event in the evening. I spent yesterday
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: revising a paper that I'm writing on the birds of
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: the Wondomin Peninsula of New Guinea. New Guinea, the island
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: of New Guinea, has 10 isolated mountain ranges on the
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: north coast, and I personally have explored 10 of those,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: and for many of them I've discovered the highest peak,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: and I've inventoried their birds. So yesterday I was working
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: on a paper on the birds of Wondomin Mountains. I used, ah, behold.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: An eraser. An eraser.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: You've got a nice big high school eraser.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: I used the eraser and I used my 0.7 millimeter pencil.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: I cleaned up my handwritten draft, which I will give
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: to my secretary. My secretary will then type it up
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: and then I will edit the draft again with my
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: eraser and pencil. Eraser and pencil.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: So when you edit the draft, when she types up
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: a draft and you edit it, are you just writing
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: on it, writing on the printed draft?
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Is there another way to do it?
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: Well, rewrite it again. That's what I'm worried about. I'm
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: worried you're saying you're going to write all the edits
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: by hand again.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: If I have to rewrite it massively, then I will
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: retype it.
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: But you will type it.
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 47:08
  Speaker 2: Okay, so you're not averse to using a typewriter or
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: a keyboard.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: No. When I was about eight years old, I had chickenpox,
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: and I had to stay home from school for two weeks.
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: During those two weeks, I learned to use a typewriter,
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: but I got cured of chickenpox after I had done
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: the first three rows. So I can touch type the
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: bottom three rows, but I cannot touch type the top row.
• 47:37
  Speaker 2: But That's hilarious.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: I'm a faster typist than any secretary that I've ever had.
• 47:43
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Wow.
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: And only touch typing the first three rows.
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: That's hilarious. There's a lot of people that I know
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: that write longhand and they like to write like with
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: a pen on paper, whether it's a book or anything, songs,
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: a lot of songwriters, like most songwriters that I know,
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: they write on pieces of paper or They improvise it
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: and then write it down as they're improvising it. But
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: it's so much easier and quicker to type. That's what
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: drives me nuts. Like I know that I remember things
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: much better when I write them down physically, but I
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: can type pretty quickly and I don't have to look
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: at the keys. I touch type.
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: Some things I produce the first draft by typing, but
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: what I find is that my style, my English prose style,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: is different if I type it than if I write it.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: When I type it, I notice that my style is
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: more wordy, whereas if I write it down, my style
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: is more simplified and compressed.
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: Interesting, because it takes longer to write a word than
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: it does to type it or say it. So as
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: you're writing the word, you have more time to think
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: and you have more time to analyze whether or not
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: you need extra words or you can sort of focus
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: more on the structure of the sentence rather than if
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: you're typing, it's like so quick that maybe you put
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: some extra stuff in there that you didn't need to
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: because you didn't have a time to really, as you're
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: writing each word out, you're thinking, what's the correct word?
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: after this? What's the proper way to phrase this? You
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: have more time.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: You're right. Typing is faster. And so typing reflects better.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: Mark my thinking. Whereas if I'm writing, it takes longer
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: for me to write a word than to type it.
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: And so I have to think a little more. When
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: I'm writing, I'm doing more of the organization than when
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: I'm typing, which can be more of a free flow.
• 49:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: I want to mention one other great advantage of... I
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: don't know if you've discovered this, but at the bottom
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: of my iPhone, there's an icon which looks like a microphone.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: That icon, when I press that icon, it allows me
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: to dictate in other languages. So the languages that I'm
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: active in today are Italian and German. I do my
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: correspondence on my iPhone here. in Italian and German, because
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: of this little device. Now, this little, when my wife
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: forced me to get the iPhone, there were a few
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about. And
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: then a high school classmate of mine, who married a
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: French woman, showed me on my iPhone, there's this little icon,
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: and he said, that icon, Jared, will permit you to
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: do your dictation in German and Italian. So I learned,
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: and I do my correspondence in German and Italian now.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: Not never by hand. I always do it on the iPhone.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty amazing. With AI now, they they have
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: I think Google was the first to do this. I
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: think Samsung phones definitely had this where you could have
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: someone speak to you and it would translate their words
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: in real time. So you could have a real honest
• 51:14
  Speaker 2: conversation with someone in another language. I guess they would
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: have to put on headsets as well. And you would
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: be able to talk back and forth and it would
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: absolutely change. And in the future, they're going to have
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: it set up where it'll do it in your voice.
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: So you will say something in English. It'll translate it
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: perfectly in Spanish. And it'll translate it as Jared Diamond.
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: Instead of like some robot voice, Mr. Diamond wants to know.
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: Instead of that, you would get your actual voice, which is,
• 51:45
  Speaker 2: you know, we're getting close to like Tower of Babel
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: type stuff here. Like universal language, the ability to instantaneously
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: translate everything all the time so everybody knows what everybody's saying.
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: It's a very unique time.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: This has a very interesting history in which I was
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: secondarily involved. In the 1970s, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: got the idea of automatic translation. And so they set
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: up a research group, a well-funded research group. I had
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: a close friend who was a member of that research group.
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: And the goal of Xerox PARC, which was well-funded, was
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: to develop a device that would do simultaneous translation. They failed.
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: It was a couple of decades later. The reason was
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: there were two things that were complicated that were not
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: understood in the 1970s. One was we didn't understand enough
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: about the structure of language, and I'll give you an
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: example of that. And the other thing we didn't understand
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: was the technology of simultaneous translation. The example of not
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: understanding enough about the structure of language was that in
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: the initial trial runs of Xerox PARC, they had a sentence,
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: the phrase, out of sight, out of mind. And they
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: had their attempted technology to translate this into Russian and
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: then from Russian to translate it back into English. And
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: so they said out of sight, out of mind. The
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: device translated into Russian. The Russian translated it back into English.
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: And out of sight and out of mind came back
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: invisible idiot. But it took a couple of decades to
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: overcome that.
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Armra. Every week
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: there's some new wellness hack that people swear by. And
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: after a while, you start thinking, why do we think
• 53:54
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• 54:09
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• 54:13
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  Speaker 2: If you want to try, Armra is offering my listeners
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  Speaker 2: 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to armra.com slash rogan. Well,
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: which brings us back to religious texts, which is, I mean,
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: the Bible, the Old Testament, there's versions of it in
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: Aramaic and the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the books.
• 54:37
  Speaker 2: And then there's the ancient Greek version of it, the
• 54:40
  Speaker 2: ancient Hebrew version of it, the translations to all these
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: different languages and how much is lost in those translations
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: and how weird do things get?
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: Right. The beginning of the gospel according to St. John.
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: with God. Word. So St. John was not written in English.
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: It was written in Greek or translated into Greek. And
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: the Greek word for word is logos. The Greek word
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: logos means word, but it also means rational system. And
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: so when you translate the first line of the St.
• 55:25
  Speaker 1: John Gospel, in the beginning was the word. There was
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: much more. In the beginning was A system, an organization,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: not just a word. That's an example of the difficulties
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: of translating from one language into another. Let me give
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: you another example. The last foreign language that I learned
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: was Italian, and I now read Italian every day. But
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: in Italian, there are two words that mean I love.
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: In English, there's only one word that means I love.
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: In Italian, you can either say amo or voglio bene.
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: Voglio bene literally means, I wish you well. Surprisingly to me,
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: in Italian, physical love, sexual love, is voglio bene, whereas amo,
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: which is literally the word love, amo is the root
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: for amateur. It's the root for love in other languages.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love. So
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: Italian has these two words, For love. Another example.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: Can I ask you one more question? Does Italian have
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: a word for love for things that aren't sexual and
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: not personal, not friendly, like a thing, like love race
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: car driving?
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: Forse desiderio, desire.
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: Desire. So they don't use the term love like we do.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: We have a bunch of different versions of love, even
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: ironic love. Oh, I love it when that happens. You know,
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: when something stupid happens, you know, you break your shoelace. Oh,
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: I love it when that happens. We have a lot
• 57:12
  Speaker 2: of uses of that word love.
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: Right. That illustrates the difficulty of translating from one language
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: to another. So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend,
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: which I'm happily aware, if I were to have an
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake of saying
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: to her, ti amo, and I didn't say, ti voglio bene,
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: I would be thrown out.
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: I'd beat your ass.
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: A German example is that the German language has two
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: words meaning to eat, essen and fressen. Essen is eat
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: referring to humans, and fressen is eat referring to animals.
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: But a person who gobbles up a lot of stuff,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: you say that person is fressen. I'll give you an
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: example from the only New Guinea language that I made
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: much progress learning, the Foray language of Papua New Guinea.
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: In the Foray language, the verb to be, in English
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: we have just one verb to be. In Foray, there
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: are two verbs to be. There's mindia and windia. Windia
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: is to be of something inanimate. This sweet potato tastes good.
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: This sweet potato is good, windia, but mindia is to
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: be referring to an animal. So the first sentence of
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: foray that I learned on my second day in the
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: foray area was there was a frog in a creek,
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: and I had already learned the word for water, which
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: is dakwa, wani, wani in foray, and dakwa was the
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: word for that sort of frog. And so I said
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: to— I was practicing the foray that I just learned. I
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: said to a four-way man, Daquo, Wendia, and he shook
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: his head severely, Wendia, Mindia, because I had used the
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: when I should have used the animate word to be.
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: English does not make that distinction. Wow.
