00:00:53.000A short answer is I was born in 1937, which means that I grew up in the Second World War under the shadow of Hitler.
00:01:02.000Every day there was something going on with the war.
00:01:05.000My father pasted up on the wall of my bedroom a map of the European theater and the Pacific theater and there was always the question, why did it happen and if it hadn't been for Hitler, would there still have been that outcome?
00:02:01.000She survived, but others of the family didn't survive.
00:02:03.000And so ever since I've known Marie, there's constantly been that question.
00:02:08.000And then leaders have made a difference in my life.
00:02:12.000There 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.
00:02:29.000And that was a poor choice of lab 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 Not a good choice.
00:02:55.000You have to be careful with water pumps and be more careful in the future.
00:03:00.000That permitted my scientific career to continue.
00:03:04.000Other people might have thrown me out.
00:03:07.000So leaders have made a difference in my life.
00:03:09.000Well, leaders most certainly make a difference in the world.
00:03:13.000And one of the things that really terrifies me is Nazi Germany was not that long ago.
00:03:20.000And there was a time in my life where I think most people generally agreed that that could never happen again.
00:03:27.000That type of scenario where 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 forever.
00:03:44.000As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is and that there is always these.
00:03:51.000These battles of, for lack of better terms, good and evil.
00:03:55.000And evil, good leaders who generally just want something good for their people and they want to leave a mark and be remembered as someone who made a difference.
00:04:05.000And then leaders who just want to take over all the systems and make sure they can't be contested and want to dominate the country and change it.
00:04:16.000You make some really compelling cases in your book about circumstance and about all these different factors that lead to leaders.
00:04:26.000Either having successful runs or not successful.
00:04:30.000There's a lot of factors that we don't take into consideration.
00:04:33.000You opened the book with a story about how Hitler almost died in a car accident.
00:04:37.000And what would the world have looked like if these cars had just been moving?
00:04:43.000One was two seconds ahead, one was two seconds behind, perfect impact, dead Hitler, now what?
00:05:02.000How would civilization look if just a few things had been off?
00:05:05.000Aaron Powell There are so many things to say about what you've just said.
00:05:11.000Growing up after World War II, we thought never again.
00:05:17.000And yet in Cambodia, Pol Pot killed about one quarter of the Cambodian population in evil ways.
00:05:29.000encouraged children to kill their parents.
00:05:33.000Pinochet, nobody expected what Pinochet did in Chile.
00:05:38.000His body count was nowhere near Hitler's body count because Chile is a small country and Pinochet did not set out to exterminate a large fraction of the population.
00:05:48.000But the tortures that he implied are simply too, they were far worse than anything that the Nazis did and he surprised his fellow generals.
00:06:47.000Winston Churchill recognized that the time was right.
00:06:51.000When 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.
00:07:02.000Winston Churchill became prime minister because Germany invaded France, and Churchill did not cause Germany to invade France.
00:07:09.000He recognized that he was at the right time and place.
00:07:12.000There are other leaders who are at the right time and place, but they don't know it.
00:07:19.000Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard, I think, in 2004 as a result of his having been born in 1984.
00:07:27.000Mark Zuckerberg did not choose the year of his birth, but 2004 was an ideal time to jumpstart social media because there had been some before and some afterwards, but the changes in the Internet made 2004 a particularly good year.
00:07:43.000So leaders, some leaders choose the time and place to go all dead.
00:07:49.000Some leaders find themselves in the right time and place, although they didn't manufacture it.
00:07:53.000Winston Churchill did, and some leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan.
00:08:01.000Genghis Khan, the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland, and yet there were other people who tried, like Attila the Hun and Timur the Turk.
00:08:17.000Well, within the last ten 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.
00:08:31.000If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan.
00:08:39.000But 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.
00:08:48.000And it also meant hay to feed Mongol horses to ride into battle.
00:08:52.000So Genghis Khan was someone at the right time and place.
00:08:57.000And we didn't have any idea until this tree ring study of the last decade.
00:09:02.000Interesting, but you think that's the primary reason why he was so successful?
00:09:06.000Because 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.
00:09:21.000So he accepted all religions and it was one of his strengths is that he didn't care.
00:10:16.000The first century A.D. 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.
00:10:37.000in the Roman Empire then, but the Roman Empire was basically the father of the European countries that spread around the world 15 centuries later.
00:10:49.000Now, Jesus Christ didn't pick the place where he was born.
00:10:53.000Neither 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.
00:11:40.000In some cases, the same person is the charismatic leader and the organizer in the general.
00:11:47.000For Mohammed was an outstanding, he was charismatic, he was a great organizer, he was a great general.
00:11:55.000The Mahdi of the Sudan who established this empire in East Africa, fantastic general and organizer and incredibly charismatic.
00:12:06.000But 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.
00:12:56.000The entire religion is based on this guy saying that I think he said all these things 20 years after he said them when no one wrote it down and I never met him.
