Joe Rogan Experience #2549 - Jared Diamond

1. 0:00 – 0:02

   Intro

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      [upbeat music]

2. 0:02 – 3:10

   Why Diamond wrote this book: growing up with WWII, Hitler, and firsthand lessons about leaders

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

   2. JDJared Diamond0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat music] Very nice to meet you, sir.

   4. JDJared Diamond0:13

      It's a pleasure to meet... Great pleasure to meet you.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel, and, uh, I just got into this yesterday, uh, and today. I, I started reading your new book. Uh, awesome. Awesome so far. Fascinating. I have so many questions. But my first one is, have you done podcasts before?

   6. JDJared Diamond0:31

      Um, y- I've done podcasts, um, quite a few podcasts, um, at home in my wife's study on my wife's tell- screen, and I've done face-to-face interviews, like with you.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:43

      Oh, okay. Cool. Um, so, w- first of all, why'd you write this book?

   8. JDJared Diamond0:48

      Why did I write this book? Um, a short answer is I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the Second World War under the shadow of, of Hitler. Um, every day there was something going on with the war. Um, my father pasted up on the wall of my bedroom, um, a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater, and th- there was always the question, w- why did it happen, and if it hadn't been for Hitler, um, would there still have been that outcome? Then I moved to Europe. I lived in England. Um, I lived in Germany. I love German music. I love the German language. Why? And then I moved to Chile. Um, I lived in Chile, the most democratic country of South America. Before Pinochet, nobody saw what was coming with Pinochet. His own fellow generals didn't see it coming. Um, and so there's, there's been throughout my life this, this question, um, d- do bad as well as good people make a difference? Also, my wife is, my wife was posed, the last of my family in Europe disappeared in the Holocaust. Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz. She survived, but others of the family didn't survive. And so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that, that question. And then, uh, leaders have made a difference in my life. Um, there was the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department who, when a pump, water pump that I had been operating blew overnight, and it flooded my lab room, but it also flooded the lab room below me. And that was a poor choice of lab r-room to flood because it belonged to Lord Adrian, Nobel Prize winner, the father of, father-in-law of my thesis supervisor, and the master of my college at Cambridge. Not a good choice. [laughs]

   9. JRJoe Rogan2:45

      Oh, no. [laughs]

   10. JDJared Diamond2:45

       But the ch- the chairman of the depa- of the department called me in. I, I thought I'm gonna be thrown out. Um, he, he said, "You know, that was sloppy. You have to, uh, um, be careful with water pumps, and be more careful in the future." Um, that permitted my scientific career to continue. Um, other people might have thrown me out. So leaders have made a difference in, in my life.

3. 3:10 – 5:07

   “Never again” isn’t guaranteed: civilization’s fragility and modern parallels

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:10

      Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world, and one of the things that really terrifies me is, uh, Nazi Germany was not that long ago.

   2. JDJared Diamond3:21

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan3:21

      And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again.

   4. JDJared Diamond3:28

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan3:28

      That that type of scenario where, uh, a com- a group of people are completely othered to the point where they're not human anymore, that a nation goes along with it, like that, we thought we were done with that.

   6. JDJared Diamond3:41

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JRJoe Rogan3:42

      Forever. I don't believe that anymore. Um, as I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is, and that there is always these, these battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil.

   8. JDJared Diamond3:56

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan3:57

      Good leaders who generally just want something good for their people, and they wanna leave a mark, and be remembered as someone who made a difference, and then leaders who just want to take over all the systems, and make sure they can't be contested, and wanna dominate the, the country, and, and change it. And you make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders either having successful runs or not successful.

   10. JDJared Diamond4:30

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JRJoe Rogan4:30

       There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration. Like you open the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident.

   12. JDJared Diamond4:37

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan4:37

       And what would, what would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving, one, one was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler. Now what?

   14. JDJared Diamond4:49

       Yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan4:50

       What would the world look like? There's, there's so many instances. What if JFK didn't get shot?

   16. JDJared Diamond4:54

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JRJoe Rogan4:54

       What if Martin Luther King Jr. didn't get shot? There's so many different moments in history where you go, "Well, how would culture look? How would society, how would civilization look if just a few things had been off?"

4. 5:07 – 7:39

   Diamond’s framework: when leaders matter (right time/place + seizing the moment)

   1. JDJared Diamond5:07

      There are so many things to say about w- what you've ju- just said. Um, so growing up, um, after World War II, we thought never again. Um, and yet, um, in Cambodia, um, Pol Pot killed about one quarter of the Cambodian population in evil ways. He, he encouraged children to kill, kill their parents. Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet d- did in Chile. Um, his body count was, was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile's a small country, and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of the population. But the tortures that he implied are simply too s- they were far worse than anything that the Nazis did, and he surprised his f- his fellow generals. So all of that is a surprise. Um, as for leaders can do either Good or bad, or they can do nothing. If you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference, Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers. But I can boil it down to four or five things. A leader has to be at the right time and place. Some leaders recognize that it's the right time and place, and they seize it. Bill Gates, when he saw the cover of Popular Electronics with the Intel 8080 chip, Bill Gates said to Steve Allen, "Now is the time. We got to start now building a microcomputer, because if we don't do it, somebody else will." So Bill Gates recognized that the time was right, and he made the time right. Winston Churchill recognized that the time was right. When Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister, he said, "I knew that this was the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation." But he didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill became prime minister because Germany invaded France, and Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France. He recognized that he was at the right time and place. There are other leaders who are at the right time and place, but they don't know it. Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think in 2004, as a result of his having been born in 1984. Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of his birth. But 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart social media, because there had been some before and some afterwards.

5. 7:39 – 9:56

   Genghis Khan and climate luck: tree rings, resources, and extraordinary ability

   1. JDJared Diamond7:39

      But the changes in the internet made 2004 a particularly good year. So some leaders choose the time and place, de Gaulle did. Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it. Winston Churchill did. And some leaders, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan. [chuckles] Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. And yet there were other people who tried, Attila the Hun and Timur the Turk. Why did Genghis Khan succeed? Well, within the last 10 years, students of tree rings have figured out that on the Mongolian steppe, the wettest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan. But he happened to have been born at the right time and place, because with all that rain, that meant hay to feed sheep and goats to feed Mongol babies, and it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle. So Genghis Khan was someone at the right time and place, but he had no idea, and we didn't have any idea until this tree ring study of the last decade.

   2. JRJoe Rogan9:02

      That's interesting. But you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful? Because he was obviously a brilliant strategist, and he was incredibly ruthless and fantastic at organizing different groups of people together, particularly people of different religious persuasions. So he accepted all religions, and it was one of his strengths, is that he didn't care. "I'll take you all in. Everybody gets to come in here." And the way he would attack these cities, there's also the strategy of they never settled down. They always were in tents, and they would camp out in front of cities and just wait them out. There was a lot to it other than just resources, right?

   3. JDJared Diamond9:45

      Absolutely.

   4. JRJoe Rogan9:45

      He's kind of an extraordinary individual.

   5. JDJared Diamond9:48

      It took two things together. The first thing was that he was at the right time and place.

   6. JRJoe Rogan9:55

      Hmm.