• 59:24
  Speaker 2: The example that you brought about the word in the
• 59:28
  Speaker 2: biblical scripture... and logos, the difference. That is such a
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: giant difference. So there's a giant difference in what it means,
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: and unfortunately it leaves, when you just have the term word,
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: it leaves so much to interpretation. There's so much spin
• 59:45
  Speaker 2: that a pastor or someone who's relaying this can say
• 59:48
  Speaker 2: what it actually means is. If they don't know the
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: original language of it, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a researcher,
• 59:56
  Speaker 2: a very fascinating guy, he learned ancient Hebrew. over the
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: course of 16 years, he self-taught himself ancient Hebrew so
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: that he could read the Bible in its original form.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: And he's like, I highly recommend it. I'm like, well,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: that's a lot. You're asking a lot. But he felt
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 2: like the only way he could really understand what they
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: were saying, what it really meant, was to really truly
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: understand the language and be able to read it and
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: speak it.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The same is true of... every language, languages, one
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: translates languages, but there's lots of stuff lost in translation
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: because of the words and the grammar. For example, the Iliad,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: Homer's Iliad, the English text of the Iliad will begin
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: by saying something like, I sing of the wrath of Achilles,
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: the terrible wrath that destroyed so many Greeks. So that's
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: how it comes out in English. The original Greek is.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: So the first word in the Alita is wrath,. The
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: second word is sing. The third word is goddess. So
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: literally it's wrath, sing, goddess, and then wrath of Achilles,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: son of Peleus. The Iliad as it was written in Greek,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: that is a great first line, and it loses its
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: power in translation.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 2: I wonder if AI could reinterpret certain books that have
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 2: been translated and do so in a way that accurately,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: accurately reflect, reflects the context and what they were saying.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: Like instead of sticking to the original translations of these books,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 2: like the Iliad or any, any old book that's written
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: in different languages, if there could be a way where
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: it could analyze what the correct way of phrasing it
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: in the English language would be, With whatever extra words
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: we would have to use or whatever different ways you
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: would have to phrase it. But instead of just going
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: with word for word the way we did it now.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: If that could be done, one might be able to
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: get the meaning with more lengthy prose. But one would
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: lose the power, the condensation of the Iliad. To be
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: able to.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: You really have to be able to read it in Greek.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: Yes, yeah.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: And the weirder stuff is with ancient Hebrew, the numbers,
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: that also letters also double as numbers, and words have
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 2: numeric value. That's kind of wild.
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, my understanding is that with Hebrew, at least originally...
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: The so-called Semitic Afroasiatic languages, the vowels were not essential.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: A word root was specified just by the consonant. And
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: so the early texts of the Bible and of, say,
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: Phoenician had just the consonants, not the vowels. The vowels...
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: there wasn't ambiguity if you omitted the vowels. Nowadays, my
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: understanding is that Hebrew does have lines in the corner,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: and Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, which is an Afro-Asiatic language,
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: also has lines in the corner that convey the vowels.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: But there's a lot with those languages that you can
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: convey without specifying the vowels at all. Whereas with English,
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: you can't dispense with vowels.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: It's so interesting. It's so interesting that different languages evolved
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: like that. They have so many variables that just don't
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: exist in the English language. And then for us to
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: try to understand exactly what they were saying, the power
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 2: in their words, is almost impossible.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: An example is my book's get translated into lots of languages.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: The Guns, Germs, and Steel have been translated into 45 languages.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: One thing that I can see, because I've got all
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: the editions, I see how thick are the editions. The
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: German edition is always the thickest. The Italian edition is
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: the next thickest. The English edition is thinner. It just
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: takes more words to say something in German than it
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: does to say the same thing in English.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: Is it saying the exact same thing, though? Like in
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: their language, the way they interpret it, is it the same?
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, and no. German grammar is distinctive. The
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: German vocabulary is distinctive. So when you ask, is it
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: the same, any linguist would say, no, it's not the same.
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: We attempt to come up with an approximation, but we
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: know that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: another language.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: I had a fascinating guy in here the other day
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: that spent eight years of his life living with the
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: Pitaha people in the Amazon jungle and learning their language.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: Was this Daniel?
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, Daniel Everett.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: Have you spoken to him before?
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: I've corresponded with him.
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: Brilliant guy and such a fascinating conversation. I mean, utterly
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: fascinating that he had no writing, no studies, nothing to
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: go by. And he had to construct their language and
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: write it down over the course of years and years
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: of learning how to say things with them.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah. In New Guinea, New Guinea is the most language
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: rich part of the world. There are a thousand languages,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: not dialect, but a thousand languages in New Guinea. And
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: especially Lutheran missionaries, who are highly trained linguists, who are
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: sent out there. Their purpose is to translate the Bible
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: into a language. But the local languages, they start out...
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: Of course, there was no writing in New Guinea, so...
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: a Lutheran linguist will be dropped into an area. He
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: just listens to what they're saying. He has to figure
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: out what they're saying and has to figure out the sounds.
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: One example of that is that in 1990, I was
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: in the Lakes Plains of Indonesia, New Guinea, next to
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: a tribe called the Thawiyaw being studied by an American
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language.
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: The Thawiyaw language is a tonal language like Chinese. Chinese
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: has either five tones, mainland and Mandarin, and six tones
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: Cantonese or vice versa. This woman linguist, she had been
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: living for 15 years with the Thao Yi Yao, and
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: she had already identified 12 tones. She thought there might
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't,
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: I wasn't sure of that. But among the Fawaii, you
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: have to get the tone right. The syllables are mostly,
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: they're monosyllables, like bay. But bay, you can pronounce in
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: 12 different ways. Bay, bay, bay, bay, bay, bay. And
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: one of those bays means sweet potato. And another bay
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: means snake. And another bay means delicious potato. and another
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: bei means feces, and then there's another bei that means mother-in-law.
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: And so if a linguist or if a young child
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: learning Thao Yi Yao says something with the word bei
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: and gets the tone wrong, and you want to say,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: beloved mother-in-law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: and you drop the bei instead of rising the bei,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: what comes out? What comes out is, vile snake, let
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: me give you this feces. to eat.
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: Oh, my.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: God.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: Oh, my God.
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: A consequence of that is this linguist noticed that when
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: little kids are going around the Fowey Village with their mother...
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: There's not a back-and-forth conversation. Instead, the mother says something,
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: and the kid repeats the same thing, and the mother
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: may correct the kid. So it's mother and then repetition. Why?
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: Because with the fowey yow, if you get the pronunciation
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: slightly wrong, you've turned beloved mother-in-law into feces-dropping steak.
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: How did those two get so close? That seems to
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: me to not be a coincidence.
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: That's their problem.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: It is their problem, but it's also very telling.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: It's a big problem.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: What did you do? It's almost like they left the
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 2: door open to people with bad hearing to not be
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: able to catch what you're saying as you're walking out
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: the door. Yeah. That's not what I said. No, no, no.
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: I said, beloved mother-in-law. That's hilarious. What was the first
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: truly literate society?
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: Oh, that we know. The first writing was in the
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It was what's called cuneiform,
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: these wedge-shaped symbols. It was written with a stylus that
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: had different forms at the end. And so the writing
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: was done, cuneiform writing was done with a stylus. Cuneiform
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: was used to write many different languages. It was used
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 1: first to write, I believe, Akkadian, which was the language
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: of the first empire of the Fertile Crescent, and Cuneiform,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: the Hittite language of Turkey, which is the oldest and
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: most distinct Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in Cuneiform.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: So Cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: just as the English alphabet or the Roman alphabet is
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 1: used to write German and Swedish, and it's used to
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: write foray, the New Guinea language that I work with.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: The Phoenician, the Phoenicians, the first Greek writing was Linea
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: B of Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system.
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: And then the Greeks lost writing for a couple of centuries.
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: They lost it, totally. They became illiterate. The whole culture. Right.
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: At the time of the Trojan War, the Greeks wrote
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: in Linea B. this syllabic writing system. And then writing
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: disappeared from Greece for several centuries. It came back around
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: 800 BC, but the writing that came back was not
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: this syllabic linear B system. It was instead derived from
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: the Phoenician alphabet. So it was alphabetical writing. It was
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: not syllabic, but it was alphabetic. And the Greeks added
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: vowels The Phoenicians, because it was Afro-Asiatic language, did not
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: have symbols for vowels. In Greek, if you... In Phoenician,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: if you drop the vowels, you can still understand. In Greek,
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: you have to specify the vowels, otherwise it's not comprehensible.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: So the first, what we call alphabet, was the Greek
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: alphabet of AD 800, which then got modified slightly into
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: the Etruscan alphabet in Italy... And the Greek alphabet then
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: got modified into the Roman alphabet for Latin, which is
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: modified again to the alphabet that we've got today. So
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: the first writing system then was... Cuneiform. Cuneiform. And then
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: there were syllabic writing systems. And then came alphabets. Japanese...
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: is the world's most complicated writing system because it's really
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: four writing systems. Japanese has two syllabaries. For example, my name, diamond.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: The Japanese write it in two, da-ya-mon-no-do, because Japanese doesn't
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: put two consonants together. So my name comes out, da-ya-mon-no-do,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: in either of these two writing systems. Japanese also has
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: a third writing system, which is basically Chinese derived, the kanji,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: and then a fourth writing system, which is the Roman
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: writing system. So Japanese is the most complicated writing system
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: in the world. I just come from Korea last Friday.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: I flew from Korea.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 2: I heard you speak about the Korean language, that it's
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 2: the best language.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: It's the best writing system in the world. What the
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 1: Koreans do is they take their letters and they group
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 1: their letters into syllables. So if you look at Korean writing,
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: you'll see that there are several things pushed together in
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: a little box. That box is a syllable. And the
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: result is that Koreans, when they read, they read not
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: letter by letter, but they read by syllables. And so
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: because of this wonderful writing system.