00:14:10.000What's thought to be the first of the Gospels, the Gospel according to Mark, is estimated to have been written down something like 20 years after the death of Jesus.
00:14:46.000A difference also between Muhammad and Jesus is that Jesus we know was at the right place and right time.
00:14:53.000The Western Roman Empire we know was at the peak of its power.
00:14:57.000Why on earth did Saudi Arabia? produce a world religion then?
00:15:01.000Was it that, as with Genghis Khan in Mongolia, was it that at the time of Muhammad's birth, was Saudi Arabia undergoing a particularly wet time, which meant lots of people, which meant lots of armies?
00:15:16.000We don't have the weather information about Arabia, so we don't know why – we don't know whether we infer that probably Muhammad was at the right place and right time, but we can't nail it down the way we can with Genghis Khan and the way we can with Jesus.
00:15:31.000It's interesting, too, because Muhammad was essentially a prophet, right?
00:15:41.000It's like we know there was a man that existed during that time and he became this religious leader.
00:15:49.000The religion is founded on his thoughts and his ideas essentially, of course, written down hundreds of years later.
00:15:57.000It's just incredible how many different versions of that kind of a system, these religious systems, where someone becomes the person who has all the rules and everyone follows those rules, or you're ostracized from the kingdom.
00:16:51.000One might say that the religious teachings are secondary.
00:16:57.000In the case of 19th century American history, the United States gave rise to five religions that have gone around the world Mormon religion, Seventh day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian science.
00:17:13.000Why have the Mormons been so successful?
00:17:15.000Was it because of Joseph Smith's teachings?
00:17:19.000With due respect to the Mormons, the religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merit.
00:17:25.000But the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young.
00:17:32.000And the social features of the Mormon religion, their optimism, their emphasis on living a fulfilling life, on being happy, And they're expecting every Mormon if you're a Mormon, you tithe yourself, you don't fill out a 1040 income tax form.
00:17:59.000Mormons are expected to devote 10% of their income to the church and they calculate it themselves.
00:18:10.000So the Mormon religion, I would say, has spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, but because he was charismatic and because Brigham Young then was an outstanding leader.
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00:19:56.000You know, if the whole origin story wasn't so, as the kids say, sus, you know, it would make you really be interested in, like, what's going on here?
00:20:04.000Like, it seems like these guys have it nailed.
00:20:07.000Other than the nine wives and all that other jazz.
00:20:09.000But that seems like an offset of the original idea.
00:21:24.000Christianity emphasized taking care of the sick.
00:21:28.000And so when you look at tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire, Christians lived longer and they were less likely to die than were pagans.
00:21:41.000And the result was that Christianity that started out as a maybe a few dozen people under Jesus.
00:21:47.000And even in St. Paul's time, what, maybe a hundred people, Christianity grew to be the numerically dominant religion of the Roman Empire.
00:21:56.000On top of that, Christianity derived from Judaism emphasized writing.
00:22:02.000And so when Constantine needed bureaucrats for his empire, there were all of these literate Christians and the pagans were not literate.
00:22:10.000So Christianity had reasons for its success that would do respect have nothing to do with a virgin birth.
00:22:43.000With Muslims, as with Christianity, I would not argue that the theological beliefs of Islam were decisive in the spread of Islam.
00:22:59.000Instead, the organization, the motivation, the military spirit, the family and social connections, and maybe, although we don't know, something about the weather in Saudi Arabia during Muhammad's lifetime, those rather than theological beliefs I see as the reason behind.
00:23:24.000Well, whatever was the origin of the original way of constructing it, the way it's practiced today, the people that are Muslims are devoutly Muslim.
00:23:39.000There's a large population of them that are very religious.
00:23:42.000And that population is very I think that whole very strong belief system is very attractive to people because most people are very undecisive.
00:24:02.000The constant pursuit of material possessions with a finite lifespan.
00:24:06.000Something that you can join where everyone is all in and they're very locked in and disciplined.
00:24:14.000And that discipline, you know, it takes a lot to agree to pray five times a day.
00:24:20.000It takes a lot where everyone agrees we're all going to play music and pray five times a day and we're a part of a team.
00:24:26.000And if you leave, The punishment is death.
00:24:29.000So, if you decide that you don't want to be a part of this anymore and you don't believe anymore and you announce that, they can kill you.
00:24:36.000That'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.
00:24:43.000It's a very strong sentiment that I think appeals to people.
00:24:47.000It doesn't appeal to me like I want to join it, but when I watch these people give speeches and I watch them express their views and beliefs, the confidence that they have is something that is very attractive to people.
00:25:01.000And I think that confidence is a weird, that charismatic confidence is a weird aspect of human beings in that we follow those people like universally.
00:25:14.000Like we follow charismatic, confident people universally and charismatic, confident people that have a very strong belief system.
00:25:23.000And you got all these other people that are part of the strong belief system.
00:25:25.000There's a compelling force that makes you want to join.