6. 9:56 – 12:24

   Founding world religions: charisma, organization, and the advantage of empires

   1. JDJared Diamond9:56

      But he also had to be an extraordinary person. If he had been an equally extraordinary person at some other time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him. So you are correct. At a given time and place, that may be the occasion for someone to emerge. But who emerges depends upon the personal qualities. For example, to take religion. The 1st century AD of the Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become the world religion 15 centuries later, because the Roman Empire was the most powerful state of Western Eurasia. And so Christianity was founded in the Roman Empire then. But the Roman Empire was basically the father of the European countries that spread around the world 15 centuries later. Now, Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was born. Neither he nor his followers had any idea that 15 centuries later, the religion that grew up in the Roman Empire then would spread around the world. It was the right time and place. But there were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion, you have to be charismatic, number one. You have to be an outstanding organizer. Christ died too early. It was St. Paul who was the outstanding organizer. And often, religions also need a great general. In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer and the general. For example, Muhammad was an outstanding, he was charismatic. He was a great organizer. He was a great general. The Mahdi of the Sudan, who established this empire in East Africa, a fantastic general and organizer, and incredibly charismatic. But the Mahdi, he was in the right place to establish an empire in East Africa. But he wasn't in the right place to establish a world empire, because East Africa just didn't have the technology and the demographics, whereas Christianity did.

7. 12:24 – 22:17

   Paul, oral tradition, and why Christianity grew: social incentives over miracles

   1. JRJoe Rogan12:24

      The, the Paul thing is very interesting 'cause the more I read, uh, about the Bible and the construction of it, the more it, it just gives you pause. Like, Paul was really kind of the creator-

   2. JDJared Diamond12:36

      Mm

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:36

      ... of Christianity because he never met Jesus. So Jesus never spoke to him, and Jesus never wrote anything down. And so when Paul has this vision when he's on the road to Damascus and he has this, whatever it is, some spiritual encounter that he says he met Jesus.

   4. JDJared Diamond12:54

      Mm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan12:54

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

   6. JDJared Diamond13:03

      Yeah

   7. JRJoe Rogan13:03

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

   8. JDJared Diamond13:05

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan13:06

      So it's really Paul.

   10. JDJared Diamond13:10

       Y- yes and no. Um, it, it, it was two people. It was Jesus, and there was Paul. Yes, Paul was the great organizer. Jesus, of those various other rival Messiahs, um, Jesus had some advantages with his message. It was a universal message. It was not directed just to the Romans. It was not directed just to men. It was, it was aimed, aimed at, um, um, everybody. Um, so of the candidate Messiahs then, um, Jesus had a particularly good message. Um, but it took an or- a good message isn't enough. It took Saint Paul as, as the o- organizer.

   11. JRJoe Rogan13:50

       Y- but it's fascinating that Paul never met him-

   12. JDJared Diamond13:53

       Mm

   13. JRJoe Rogan13:53

       ... and that Jesus never wrote anything down. So when Paul's-

   14. JDJared Diamond13:56

       Yeah

   15. JRJoe Rogan13:56

       ... talking about this, this is literally just from verbal history.

   16. JDJared Diamond14:00

       Right.

   17. JRJoe Rogan14:00

       Which is really strange.

   18. JDJared Diamond14:01

       Mm.

   19. JRJoe Rogan14:02

       An oral history that it takes 20 years before this guy says, "This is what Jesus said," and then we all go on that.

   20. JDJared Diamond14:11

       Right. The, the... what's thought to be the first of the Gospels, um, um, Gospel according to Mark-

   21. JRJoe Rogan14:17

       Mark

   22. JDJared Diamond14:17

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

   23. JRJoe Rogan14:25

       Yeah.

   24. JDJared Diamond14:25

       So we, we have, have no f- first-person accounts of, of Jesus.

   25. JRJoe Rogan14:31

       Well, it'd be really nice if he wrote things down. [laughs]

   26. JDJared Diamond14:34

       Um, it would've made things more certain. In, in the case, in the case of Mo- Mohammed, um, it was two centuries before things got written down.

   27. JRJoe Rogan14:43

       Wow.

   28. JDJared Diamond14:43

       So we know even less about Mohammed-

   29. JRJoe Rogan14:45

       That's crazy

   30. JDJared Diamond14:46

       ... than, than we do about Je- Jesus. Or a difference also between Mohammed and Jesus is that Jesus we know was at the right place and right time. The Western Roman Empire we know was at the peak of its power. Why on earth did Saudi Arabia produce a world religion then? Um, was it that, as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia, uh, was it that, uh, at the time of Mohammed's birth, was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly w- wet time, which meant lots of people, which meant lots of arms? We, we don't have the weather information about Arabia, so we don't know why. We don't know whether. We infer that probably, um, Mohammed was at the right place and right time, but we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we can with Jesus.
8. 22:17 – 26:07

   Modern echoes: Islam, Mormonism, commitment mechanisms, and disciplined communities

   1. JRJoe Rogan22:17

      Yeah, of course. Um, it's really interesting the way you just outlined the reason why Christianity was successful. You could say that that same pattern is being mirrored by Muslims, that they, uh, strict adherence to religion, they emphasize having many children-

   2. JDJared Diamond22:33

      Mm

   3. JRJoe Rogan22:34

      ... and they take care of their community.

   4. JDJared Diamond22:35

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan22:36

      And their populations are rising, while a lot of secular people, their populations are dropping off.

   6. JDJared Diamond22:41

      That's true. Yeah. W- with, with Muslims, a- as with, with Christianity, um, um, I would not, I would not ar- a Muslim might argue, but I would not argue that, that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam. Um, instead, the, the organization, um, the motivation, the military spirit, um, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know, something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs, um, I see as the reason behind Islam's spread.

   7. JRJoe Rogan23:24

      Well, w- whatever was the o- origin of the original way of, uh, constructing it, the way it's practiced today-

   8. JDJared Diamond23:35

      Mm

   9. JRJoe Rogan23:35

      ... the, the people that are, are Muslims are devoutly Muslim. There's a large population of them that are very religious.

   10. JDJared Diamond23:43

       Mm.

   11. JRJoe Rogan23:43

       And that population is very... I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people, because most people are very indecisive. They, they don't really know why they're here. They don't kn- really know what life is for, existential angst. Society seems pointless. The constant pursuit of material possessions w- with a finite lifespan. Something that you can join where everyone is all in-

   12. JDJared Diamond24:12

       Mm-hmm

   13. JRJoe Rogan24:12

       ... and they're very locked in and disciplined, and that discipline, y- you know it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day.

   14. JDJared Diamond24:20

       Yeah, yeah.

   15. JRJoe Rogan24:20

       It takes a lot where everyone agrees, "We're all gonna play music and pray five times a day, and we're a part of a team." And if you leave- The punishment is death. So if you decide that you don't wanna be a part of this anymore, and you don't believe anymore, and you announce that, they can kill you. That's also in the religion, which is like, "You're all in, and you're all in for life, and we all support each other." And it's a very strong sentiment that I, I think appeals to people. Like, it is, it doesn't appeal to me like I wanna join it, but when I watch these people give speeches, and I watch them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they have is something that is very attractive to people. And I think that confidence is a weird-- That charismatic confidence is a weird aspect of human beings, uh, in, in that we, we follow those people, uh, like universally. Like, we follow charismatic, confident people universally, and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system. And you got all these other people that are part of this strong belief system. There's a compelling force that makes you wanna join.

   16. JDJared Diamond25:30

       Mm-hmm. Something, something of that is also true of Mormonism, although in s-somewhat different ways.

   17. JRJoe Rogan25:37

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

   18. JDJared Diamond25:42

       That's right. And it, and it's compelling that, that 18-year-olds, every 18-year-old Mormon man is expected to go devote two years to, um, to proselytizing. And if you don't have much money, you go 70 miles away. And if you do have money, you go to the Pacific Ocean or to Europe, with the result that Europe... But these, these people take it seriously.

   19. JRJoe Rogan26:07

       Yes.