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: One of the more interesting things about the history of
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: the Mongols and Genghis Khan is the book, The Lost
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 2: History of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish, right?
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: Because it wasn't written, like it was written phonetically like
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: the Mongolian language, but in Chinese. Is that what it was?
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 2: Is that how they did it?
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: One of my classmates at Harvard, Joe Fletcher was the
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: person who rediscovered that Manga book and figured out how
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: to read it. Really? That wasn't until the early 1960s.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 2: That's insane.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: But there are, of course... There are writing systems that
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: we still can't read. The Etruscans, the people of Italy
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: whom the Romans eventually conquered. So the Etruscans took the
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: Greek alphabet and modified it slightly. We have some Etruscan
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: writing in stone. But all Etruscan books got burnt or lost.
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: The longest Etruscan text that we've got, there was a
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia. This linen shroud
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: was used to wrap something, but the linen shroud was
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: evidently a piece of Etruscan writing because there's a long
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: Etruscan text on it, and the shroud was then reused
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: to wrap someone's book. The result is that We can
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: pronounce Etruscan writing. We can read it because it's Greek letters,
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: but we don't know the meaning of the words for
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: the most part. There aren't Rosetta stones for Etruscan. The
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: closest we come to it is that dices, these six-sided
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: dices have been found in Etruscan areas. And on the dices,
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: there are six So evidently, the six symbols must mean one, two, three, four, five, six.
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: And people have figured out one or two of those,
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: but they haven't figured out the others. So we know
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: the Etruscan symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six,
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: but we don't know which one of them is six
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: and which one of them is three and which one
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: of them is four.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: Have you ever seen the Easter Ireland language that it
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: can't translate?
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you have. Yeah. That's fascinating. Yeah.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 2: That's a beautiful one too, right? It's really interesting the
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 2: way they write.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: It's quite mysterious. There are a few samples of Easter
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: Island writing known. They're all in wood. The first European visitor...
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: There it is right there. Yes, all right. The first
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: European visitor to Easter Island of whom we have a record,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: was the Dutch Roggeveen in, I think, 1722. And he
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: did not observe writing. The first mention of writing was
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Island
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: in the 1770s. There's a suspicion that the Easter Islanders
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: might have invented writing when the Spaniards came as the
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: second visitor to Easter Island in 1770. The Easter Islanders
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: may have seen Spaniards with wooden sticks, looking at the
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: wooden sticks and doing things. And that may have given
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: the Easter Islanders the idea to invent a writing system
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: of their own. So it's possible that it was late
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: invention inspired by the Spaniard. But a case where we
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: know that happened, the Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas, no
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: Native Americans had a writing system in North America. The Maya, yes,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 1: but not in North America. There was a Cherokee Indian
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: called Sequoyah who had a store, and he noticed that
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: when Europeans... came into his store, they would scribble things
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: on paper, they would talk to each other, and they
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: got a lot of power. They were able to communicate
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: with each other. So he realized that they were writing
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: down words, but he had no idea. what the writing
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: system was. He didn't know whether it was an alphabet.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: He didn't know about alphabets or syllabaries. He tried different
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: writing systems. He spent about 10 years doing it. And
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: he finally ended up with a syllabary where the symbols
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: are for syllables, not letters. The Cherokee syllabary has 80
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: signs for 80 different syllables. And Sequoyah convinced the Cherokees
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: of the value of this writing system. by having two
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: Cherokees at the opposite end of like a football field.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: And he had one Cherokee say something to him, which
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: he then wrote down on paper. And then he went
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: to the other end of the football field and handed
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: that piece of paper to another Cherokee to whom he
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: had taught his writing system. And that other Cherokee then
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: Cherokee at the other end of the football field said.
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: at the field had said. So Sequoia in that way
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing. Wow.
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating. Knowing the origin of a culture's written language
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 2: and learning it from others. Well, they all had to
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: originally have learned it most likely from someone else that
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: they saw something being written down. Or did they all
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: come up with it at the same time? When did
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: Have you seen the newest discovery out of Gobekli Tepe
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: where they believe that they found what they think is
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 2: probably writing that predates cuneiform by 5,000 or 6,000 years?
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: No, I've not seen that.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 2: It's really recent. It's over the last couple of weeks.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: Jamie will pull it up. It's a very weird way
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 2: of writing. Did Daniel Everett discuss this with us? Are
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 2: you talking about the thing I have on the screen? Yes.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker 2: I brought this up because I found it on that
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 2: podcast I was watching with Lex.
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: Irving is his name. It is the case with cuneiform,
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: although we think of cuneiform as having arisen around 3500 B.C.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: Irving Finkel, that's it. So this is it. Did Irving
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 2: Finkel find ancient writing at Gobekli Tepe?
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: Uh-huh. We know that for cuneiform, there were marks going
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: back several thousand years. And there's a debate among linguists
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: whether those marks are the earliest proto-writing. It's suspected that
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: the marks were used to count sheep. They function as numerals.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: They might have had word for sheep. But what's clear
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: is Every writing system other than the first writing, one
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: has to ask, might it have been copied from the
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: first writing? But the first writing had to be a
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: new invention. And there are at least three writing systems
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: that we're sure are independent. Cuneiform, because it was the
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: first writing system we know of. The New World was
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: isolated from the Old World, and yet Mexican Indians developed writing.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: The earliest writing in Mexico is something like, 700 B.C.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: or 900 B.C. And then the Maya also had writing,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: syllabic writing. The Maya had lots of books, which Bishop
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: Belander burnt all of them except four. But the Maya
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: writing arose independently of cuneiform because there was no contact
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: between the Old World and the New World. And then
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: Chinese writing. Chinese writing is first attested around 1300 B.C.,
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: Chinese writing is totally different from cuneiform or anything else
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: in the Fertile Crescent at the time. So it's suspected
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: that the Chinese developed writing independently of the Fertile Crescent,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing,
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: namely cuneiform and the Fertile Crescent, Mexican writing, and then
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: Chinese writing, and then possibly Easter Island writing.
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 2: The thing you were talking about with Greece is so fascinating,
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: that a war, the Trojan War, can be so catastrophic.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: that the entire culture becomes illiterate for hundreds of years?
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: It was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 1: the Bronze Age. So Bronze Age cultures, this was just
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: as iron was emerging. Bronze was the main metal used
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: in the Middle East, in Turkey. Bronze Age cultures included Troy,
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: Homer's Troy. Crete, so the island of Crete had Linea B,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: which was the earliest, the syllabic old Greek writing system.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: But Linear B was derived from another writing system called
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: Linear A, which we can't read yet. We don't have
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: enough text. It's suspected that Linear A recorded the Minoan
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: language of Minoan Crete, whatever that language is. We don't
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: know the language. That might have been another independent invention.
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and... Greece and
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: Cyprus and the Levant from Palestine up to Lebanon and
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: then Anatolia, Turkey, all of that Bronze Age civilization collapsed.
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: roughly around the time of the Trojan War. So the
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: Trojan War may have had something to do with the
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: collapse of Troy itself, but the Trojan War certainly didn't
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: have anything to do with the disappearance of Linear B
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: writing from all of Crete and from all of Greece.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: There were this Greek pottery that turned up in the
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: Fertile Crescent, making one suspect that there was a mass invasion,
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: and the mass invasion destroy the Bronze Age civilization of
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: Crete and Cyprus and Turkey and the Hittite Empire. But then,
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: just to go back to Troy, the fall of Troy
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: was the fall of Troy, and that's all. But there
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: was a much broader collapse of Bronze Age civilization in
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: the whole eastern Mediterranean, and we don't know why. We
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: don't know whether it was an invasion. Egyptian writing at
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: the time talks of sea peoples, people who came by
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: the sea and fought with the Egyptians. So we don't
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: know whether the collapse of the Bronze Age was because
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: of invaders from the sea or whether it was because
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 1: of climate change or whether it was because of invention
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: of new weapons.
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 2: It's just insane that they could completely lose their language
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 2: and then come up with a whole new way of writing.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to... Okay. Other examples of it...
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: Let's see. India. The so-called Harappan civilization of India and Pakistan.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: In the Indus Valley, there was a high civilization called
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: Harappan civilization between about 3000, 2000 BC. And they had writing.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: We have their seals, their rings that were used to
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: stamp with wax. but we don't have any long texts.
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: The longest text on one of these rings is only
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: three or four symbols. There are several hundred different symbols.
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: We can't read it. Harappan writing disappeared, and then writing
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: reemerged in India with Alexander the Great. When Alexander of
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: Macedon invaded India... after Alexander evacuated India, writing came back
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: in India, but it was a completely different writing system,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: the progenitor of modern Indian writing system. So there's another
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: case of writing disappearing, the Harappan writing, and then 2,000
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: years later, a completely different writing system emerged. It's so extraordinary.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 2: And then you have the hieroglyphs, which is a totally
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: different way of writing. that the Egyptians came up with.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: Again, that is really interesting. So cuneiform emerged roughly, say,
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: 3400 B.C., Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged about 3000 BC. Hieroglyphs have
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: absolutely nothing to do with cuneiform. We can read cuneiform.
