Latest / Drawn of History / Joe Rogan Experience _2549 - Jared Diamond(M4A_128K)

Transcript

Joe Rogan Experience _2549 - Jared Diamond(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

• 0:04
  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. I'm Quite a few podcasts 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 Kmart.
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: Not a good choice.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, no.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: The chairman of the department called me in. I thought
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: I'm going to be thrown out. He said, that was sloppy.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: You have to be careful with water pumps and be
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: more careful in the future. That permitted my scientific career
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: to continue. Other people might have thrown me out. So
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: leaders have made a difference in my life.
• 3:10
  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
• 3:36
  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 realize 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
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: was two seconds behind. Perfect impact. Dead Hitler. Now what?
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:50
  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?
• 5:07
  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,
• 5:29
  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.
• 5:54
  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
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: to Steve Allen, now is the time. We 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 think,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: in 2004. As a result of his having been born
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: social media because there had been some before and some afterwards.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: But the changes in the Internet made 2004 a particularly
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: good year. So some leaders choose the time and place
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: to go all dead, Some leaders find themselves in the
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it. Winston
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Churchill did. And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg and
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: all the way from China to Poland. And yet there
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: were other people who tried, like Adolfo Han and Timur
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well... within the
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: last 10 years, students of tree rings have figured out
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: that on the Mongolian steppe, the wettest time in the
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: If he had been born 10 years later or 200
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: But he happened to have been born At the right
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: time and place because with all that rain, that meant
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: hay to feed sheep and goats to feed Mongol babies.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: And it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: ride into battle. So Genghis Khan was someone at the
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: right time and place, but he had no idea. And
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: we didn't have any idea until this tree ring study
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: of the last decade.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: That's interesting. But you think that's the primary reason why
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: And he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: So he accepted all religions. And it was one of
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: his strengths is that he didn't care. I'll take you
• 9:26
  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
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: of they never settled down. They always were in tents.
• 9:38
  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
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: to it other than just resources, right?
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: He's kind of an extraordinary individual.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: It took two things together. The second thing, the first
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: thing was that he was at the right time and place.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: But he also had to be an extraordinary person if
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: he had been an equally extraordinary person at some other
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him. So
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: you are correct. At a given time and place, that
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: may be the occasion for someone to emerge. But who
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: emerges depends upon the personal qualities. For example, to take
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: religion seriously. the first century AD of the Roman Empire
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: was the perfect time and place to found what would
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: become the world religion 15 centuries later, because the Roman
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia. And
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then, but
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: the Roman Empire was the basically the father of the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 10:55
  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
• 11:02
  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.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion,
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: you have to be charismatic, number one. You have to
• 11:29
  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
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: is the charismatic leader and the organizer. Muhammad was an outstanding,
• 11:50
  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
• 11:58
  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
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: because East Africa just didn't have the technology and the
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: demographics whereas Christianity did.
• 12:24
  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
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: more it just gives you pause. Like Paul was really
• 12:35
  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
• 12:42
  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
• 13:06
  Speaker 2: it's really Paul.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Yes and no. It was two people. It was Jesus...
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: And there was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: of those various other rival messiahs, Jesus had some advantages
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: with his message. It was a universal message. It was
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: not directed just to the Romans. It was not directed
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: just to men. It was aimed at everybody. So of
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: the candidate messiahs then, Jesus had a particularly good message.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: But a good message isn't enough. It took St. Paul
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: as 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,
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: this is literally just from verbal history.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 14:00
  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.
• 14:11
  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.
• 16:51
  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 people. under Brigham Young,
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: and the social features of the Mormon religion, their optimism,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: their 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
  Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Ketone IQ. I've
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: tried a lot of supplements, but for years it's been
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: one thing that I've been obsessed with to keep my
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: brain locked in, and that's ketones. an energy molecule our
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: brains naturally create when pushed to our limits. Ketones used
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: to cost thousands of dollars a shot and were only
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: used by super elite people. But now, thanks to a
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: $ 6 million research contract with the military, Ketone IQ had
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: a breakthrough and you can finally get ketones online, on Amazon,
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: or at Target for $ 5 a shot. They don't taste good,
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: but damn, do they work. Trust me, if you rely
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: on your brain for your day-to-day success like I do,
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: take Ketone IQ. I take it and I love it.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: I feel sharper. I make better decisions. I have faster
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: memory recall and I'm more productive. Your brain thrives on ketones.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Go to ketone.com slash rogan for 30% off your subscription
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: order or find Ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide in
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: the protein and electrolyte aisle today. and get your first
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: shot free. They're so confident in it that they even
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: offer a 60-day money-back guarantee. So go ahead and take
• 19:36
  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
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: that level. They are the nicest. people. Like I have
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: yet to run into an asshole that's a Mormon. It's
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: kind of shocking. You know, if the whole origin story
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: wasn't so, as the kids say, sus, you know, it
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: would make you really be interested in like, what's going
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: on here? Like, it seems like these guys have it nailed.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: other than, you know, the nine wives and all that
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: other jazz. But that seems like an offset of the
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: 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 understanding. And I don't think it could be claimed
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: that the belief in a virgin birth was a major
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: factor propelling Christianity. Instead, there were many things that propelled Christianity.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: This gets interesting. The Christians outbred Christianity. pagans in the
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire because Roman
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: religion had a low view of women. Children did not
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: have high prestige. There was frequent abortion, whereas Christianity from
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the early Christianity did give a high role to women
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: compared to Roman religion. Christianity favored having babies. Christianity emphasized
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: taking care of the sick. And so when you look
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire, Christians lived longer and they were less likely
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: to die than were and the result was that Christianity
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: that started out as maybe a few dozen people under Jesus,
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: and even in St. Paul's time, what, maybe a hundred people,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire. On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: emphasized writing, and so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: There were all these literate Christians and the pagans were
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: not literate. So Christianity had reasons for its success that
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: would do respect, 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, I would not,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Muslim might argue, but I would not argue that the
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Instead,
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: social connections, and maybe, although we don't know something about
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: than theological beliefs I 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
• 23:36
  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,
• 23:46
  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
• 24:23
  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,
• 24:27
  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.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: And so Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: and the Pacific. There's one other thing that I'd like
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: to say here, and that is that people often ask me,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: Jared Gunstrom's deal.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: Neglects individual people. It's about things that happened over the
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: last 10,000 years. And Guns, Germs, and Steel, the different
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: outcomes of societies and different content, has nothing to do
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: with any individual. Whereas here, you've written a book about leaders,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: about individuals. How do you reconcile Guns, Germs, and Steel
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: with leaders? And my first response would be to say
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: that Guns, Germs, and Steel is about entire continents for 10,000 years.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: where one person doesn't make a difference, whereas my book
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: about leaders is about individuals in the short term. But
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: the one case that I can think of where an
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: individual makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: The beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad, those
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: individuals had a long-lasting effect. And so far it looks
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: as if the release of Joseph Smith, he's been gone for, what,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: 200 years now. But the prospects are that Joseph Smith, again,
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: will have a long-lasting influence. Whereas I can't think of
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: a politician or a business person who has had an
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: 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
• 28:14
  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
• 29:35
  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. Keep that microphone up to your face. My apologies.