9. 26:07 – 29:58

   Reconciling ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ with leader-driven history

   1. JDJared Diamond26:07

      And so Mormonism has done well. It, it's spreading in Europe and the Pacific. There's one other thing that, that I'd, I'd like to say here, um, and that is that, that people often ask me, um, "Jared, Guns, Germs, and Steel, um, neglects individual people. It's about things that happened over the last 10,000 years. Um, and Guns, Germs, and Steel, the different outcomes of societies on different continent has nothing to do with any individual." Um, whereas here you've written a book about leaders, about individuals. How do you reconcile Guns, Germs, and Steel with leaders? And my, my first response would be, um, to say that Guns, Germs, and Steel is about entire continents for 10,000 years, where one person doesn't make a difference. Whereas my book about leaders is about individuals in the short term. But the, the one case that I can think of where an individual, um, makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion, uh, the beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad. Those individuals had a long-lasting effect. And so far, it looks as if the beliefs of Joseph Smith, he's been gone for, what, 200 years now. But the prospects are that Joseph Smith, again, will have a long-lasting influence. Whereas I can't, I can't think of a, of, of a politician or a businessperson, um, who has had an, an effect 2,000 years later.

   2. JRJoe Rogan27:43

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

   3. JDJared Diamond28:20

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JRJoe Rogan28:21

      They're not, it's not either/or, right?

   5. JDJared Diamond28:23

      Yeah. Um, so the, the s- the spread of, of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500, um, onwards, um, yes, there were convincing, um, convincing priests and devoted priests, but behind these convincing, devoted priests were European guns, germs, and steel. Um, European smallpox, European measles that killed far more Native Americans than did, than did European-

   6. JRJoe Rogan28:52

      Mm

   7. JDJared Diamond28:52

      ... guns and, and, and, and horses. So, um, uh, religion, to become worldwide, religion needs what one had called economic and demographic engine. The Mahdi of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are of as being incredibly charismatic, and his military success as a general, um, his s- his small troops with s- sticks and stones nevertheless w-wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with machine guns, um, and then his organizational ability. Um, but so the Mahdi was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the, the economic and demographic push to s- s- sp- um, spread his religion around the world.

   8. JRJoe Rogan29:44

      Yeah. It, a lot of factors have to be in place, and sometimes the chips all align perfectly.

   9. JDJared Diamond29:51

      Right. Um, let's think-

   10. JRJoe Rogan29:54

       Keep that microphone up to your face.

   11. JDJared Diamond29:55

       My apologies.

   12. JRJoe Rogan29:56

       I love your book anyway. Sorry.

   13. JDJared Diamond29:57

       My apologies. Yeah. Um-

   14. JRJoe Rogan29:57

       You have a very, very soft-spoken

10. 29:58 – 37:59

    Business leaders and inevitability vs. “personal stamp”: Bezos, Jobs, and the stock market

    1. JDJared Diamond29:58

       So, so e-examples of, of everything, everything aligning, um, in, in the business world, um, Jeff Bezos and, and Steve Jobs. Um, out of 340 million Americans today, or 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were, were getting launched, um, it's impossible to make an argument that, that nobody except, um, Bill Gates had the business know-how and the Um, computer skills, um, not to, to f- to f- found personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time. And again, um, J- Jeff Bezos, um, he was-- he, he recognized that it was the right time. He went to the, the head of the company that had hired him, and he, he said, "The internet has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year. This is the perfect time to set up an everything store, um, based, um, based on the internet." So he recognized that the, that the time was right.

    2. JRJoe Rogan31:10

       Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you tried to do that. It, it's like what he did was really fascinating 'cause he started off with what I thought was, like, an okay idea, like sell books. Sell books online. Like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes & Noble. You can get books anywhere. There was bookstores everywhere. It was kinda easy to get books. But then the whole, you can buy toothpaste too and, and everything at, like, in just one click. Like, all that revolutionized, and it all appealed to our laziness. And as we got more and l- more lazy and more and more short attention span, TikTok-y, it became the perfect way to buy things.

    3. JDJared Diamond31:46

       Right.

    4. JRJoe Rogan31:47

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

    5. JDJared Diamond31:55

       Right. In the case of, in the case of J- of, of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to s-set up an online bookstore. It was his goal in-- explicitly, his goal in life was to set up an everything store, and but he recognized that an everything store has to start out with something.

    6. JRJoe Rogan32:13

       Really? So he started out with books.

    7. JDJared Diamond32:15

       He started out with books because he recognized that books were a, a ideal thing to start out with.

    8. JRJoe Rogan32:21

       Oh.

    9. JDJared Diamond32:21

       All books are uni-uniform. Um, it's not that you buy a diamond and 78. They're a different diamond. Every, all the books are, are uniform, um, and there are, there are a couple of warehouses for books where he could get books and anybody else could get books. And customers in the stores, um, they're not going to look around to see what is the best copy of Jared Diamond's Profits, Prophets. Um, every copy is the same. So, so Jeff Bezos recognized explicitly that, that books are a good thing to start out with. Having started out with books, he then reasoned what are good things to move on to, and he moved on to perfume and jewelry. Uh, uh, he, he waited quite a while to move on to, um, m-move on to whatever else he moved on to.

    10. JRJoe Rogan33:14

        Toothpaste.

    11. JDJared Diamond33:15

        So he, he was-

    12. JRJoe Rogan33:15

        Deodorant

    13. JDJared Diamond33:15

        ... strategic.

    14. JRJoe Rogan33:16

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

    15. JDJared Diamond33:25

        That... Yeah, that's a, that's a great example. There was online... Sorry, there was, there were everything stores, um-

    16. JRJoe Rogan33:34

        But not to that level.

    17. JDJared Diamond33:36

        Not to that level-

    18. JRJoe Rogan33:37

        Yeah

    19. JDJared Diamond33:37

        ... before Jeff Bezos. Before Jeff Bezos, there was eBay. eBay operates in a different way.

    20. JRJoe Rogan33:43

        Oh.

    21. JDJared Diamond33:43

        Um, and after Jeff Bezos, um, Walmart has set up its own everything store. But Walmart's everything store is based on, coupled to a brick-and-mortar store, whereas Jeff Bezos, his strategy from the beginning was his everything store was going to be an online store. So here's an example that, that indicates that without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores. We've got Walmart and, and we've got eBay, but Jeff Bezos, uh, put his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making an online everything store.

    22. JRJoe Rogan34:20

        Also, being the first to figure out the whole one-click thing.

    23. JDJared Diamond34:23

        Yeah.

    24. JRJoe Rogan34:23

        Where you have an account, your credit card's listed. You n- you know what you need. Bam, one click. Toilet paper on the way. Arrives by 4:00 p.m. [snaps fingers] Let's go.

    25. JDJared Diamond34:31

        That's right.

    26. JRJoe Rogan34:31

        You don't have to go to the store. And now you can get groceries delivered too? Like it's... And eventually it's gonna be robots showing up at your house delivering these things, which is probably already happening somewhere. They're probably testing that right now with drones, right?

    27. JDJared Diamond34:45

        Yeah. Yeah. Um, y- y- uh, this again illustrates that, um, Jeff Bezos was strategic.

    28. JRJoe Rogan34:53

        Yeah.

    29. JDJared Diamond34:53

        Out of 340 million Americans, if Jeff Bezos hadn't done it, maybe somebody else would have done it. But what we know for sure is that there, there, there were and w- before and there were afterwards other ways to develop an everything store. What Jeff Bezos did was to, to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction. Um, to hell with whether the investors are satisfied with their, um, their, their stock returns. Um, he didn't care about that. He prioritized customer satisfaction. So he, he developed something that w-would have happened, that did happen and before and did happen afterwards, but he did it in a distinctive way.