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: We can read hieroglyphs. But it's suspicious that hieroglyphs emerged
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: only a few centuries after cuneiform. This is an example
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: of what's called idea diffusion. It's not that the writing
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: system itself, it's not that cuneiform writing spread to Egypt,
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: but the idea of writing spread. Similarly with Sequoia, this
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: Cherokee Indian, it's not that Sequoia copied English writing, it's
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: that he got the idea of writing and then he
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: invented the writing system himself. So we suspect that hieroglyphs
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: were idea diffusion, that Egyptians got the idea of writing
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: from the Fertile Crescent, and then they developed their own
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: writing system.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: And it makes sense if you think about how complex
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are, and then you look at
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: how complex and beautifully constructed ancient Egyptian society was. I mean,
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: they were operating... on a completely different creative and engineering
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 2: level than anyone else in the world. And, of course,
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 2: their writing is going to be pretty wild, too. Kind
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: of makes sense.
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: Right. It's a clear example of a writing system being invented,
• 1:30:12
  Speaker 1: not gradually evolving, but bang, the earliest hieroglyphics are full hieroglyphics.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: Very strange.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: Right. There's another example, Korean writing. Okay. So Korean writing,
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: Korean writing, Hangul, which groups letters into syllables. This is
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 1: not a writing system that gradually evolved. Instead, a king
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: of Korea called King Sejong around roughly the year 1430.
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: Until then, Koreans wrote with Chinese-based writing systems. And King
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: Sejong has a famous proclamation, which Koreans learn by memory.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: King Sejong's proclamation says, it grieves me that our people
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: write the Korean language with Chinese-like writing when the sounds
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: and the words of the Chinese language are not similar
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: to the Korean writing. Therefore, I, King Sejong, have devised
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: a new writing system, which I wish all of my
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: subjects to learn. My writing system is matched to the
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: Korean language. And that was Han Gull. King Sejong invented
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: Han Gull himself at a bang. There was no precedent. Wow.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 2: That's an excellent example of how one individual, one leader
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 2: can radically transform a society.
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And it's also an example of a
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: leader coming up with an invention that has lasted already
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: for 600 years. A leader not doing something ephemeral that
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: gets replaced, but a leader devising a writing system that
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: has carried on.
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 2: There's an interesting thing with the Mormons. When you were
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: talking about how they figured out a way to get
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: people very invested in in being a Mormon, and one
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 2: of the ways is by being a missionary, that you
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: have to be a missionary. One of the things societies
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 2: have figured out is to get people to be deeply nationalistic,
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 2: you almost have to have them serve. Like conscription for
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: all young people to do a certain amount of time
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: in the military. That's a very common thing. Like think
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 2: about Israel, for instance. Israel is very... nationalistic, very proud society.
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 2: People that are from Israel, you meet them, they're very
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: proud of being from Israel. Korea is another example of that.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: They have mandatory military service. You have to do that.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: That's an interesting question. Is it the case that national
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: identity universally depended upon a draft? Finland has a strong
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: national identity Finland was a province of the Russian Empire.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: Finland did not become independent until 1918. So there was
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: no Finnish draft at the time of Finnish independence. Instead,
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: the anchor for Finland's national identity is the Finnish language,
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: which it's a very distinctive language. The Finns are proud
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: of their language. It's a poetic singing language. It's related
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: somewhat distantly to Hungarian. But I mention it as a counter...
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: You're probably right. In many cases, that national identity was
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: fostered by the draft in Italy, the unification of Italy
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: in 1862. The development of Italian national identity depended heavily
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: on a national school system but also on national army.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: So I have Italian conversation once a week with my
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Italian teacher. She explained to me that the national identity
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: Italians had lots of dialects, 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: New Guinea, we would say that they're different languages. Even today,
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: there are different dialects in Italy that different Italians cannot understand.
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: In contrast to.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialect.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah. Right.
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 2: And if you just spoke classic Italian that you learned
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: in college, you would have no idea what they were
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: talking about because they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: Right. Yeah. Interestingly, my first trip to Italy, dialects were
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: far more developed in Europe 60 years ago. My first,
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: and that's true in Italy, Germany, and England, my first
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: trip to England was at the age of 12 in 1950.
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: My sister and I were taken by my parents to
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: a small town on the east coast of England called Beckles.
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: My father was a doctor and was visiting a doctor
• 1:35:22
  Speaker 1: in Beckles. So my parents and their friends were talking
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: English and my sister and I were bored, so we
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: wandered off into the town, and we wandered off only
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: about two blocks, but we made several turns, and we
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: couldn't figure out how to get back to the house
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: of this family, the Grantham Hills, so we asked a
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: man on the street in American English how to get
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: back to the house of the Grantham, and he said
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: something which he thought was, we couldn't understand a word
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: of it. That's just an example of how Strongly differentiated
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: dialects were in England as recently as 1950. When I
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: was a student in England in 1950... What did.
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 2: It sound like? Did it sound like a totally different language?
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: I can't reproduce any of it. All I can tell
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: you is that it was completely incomprehensible.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: But it was a form of English.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: Presumably. When we got back to the house and we
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying... Then
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: the Grantham Hill says, well, that's the local dialect. Wow. Similarly,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: in Germany, when I lived in Germany in 1961, I
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: lived in Munich, capital of Bavaria. And Bavarians have a strong,
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: strong dialect. Instead of saying, ich bin ein Bayer. und
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: ich hab eine dicke Haut. I'm a Bavarian and I
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: have a thick skin. They would say, ich hab eine
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: dicke Haut. So when I was traveling around with a
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: friend of mine from northern Germany, from the Rhineland, where
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: they speak what is closest to Hochdeutsch, literary German, and
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria and asked
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: to be filled up with gas. Because I understood what
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: the guy was saying, but my friend Josef from the
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: Rhineland What did he say? He couldn't understand the Bavarian
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: at all. That's wild.
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 2: That's wild because they're so close to each other. That's
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: what's so strange about it.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: Right. But again, in Italy, Sicilian is often regarded as
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: a separate language. As you know, there are books written
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: in Sicilian. Modern literary and government Italian is close to
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: the dialect of Florence. but there are dozens and dozens
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: of Italian dialects, which persisted until after World War II
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: and were mutually incomprehensible. But those dialects now have been
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: fading because of universal education plus the draft.
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 2: Wow. When did you start learning Italian?
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: I started learning Italian... It was April 1999, and I
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: can date it because my wife and I and our
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: kids had been to on a vacation in Italian Switzerland
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: and our son Max fell and he hurt his leg
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: so we had to go to a hospital none of
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: us knew Italian but my wife knew that the Italian
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: word for where was dove dove Dove l'ospedale. And so
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: Italy in May 1999, I thought, Dove, that's simple. I
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: can learn that. Why don't I learn enough Italian that
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: I can ask where the bathroom is and I can
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: order meals and restaurants? So I studied Italian grammar for
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: six weeks, and we were scheduled to go to Germany
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: on May 11th, and my father died that morning, so
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: we aborted the Italian trip But after the Italian trip,
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: I've spent six weeks learning much of the grammar. Let's
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: put in another six weeks and learn the rest of
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: the grammar. So I put in another six weeks. I
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: learned the rest of the grammar. And having learned the grammar,
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: I said, I've learned the grammar. Let's now read some Italian.
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: So I began reading Italian. And then after eight months,
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: so I've been reading Italian. I said, why don't I
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: speak it? UCLA has an Italian department. So I put
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: up a notice in the Italian department saying I would
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: like to hire Italian graduate students to come speak Italian
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: to me. And someone, an Italian woman answered the ad.
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: She came to my office. And here I had been
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: dealing with Italian for eight months. And here is a
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: live Italian speaking Italian to me for the first time.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: It's like knowing of something and then you suddenly have
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: the experience The closest parallel I can think of is
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: having heard of sex and then you have your first
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: sexual experience. So I then arranged for Italian speakers to
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: come every week to talk Italian with me. And then
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: since then, the two Italian speakers who came and talked
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: Italian with me, both of them had American boyfriends. Both
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: of them had difficult relationships. They couldn't decide whether to
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: marry the American boyfriend or not. But I, in effect,
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: did marital therapy in Italian for two years. I talked
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 1: through with my Italian teachers. I said that the horrible
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: relationship that their parents had and their boyfriend's parents had
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 1: They can make a relationship of their own. So both
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: of them are married. They're still married. And it's now
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: 27 years later. I still, every week, I talk to
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: Francesca for two hours every two weeks. Francesca is the
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: person with whom I talk the most and I have
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: the widest range of conversation of anybody in the world
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: except for my wife and my Australian companion on my
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: New Guinea expedition because in our conversation we talk about everything. Wow.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 2: How many languages do you know?
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: In my life I've dealt with 13 languages. Three of
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: them I only read, never spoke. Greek, Latin, and Dutch.
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: I never spoke. I just read them. I can The
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: languages that I can give lectures in now are English, Italian, German,
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: and New Guinea talk Pidgin. I used to be fluent
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: in Spanish and Russian, but my Russian got driven out
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: by Indonesian when I started working in Indonesia. Finnish I
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: learned enough to hitchhike, and what else? And then the
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: foray language, I can speak rudimentary foray, and those are
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: my languages.
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 2: That's incredible. How do you not mix them up in
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: your head?
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: I do mix them up.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: I would imagine.
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: I can keep straight New Guinea Talk Pigeon and English,
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 1: and mostly I can keep straight Italian and German.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: Because they're so different from each other.