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: You have very soft spoken.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: So examples of everything aligning. In the business world, Jeff
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: Bezos and Steve Jobs, out of 340 million Americans today,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: it's impossible to make an argument that Nobody except Bill
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Gates had the business know-how and the computer skills to
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: found personal computers, but he was there at the right
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: place and right time. And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: that it was the right time. He went to the
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: head of the company that had hired him, and he said,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: the internet works. has multiplied by a factor of 2,300
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: in the last year. This is the perfect time to
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: set up an everything store based on the Internet. So
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: he recognized that the 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, and
• 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: He was, it was like all, the green lights. He
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: was driving down the boulevard and every light turned green
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: right when 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 a ideal thing to start out with. All books
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: are uniform. It's not that you buy a Diamond and
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: a 78. They're a different time. All the books are uniform.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: And there are a couple of warehouses for books where
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: he could get books and anybody else could get books.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: And customers in stores, they're not going to look around
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: to see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Prophets.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Every copy is the same. So Jeff Bezos read 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.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's... It's kind of amazing because if it didn't
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: take place, what would online shopping look like? Would somebody
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: else have figured that out?
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: I wonder. That's a great example. There was online. Sorry.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: There were 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 operates. has set up its own
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on, coupled
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: to a brick-and-mortar store, whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: the beginning was his everything store was going to be
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: an online store. So here's an example that indicates that
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: got Walmart and we've got eBay. But Jeff Bezos put
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making an online
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: 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
• 36:00
  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 stock markets hadn't developed– stock markets would have developed. Namely,
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: it seems a unique way of doing things and it
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: didn't take a person or it didn't take an accent.
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: A stock market is as logical as, say, as is
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: the internet.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: Interesting. Well, it certainly makes for more businesses being able
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: to be funded. That's for sure. It certainly makes more
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: people invest in businesses and And then more people who
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: are just investors, who don't do anything in business at
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: all except buying trade stocks, which is a very odd
• 37:13
  Speaker 2: position in society. But that all encourages growth. It makes
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: us uncomfortable because it's unchecked growth sometimes. And we worry
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: about things getting too big and people getting pushed aside.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: But it's a fascinating engine 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.
• 37:56
  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. I use it to do my
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 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: and that he cared a lot about And he cared
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: a lot about simplicity, including simplicity of the gadget, but
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: simplicity also of the overall business. When Steve Jobs was
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: fired from Apple, Apple then went downhill for a decade
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: until Steve Jobs was brought back. And when Steve Jobs
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: was brought back, one of the first things he did
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: was to say, there are too many products. We should
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: not have 100 products. We should have just four products
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: and concentrate on them. Another thing that he did was
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: 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
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: right so I still called up Joshua and Max because
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: there are so many buttons Steve Jobs didn't do it
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: that way my iPhone has one two I think it's
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: got got four buttons Last night, I discovered an essential button.
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize that on the left side, the most
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: recent conversation that I had with my iPhone, the sound
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: quality was very poor. And I knew from Marie having
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: showed me before that somewhere on that iPhone, there's a
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: volume control device, but I didn't know what it was.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: But yesterday I saw that on the left side there
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: were two things. I tried pushing one and the volume
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: went up. It was 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.
• 40:37
  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.
• 41:11
  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.
• 41:19
  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
• 41:27
  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 Harvard.
• 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 insanely complicated thing from another planet that
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: you're trying to back engineer to figure out how it works.
• 42:02
  Speaker 2: When everybody knows how to do the things 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.
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: I'm just incompetent at it. In my school, in I
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: think the second year in my middle school, we were
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: all told to build these make-it-yourself radios. And I tried
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: to do it. I couldn't do it. My father then
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: got– my father was a physician and scientist. He got
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: someone in his lab to put my phone together. When
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: I went to Cambridge, England to get my PhD in physiology,
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: there were various organs I could have worked on. I
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: 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. The gallbladder is a sac coming out of
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: the bile, coming out of the liver. It's just a
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: simple sac, and it absorbs salt and water, but we
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: don't know how. I then 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 a gallbladder, 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
• 45:39
  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 2: An eraser.
• 46:21
  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
• 46:33
  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.
• 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?
• 46:52
  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
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: a keyboard.
• 47:12
  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. Fuck.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: 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: 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.