    30. JRJoe Rogan35:39

        I often think what would society look like if there wasn't a stock market. If n- the concept of investing in other people's businesses was just never discussed, never heard, n- no one i- invented it. What would the world look like if it was just a bunch of businesses selling things individually with people either owning a business or not owning a business, but you don't, you don't have stock in publicly traded companies where there's a, there's this obligation to your shareholders to make more money, which makes you more ruthless, cut more corners, pay people less, do, do, do everything you can to save as much money possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders.
11. 37:59 – 49:54

    Diamond the technophobe: writing by hand, pencil workflows, and dictation

    1. JDJared Diamond37:59

       I have a cellphone that my wife and son forced me to get, and-

    2. JRJoe Rogan38:03

       [laughs]

    3. JDJared Diamond38:03

       ... I use it to do my email, and that's, that's all, all that I use it for.

    4. JRJoe Rogan38:06

       You don't get on TikTok? Do any dances? Nothing?

    5. JDJared Diamond38:09

       No, no.

    6. JRJoe Rogan38:10

       Nothing? No memes?

    7. JDJared Diamond38:11

       Um, I-

    8. JRJoe Rogan38:11

       I'll send you some memes. [laughs]

    9. JDJared Diamond38:13

       [laughs] Whatever meme. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, I, I'm, I'm technophobe, and, uh, uh, uh, I'm w- So cellphones certainly would have, would have emerged.

    10. JRJoe Rogan38:23

        Yeah.

    11. JDJared Diamond38:24

        Um, but Steve Jobs put a distinctive face on cellphones in that he cared a lot about appearance, and he cared a lot about simplicity. Um, simplicity including sim- simplicity of the gadget, but simplicity also of the overall business. When Steve Jobs was, was fired from Apple, um, Apple then went downhill for a decade until Steve Jobs was brought back. And when Steve Jobs was brought back, um, w- one of the first things he did was to say, "There are too many products. We should not have 100 products. We should have just four products and conc- concentrate on them." Um, another thing that he did was to say, "The project, product should look good and be simple." Um, um, only a couple buttons on it. The contrast case, um, is that the television set that we have at home, um, has, uh, uh, a, um, uh, uh, uh, you know, one of these push button devices with, with 49 buttons. When my wife and I wanted to watch the World Cup, we had to call up our son Joshua and Max to, to talk us through.

    12. JRJoe Rogan39:32

        [laughs]

    13. JDJared Diamond39:33

        And, and I wrote it down.

    14. JRJoe Rogan39:34

        [laughs]

    15. JDJared Diamond39:34

        Uh, and when I wrote it down, I still didn't get it right, so I still call, called up Joshua and Max because there are so many buttons. Um, uh, Steve Jobs didn't do it that way. M- M- My iPhone, um, has one, two... I think it's got f- got four buttons. Last night, I discovered, um, a- an essential button. I didn't realize on the left side, the most recent conversation that I had with my iPhone, the sound quality was very poor. And I, I knew from Marie having showed me before that somewhere on that iPhone there's a volume control device-

    16. JRJoe Rogan40:11

        [laughs]

    17. JDJared Diamond40:11

        ... but I didn't know what it was. But, but yesterday, I saw that on the left side there were two things. I tried pushing one, and the volume went up. It was the upper one. And-

    18. JRJoe Rogan40:20

        How do you not know that?

    19. JDJared Diamond40:23

        How, how, how did I? I wasn't born with the knowledge. [laughs]

    20. JRJoe Rogan40:27

        [laughs] That seems so alien to me. But, I mean, uh, those things existed even on old flip phones. Did you ever have an old flip phone?

    21. JDJared Diamond40:35

        I, I did have an old, old f- flip phone.

    22. JRJoe Rogan40:37

        Didn't it have, like, a little thing where you press it for the volume, and it goes up?

    23. JDJared Diamond40:41

        Possibly, but I don't recall.

    24. JRJoe Rogan40:42

        [laughs]

    25. JDJared Diamond40:42

        I don't recall. Cer- certainly with my iPhone-

    26. JRJoe Rogan40:45

        [laughs]

    27. JDJared Diamond40:45

        ... Marie did explain to me when she forced me to get the, the iPhone, um, she showed me that of these four buttons, um, two, these lengthy things on the left, are volume controls, but I didn't rem- didn't, didn't remember whether the lower one increased-

    28. JRJoe Rogan41:00

        [laughs]

    29. JDJared Diamond41:01

        ... or the lower one decreased the volume. I didn't dare touch them because I was afraid that I would, I would ruin the device.

    30. JRJoe Rogan41:06

        That's so funny.
12. 49:54 – 1:10:07

    Translation, AI, and what gets lost: from Xerox PARC to ‘logos’ and tone languages

    1. JDJared Diamond49:54

       I, I want to mention o- one other great advantage of, um, iPhone. I don't know if you've discovered this, but-

    2. JRJoe Rogan50:01

       [laughs]

    3. JDJared Diamond50:02

       But, but at the, at the bo- at the bottom of my iPhone, there's an, there's an icon-

    4. JRJoe Rogan50:06

       Right

    5. JDJared Diamond50:07

       ... which looks like a, a microphone. Uh, that, that, that icon, um, when I press that icon, it allows me to dictate in other languages. So the, the languages that I'm active in today are Italian and German. I do my correspondence on my iPhone in Italian and German because of this little device. Now, this little... When my wife forced me to get the iPhone, um, there were a few buttons at the bottom that I didn't know about. And then a high school classmate of mine, um, who married a French woman, um, showed me on my iPhone, there's this little icon, and he said, "That icon, Jared, will permit you to, to, to do your dictation in German and Italian." And so I learned, and, and I do my correspondence in German and Italian now. Not, never by hand. I always do it on the iPhone.

    6. JRJoe Rogan50:55

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

    7. JDJared Diamond51:12

       Yeah.

    8. JRJoe Rogan51:13

       So you could have a real honest conversation with someone in another language.

    9. JDJared Diamond51:16

       Mm-hmm.

    10. JRJoe Rogan51:17

        I guess they would have to put on headsets as well, and you would be able to talk back and forth, and it would absolutely change. And in the future, they're gonna have it set up where it'll do it in your voice.

    11. JDJared Diamond51:28

        Yeah.

    12. JRJoe Rogan51:29

        So you will say something in s- in English. It'll translate it perfectly in Spanish.

    13. JDJared Diamond51:34

        Mm-hmm.

    14. JRJoe Rogan51:34

        And it'll translate it as Jared Diamond. Instead of like some robot voice, "Mr. Diamond wants to know..."

    15. JDJared Diamond51:40

        Yeah.

    16. JRJoe Rogan51:40

        Instead of that, you would get your actual voice.

    17. JDJared Diamond51:43

        Mm-hmm.

    18. JRJoe Rogan51:44

        Which is, y- you know, we're, we're getting close to like Tower of Babel type stuff here.

    19. JDJared Diamond51:48

        Mm-hmm.

    20. JRJoe Rogan51:48

        Like universal language. The, the ability to instantaneously translate everything all the time so everybody knows what everybody's saying. It's a very unique time.