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: They're different. So I can keep them straight. When I
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: started learning Italian, I had been fluent in Spanish. Italian
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: drove out my Spanish completely. Russian, I used to be
• 1:43:11
  Speaker 1: fluent in Russian. When I started to learn Indonesian, and
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: I was initially struggling with Indonesian, and I couldn't find
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: a word, out would come the Russian word. Russian and Indonesian,
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: they're completely different from each other, but I felt that
• 1:43:26
  Speaker 1: it's as if I have, what, four channels for languages.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: I can keep straight English, Italian, German, and a fourth language.
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: But a fifth language, if I attempt to bring back
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: a fifth language, I'll confuse that. And so Indonesian and Russian,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: although they're totally different. Once I started in Indonesian, it
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: drove out my Russian.
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 2: That's crazy.
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: It is crazy.
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 2: So do you think that if you lived in Russia
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 2: for a little bit, you'd pick it back up again?
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: I think so. And I will have the test soon
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: because of our two, we have twin sons. And of
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: our twin sons, one of them is engaged to a
• 1:44:03
  Speaker 1: wonderful Russian woman, Anastasia. They're getting married in our garden.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: And so when Anastasia comes over for dinner once or
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: twice a week, I trot out some elementary phrases of Russian.
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: I greet her in Russian. beautiful citizeness. I would like
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: to bring back more of my Russian, but I'm afraid
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: that if I brought back my Russian, my German, I
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: don't know whether I'll do it.
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 2: You only have a certain amount of hard drive space.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I've run into that problem all the time just
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: with the various interviews that I do, like fascinating conversations
• 1:44:44
  Speaker 2: that I have I completely forget.
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 2: Because it's just there's no room in there anymore. And
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 2: I could imagine like keeping– I want to talk about pigeon.
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 2: I want to talk about pigeon talk, New Guinea pigeon talk.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 2: Is that a written language?
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It is now written. It's very interesting and it's
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language.
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: So– New Guinea talk pigeon, it sounds like baby talk.
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: Me talk long you, you grasp long you, and top long,
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: long head long you, you go finis, teeth long you,
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: you go right, eye long you, brown pal, lick lick, yeah. Okay,
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: so that's a sample of a pigeon.
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 2: What did you say?
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: Oh, I said that the hair on your head is
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: somewhat sparse, and you have brown eyes, and grasp long you,
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: you lick lick, that's all. Wow. So, here's how New
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: Guinea talk pigeon sounds. arose and it's a model for
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: how similar pidgin languages have arisen all around the world
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: dozens or hundreds of times. When German colonial administrators came
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand different languages,
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: but the Germans had to communicate with them and the
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: Germans hired or kidnapped New Guineans belonging to many different
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: language groups. The Germans had to communicate with their workers,
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: and the workers had to communicate with each other. So
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: it's not that anybody invented something. The Germans began speaking
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: a stripped-down, easy German, and the New Guineans began picking
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: up some elementary German words, but they also picked up
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: words from other New Guinea languages. This first language was
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: called a pidgin language. It's very simple. It's not adequate
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: to express the range of human emotion, but it's enough
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: to discuss plantation agriculture. And it was enough for adults
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: who had another, had their own main language and were
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: using the pidgin language just to discuss the coconut plantation.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: Where pidgin became inadequate was once you get the children
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: of pidgin-speaking parents and the children from pidgin-speaking parents of
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: different native languages children are starting to communicate with each other.
• 1:47:12
  Speaker 1: This stripped-down language that's enough to talk about coconuts, but
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: is not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion.
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: The children themselves, within a decade, modified spontaneously, not consciously,
• 1:47:31
  Speaker 1: modified pigeon to become a full language with a grammar...
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: and tenses, and future tense, and prepositions.
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 2: Over how long? What period of time?
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: A decade. Wow. A decade. The best information we have
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: about how, and these pidgin languages, these Creole languages, which
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: are the more complex ones with prepositions, have developed all
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: around the world. Our best information about the development of
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: Creole language comes from Hawaii, because Hawaii plantations, plantation workers
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: were brought in from Japan and China and various other places.
• 1:48:11
  Speaker 1: So again, workers are thrown together on a plantation. They
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: have to communicate with English-speaking plantation workers owners, and they
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: spontaneously develop this really stripped-down so-called pigeon language that doesn't
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: have prepositions and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: discussing what you can do with a sugar cane. But
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: the children of these workers... who now want to talk
• 1:48:39
  Speaker 1: with each other and have a normal life. The pidgin
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: language is not adequate, and the children spontaneously made the
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: pidgin more complex. Within a decade, the children invented prepositions,
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: and they invented future tense, and they invented plurals, and
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: this is somewhat documented because the newspapers have missionaries in
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: Hawaii in the decade from 1890 to 1900. Every now
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: and then, the newspapers would quote something funny that a
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: Hawaiian said on a plantation, and it would be an
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: example of Creole as of 1892. And then you can
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: see from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: Creole had gotten in 1894. So New Guinea talk vision
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: which is actually what's called the Creole language, is a
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: full complex language with prepositions. You can say anything. It's
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: the government language. New Guineans, New Guinean government leaders, they
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: are more fluent usually in Creole than they are in English.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 1: So in Parliament in Papua New Guinea, the language of
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: Parliament is either English or or talk Pidgin, and then
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: there's one other, other Creole language. When I started out
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 1: in New Guinea, the first thing that I learned was
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: talk Pidgin, because I could pick it up very quickly.
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: Not appellate, something belong, mark them along. Did you have.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 2: Any preparation in the language before you went there, or
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 2: did you try to pick it up as you were there?
• 1:50:26
  Speaker 1: I picked it up as I was there.
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 2: And was there anything written about the language before you
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 2: got there? Was it possible to study it? And when
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 2: they wrote it down, did they write it using English alphabet?
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: That's right, yeah. There are books. There are grammars of
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: New Guinea Pigeon. I learned New Guinea Pidgin initially, which
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: is a Creole language with prepositions. I learned it by
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: talking with New Guineans. And then eventually I acquired one
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: or two of these pidgin grammars and a pidgin dictionary
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: and was able to make my pidgin more complex. Wow.
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: Just as an example, thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science.
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: but to demonstrate that you can say anything in talk vision.
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: I can give a lecture about the second law of
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 1: thermodynamics in talk vision. You've got one fellow man, Ansaga, Ansaga,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: you've got this fellow. You talk along, Hatumas, this fellow Hatumas,
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: and the thermodynamics, this fellow, Ansaga, you've got strong fellow, Tintin,
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: and you make him rule number two, belong... belong, tinted
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: and belong hot. I mean, second law of thermodynamics.
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: So what did you just say?
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: What I said is that a Swede called Lars Ansaga
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is thermodynamics is
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: about heat. And Ansaga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions.
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: And so I explain... Dispel Ansage, he come up, he
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: mark him rule number two, long, long, savvy belong heat.
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: Savvy belong heat, literally, knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics.
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: Rule number two, long, savvy belong heat. Ansage got this
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: bella strong, bella tinted. Ansage's got, he's a smart man.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 2: Have you talked to someone in this pigeon, talk pigeon,
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 2: where they, where you could explain something like that and
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 2: they could relay it to you? Like they understand what
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 2: you're talking about?
• 1:52:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. With New Guineans, so in my work in
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use pigeon.
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: In Papua New Guinea, they do use pigeon. And with
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: New Guineans, they and I can discuss anything in pigeon.
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: and they can explain to me the difference between the
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: taste of human red meat and human fat. You can
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: say anything and talk to a patient.
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a weird part of their culture, right? That
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 2: they can differentiate the taste between human red meat and
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 2: human fat?
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: Well, they say that human red meat is like the
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird like an ostrich,
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: whereas human fat, they say, is like the fat of pigs.
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: I was never offered... and I never, I wouldn't have
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: accepted because the place in New Guinea where I began
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: my work was the foray area. The foray were the
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: people who had Kuru, which is basically mad cow disease.
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: They were the people who were dying of Kuru, and
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: they were the people that I worked with for the
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: first eight years.
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 2: And who were they eating?
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: Oh. There were, there's what's called Endo-cannibalism and exo-cannibalism. Exo-cannibalism
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: is eating your dead enemies whom you kill in war.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: Endo-cannibalism is eating your dead relatives. When the Australian government
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: came in, it was easy. They forbade cannibalism. And quickly,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: exocannibalism disappeared because the tribe that was being eaten complained
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: to the government. And the government told the people who
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: were eating the other people, you can't do that anymore.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: But endocannibalism, in New Guinea, traditionally, you would as soon
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: fail to eat your dead mother as you or I
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: would just throw away the body of our dead mother.
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: There are precise rules about who gets to eat, eat what.
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: But in general, the relatives eat the body, and there
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: are rules about what part of the body you eat.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: In 1965, I had working my camp with me a
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: New Guinean who did not speak pidgin, and we were
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: in a remote camp on a mountain. We were getting
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: no visitors because it was remote. And one day into
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: camp came a man, sat down with this guy who
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: didn't speak to occupation, talked with him, and then the
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: man got up. And his friend said to me, this
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: man is quitting his work with you. Why he's quitting
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: his work with you? Because... the young man who made
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: a down payment on my worker's daughter. You make down
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: payments when a girl is young. So there was a
• 1:55:53
  Speaker 1: young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter,
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: and that young man had died. He was the prospective
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: son-in-law of my worker. And because he was the prospective son-in-law,
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: my worker was expected... But it's true. My work was
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: expected to eat the forearm. So he quit his work
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: with me and walked away. There's no way that he
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: would fail to eat the forearm of his prospective son-in-law
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: any more than you or I would throw our mother's
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: body into the ditch.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 2: So he quit working with you because of that?