• 49:24
  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
• 49:41
  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... iPhone.
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you've discovered this, but at the
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: bottom of my iPhone, there's an icon, which looks like
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: a microphone. That icon, when I press that icon, it
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: allows me to dictate in other languages. So the languages
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: do my correspondence on my iPhone in Italian and German
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: because of this little device. Now, this little, when my
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: wife forced me to get the iPhone, there were a
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: few buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: And then a high school classmate of mine, who married
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: a French woman, showed me on my iPhone, there's this
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: little icon. And he said, that icon, Jared, will permit
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: you to do your dictation in German and Italian. So
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: I learned, and I do my correspondence in German and Italian,
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: never by hand. I always do it on the iPhone.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Um, with AI now they, um,
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: they have, I think Google was the first to do this.
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: I think Samsung phones definitely had this where you could
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: have someone, uh, speak to you and it would translate
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: their words in real time. So you could have a
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: real honest conversation with someone in another language. I guess
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: they would have to put on headsets as well. And
• 51:19
  Speaker 2: you would be able to talk back and forth and
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: it would, Absolutely changed and in the future they're gonna
• 51:25
  Speaker 2: have it set up where it'll do it in your
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: voice Yeah, so you will say something. It's in English
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: It'll translate it perfectly in Spanish and it'll translate it
• 51:35
  Speaker 2: as Jared Diamond instead of like some robot voice Mr.
• 51:39
  Speaker 2: Diamond wants to know instead of that you would get
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: your actual voice Which is you know, we're getting close
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: like Tower of Babel type stuff here like universal language
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: the ability to instantaneously translate everything all the time so
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: everybody knows what everybody's saying. 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 translations. 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
• 53:01
  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
• 53:22
  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
  Speaker 2: we can just outsmart our bodies? That's why Armra Colostrum
• 53:58
  Speaker 2: caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism,
• 54:08
  Speaker 2: et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: taking this. If you want to try, Armra is offering
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to armra.com
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: slash rogan. Well, which brings us back to religious texts,
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: which is, I mean, the Bible, the Old Testament, there's
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: versions of it in Aramaic and the Dead Sea Scrolls
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: and some of the books. And then there's the ancient
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: Greek version of it, the ancient Hebrew version of it.
• 54:43
  Speaker 2: the translations to all these different languages and how much
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: is lost in those translations 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 word is logos. The Greek
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: word logos means word, but it also means rational system.
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: And 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 the
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: difficulties of translating from one language into another. Let me
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: give you another example. The last foreign language that I
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: learned was Italian, and I now read Italian every day.
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: But 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,
• 56:11
  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 married, but if I were to have
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: an Italian girlfriend, and if I made the mistake of
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: saying to her, ti amo, and I didn't say, ti
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: voglio bene, 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
• 58:08
  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 to,
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: I was practicing the foray that I just learned, I
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: said to a four-way man, dakwo, wunimdi, wundia, and he
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: shook his head severely, wundia, mindia, because I had used
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: the inanimate word for to be to refer to this
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: frog 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
• 1:01:03
  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. Yeah.
• 1:01:50
  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.
• 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.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. My understanding is that with Hebrew, at least originally,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: the so-called Semitic Afro-Asiatic 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. There wasn't
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: ambiguity if you omitted the vowels. Nowadays, my understanding is
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: that Hebrew does have lines in the corner, and Amharic,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: the language of Ethiopia, which is an Afro-Asiatic language, also
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: has lines in the corner that convey the vowels. But
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: there's a lot with those languages that you can convey
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: without specifying the vowels at all. Whereas with English, you
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: can't dispense with the 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
• 1:04:30
  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, so my books get translated into lots
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: of languages. The Guns, Germs, and Steel have been translated
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: into 45 languages. And one thing that I can see,
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: I see how, because I've got all the, I see
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: how thick are the editions. The German edition is always
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: the thickest. The Italian edition is the next thickest. The
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: English edition is is thinner. It just takes more words
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: to say something in German than it does to say
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: 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
• 1:05:46
  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. Yeah. 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-rich
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: part of the world. There are a thousand languages, not dialects,
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: but a thousand languages in New Guinea. And most of
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, especially
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: Lutheran missionaries, who are highly trained linguists, who are sent
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: out there. Their purpose is to translate the Bible into a.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: Language.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: But the local language is... they start out, of course
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: there was no writing in New Guinea, so a Lutheran
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: linguist will be dropped into an area. He just listens
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: to what they're saying. He has to figure out what
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: they're saying, and has to figure out the sounds. One
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: example of that is that in 1990, I was in
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: the lakes plains of Indonesian New Guinea, next to a
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: tribe called the Thawiyau tribe, 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 Fawiyiyao 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 Fawiyiyao, and she had
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: already identified 12 tones. She thought there might be a
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she didn't, wasn't
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: sure of that. But among the Fowey, you have to
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: get the tone right. The syllables are mostly, they're monosyllable,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: like bay. But bay, you can pronounce in 12 different ways. Bay, bay, bay, bay, bay, bay.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: And one of those bays means sweet potato. and another
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: bay means snake, and another bay means delicious, and another
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: bay means feces, and then there's another bay 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 bay
• 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 cake,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: and you drop the bay instead of rising the bay,
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: what comes out is, vile snake, let me give you
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: this feces.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: To eat. 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. That's not what I said.
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: 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, most
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: distinct Indo-European language. Hittite was also written in Cuneiform. So
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: 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,
• 1:12:45
  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. And then there
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: were syllabic writing systems. And then came alphabets. Japanese... is
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: the world's most complicated writing system because it's really four
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 1:15:03
  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?