    21. JDJared Diamond51:58

        Mm-hmm. This has a very interesting history, uh, in which I was secondarily i- i- involved. Um, in the 1970s, Xerox PARC in Palo Alto got the idea of, um, got the idea of automatic translation. And so they, they set up a research group, a well-funded research group. Um, uh, I had a c- close friend who was a member of that, that research group. Um, and the goal of Xerox PARC, which was well-funded, was to, to develop, um, a device that would do simultaneous translation. Um, they failed. It was a couple of decades later. The reason was there were two things that were complicated that were not understood in the 1970s. One was we didn't understand enough about the structure of language, and I'll give you an example of that, and the other thing w- w- we didn't understand was the technology of simultaneous translation. The, the example of, uh, not understanding enough about the structure of language w- was, was that i- in the initial trial runs of, of Xerox PARC, um, they, they had a sentence, um, the, the phrase, "Out of sight, out of mind." And they had their attempted technology to translate this into Russian, and then from Russian to translate it back into English. And so they s- they said, "Out of sight, out of mind." The device translated it into Russian. The Russian translated it back into English. And out of sight and out of mind came back, "Invisible idiot." [both laughing] But it, it took, it, it took a couple of decades t- to, to overcome that.

    22. JRJoe Rogan53:45

        This episode is brought to you by ARMRA. Every week there's some new wellness hack that people swear by, and after a while, you start thinking, "Why do we think we can just outsmart our bodies?" That's why ARMRA Colostrum caught my attention. It's something the body already recognizes and has hundreds of these specialized nutrients for gut stuff, immunity, metabolism, et cetera. I first noticed it working around training, especially workout recovery. Most stuff falls off, but I am still taking this. If you wanna try, ARMRA is offering my listeners 30% off plus two free gifts. Go to ARMRA.com/rogan. Well, which brings us back to religious texts.

    23. JDJared Diamond54:28

        Yes.

    24. JRJoe Rogan54:28

        Which is, I mean, the Bible, the Old Testament, there's versions of it in Aramaic, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in some of the s- some of the books, and then there's the ancient Greek version of it, the ancient Hebrew version of it, the, the translations to all these different languages, and how much is lost in those translations, and how, how weird do things get?

    25. JDJared Diamond54:50

        Right. The beginning of the gospel according to St. John. "In the be- In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God." Word. So the St. John was not written in English. It was, uh, um, written, uh, um, in Greek or translated into Greek, and the Greek word for, for word is logos. The Greek word logos, um, means word, but it also means rational system. And so when you translate the first line of the Saint John gospel, in the beginning was the word, um, there was much more. Uh, in the beginning was a system, an organization, not just a word. But that, that's an example of the, the difficulties of translating-

    26. JRJoe Rogan55:43

        Yes

    27. JDJared Diamond55:43

        ... from one language into... Let me give you another example. Um, the last foreign language that I, that I learned was Italian, and I now read Italian every day. But in Italian, uh, there are two words that mean I love. In English, there's only one word that mean I love. In Italian, you can either say amo or voglio bene. Um, voglio bene literally means I wish you well. Surprisingly to me, um, in Italian, physical love, sexual love is voglio bene, whereas amo, which is literally the word love, a-amo is, is the, the root for amateur. It's, it's the root for love in other languages. Um, that's a friendly love rather than a s-sexual love.

    28. JRJoe Rogan56:32

        Mm.

    29. JDJared Diamond56:32

        So Italian has these, these t-two words, um, for, for love. Another example-

    30. JRJoe Rogan56:37

        Can I ask you one more question?
13. 1:10:07 – 1:32:07

    Writing systems: cuneiform origins, literacy collapse, and leaders inventing scripts (Korea)

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:10:07

       That's hilarious. What was the first truly literate society?

    2. JDJared Diamond1:10:14

       Oh, that we know. The first writing was in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. It was what's called cuneiform, the wedge shape symbols. It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end. And so the writing was done, cuneiform writing was done with a stylus. Cuneiform was used to write many different languages. It was used first to write, I believe, Akkadian, which was the language of the first empire of the Fertile Crescent. And cuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey which is the oldest, most distinct Indo-European language, Hittite was also written in cuneiform. So cuneiform symbols were used to record many different writing systems just as the English alphabet or the Roman alphabet is used to write German and Swedish, and it's used to write Fore, the New Guinea language that I work with. The Phoenicians, the first Greek writing was Linear B of Homer's Troy. It was a syllabic writing system. Then the Greeks lost writing for a couple of centuries, and then-

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:11:51

       They lost it totally.

    4. JDJared Diamond1:11:53

       They became illiterate. So-

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:11:55

       The whole culture.

    6. JDJared Diamond1:11:57

       Right. At the time of the Trojan War the Greeks wrote in Linear B, this syllabic writing system, and then writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries. It came back around 800 BC, but the writing that came back was not the syllabic Linear B system. It was instead derived from the Phoenician alphabet. So it was alphabetical writing. It was not syllabic, but was alphabetic. And the Greeks added vowels. The Phoenicians, because it was an Afro-Asiatic language, did not have symbols for vowels. In Phoenician if you drop the vowels you can still understand. In Greek you have to specify the vowels, otherwise it's not comprehensible. So the first what we call alphabet was the Greek alphabet of AD 800, which then got modified slightly into the Etruscan alphabet in Italy. And the Greek alphabet then got modified into the Roman alphabet for Latin, which is modified again to the alphabet that we've got today. So the first writing system then was Um-

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:13:20

       Cuneiform

    8. JDJared Diamond1:13:20

       ... with a style, c- cuneiform. And, and then there were syllabic writing systems. Um, and then, then came alphabets. Japanese is the world's most complicated writing system because it's really four writing systems. Uh, Japanese has two syllabaries. Um, for example, my name, Diamond, uh, the Japanese write it in two, Dai-a-mono-do, because th- th- um, J- Japanese doesn't put two consonants together. So my name comes out Dai-a-mono-do in either of these two writing systems. Japanese also has a third writing system, which is basically Chinese derived, the kanji, and then a fourth writing system, which is the, the Roman writing system. So Japanese is the most complicated writing system in the world. I just come from Korea la- last Friday. I f- I flew from Korea, and-

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:14:11

       I heard you speak about the Korean language, that it's the best language.

    10. JDJared Diamond1:14:15

        It's, it's the best writing system in the world. The, the Kor- what the Koreans do is they take their letters, and they group their letters into syllables. So if you, if you look at a Korean writing, you'll see that there are several things pushed together in a little box. That box is a syllable, and the result is that Koreans, when they read, they, they read not letter by letter, but they read by syllables, and so Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:14:48

        Oh

    12. JDJared Diamond1:14:48

        ... because of this wonderful writing system.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:14:50

        Uh, one of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols and Genghis Khan is the book, The Lost History of the Mongols-

    14. JDJared Diamond1:14:59

        Yeah

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:14:59

        ... that they initially thought was gibberish.

    16. JDJared Diamond1:15:02

        Yeah.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:15:02

        Right? Because it wasn't written... Like, it was written phonetically like the Mongolian language, but in Chinese. Is that what it was? Is that how they did it?

    18. JDJared Diamond1:15:13

        On- one of my, um, um, c- classmates at Harvard, um, Joe Fletcher, uh, was the person who, who, um, rediscovered that Mongol book and figured out how to, how to, how to read it.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:15:33

        Really?

    20. JDJared Diamond1:15:33

        Yeah. Yeah. Th- that wasn't until y- the early 1960s.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:15:39

        That's insane.