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because the funeral feast was going to— the son-in-law had
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: just died. This guy walked into camp, had brought the
• 1:56:45
  Speaker 1: news to my worker that your prospective son-in-law has died,
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: and the funeral feast is going to take place three
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: days in the future. So you'd better come now so
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: that you're there before the body rots.
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 2: That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 2: talking about, how the Pitaha deal with their debt. It's
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 2: very similar. But the thing is the amount of time
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 2: they have to wait before you eat them is also similar,
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 2: which is I don't understand totally. Did they have an
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 2: explanation for that?
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: No. And it's hard for you and me to understand
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 1: because— In the area where my work quit in order
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 1: to— it' s a warm, hot area, about 3,000 feet. And the body,
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: a dead body, is put— is, was— the government has largely put
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: it down. The body is put on a raised wooden
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: platform with slats on it, and underneath the platform is
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: a bucket. So— I'm sorry you asked me. The body
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 1: putrefies and the flesh turns to liquid. The liquid then
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: drips through the slats on the platform down into the bucket.
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: You then dip your sweet potato in the bucket of
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: this putrid fluid, and then you eat the sweet potato.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: That's what I'm told. Whoa! I was not offered. I
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: was not accepted if offered, but I was told that.
• 1:58:27
  Speaker 1: told by the missionary in the area and by New
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: Guineans themselves. That's what they do with dead bodies.
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 2: Is there a scenario where they would have encouraged you
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 2: or required you to consume someone?
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 1: Never.
• 1:58:43
  Speaker 2: Not when you were there?
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: Absolutely never because endocannibalism, there are precise rules about Right.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: Who gets to eat which part of the pie.
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 2: What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 2: someone there and you decided to get married and you
• 1:58:59
  Speaker 2: married someone of the tribe and then that person died?
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 2: Would you have had to eat them?
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: I do not know. I never put it to the test.
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 2: But according to their rules, would you have?
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: Probably.
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 2: What would you do?
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: Probably, yes, husbands and wives are expected to eat the
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 1: other person. I would not have eaten because the first
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: tribe that I worked, the Foray tribe, they were the
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 1: people who had Kuru, which is basically mad cow disease.
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: And the commonest cause of death among the Foray when
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: I was there was... Kuru, mad cow disease.
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: That's from eating brain tissue, right?
• 1:59:47
  Speaker 1: That's right. Eating the uncooked brain.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 2: But even if you cook it, it's a prion disease, correct?
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: It's a prion disease.
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: Prions survive thousands of degree temperatures without dying.
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: A couple hundred degrees, not thousands.
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:00:02
  Speaker 1: They certainly survive a couple hundred degrees.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 2: I thought it was a lot more than that. I
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 2: thought that was one of the issues with mad cow
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: disease that no matter— How if you had beef that
• 2:00:13
  Speaker 2: was infected with these prions, no matter how hot you
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 2: make it, it doesn't cook it off.
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: My understanding with that.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 2: Let's put it into perplexity. I would like to know, like,
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 2: at what temperature do prions get destroyed? Because I think
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 2: it's extraordinarily high. Maybe there's different prions and different ones
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 2: have different temperatures.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's 600 degrees.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: Because I didn't think it was just raw brain. I
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: think the issue is any brain tissue of the same
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 2: species as you is where this disease comes from, which
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 2: is why cows get it from eating brain tissue of cows.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 2: And then those prions are transferable to human beings if
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 2: you eat the tissue of those cows.
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: That is true.
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: That's true. And in fact– That's not a.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 2: Real good, concise answer. Prions can survive temperatures that kills
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: most microbes. Boiling, ordinary cooking, and standard steam sterilization are
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 2: not reliably sufficient. Resistance also varies by prion strain, what
• 2:01:13
  Speaker 2: we were talking about, yeah, and whether the material is wet, dried,
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 2: or embedded. Boiling, 212 degrees, not dependable. 1,000 degrees. Celsius. Yo,
• 2:01:27
  Speaker 2: what is that Fahrenheit? Reported to destroy prion infectively. This
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 2: is the level associated with effective incineration.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks like 900 degrees Fahrenheit is agreed upon.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: At least for a few hours it's reliably destructive. Wow.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 2: 900 degrees Fahrenheit for hours. Even that's, yeah, well done doesn't... Cooking, yeah,
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 2: well done cooking does not reliably destroy prions. What a
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 2: crazy disease. A disease you only get from eating each other.
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: It's almost like nature doesn't want you to eat each other.
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: The reconstructed history of the Why on earth did the
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: foray have this basically mad cow disease as the commonest
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: cause of death? In humans, there's a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob,
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: which is a spontaneous mutation. And usually, spontaneous mutation, it
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: dies out because nowadays we don't eat meat.
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 2: Each other.
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: Each other. But what's thought to have happened in the
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: foray area, Creutzfeldt-Jakob arises rarely as a spontaneous mutation. The
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: guess is that someone in the foray area around 1910
• 2:02:52
  Speaker 1: developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob and died, but the foray were practicing endocannibalism.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 1: The women would cut up the skulls and the babies
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: with the women would be playing there with the mother,
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: and here's this soft tissue, the brain that's fun to
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: play with, so the babies would play with the brain
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: and lick their fingers. So the transmission was by cannibalism,
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: particularly to babies at the time, and it's all thought
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: to have arisen with one foray person who had Christ
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: for Jacob and died of it in around 1910, but
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 1: was then eaten by others, who were in turn eaten
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: still by others, so that Kourou, Kreutzfeldt Jakob, then exploded
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: among the foray.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 2: What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 2: disease does not occur with the Piraha, that they do
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 2: have endocannibalism, and he thinks they still practice it. He
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 2: thinks they secretly still practice it. They just don't. They
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 2: kind of hide it. They don't have that disease.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: That makes sense because Kreutzfeldt Jakob is rare.
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: Even among cannibals?
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: Oh, among everybody. Creutzfeldt-Jakob, it's a rare mutation, like one
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: in 10,000, one in 100,000. It's pure chance that one
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: Creutzfeldt-Jakob mutation arose in the foray and not in any
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: other tribe in New Guinea. So it doesn't surprise me
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: in the least that the Parana, whatever the name is,
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: didn't have Creutzfeldt, didn't have... Kuru because nobody in the world,
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: no human population in the world had Kuru except for
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: the foray as a result of that accident of one
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: person with a quite full yaka evidently getting eaten around 1910.
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 2: That is so fascinating and also fascinating that it exists
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 2: in cows.
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: It exists in cows. It exists in... sheep and goats.
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: There's a disease of sheep and goats called scrapie, which
• 2:05:07
  Speaker 1: is basically, it's a prion disease, and it was scrapie
• 2:05:11
  Speaker 1: that gave the idea to the medical physician working in
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: the foray area that when I arrived in 1964, Kuru
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: was completely mysterious. It affected only the foray. If a
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: foray went down to Port Moresby, the Foray might still
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: develop Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the Foray environment.
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: Foreigners who came into the Foray, I didn't develop Kuru.
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: Other New Guineans who came into the Foray area didn't
• 2:05:49
  Speaker 1: develop Kuru. The only people who developed Kuru were the Foray,
• 2:05:55
  Speaker 1: but the symptoms of Kuru were, because the disease is
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: now gone, or similar to the symptoms of scrapie. And
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: so that gave the idea that Kuru might be an
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: infectious disease. So an infectious disease expert managed to get
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: the foray to provide him with the brain of a
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 1: foray man who had died of Kuru. And the doctor
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: managed to get dry ice shipped into the foray area
• 2:06:30
  Speaker 1: in order to freeze the coral. He got it shipped
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: back to the National Institute of Health. How long did
• 2:06:37
  Speaker 1: that take? A couple of days. But it was frozen
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: in dry ice. And he then injected this brain tissue
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the animal... most likely to
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: be able to be infected with human Kuru would be
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: a chimpanzee. And it took three years. I saw that
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: chimpanzee in a cage. After three years, finally, the chimpanzee
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: had been completely healthy. After three years, the chimpanzee then
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: began developing the instability of Kuru and died of Kuru.
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: and then that chimpanzee's brain was injected into the brain
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: of other chimpanzees, and the time for infection was shorter.
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: The last death due to Kuru was in 2009. The
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: last funeral feast... was 1959. After that, the Australians imposed
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 1: control and banned funeral feasts, so the last four-way funeral
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: feast was 1959. That then would have been the last
• 2:07:52
  Speaker 1: transmission of Kuru, and the last death was then in 2009,
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: which was 50 years later. So the latency, it took
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: 50 years for that person who had been infected by
• 2:08:06
  Speaker 1: eating or licking the brain in 1959. A long latency.
• 2:08:11
  Speaker 1: The next last death was 2005, and the last death
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 1: was 2009.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: And so these are people that have been infected decades earlier?
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: They were infected in 1959. Right.
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: But is it possible that they were doing what Daniel
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: Everett feels like the Pita Ha were doing, was lying
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 2: about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts?
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: Very unlikely, because the foray area, by the time I
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 1: got there in 1964, they were missionaries.
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 2: You watched them do this thing where they dipped a
• 2:08:46
  Speaker 2: sweet potato into the petrified... Putrefied?
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 1: No, no, I have not. I was told about it
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: by the missionary in the area who didn't know what
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: was going on.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: But you knew that they were engaging in this?
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I would have wanted to watch.