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: One of my, um, um, classmates at Harvard, um, Joe Fletcher, uh,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: was the person who, who, um, Rediscovered that Manga book
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: and figured out how to read it. Really? That wasn't
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: until the early 1960s. That's insane. There are, of course,
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: there are writing systems that we still can't read. The Etruscans,
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: the people of Italy whom the Romans eventually conquered. So
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: the Etruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: We have some Etruscan writing in stone. The longest... But
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: all Etruscan books got burnt or lost. The longest Etruscan
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: text that we've got, there was a linen shroud that
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: turned up in Yugoslavia. This linen shroud was used to
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: wrap something, but the linen shroud was evidently a piece
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: of Etruscan writing because there's a long Etruscan text on it,
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: and the shroud was then reused to wrap someone's book.
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: The result is that We can pronounce Etruscan writing. We
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: can read it because it's Greek letters. But we don't
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: know the meaning of the words, for the most part.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: They're on Rosetta stones for Etruscan. The closest we come
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: to it is that dices, these six-sided dices, have been
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: found in Etruscan areas. And on the dices, there are six...
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: 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 Island language that it
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: can't translate?
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you have. Yeah.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 2: That's fascinating.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: Right. It's quite mysterious. There are a few samples of
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: Easter Island writing known. They're all in wood. The first
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: European visitor.
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 2: There it is right there.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: Yes, all right. The first European visitor to Easter Island
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: of whom we have a record, was the Dutch Roggeveen in,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: I think, 1722. And he did not observe writing. The
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: first mention of writing was by the third or fourth
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: European visitor to Easter Island in the 1770s. There's a
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 1: suspicion that the Easter Islanders might have invented writing when
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: the Spaniards came as the second visitor to Easter Island
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: in 1770. The Easter Islanders may have seen Spaniards with
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: wooden sticks, looking at the wooden sticks and doing things.
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: And that may have given the Easter Islanders the idea
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: to invent a writing system of their own. So it's
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: possible that it was late invention inspired by the Spaniards.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: But a case where we know that happened, the Cherokee Indians...
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: of the Carolinas, no Native Americans had a writing system
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: in North America. The Maya, yes, but not in North America.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: There was a Cherokee Indian called Sequoyah who had a store,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: and he noticed that when Europeans... came into his store,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 1: they would scribble things on paper, they would talk to
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: each other, and they got a lot of power. They
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: were able to communicate with each other. So he realized
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: that they were writing down words, but he had no idea.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: what the writing system was. He didn't know whether it
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: was an alphabet. He didn't know about alphabets or syllabaries.
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: He tried different writing systems. He spent about 10 years
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: doing it. And he finally ended up with a syllabary
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: where the symbols are for syllables, not letters. The Cherokee
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: syllabary has 80 signs for 80 different syllables. And Sequoyah
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: by having two Cherokees at the opposite end of like
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: a football field. And he had one Cherokee say something
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: to him, which he then wrote down on paper. And
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: then he went to the other end of the football
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: field and handed that piece of paper to another Cherokee
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: to whom he had taught his writing system. And that
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: words that the Cherokee at the other end of the
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: football field at the field had said so Sequoia in
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: that way convinced the Cherokees of the power of his writing.
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 2: Wow that's fascinating like knowing the origin of a culture's
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: written language and learning it from others well they all
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 2: had to originally have learned it most likely from someone
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: else that they saw something being written down I mean
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 2: or did they all come up with it at the
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: same time like when did Have you seen the newest
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: discovery out of Gobekli Tepe where they believe that they
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 2: found what they think is probably writing that predates cuneiform
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 2: 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
• 1:21:24
  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. Irving is his name.
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: It is the case with cuneiform, although we think of
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: cuneiform as having arisen around 3500 B.C.
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: Irving Finkel, that's it.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: So this is it.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: Did Irving 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 functioned 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
• 1:22:37
  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 the main metal
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: used in the Middle East, in Turkey. Bronze Age cultures
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: included Troy, Homer's Troy. Crete, so the island of Crete
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: had Linea B, which was the earliest, the syllabic old
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: Greek writing system. Linear B was derived from another writing
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: system called Linear A, which we can't read yet. We
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: don't have enough text. It's suspected that Linear A recorded
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: the Minoan language of Minoan Crete, whatever that language is.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: We don't know the language. That might have been another
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: independent invention. But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: Greece and and Cyprus, and the Levant from Palestine up
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: to Lebanon, and then Anatolia, Turkey, all of that Bronze
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: Age civilization collapsed roughly around the time of the Trojan War.
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 1: So the Trojan War may have had something to do
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: with the collapse of Troy itself, but the Trojan War
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: certainly didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: Linear B writing from all of Crete and from all
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: of Greece. There were this Greek pottery that turned up
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: in the Fertile Crescent, making one suspect that there was
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: a mass invasion, and the mass invasion destroyed the Bronze
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: Age civilization of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey and the
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: Hittite Empire. But then, just to go back to Troy,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 1: the fall of Troy was the fall of Troy, and
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: that's all. But there was a much broader collapse of
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: Bronze Age civilization in the whole eastern Mediterranean, and we
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: don't know why. We don't know whether it was an
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: invasion riding Egyptian writing at the time, talks of sea peoples,
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 1: people who came by the sea and fought with the Egyptians.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: So we don't know whether the collapse of the Bronze
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: Age was because of invaders from the sea, or whether
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: it was because of climate change, or whether it was
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: because of invention of new weapons.
• 1:26:44
  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. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to, okay, I'm Other examples of it. Let's see. India.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: The so-called Harappan civilization of India and Pakistan. In the
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: Indus Valley, there was a high civilization called Harappan civilization
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: between about 3,000, 2,000 B.C. And they had writing. We
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: have their seals here. They're rings that we use 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.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: So extraordinary. And then you have the hieroglyphs, which is
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 2: a totally different way of writing that the Egyptians came
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 2: up with.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: Again, that is really interesting. So cuneiform emerged roughly, say,
• 1:28:38
  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 a Chinese-based writing system. And
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: King 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-gol. King Sejong invented Han-gol
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: 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 leader...