    22. JDJared Diamond1:15:40

        Yeah. Uh, but there, there are, of course, there are writing systems that we still can't, can't read. The Etruscans, um, the people of Italy whom the Romans eventually conquered. Um, so the Etruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly. Um, we have some Etruscan writing in stone. The longest... But all, all Etruscan books got, got burnt or lost. The longest Etruscan text that we've got, uh, there was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia, and this linen shroud was used to wrap something. But the linen shroud was, was evidently a piece of Etru- was a piece of Etruscan writing because there's a long Etruscan text on it, and the shroud was then reused to f- f- to, to w- wrap so- someone's book. Um, the result is that we can pronounce Etruscan writing. We can read it because it's Greek, Greek letters, but we don't know the meaning of the words for the most part. Um, there w- there aren't Rosetta Stones for Etruscan. The closest that we come to it is that dice, dices, these si- six, six-sided dices, um, have been found, um, i- in Etruscan areas. And on the dices, there are, there are six s- symbols. So evidently, the, the six symbols, uh, must mean one, two, three, four, five, six. Um, and people have figured out one or two of those, but they haven't figured out the others. So we know the, the Et- the Etruscan symbols for one, two, three, four, five, six, but we don't know which one of them is six, and which one of them is three, and which one of them is four.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:17:25

        Have you ever seen the Easter Island, uh, language that they can't translate?

    24. JDJared Diamond1:17:30

        I'm sure you have.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:17:30

        Yeah.

    26. JDJared Diamond1:17:31

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:17:31

        That's fascinating.

    28. JDJared Diamond1:17:32

        Yeah.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:17:32

        That's a beautiful one, too, right?

    30. JDJared Diamond1:17:34

        Yeah.
14. 1:32:07 – 1:44:36

    Languages, identity, and memory limits: dialects, learning Italian, and the “hard drive” problem

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:32:07

       You know, it, there's an interesting thing with the Mormons when you were talking about how, um, they've figured out a way to get people very invested in being a Mormon, and one of the ways is by being a missionary, that you have to be a missionary. One of the things societies have figured out is to, to get people to be deeply nationalistic, you almost have to have them serve.

    2. JDJared Diamond1:32:29

       Mm-hmm.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:32:29

       You know, like conscription-

    4. JDJared Diamond1:32:31

       Mm-hmm

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:32:31

       ... for all young people to do a certain amount of time in the military. That's a very common thing.

    6. JDJared Diamond1:32:36

       Mm-hmm.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:32:36

       Like think about, um, like Israel for instance. Israel, very nationalistic, very proud society. People that are from Israel, you meet them, they, they're very proud of being from Israel. Korea is another example of that. They have mandatory military service.

    8. JDJared Diamond1:32:51

       Mm-hmm.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:32:51

       You have to do that.

    10. JDJared Diamond1:32:53

        Hmm. Um, so that's an interesting question. Is it the case that national identity universally depended upon a draft? Um, um, Finland... So Finland has a strong national identity. Um, Finland was a province of the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1918, um, so there was no, there was no Finnish draft, um, at the time of Finnish independence. Instead, the, the anchor for Finland's national identity is the Finnish language, which it's a very distinctive language. The Finns are p- are proud of their language. It's a poetic singing language. Um, um, it's related somewhat distantly to, to Hungarian. But I mention it as, as a counter. You, um, you're probably, probably right in, in many cases that national identity was fostered by the draft. In Italy, the unification of Italy in 1862, um, the, the development of Italian national identity, um, depended heavily on a national school system, but also on a national army. Um, so, uh, uh, uh, I have Italian conversation once a week with my, my Italian teacher and, um, she, she explained to me that the national identity, um, Italians had lots of dialects, like 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible. In New Guinea, we would say that they're, they're different languages. Um, in, even today, there are different dialects in, in Italy that different Italians can- cannot understand, in contrast to, to-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:34:43

        Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialect.

    12. JDJared Diamond1:34:45

        Okay.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:34:46

        Yeah.

    14. JDJared Diamond1:34:47

        Right.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:34:47

        And if you just spoke classic Italian that you learn in college, you would have no idea what they were talking about 'cause they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.

    16. JDJared Diamond1:34:54

        Right. Yeah. Interestingly, um, my first trip to... Dialects were far more developed in Europe, um, 60 years ago. My, my first... And that's true in Italy, Germany, and England. My first trip to England was at the age of 12 in 1950. My sister and I were taken by my parents to a small town on the east coast of England called Beccles. My father was a doctor and was visiting a doctor in Beccles. Um, so the, my parents and, and their friends were, were talking, and my sister and I were bored, so we, we wandered off into the, into the town. Um, and we wandered off only about two blocks, but we made several turns, and we couldn't figure out how to get back to the house of this family, the Grantham Hills. So we asked a man on the street i- in American English, "How do we get back to the house of Grantham?" And he said something which he thought was... We couldn't understand a word of it. Um, that, that's just an example of how strongly differentiated dialects were in England as recently as 1950. When I was a student in England in 1950-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:36:05

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

    18. JDJared Diamond1:36:10

        I can't tell. I ca- I, I can't reproduce any of it. All, all I can tell you was that it was completely incomprehensible, but this-

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:36:17

        But it was-

    20. JDJared Diamond1:36:17

        But this-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:36:18

        ... a form of English.

    22. JDJared Diamond1:36:19

        Presumably, because this was the... When we, when we got back to the house and we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying, then the Grantham Hills says, "Yeah, well, that's the local dialect." But sim-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:36:28

        Wow

    24. JDJared Diamond1:36:29

        ... similar, similarly in, in Germany, when I lived in Germany in 1961, I lived in, in Munich, capital of Bavaria, and, um, Bavarians have a, have a strong, strong dialect. Um, um, instead of saying, "Ich bin ein Bayer und ich habe eine dicke Haut," I'm a Bavarian and I have a thick skin, they would say, "Ibi u boyi ihapu dika haut." So w- w- when, when I was traveling around with a friend of mine from Northern German, from the Rhineland, where they speak what is closest to Hochdeutsch liter- literary German, and we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria, um, and asked to be filled up with gas. Because I'd been living in M- I understood what the guy was saying. But my friend Joseph from the Rhineland, "What did he say?" He could not, he couldn't understand the Bavarian at all.

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:37:21

        That's wild.

    26. JDJared Diamond1:37:23

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:37:23

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

    28. JDJared Diamond1:37:27

        Right. But again, in, in Italy, you, you, um, Sicilian is, um, it's often regarded as a separate language. There are in fact, as you know, there, there are books written in, in Sicilian. Um, modern literary and government Italian is the li- is close to the dialect of Florence, but there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects, um, which persisted until after World War II, and were mutually incomprehensible. But those dialects now have been fading because of universal e- universal education plus the draft.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:38:06

        Wow. When did you start learning Italian?

    30. JDJared Diamond1:38:10

        Um, I started learning Italian, um, it was April 1999, and I can-
15. 1:44:36 – 1:52:35

    Tok Pisin and creoles: how children turn “plantation pidgin” into full language

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:44:36

       Yeah. I've run into that problem all the time, just with the various interviews that I do. Like fascinating conversations that I have, I completely forget because it's just there's no room in there anymore. And I could imagine like keeping thir- I want to talk about pidgin. I want to talk about pidgin talk. New Guinea pidgin talk.

    2. JDJared Diamond1:44:56

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:44:56

       Is that a written language?

    4. JDJared Diamond1:44:58

       Yeah. It is now written. It's very interesting, and it's of enormous significance for understanding the development of human language. So New Guinea talk pidgin, it sounds like baby talk. [speaking Pidgin] Okay, so that's a sample of a pidgin.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:45:26

       What did you just say?

    6. JDJared Diamond1:45:27

       Oh, I said that the hair on your head is somewhat sparse, and you have brown eyes and-

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:45:34

       [laughs]

    8. JDJared Diamond1:45:35

       [speaking Pidgin]

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:45:35

       Wow.