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: You didn't want to watch?
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: I was not offered the opportunity.
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 2: You weren't allowed.
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: Right. And you don't want to push. Didn't, was it
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: one of the Rockefeller's sons? that supposedly was consumed by
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: people in New Guinea. He had insulted them on a
• 2:09:21
  Speaker 2: previous trip. He wanted something that was sacred. This was
• 2:09:25
  Speaker 2: like the lore. And then he returned not knowing that
• 2:09:28
  Speaker 2: he was in danger. They killed him on the boat
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: and then they ate him.
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: It's well known what happened. So this was Michael Rockefeller
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 1: who collected art in the Balaam Valley. And then he
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: wanted to come down to the did come down to
• 2:09:42
  Speaker 1: the south coast where there's great art produced in the
• 2:09:45
  Speaker 1: Asmod area. He was coming down a coastal river in
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 1: a boat with a Dutch patrol officer, and there was
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: a tidal bore that capsized the boat. The boat was
• 2:09:58
  Speaker 1: swept out to sea. So what do you do? What
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: does Michael Rockefeller do? What does the Dutch patrol officer do?
• 2:10:06
  Speaker 1: The Dutch patrol officer couldn't swim. He had no choice.
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 1: The chances of being picked up and spotted seemed vanishingly
• 2:10:12
  Speaker 1: low because there was very little airplane traffic. But the
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 1: Dutch patrol had no choice. He stayed on the boat.
• 2:10:20
  Speaker 1: And in fact, so Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer.
• 2:10:23
  Speaker 1: He figured that the chances of being picked up were
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: so low that he swam for shore. A plane did
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 1: spot the overturned boat and picked up the Dutch patrol officer.
• 2:10:34
  Speaker 1: Michael Rockefeller swam for shore, and when he got close
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: to shore, he had the misfortune that as he approached shore,
• 2:10:45
  Speaker 1: there came a canoe of natives who, about five years previously,
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: a Dutch patrol officer had come to that village to
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 1: punish the natives for killing natives of some other village.
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 1: And the Dutch patrol officer killed four natives from the village.
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: So when the natives in that village saw Michael Rockefeller,
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 1: as far as the natives are concerned, Michael Rockefeller belongs
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: to the same to the same clan. He's white. They
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: killed him. It was not learned what had happened until
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: some years later because the natives didn't admit it. They
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: knew that they were going to be punished.
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 2: And did they admit that they consumed him?
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: I do not know. I think they did. That I'm
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 1: not sure. But they certainly killed him.
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 2: What is it like hanging around with a group of
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 2: people where part of their culture is eating people? What
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: does it feel like?
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: I've not... Oh, okay. So the guy who left my
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: camp to eat his... He was a nice guy. He
• 2:12:10
  Speaker 1: was a hard worker. He knew his birds. Yes, he
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 1: had this... This habit, which I didn't have, that's his business.
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I get that perspective. And you are there in
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: their culture, in their world. And they've been living like
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 2: that for a long time.
• 2:12:29
  Speaker 1: I do weird things that disgust them. So they do
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 1: weird things that disgust me.
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: Well, there are certain tribes in Papua New Guinea that
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: also have a very disturbing practice with young boys. You
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 2: know that.
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: I know it very— yeah, because that was the practice of
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 1: the foray and many other tribes with whom I worked.
• 2:12:55
  Speaker 1: It was not a rare practice. The way of life
• 2:13:01
  Speaker 1: there was that each woman, each wife had her own hut,
• 2:13:08
  Speaker 1: and the men lived in a communal man's house. The
• 2:13:12
  Speaker 1: young kids lived lived with a mother until a boy
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: reached the age of six. And when the boy reached
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: the age of six, he then moved into the men's
• 2:13:25
  Speaker 1: house where he developed a homosexual relationship with the adult men.
• 2:13:31
  Speaker 1: At teenage, suddenly, this boy who's had only men-men relationships,
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 1: suddenly the tribe has bought for him a girl from
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: the neighboring tribe, and he's told that he's supposed to
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 1: have sex with a woman. Until then, the boys have
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: been told that women are dirty, defiling. If you touch
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: a woman, it'll be very dirty. I saw a film
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 1: made by a medical photographer of two of these small
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 1: boys the night before they were going to be married
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 1: to teenage girls. And the older men were explaining to
• 2:14:21
  Speaker 1: these 13-year-old boys how you have sex with a woman.
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: The two boys, they were just appalled, disgusted out of
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 1: their mind to have to have sex with a woman. Wow.
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 1: But there's then this.
• 2:14:44
  Speaker 1: Sudden transition from the homosexual adult male, young male society
• 2:14:51
  Speaker 1: to having sex with a woman.
• 2:14:56
  Speaker 2: What a strange culture where they've got this ubiquitous homosexual
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 2: experience that every young boy has and they think it's
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 2: essential to their growth. It's essential to, like, that another
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 2: man's semen is essential... to them becoming strong.
• 2:15:15
  Speaker 1: You think that's strange, but wait till you hear what
• 2:15:18
  Speaker 1: Naginians have to say about our habits.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 2: Well, that's nice. Everyone's allowed their own opinion. I think
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 2: I'll stick with the way we do it. When I
• 2:15:32
  Speaker 2: hear about something like that, I'm always fascinated by how
• 2:15:34
  Speaker 2: did that ever get started? And how did that get
• 2:15:39
  Speaker 2: universally accepted in a tribe?
• 2:15:43
  Speaker 1: My understanding is around the world, such relations are not rare.
• 2:15:55
  Speaker 1: They're not the rule. But for example, in Central America,
• 2:16:01
  Speaker 1: there were Native American tribes in Central America where there
• 2:16:07
  Speaker 1: were a class of young men who acted as sex partners,
• 2:16:14
  Speaker 1: the Spanish, when they came into this area, were utterly
• 2:16:17
  Speaker 1: disgusted by this practice. And so the Spanish had war dogs.
• 2:16:24
  Speaker 1: These were dogs that were trained to rip people apart.
• 2:16:27
  Speaker 1: And so the Spanish, being disgusted by this practice, would
• 2:16:32
  Speaker 1: bring war dogs into an enclosure with these professional sex partners.
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: and the war dogs would then rip them apart. Oh, God.
• 2:16:44
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't know if that's how you should handle it,
• 2:16:47
  Speaker 2: but I kind of see their perspective.
• 2:16:51
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 2:16:52
  Speaker 2: It is so odd how different cultures are, that we're
• 2:16:57
  Speaker 2: all just human beings, but we've agreed on these very,
• 2:17:01
  Speaker 2: very different ways of behaving all around the world.
• 2:17:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. As an example of when I was given an
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: opportunity about but declined it. I went into an isolated
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: mountain range with three New Guineans. We were dropped off
• 2:17:16
  Speaker 1: by helicopter. And I had brought in rice and tin
• 2:17:20
  Speaker 1: fish and food. But the New Guineans had brought in
• 2:17:25
  Speaker 1: some sago grubs. These are the larvae of a big beetle,
• 2:17:32
  Speaker 1: which the beetle injects its eggs into the sago palm
• 2:17:38
  Speaker 1: and then the larva grows into a large object which
• 2:17:44
  Speaker 1: looks like a shrimp. And they're fatty and they're high
• 2:17:49
  Speaker 1: in fat. protein. So the New Guineans brought in a
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 1: couple of these sago grubs, and they offered me a
• 2:17:55
  Speaker 1: sago grub.
• 2:17:57
  Speaker 2: You didn't want to try it?
• 2:17:59
  Speaker 1: Part of me was curious, but it just looked so
• 2:18:02
  Speaker 1: disgusting to see this. I declined the sago grub. In retrospect.
• 2:18:08
  Speaker 2: Well, that kind of makes sense to me out of
• 2:18:10
  Speaker 2: necessity because it's high in protein and it's just food. Oh,
• 2:18:15
  Speaker 2: they cook it. So there you go. If you cook it,
• 2:18:17
  Speaker 2: it makes even more sense.
• 2:18:20
  Speaker 1: As an example of something that we love, but Paul's
• 2:18:24
  Speaker 1: New Guineans, a couple of New Guineans who lived in
• 2:18:28
  Speaker 1: the highlands, I brought down to the coast when we
• 2:18:32
  Speaker 1: were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range. They
• 2:18:34
  Speaker 1: had never been in the coast. They had never encountered
• 2:18:38
  Speaker 1: ice cream or anything cold because, of course, they had
• 2:18:42
  Speaker 1: hot food from cooking, but they had no way of
• 2:18:45
  Speaker 1: making cold. First of all, we stayed in a motel.
• 2:18:52
  Speaker 1: for the first time in their life. They got to
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 1: sleep in beds. When I asked them the next morning
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: how they liked sleeping in the bed, one of them said,
• 2:19:00
  Speaker 1: no good. He had no experience of sleeping in bed.
• 2:19:03
  Speaker 1: He rolled out of the bed at night, so he
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: didn't like sleeping in the bed. But then I offered
• 2:19:07
  Speaker 1: them ice cream, and one of them He rejected the
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: ice cream. He said, it's cold. It hurts my mouth. Well,
• 2:19:16
  Speaker 1: you and I are accustomed to eating ice cream. We're
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: accustomed to eating cold food. But a New Guinean has
• 2:19:21
  Speaker 1: never had experience of anything cold.
• 2:19:24
  Speaker 2: Well, that makes sense that it would be odd because
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 2: it's an odd sensation. But I would feel like once
• 2:19:29
  Speaker 2: they tasted it, they'd be like, oh, I get it.