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: I'm 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.
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: You know, there's an interesting thing with the Mormons when
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 2: you were talking about how they figured out a way
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 2: to get people very invested in being a Mormon. And
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 2: one of the ways is by being a missionary, that
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 2: you have to be a missionary. One of the things
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 2: societies have figured out is to get people to be
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 2: deeply nationalistic. You almost have to have them serve. Like
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 2: conscription for all young people to do a certain amount
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 2: of time in the military. That's a very common thing.
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 2: Like think about Israel, for instance. Israel, very nationalistic, very
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 2: proud society. People that are from Israel, you meet them,
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 2: they're very proud of being from Israel. Korea is another
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: example of that. They have mandatory military service. You have
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 2: to do that.
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: So that's an interesting question. Is it the case that
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: national identity universally depended upon a draft? Finland. So Finland
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: has a strong national identity. Finland was a province of
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: So there was no Finnish draft yet. at the time
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: of Finnish independence. Instead, the anchor for Finland's national identity
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: is the Finnish language, which it's a very distinctive language.
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: The Finns are proud of their language. It's a poetic
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: singing language. It's related somewhat distantly to Hungarian, but I
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: mention it as as a country, you're probably right. In
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: many cases, that national identity was fostered by the draft
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: in Italy, the unification of Italy in 1862. The development
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: of Italian national identity depended heavily on a national school system,
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: but also on a national army. So I have Italian
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: conversation once a week with my Italian teacher. She explained
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: to me that the national identity Italians had lots of dialects,
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea, we would say
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: that they're different languages. Even today, there are different dialects
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: in Italy that different Italians cannot understand in contrast to.
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialects. Okay.
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: 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. Interestingly, my first trip to dialects were far more
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: developed in Europe 60 years ago. My first, and that's
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: true in Italy, Germany, and England, my first trip to
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 1: England was at the age of 12 in 1950. My
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 1: sister and I were taken by my parents to a
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: 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
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: and my sister and I were bored so we wandered
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 1: off into the town and we wandered off only about
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: two blocks but we made several turns and we couldn't
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 1: figure out how to get back to the house of
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: this family, the Grantham Hills. So we asked a man
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: on the street in American English, how do we get
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: back to the house of the Grantham? And he said
• 1:35:51
  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?
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: I can't reproduce any of it. All I can tell
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: you was that it was completely incomprehensible.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: But it was a form of English.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker 1: Presumably, because when we got back to the house and
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: then 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 bin ein
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: Bayer und ich hab eine dicke Haut. So when I
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: was traveling around with a friend of mine from northern Germany,
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: from the Rhineland, where they speak what is closest to Hochdeutsch,
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: literary German, and we stopped at a gas station in
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 1: Bavaria and has to be filled up with gas. Because
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: I understood what the guy was saying, but my friend
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: Joseph from the Rhineland, what did he say? He couldn't
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: understand the Bavarian at all.
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 2: That's wild. That's wild because they're so close to each other.
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: That's what's so strange about it.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: Right. But again, in Italy, Sicilian is... It's often regarded
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: as a separate language. As you know, there are books
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 1: written in Sicilian. Modern literary and government Italian is close
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: to the dialect of Florence. But there are dozens and
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: dozens of Italian dialects which persisted until after World War
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 1: II and were mutually incomprehensible. But those dialects now have
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: been 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 can...
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: Pull up the... I can date it, because... My wife
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: and I and our kids had been to... on a
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: vacation in Italian, Switzerland. And our son, Max, fell and
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: he hurt his leg. So we had to go to
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: a hospital. None of us knew Italian, but my wife
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: knew that the Italian word for where was dove. Dove. Dove.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: Dove l'ospedale. And so when we were scheduled to have
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: a family vacation in Italy in May 1999, I thought, Dove,
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: that's simple. I can learn that. Why don't I learn
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: enough Italian that I can ask where the bathroom is
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: and I can order meals and restaurants? So I studied
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: Italian grammar for six weeks, and we were scheduled to
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: go to Germany on May 11th. And my father died
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: that morning, so we aborted the Italian trip. But after
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: the Italian trip, I've spent six weeks learning much of
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: the grammar. Let's put in another six weeks and learn
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: the rest of the grammar. So I put in another
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 1: six weeks. I learned the rest of the grammar. And
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: having learned the grammar, I said, I've learned the grammar.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: Let's now read some Italian. So I began reading Italian.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: And then after eight months, so I've been reading Italian.
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: I said, why don't I speak it? UCLA has an
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: Italian department. So I put up a notice in the
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: Italian department saying I would like to hire someone. Italian
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: graduate students to come speak Italian to me and someone,
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: an Italian woman answered the ad. She came to my
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: office and here I had been dealing with Italian for
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: eight months and here is a live Italian speaking Italian
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: to me for the first time. It's like knowing of
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: something and then you suddenly have the experience The closest
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 1: parallel I can think of is having heard of sex
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: and then you have your first sexual experience. So I
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: then arranged for Italian speakers to come every week to
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: talk Italian with me. And then since then, the two
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: Italian speakers who came and talked Italian with me, both
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: of them had American boyfriends. Both of them had difficult relationships.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: They couldn't decide whether to marry the American boyfriend or not.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: But I, in effect, did marital therapy in Italian for
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: two years. I talked through my Italian teachers. I said
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: that the horrible relationship that their parents had and their
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: boyfriend's parents had didn't necessarily— need to be the model
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: for any marriage they can make a relationship of their
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: own so both of them are married they're still married
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: and it's now it's now 27 years later I still
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: every week I talk to Francesca for two hours every
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: two weeks Francesca is the person with whom I talk
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: the most and I have the widest range of conversation
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: of anybody in the world except for my wife and
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: my Australian companion on my New Guinea expedition because we
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: talk about everything.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: Wow. 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.