    10. JDJared Diamond1:45:38

        So here's how New Guinea talk pidgin arose, and it's a model for how similar pidgin languages have arisen all around the world dozens or hundreds of times. When German colonial administrators came to New Guinea, New Guinea has these thousand different languages, but the Germans had to communicate with them, and the Germans hired or kidnapped New Guineans belonging to many different language groups. The Germans had to communicate with their workers, and the workers had to communicate with each other. So it's not that anybody invented something. The Germans began speaking a stripped-down, easy German, and the New Guineans began picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked up words from other New Guinean languages. This first language was called a pidgin language. It's very simple. It's not adequate to express the range of human emotion, but it's enough to discuss plantation agriculture, and it was enough for adults who had their own main language and were using the pidgin language just to discuss the coconut plantation. Where pidgin became inadequate was once you get the children of pidgin-speaking parents, and the children from pidgin-speaking parents of different native languages, children are starting to communicate with each other. This stripped-down language that's enough to talk about coconuts but is not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion, the children themselves, within a decade, modified spontaneously, not consciously, modified pidgin to become a full language with a grammar and tenses and future tense and prepositions.

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:47:41

        Over how long? What period of time?

    12. JDJared Diamond1:47:42

        A decade.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:47:43

        Wow.

    14. JDJared Diamond1:47:43

        A decade. The best information we have about how these pidgin languages, these creole languages, which are the more complex ones with prepositions, have developed all around the world. Our best information about the development of creole language comes from Hawaii because Hawaii plantations, plantation workers were brought in from Japan and China and various other places. So again, workers are thrown together on a plantation. They have to communicate with English-speaking plantation owners, and they spontaneously develop this really stripped-down so-called pidgin language that doesn't have prepositions and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you can do with a sugarcane. But the children of these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal life, the pidgin language is not adequate, and the children spontaneously made the pidgin more complex. Within a decade, the children invented prepositions, and they invented future tense, and they invented plurals. And this is somewhat documented because the newspapers of missionaries in Hawaii in the decade from 1890 to 1900, every now and then, the newspapers would quote something funny that a Hawaiian said on a plantation, and it would be an example of Creole as of 1892. And then you can see, uh, you know, from, from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated Creole had gotten in 1894. So, um, New Guinea Tok Pisin, which is, is actually what's called a creole language, is a full complex language with prepositions. You can say anything. It's the government language. Um, New Guineans, um, uh, the New, New Guinean government leader, they are more fluent, um, usually in Creole than they are in, in English. So in parliament, in Papua New Guinea, um, the, the language of parliament is either English or Tok Pisin, and then there's one other, other creole language. When I started out, out in New Guinea, the first thing that I learned was, was, was, was Tok Pisin because I could, I could pick it up very quickly. Um, and not a pel [laughs] sam belong, belong makim long yu. This fella could-

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:50:21

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

    16. JDJared Diamond1:50:26

        I picked it up as I was there.

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:50:27

        And was there anything written about the language before you got there? Like, was, was it possible to study it and-

    18. JDJared Diamond1:50:33

        Yeah

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:50:33

        ... and when they wrote it down, did they write it using English alphabet?

    20. JDJared Diamond1:50:36

        That's right. Yeah. Yeah. There, there are, there are books, there are grammars of New Guinea Pidgin. Um, I learned New Guinea Pidgin initially, which is a creole language with prepositions, et cetera. I learned it by talking with New Guineans. Um, and then eventually I acquired, um, um, one or two of these, um, Pidgin grammars and a Pidgin dictionary and was able to make my Pidgin more complex.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:51:03

        Wow.

    22. JDJared Diamond1:51:04

        [laughs] Just as an, just as an example, um, thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science. Um, but to demonstrate that you can say anything in Tok Pisin, um, I've gi- I, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in, in Tok Pisin. Um, e got one pel man, man savi tumas nem long Onsaga. Onsaga e got dis pel i... Um, uh, e tok long hat tumas. Um, na dis pel hat tumas emi thermodynamics. Na dis pel Onsaga e got strong pel tintin. Na, na emi, emi makim rul nom tu belong, belong sai- belong tintin belong hat, emi second law of thermodynamics.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:51:44

        So what did you just say?

    24. JDJared Diamond1:51:45

        Oh, what I said, what I said is that a Swede called Lars Onsaga, um, developed the second law of thermodynamics, um, which is thermodynamics is about heat. And Onsaga, um, developed the thermodynamics of, um, rates of reactions. And so I explained, "Dis pel Onsaga e kam ap-- e, e, e makim rul nom tu, rul nom tu long, long savi belong heat." Savi belong heat, literally knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics. "Rul nom tu long savi bo- belong heat. Onsaga e got dis pel a strong pel tintin. Onsaga, he's got-- He's smart man."

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:52:25

        Have you talked to someone in this Pidgin, Tok Pisin where they-- wh- where you could explain something like that and they could relay it to you, like they understand what you're talking about?

16. 1:52:35 – 2:22:08

    New Guinea fieldwork: endocannibalism, kuru/prions, and extreme cultural divergence

    1. JDJared Diamond1:52:35

       Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, with, with New Guineans, um, so in my work in Papua New Guinea, um, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use Pidgin. In Papua New Guinea, they do use Pidgin. And with New Guineans, um, um, they and I can discuss anything in Pidgin. Um, I could, um, I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics, and they can explain to me th- the difference between the taste of, taste of human, human red meat and human, human, human fat. You can say anything in Tok Pisin.

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:53:08

       Yeah, that's a weird part of their culture, right? The, that they can differentiate the taste between human red meat and human fat.

    3. JDJared Diamond1:53:16

       Well-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:53:16

       [laughs]

    5. JDJared Diamond1:53:17

       ... they s- they say that the human, human red meat is like the meat of the cassowary, the big flightless bird like an ostrich.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:53:24

       Mm.

    7. JDJared Diamond1:53:24

       Whereas human fat, they say, is like the, like the, the, the fat of pigs. I, I, I was never offered, and I never-- I wouldn't have accepted because the place in New Guinea where I began my work was the Fore area. The Fore were the people who had kuru, um, which is basically mad cow disease. They were the people who were dying of, of, of kuru, and they were the people that I worked with for the first eight years.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:53:51

       And who were they eating?

    9. JDJared Diamond1:53:54

       Oh.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:53:55

        [laughs]

    11. JDJared Diamond1:53:56

        Um, th- th- there were rule. Um, th- there's what's called endocannibalism and exocannib- cannibalism.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:54:03

        Yeah.

    13. JDJared Diamond1:54:04

        Exocannibalism is meeting-- is eating your dead enemies whom you kill in war. Endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives. Um, when the Australian government came in, it was easy f- they forbade cannibalism, and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the, the tribe who was being eaten complained to the government [laughs] and, and the government told the people who were eating the other people, "You can't do that anymore." But endocannibalism, um, in New Guinea, traditionally, um, you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother as you or I would just throw away, throw away the body of our dead mother. Um, uh, um, there were precise rules about who gets to eat, eat what. But, but in general, um, um, the, the relatives eat, eat the body, and th- th- there are rules about what part of the body you eat. Um, in 1965, I had working in my camp with me a, a New Guinean who did not speak Pidgin, and we were in a remote camp on a mountain. One-- We were getting no visi- visitors 'cause it was, it was remote. And one day into camp came a man S- sat down with, with this guy who didn't speak Tok Pisin, talk with him, and then th- th- the man, man got up, and his friend said to me, "Th-this man is quitting his work with you." "Why?" "He's quitting his work with you because the young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter..." Y- you make down payments when a, when a girl is young. So there was a young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter, and, and that young man had died. He was the prospective son-in-law of my worker. And because he was the prospective son-in-law, my worker was expe- um, this, this sound, but it's true. My worker was expected to eat the forearm. And so, so he qui- he quit his work, quit his work with me, and w- and walked away. He would, he w- there's no way that, that he would fail to eat the forearm of his pr- pr- prospective son-in-law any more than, that you or I would throw our mother's body into the ditch.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:56:33

        [exhales] So he quit working with you because of that?