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: They didn't get it. Would I, if I had eaten
• 2:19:37
  Speaker 1: that sago grub, would I have gotten it?
• 2:19:40
  Speaker 2: I bet you would have. I bet it didn't taste
• 2:19:42
  Speaker 2: like much at all. Probably would.
• 2:19:45
  Speaker 1: My guess is it tasted like a fatty shrimp.
• 2:19:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, just fat. It's probably just fatty. It probably, I mean,
• 2:19:52
  Speaker 2: especially if they're cooking it. Were they cooking them?
• 2:19:54
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 2:19:55
  Speaker 2: Or were they just eating them raw?
• 2:19:56
  Speaker 1: No, they cooked them.
• 2:19:58
  Speaker 2: Probably tasted fine. I mean, I'm sure you've eaten bugs
• 2:20:01
  Speaker 2: in other countries, right? Grasshoppers, things along those lines, crickets.
• 2:20:05
  Speaker 1: I personally have not. No?
• 2:20:06
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 2:20:07
  Speaker 1: No. Wow. What have I eaten? I've eaten rattlesnakes. What
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: else have I eaten that's strange?
• 2:20:15
  Speaker 2: When I was in Mexico, I stayed at this resort
• 2:20:20
  Speaker 2: in Puerto Vallarta, and they had these bowls of, like,
• 2:20:23
  Speaker 2: it looked like fried crickets.
• 2:20:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's right. So in my book, I have a
• 2:20:31
  Speaker 1: chapter on Soretse Kama, who was the first president of
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 1: the African nation of Botswana. Soretse Kama was... the hereditary
• 2:20:44
  Speaker 1: chief of the largest tribe in Botswana, but he also
• 2:20:49
  Speaker 1: was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at
• 2:20:53
  Speaker 1: the time of independence. And so he was sent to
• 2:20:56
  Speaker 1: England for higher education. He got educated. He had higher
• 2:21:02
  Speaker 1: education at Oxford, and so he was comfortable in both
• 2:21:07
  Speaker 1: European and in Native African society. He wore He was
• 2:21:13
  Speaker 1: a great, great speaker. And he graduated law school at Oxford.
• 2:21:20
  Speaker 1: But in his suit pocket, in his jacket pocket, he
• 2:21:25
  Speaker 1: routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers, which was standard
• 2:21:29
  Speaker 1: food in his area of Botswana. And he would offer
• 2:21:33
  Speaker 1: his guests, his European guests or his African guests, would
• 2:21:36
  Speaker 1: you like to have a dried grasshopper? And he would
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 1: pop in the dried grasshoppers before. I have had friends
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: who've eaten dried grasshoppers and they say they were okay.
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 1: I could not bring myself.
• 2:21:46
  Speaker 2: They don't taste– well, I didn't have grasshoppers. I had crickets.
• 2:21:49
  Speaker 2: They don't taste bad at all. I ate a live
• 2:21:52
  Speaker 2: roach once for fear factor. It didn't taste like much.
• 2:21:56
  Speaker 2: It was disgusting because it was just the concept of
• 2:21:59
  Speaker 2: it was disgusting. But the taste of it was very bland.
• 2:22:02
  Speaker 2: It was not that bad at all. It's just protein.
• 2:22:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:22:08
  Speaker 2: The Botswana story is fascinating. It's also in your book.
• 2:22:11
  Speaker 2: where you discussed the transformation of Botswana under this guy's leadership.
• 2:22:17
  Speaker 1: There was a leader who really made a difference, and
• 2:22:23
  Speaker 1: that's a case of someone, he was the only one
• 2:22:28
  Speaker 1: who could have done it. The reason is, he was
• 2:22:33
  Speaker 1: the only one who could have made Botswana successful as
• 2:22:37
  Speaker 1: founding president, because he was the chief of the largest,
• 2:22:42
  Speaker 1: most powerful tribe in Botswana. When Botswana became independent, they
• 2:22:47
  Speaker 1: set up a two-house legislature based on the British model,
• 2:22:52
  Speaker 1: but the upper house was a house of chiefs, and
• 2:22:55
  Speaker 1: a house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of
• 2:23:00
  Speaker 1: the chiefs, so it was a bad idea for Botswana democracy.
• 2:23:04
  Speaker 1: But Sretse Kama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe,
• 2:23:08
  Speaker 1: he was the only person in Botswana who could have
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 1: abolished the power of the chiefs, because he was the
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 1: most powerful chief. And the other thing was that Botswana's
• 2:23:18
  Speaker 1: financial stability has come from diamonds. The diamonds were discovered
• 2:23:22
  Speaker 1: after independence. If they had been discovered before independence, the
• 2:23:26
  Speaker 1: British and De Beers would have made a deal favoring
• 2:23:29
  Speaker 1: the British and De Beers. But in fact, the diamonds
• 2:23:31
  Speaker 1: were discovered like six months after independence, and they were
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: discovered on the land of Tsiretsi Khamis tribe. Normally in Africa,
• 2:23:40
  Speaker 1: when precious stones or oil are found on the land
• 2:23:44
  Speaker 1: of a tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves.
• 2:23:49
  Speaker 1: But because the diamonds were on the land of Siretsi
• 2:23:54
  Speaker 1: Kama's tribe, and Siretsi Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute
• 2:23:59
  Speaker 1: to the wealth of all Botswana and not just his tribe,
• 2:24:02
  Speaker 1: Siretsi Kama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever
• 2:24:09
  Speaker 1: they are, are the property of the Botswana nation, not
• 2:24:13
  Speaker 1: of the individual tribe. So he was the only person
• 2:24:16
  Speaker 1: who could have nationalized the diamonds, and he was the
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 1: only person who could have undone the power of the chiefs. Plus,
• 2:24:26
  Speaker 1: in addition, because he was equally comfortable in European society
• 2:24:32
  Speaker 1: and in African society, and he married a European woman, he...
• 2:24:41
  Speaker 1: was respected in Europe, very successful as a diplomat, and
• 2:24:47
  Speaker 1: he was respected among African countries.
• 2:24:49
  Speaker 2: Imagine if that practice had taken place in America where
• 2:24:53
  Speaker 2: all the resources, all the natural resources were the property
• 2:24:57
  Speaker 2: of the society of America and not of individuals. Imagine
• 2:25:03
  Speaker 2: how different this world would look if the oil and gas,
• 2:25:06
  Speaker 2: just the oil and gas, and of course the the minerals,
• 2:25:11
  Speaker 2: the rare earth minerals. Imagine if they were just the
• 2:25:14
  Speaker 2: property of the collective United States.
• 2:25:19
  Speaker 1: Good point. And in most African countries, it's as in
• 2:25:24
  Speaker 1: the United States. So diamonds and emeralds and oil belong
• 2:25:32
  Speaker 1: to the tribe on whose land they're found. but not
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: in Botswana. And the result is that Botswana is the,
• 2:25:40
  Speaker 1: I believe they're the second richest country in Africa. The
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 1: richest country in Africa is, I believe, Equatorial Guinea. And
• 2:25:50
  Speaker 1: it's very rich because it's got oil. And the average
• 2:25:57
  Speaker 1: per capita income in Equatorial Guinea is something like $ 10, 000
• 2:26:01
  Speaker 1: or $ 20, 000. That's because the president has an annual income
• 2:26:07
  Speaker 1: of like $ 500 billion, and everybody else has an annual
• 2:26:11
  Speaker 1: income of like $ 100, and you average it out, and
• 2:26:15
  Speaker 1: that's why Equatorial Guinea has the highest average income.
• 2:26:19
  Speaker 2: That's messing with the numbers.
• 2:26:21
  Speaker 1: That's messing with the numbers. But in Botswana, the population
• 2:26:26
  Speaker 1: of the country is only 3 million, and the money
• 2:26:30
  Speaker 1: from the diamonds, as in the case of Norway... goes
• 2:26:34
  Speaker 1: into a sinking fund. It's not spent as you go,
• 2:26:37
  Speaker 1: but it's invested on a long-term basis. Wow.
• 2:26:40
  Speaker 2: And that's an excellent example of a great leader.
• 2:26:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:26:47
  Speaker 2: Well, listen, Jared, I just want to thank you for
• 2:26:50
  Speaker 2: all your work over the years, collapse, guns, germs, and steals.
• 2:26:56
  Speaker 2: You've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly
• 2:27:01
  Speaker 2: complex and impactful moments in society and in history and
• 2:27:08
  Speaker 2: made it very entertaining and very consumable. So thank you.
• 2:27:11
  Speaker 2: And I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really great.
• 2:27:14
  Speaker 1: No, I enjoyed a lot talking to you. I did
• 2:27:18
  Speaker 1: my homework. I was told in advance that I would
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: enjoy a lot talking with you, provided that I... was
• 2:27:27
  Speaker 1: not identified with something that you disapprove of, but that
• 2:27:31
  Speaker 1: otherwise I should look forward to pleasurable experience. And in fact,
• 2:27:35
  Speaker 1: my wife got Joshua to send her... three snippets of you.
• 2:27:42
  Speaker 1: And yes, I anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time.
• 2:27:48
  Speaker 2: And it is. It was fantastic. And good luck with
• 2:27:51
  Speaker 2: learning the iPhone further. And great luck with your book
• 2:27:55
  Speaker 2: as well. I look forward to finishing it. Thank you
• 2:27:57
  Speaker 2: so much.
• 2:27:59
  Speaker 1: Bye, everybody.