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: I never spoke. I just read them. The languages that
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 1: I can give lectures in now are English, Italian, German,
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: and New Guinea Talk Pishin. 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've
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: learned enough to hitchhike. And then the foray language, I
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: can speak rudimentary foray language. And those are 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... I'm sorry. I can keep straight New
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: Guinea talk Pidgin and English. And mostly I can keep
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: straight Italian and German.
• 1:42:49
  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 I
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: 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 Indonesia, 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. I would like to bring
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: back more of my Russian, but I'm afraid that if
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: I brought back my Russian, my drive, I don't know
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: 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 Torque 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 fella, 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, so long, eye long, brown fella. So
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: here's how New Guinea Torque Pigeon arose, and it's a
• 1:45:43
  Speaker 1: model for how similar pidgin languages have arisen all around
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: the world dozens or hundreds of times. When German colonial
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: administrators came to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: different languages, but the Germans had to communicate with them,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: and the Germans hired or kidnapped New Guineans belonging to
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: many different language groups. the Germans had to communicate with
• 1:46:10
  Speaker 1: their workers, and the workers had to communicate with each other.
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: So it's not that anybody invented something. The Germans began
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: speaking a stripped-down, easy German, and the New Guineans began
• 1:46:24
  Speaker 1: picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: up words from other New Guinea languages. This first language
• 1:46:32
  Speaker 1: was called a pigeon language. It's very simple. It's not
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: adequate to express the range of human emotion, but it's
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: enough to discuss plantation agriculture and was enough for adults
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: who had their own main language and were using the
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: pigeon language just to discuss the coconut plantation. Where pigeon
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: became inadequate was once you get the children of pigeon-speaking
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: parents and the children children from pigeon-speaking parents of different
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: A decade. The best information we have about how... And
• 1:47:49
  Speaker 1: these pidgin languages, these Creole languages, which are the more
• 1:47:53
  Speaker 1: complex ones with prepositions, have developed all around the world.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: Our best information about the development of Creole language comes
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: from Hawaii because... Hawaii plantations, plantation workers were brought in
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: from Japan and China and various other places. So again,
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: workers are thrown together on a plantation. They have to
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: communicate with English-speaking plantations. owners, and they spontaneously develop this
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: really stripped-down so-called pigeon language that doesn't have prepositions and
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: can do with a sugar cane. But the children of
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: these workers who now want to talk with each other
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: and have a normal life. The pidgin language is not adequate,
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: and the children spontaneously made the pidgin more complex. Within
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: a decade, the children invented prepositions, and they invented future tense,
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 1: and they invented plurals, and this is somewhat documented because
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: the newspapers have missionaries in Hawaii in the decade from
• 1:49:09
  Speaker 1: 1890 to 1900. Every now and then, the newspapers would
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: quote something funny that a Hawaiian said on a plantation,
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: and it would be an example of Creole as of 1892.
• 1:49:22
  Speaker 1: And then you can see from a newspaper of 1894
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: how much more complicated Creole had gotten in 1894. So
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: New Guinea talk vision which is actually what's called the
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: Creole language, is a full complex language with prepositions. You
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: can say anything. It's the government language. New Guinean government leaders,
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: they are more fluent usually in Creole than they are
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: in English. So in Parliament in Papua New Guinea, the
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: the language of parliaments is either English or talk pidgin,
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: and then there's one other, the Creole language. When I
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: started out in New Guinea, the first thing that I
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: learned was talk pidgin, because I could pick it up
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: very quickly.
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 2: Did you have any preparation in the language before you
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 2: went there, or did you try to pick it up
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 2: 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 pigeon 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 pigeon grammars and a pigeon dictionary
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: and was able to make my pigeon 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,
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: and the thermodynamics, this fellow, Ansaga, you've got strong fellow, Tintin,
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 1: and you mark him, rule number two, belong... belong... belong tinted,
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: 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 Ansaga. 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. Ansagi got this
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: bella strong, bella tintin. Ansagi'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?
• 1:53:16
  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 the 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 Endocannibalism and exocannibalism. Exocannibalism
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: is eating your dead enemies whom you kill in war.
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: Endocannibalism 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,
• 1:55:57
  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
• 1:56:42
  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 Piraha 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 because...
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: In the area where my work quit in order to— it' s
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: 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. I'm sorry you asked me. The body putrefies
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: and the flesh turns to liquid. The liquid then drips
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: through the slats on the platform down into the buck.
• 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. I was not offered. I would
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: not have accepted it, but I was told. told by
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: the missionary in the area and by New Guineans themselves.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: That's what they do.
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 2: With dead bodies. Is there a scenario where they would
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 2: have encouraged you 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 was— See, let's.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 2: 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
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 2: have different temperatures.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: Maybe it's 600 degrees.
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: Because I didn't think it was just raw brains. 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.
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: Of those cows. That is true. Right. That's true. And
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 1: in fact....
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 2: That's not a real good, concise answer. Prions can survive
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 2: temperatures that kills most microbes. Boiling, ordinary cooking, and standard
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 2: steam sterilization are not reliably sufficient. Resistance also varies by
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 2: prion strain, what we were talking about, yeah, and whether
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 2: the material's wet, dried, 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. It's agreed upon
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 2: that at least for a few hours is 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 it 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
• 2:02:48
  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 among
• 2:03:45
  Speaker 1: the four.