    15. JDJared Diamond1:56:37

        Y- yeah. Because, because the funeral feast was, uh, was going to... The son-in-law had just died. This guy walked into camp, had brought the news to my worker that your prospective son-in-law has died, and the funeral feast is gonna take place three year, three, three days in the future. So you better come h- come now so that you, you are there before the body rots.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:57:01

        That's a very similar, uh, tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about, uh, with how the, the Pirahã deal with their dead.

    17. JDJared Diamond1:57:09

        Mm-hmm.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:57:10

        It's very similar.

    19. JDJared Diamond1:57:11

        Mm-hmm.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:57:11

        Like the same... But the thing is, the amount of time they have to wait before you eat them is also similar, which is, I don't understand totally.

    21. JDJared Diamond1:57:20

        Mm-hmm.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:57:22

        Did they have an explanation for that?

    23. JDJared Diamond1:57:24

        N- no. Um, and it's, it's hard for me to, for you and me to understand because in the area where my worker, um, quit in order to, to, uh, i- i- it's a w- a, a warm, hot area, about 3,000 feet. Um, and, and the body, a dead body, is put, uh, is, was, it's, it's, it's, the government has largely put it down. The body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats on it, and underneath the platform, um, is a bucket. So f- s- I'm sorry. You asked me. The, the body putrefies, and the flesh turns to liquid. And the liquid then drips through the slats in the pa- platform down into the bucket. You then d- dip your sweet potato in, in, in th- the bucket of this, this putrid fluid, and then you, you eat the s- the sweet pota- uh, th- that, that's what I'm told.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:58:21

        Whoa.

    25. JDJared Diamond1:58:21

        Yeah. I, I, I was not offered. I would not have a- accepted if off- but I was told d- uh, told b- by the missionary in the area and by New Guineans themselves that that's what they do with dead bodies.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:58:34

        Is, w- i- w- is there a scenario where they would have encouraged you or required you to consume someone?

    27. JDJared Diamond1:58:43

        Never.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:58:43

        Not when you were there?

    29. JDJared Diamond1:58:44

        Absolutely never because the, um, endocannibalism, there are precise r- rules about-

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:58:51

        Right
17. 2:22:08 – 2:28:13

    A model “good leader” case study: Seretse Khama and Botswana’s diamond governance

    1. JRJoe Rogan2:22:08

       The Botswana story is fascinating. That's also in your book-

    2. JDJared Diamond2:22:11

       Mm-hmm

    3. JRJoe Rogan2:22:11

       ... where you discuss the transformation of Botswana under this guy's leadership.

    4. JDJared Diamond2:22:17

       There was a leader who, a leader who really made a difference, and, um, that's a case of someone, um, he was the only one who could have done it. Um, the reason is re- he, he was the only one who could have made Botswana successful as founding president, um, because he was the chief of the largest, most powerful tribe in Botswana. Um, when Botswana became independent, they set up a two-house legislature based on the British model. But the upper house was a house of chiefs, and the, a house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of, rule of the chiefs, um, so it was a bad idea for Botswana democracy. But Seretse Khama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe, he was the only person in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief. And the other thing was that Botswana's, um, financial stability has come from diamonds. The diamonds were discovered after independence. If they had been discovered before independence, the British and De Beers would have made a deal favoring the British and De Beers.

    5. JRJoe Rogan2:23:30

       Mm.

    6. JDJared Diamond2:23:30

       But in fact, the diamonds were, were discovered like six months after independence, and they were discovered on the land of Seretse Khama's tribe. Um, normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found on the land of, of a tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves. But because the diamonds were on the land of Seretse Khama's tribe, and Seretse Khama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all Botswana and not just his tribe, Seretse Kha- Khama pro- proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property of the Botswana nation, not of the individual tribes.

    7. JRJoe Rogan2:24:14

       Mm.

    8. JDJared Diamond2:24:15

       So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds, and he was the only person who ca- could have undone the power of the, the chiefs. Plus, in addition, because he was equally comfortable in European society and in African society, and he, he'd married a, a European w- woman, um, he w- was respected in, in Europe, very successful as a diplomat, and he was respected among African countries.

    9. JRJoe Rogan2:24:49

       Imagine if that practice had taken place in America, where all the resources, all the natural resources were the property of the society of America and not of individuals. Imagine how different this world would look if the oil and gas-

    10. JDJared Diamond2:25:06

        Mm-hmm

    11. JRJoe Rogan2:25:06

        ... just the oil and gas-

    12. JDJared Diamond2:25:07

        Yeah

    13. JRJoe Rogan2:25:07

        ... and this co- and of course the, the minerals, the rare earth minerals, imagine if they were just the property of the collective United States.

    14. JDJared Diamond2:25:18

        Um, good point. And in most African countries, um, it's as in the United States, um, so diamonds and emeralds and oil-

    15. JRJoe Rogan2:25:29

        Cobalt

    16. JDJared Diamond2:25:29

        ... b- belong to the, the tribe on whose land they're found, but not in Botswana.

    17. JRJoe Rogan2:25:36

        Wow.

    18. JDJared Diamond2:25:37

        And the result is that, that's Bo- Botswana is the, uh- I believe they're the second richest country in Africa. The richest country in Africa is, I believe, Equatorial Guinea. Um, and it's, it's very rich because it's got oil, and th-the, the average per capita income in, in Equatorial Guine- Guinea is, is something like 10 to $20,000. That's because the president has an annual income of, like, $500 billion.

    19. JRJoe Rogan2:26:09

        [laughs]

    20. JDJared Diamond2:26:09

        And everybody else has an annual income of, like, $100, and you, you average it o- average it out, and that's why Equatorial Guinea has the highest average income. Um, but-

    21. JRJoe Rogan2:26:20

        That's messing with the numbers. [laughs]

    22. JDJared Diamond2:26:21

        That's messing with the numbers.

    23. JRJoe Rogan2:26:22

        Yeah.

    24. JDJared Diamond2:26:22

        But, but in, in Bots- in Botswana, um, the population of the country is only three million, and the money from the diamonds go, as in the case of Norway, goes into a sinking fund. It's not spent as you go, but it's invested, um, on a long-term basis.

    25. JRJoe Rogan2:26:40

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

    26. JDJared Diamond2:26:45

        Yeah.

    27. JRJoe Rogan2:26:46

        Yeah.

    28. JDJared Diamond2:26:46

        Yeah.

    29. JRJoe Rogan2:26:47

        Well, listen, Jared, I just wanna thank you for all your work over the years, uh, Collapse, um, you know, Guns, Germs, and Steel. You're, you've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in, in society and in history, and made it very entertaining and very consumable, so thank you. And I really enjoyed talking to you. It was really great.

    30. JDJared Diamond2:27:14

        No, I, I, I enjoyed a lot talking to you. I, I was ... I, I did my homework. I was told in, told in advance that, that I, I would enjoy a lot, um, uh, talking with you, uh, provided that, that I was not identified with, with something that you disapprove of, uh, but that oth- otherwise I should look forward to a pleasurable experience. And in fact, um, m- m- my wife, um, uh, got Joshua to send her th- three snippets of, of, of you and, and, um, yes, I an- anticipated that, that it would be a pleasurable time. And it is.

Episode duration: 2:28:14