• 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 some
• 2:04:26
  Speaker 1: and not in any other tribe in New Guinea. So
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Qur'an,
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: or whatever the name is, didn't have Qur'u because nobody
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: in the world, no human population in the world, had
• 2:04:43
  Speaker 1: Qur'u except for the foray as a result of that
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: accident of one person with Quesful Yaka evidently getting eaten
• 2:04:52
  Speaker 1: 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... So when I arrived in 1964,
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 1: Kuru was completely mysterious. It affected only the foray. If
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 1: a foray went down to Port Moresby, the foray might
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: still develop Kuru, so it couldn't be linked to the
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: foray environment. 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 now
• 2:06:01
  Speaker 1: gone— were similar to the symptoms of scrapie, and so that
• 2:06:04
  Speaker 1: gave the idea that Kuru might be an infectious disease.
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: an infectious disease expert, managed to get the foray to
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: provide him with the brain of a foray man who
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: had died of Kuru. And the doctor managed to get
• 2:06:27
  Speaker 1: dry ice shipped into the foray area in order to
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: freeze the Kuru. He got it shipped back to the
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 1: National Institute of Health. How long did that take? couple
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: of days, but it was frozen in dry ice. And
• 2:06:45
  Speaker 1: he then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: that the animal most likely to be able to be
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: infected with human Kuru would be a chimpanzee. And it
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: took three years. I saw that chimpanzee in a cage.
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: After three years, finally the chimpanzee had been completely healthy.
• 2:07:13
  Speaker 1: After three years, the chimpanzee then began developing the instability
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: of Kuru and died of Kuru. And then that chimpanzee's
• 2:07:22
  Speaker 1: brain was injected into the brain of other chimpanzees and
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: the time for infection was shorter. The last death due
• 2:07:34
  Speaker 1: to Kuru was in 2009. The last The funeral feast
• 2:07:40
  Speaker 1: was 1959. After that, the Australians imposed control and banned
• 2:07:46
  Speaker 1: funeral feasts. So the last foray funeral feast was 1959.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: That then would have been the last transmission of Kuru.
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: And the last death was then in 2009, which was
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 1: 50 years later. So the latency, it took 50 years
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: for that person who had been infected by eating or
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: licking the brain in 1959. A long latency. The next
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: last death was 2005, and the last death was 2009.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: And so these are people that had been infected decades earlier?
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: They were infected in 1959.
• 2:08:27
  Speaker 2: Right. But is it possible that they were doing what
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: Daniel Everett feels like the Pita Ha were doing, was
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 2: lying 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.
• 2:08:44
  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, I have not. I was told about it by
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 1: the missionary in the area who didn't know what was
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: going on.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 2: But you knew that they were engaging in this?
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: I would have wanted to watch. 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. Was it one
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: of the Rockefeller's sons? that supposedly was consumed by people
• 2:09:19
  Speaker 2: in New Guinea. He had insulted them on a previous trip.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 2: He wanted something that was sacred. This was like the lore.
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 2: And then he returned not knowing that he was in danger.
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 2: They killed him on the boat 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
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: Asmodee 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 clan. And he's white. And they killed him.
• 2:11:21
  Speaker 1: It was not learned what had happened. until some years later,
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: because the natives, of course, didn't admit it. They knew
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: 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 habit, which I didn't have, but that's his business.
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: Well, I get that perspective, and you are there in
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 2: their time. their culture and their world, and they've been
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 2: living like that for a long time.
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: I do weird things that discuss them, so they do
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 1: weird things that discuss me.
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 2: Well, there's certain tribes in Papua New Guinea that also
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: have a very disturbing practice with young boys, where they,
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 2: you know that.
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 1: I know it very, yeah, because that was the practice
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 1: of 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 with a mother until a boy reached
• 2:13:17
  Speaker 1: the age of six. And when the boy reached the
• 2:13:19
  Speaker 1: age of six, He then moved into the men's house
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 1: 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 girls 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.
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:14:41
  Speaker 1: But there's then this sudden transition from the homosexual adult male,
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 1: young male society 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 accepted.
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 1: They're not rare. They're not the rule. But for example,
• 2:15:59
  Speaker 1: in Central America, there were Native American tribes in Central
• 2:16:04
  Speaker 1: America where there were a class of young men who
• 2:16:11
  Speaker 1: acted as sex partners. The Spanish, when they came into
• 2:16:16
  Speaker 1: this area, were utterly disgusted by this practice. And so
• 2:16:19
  Speaker 1: the Spanish had war dogs. These were dogs that were
• 2:16:25
  Speaker 1: trained to rip people apart. And so the Spanish, being
• 2:16:29
  Speaker 1: disgusted by this practice, would bring war dogs into an
• 2:16:35
  Speaker 1: enclosure with these professional sex partners, and the war dogs
• 2:16:40
  Speaker 1: would then rip them apart.
• 2:16:42
  Speaker 2: Oh, God. Well, I don't know if that's how you
• 2:16:46
  Speaker 2: should handle it, but I kind of see their perspective.
• 2:16:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah. 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 opportunity,
• 2:17:09
  Speaker 1: but but declined it. I went into an isolated mountain
• 2:17:13
  Speaker 1: range with three New Guineans. We were dropped off by helicopter,
• 2:17:18
  Speaker 1: and I had brought in rice and tin fish and food,
• 2:17:23
  Speaker 1: but the New Guineans had brought in some sago grubs.
• 2:17:28
  Speaker 1: These are the larvae of a big beetle, which the
• 2:17:34
  Speaker 1: beetle injects its eggs into the sago palm, and then
• 2:17:39
  Speaker 1: the larvae grows into a large object which looks like
• 2:17:45
  Speaker 1: a shrimp. And they're fatty, and they're high in protein.
• 2:17:50
  Speaker 1: So the New Guineans brought in a couple of these
• 2:17:53
  Speaker 1: sago grubs, and they offered me a sago grub.
• 2:17:56
  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
• 2:18:35
  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. And so, first of all, we stayed in
• 2:18:50
  Speaker 1: a motel. for the first time in their life. They
• 2:18:54
  Speaker 1: got to sleep in beds. When I asked them the
• 2:18:56
  Speaker 1: next morning how they liked sleeping in the bed, one
• 2:18:58
  Speaker 1: of them said, no good. He had no experience of
• 2:19:02
  Speaker 1: sleeping in bed. He rolled out of the bed at night,
• 2:19:04
  Speaker 1: so he didn't like sleeping in the bed. But then
• 2:19:06
  Speaker 1: I offered them ice cream, and one of them He
• 2:19:12
  Speaker 1: rejected the ice cream. He said, it's cold. It hurts
• 2:19:15
  Speaker 1: my mouth. Well, you and I are accustomed to eating
• 2:19:18
  Speaker 1: ice cream. We're accustomed to eating cold food. But a
• 2:19:20
  Speaker 1: New Guinean has 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.
• 2:19:33
  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.
• 2:19:44
  Speaker 1: Probably would. 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? 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? Really? No.
• 2:20:08
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 2:20:09
  Speaker 1: What have I eaten? I've eaten rattlesnakes.
• 2:20:12
  Speaker 2: Mmm.
• 2:20:14
  Speaker 1: What 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
• 2:20:32
  Speaker 1: chapter on Sretzi Kama, who was the first president of
• 2:20:36
  Speaker 1: the African nation of Botswana. Sretzi 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
• 2:21:08
  Speaker 1: European and in Native African society. He wore wore suits.
• 2:21:12
  Speaker 1: He was a great, great speaker. And he graduated law
• 2:21:18
  Speaker 1: school at Oxford. But in his suit pocket, in his
• 2:21:24
  Speaker 1: jacket pocket, he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers,
• 2:21:29
  Speaker 1: which was standard food in his area of Botswana. And
• 2:21:32
  Speaker 1: he would offer his guests, his European guests or his
• 2:21:35
  Speaker 1: African guests, would you like to have a dried grasshopper?
• 2:21:38
  Speaker 1: And he would pop in the dried grasshoppers. But I
• 2:21:42
  Speaker 1: have had friends who've eaten dried grasshoppers and they say
• 2:21:45
  Speaker 1: they were okay. 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, largest, most powerful tribe in Botswana. When Botswana
• 2:22:46
  Speaker 1: became independent, they set up a two-house legislature based on
• 2:22:50
  Speaker 1: the British model, but the upper house was a house
• 2:22:54
  Speaker 1: of chiefs, and a house of chiefs would have perpetuated
• 2:22:59
  Speaker 1: the rule of the chiefs, so it was a bad
• 2:23:02
  Speaker 1: idea for Botswana democracy. But Sretse Kama, as the chief
• 2:23:07
  Speaker 1: of the most powerful tribe, he was the only person
• 2:23:09
  Speaker 1: in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 1: chiefs because he was the most powerful chief. And the
• 2:23:15
  Speaker 1: other thing was that Botswana's financial stability has come from diamonds.
• 2:23:21
  Speaker 1: The diamonds were discovered after independence. If they had been
• 2:23:24
  Speaker 1: discovered before independence, the British and De Beers would have
• 2:23:28
  Speaker 1: made a deal favoring the British and De Beers. But
• 2:23:30
  Speaker 1: in fact, the diamonds were discovered like six months after independence,
• 2:23:34
  Speaker 1: and they were discovered on the land of Tsiretsi Khamis tribe.
• 2:23:39
  Speaker 1: Normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found
• 2:23:43
  Speaker 1: on the land of a tribe, that tribe then claims
• 2:23:48
  Speaker 1: the rights for themselves. But because the diamonds were on
• 2:23:53
  Speaker 1: the land of Siretsi Kama's tribe, and Siretsi Kama wanted
• 2:23:57
  Speaker 1: the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana,
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 1: and not just his tribe, Siretsi Kama proclaimed that all
• 2:24:06
  Speaker 1: underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property
• 2:24:11
  Speaker 1: of the Botswana nation, not of the individual tribe. So
• 2:24:15
  Speaker 1: he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds,
• 2:24:19
  Speaker 1: and he was the only person who could have undone
• 2:24:24
  Speaker 1: the power of the chiefs. Plus, in addition, because he
• 2:24:29
  Speaker 1: was equally comfortable in European society and in... African society,
• 2:24:34
  Speaker 1: and he married a European woman. He was respected in Europe,
• 2:24:45
  Speaker 1: very successful as a diplomat, and he was respected among
• 2:24:48
  Speaker 1: 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
• 2:24:58
  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 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 the tribe on whose land they're found, but
• 2:25:35
  Speaker 1: not in Botswana. Wow. And the result is that Botswana
• 2:25:39
  Speaker 1: is the, I believe they're the second richest country in Africa.
• 2:25:45
  Speaker 1: The richest country in Africa is, I believe, Equatorial Guinea.
• 2:25:50
  Speaker 1: And it's very rich because it's got oil. And the
• 2:25:54
  Speaker 1: average per capita income in Equatorial Guinea is something like, $ 10, 000
• 2:26:02
  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 goes as in the case of Norway,
• 2:26:33
  Speaker 1: goes 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.
• 2:27:13
  Speaker 1: I enjoyed a lot talking to you. I did my homework.
• 2:27:19
  Speaker 1: I was told in advance that I would enjoy a
• 2:27:22
  Speaker 1: lot talking with you, provided that I... was not identified
• 2:27:28
  Speaker 1: with something that you disapprove of, but that otherwise I
• 2:27:31
  Speaker 1: should look forward to pleasurable experience. And in fact, my
• 2:27:36
  Speaker 1: 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.