00:26:06.000So Mormonism has done well at spreading in Europe and the Pacific.
00:26:11.000There's one other thing that I'd like to say here, and that is that people often ask me, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel neglects individual people.
00:26:22.000It's about things that happened over the last 10,000 years, and Guns, Germs and Steel, the different outcomes of societies and different continents, has nothing to do with any individual, whereas here you've written a book about leaders.
00:26:36.000about individuals, how do you reconcile Guns, German, and Steel with leaders?
00:26:41.000And my first response would be to say that Guns, German, 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.
00:26:57.000But the one case that I can think of where an individual makes a difference 2,000 years later is in religion.
00:27:10.000The beliefs of Jesus and the beliefs of Muhammad, those individuals had a long-lasting effect.
00:27:20.000And so far it looks as if the beliefs of Joseph Smith – he's been gone for, what, 200 years now, but the prospects are that Joseph Smith again will have a long-lasting influence, whereas I can't think of a politician or a business person who has had an effect 2,000 years later.
00:27:42.000Well, I think guns, germs, and steel highlighted all the factors that have to be in place for these types of changes to take place.
00:27:51.000It's not like mutually exclusive that leaders aren't important as well.
00:27:56.000It seems like they both work together hand in hand, but those leaders wouldn't have been able to do what they did without all the innovation, without the industry, without the infrastructure that these places had, without the wet season that Genghis Khan and the Mongols.
00:28:24.000So the spread of European religions, namely Christianity, from 1500 onwards, yes, there were convincing priests and devoted priests, but behind these convincing, devoted priests were European guns, germs, and steel, European smallpox, European measles.
00:28:47.000that killed far more Native Americans than did European guns and horses.
00:28:54.000So religion, to become worldwide, religion needs what one can call an economic and demographic engine.
00:29:05.000The Mahdi of the Sudan, the accounts that we have of him are of his being incredibly charismatic and his military success as a general, his small troops with sticks and stones. nevertheless wiped out British-led Egyptian armies with machine guns and then his organizational ability.
00:29:30.000So the Mahdi was able to set up an empire in East Africa, but he didn't have the economic and demographic push to spread his religion around the world.
00:29:59.000In the business world, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, out of 340 million Americans
00:30:13.000today or 320 million when Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were getting launched, it's impossible to make an argument that nobody except Bill Gates had the business know-how and the computer skills to found personal computers, but he was there at the right place and right time.
00:30:37.000And again, Jeff Bezos, he recognized that it was the right time.
00:30:45.000He went to the head of the company that had hired him, and he said, the Internet has multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in the last year.
00:31:05.000So he recognized that the time was right.
00:31:09.000Yeah, and imagine what would have happened if you tried to do that.
00:31:17.000It's like what he did was really fascinating because he started off with what I thought was like an okay idea like sell books, sell books online.
00:31:25.000Like, okay, but you can get books at Barnes Noble, you can get books anywhere.
00:31:55.000In the case of Jeff Bezos, it was not that his goal in life was to set up an online bookstore, it was his goal in His goal in life was to set up an everything store, but he recognized that an everything store has to start out with something.
00:33:38.000After Jeff Bezos, Walmart has set up its own everything store.
00:33:47.000But 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.
00:34:01.000Here's an example that indicates that without Jeff Bezos, we would still have everything stores.
00:34:07.000We've got Walmart and And we've got eBay, but Jeff Bezos put his distinctive stamp on everything stores by making an online everything store.
00:34:17.000Also, being the first to figure out the whole one click thing.
00:34:44.000This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic.
00:34:49.000This again illustrates that Jeff Bezos was strategic.
00:34:54.000Out of 340 million Americans, if Jeff Bezos hadn't done it, maybe somebody else would have done it.
00:35:00.000But what we know for sure is that there were before and there were afterwards other ways to develop an everything store.
00:35:10.000What Jeff Bezos did was to put his stamp on how to do it by prioritizing customer satisfaction to hell with whether the investors are Satisfied with their stock returns.
00:35:30.000So he developed something that would have happened, that did happen before and did happen afterwards, but he did it in a distinctive way.
00:35:38.000I often think what would society look like if there wasn't a stock market?
00:35:43.000If the concept of investing in other people's businesses was just never discussed, never hurt, no one invented it.
00:35:53.000What 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?
00:36:03.000But you don't have stock in publicly traded companies where there's this obligation to your shareholders to make more money, which makes you more ruthless, cut more corners, pay people less, do everything you can to save as much money possible because you have an obligation to your shareholders.
00:37:00.000It certainly makes more people invest in businesses and then more people who are just investors who don't do anything in business at all except buy and trade stocks, which is a very odd position in society.
00:41:43.000With all due respect, it is so fascinating to me that a man so brilliant as you, who knows so much about history, is talking about a phone like as if it's some.
00:41:53.000Like an insanely complicated thing from another planet that you're trying to back engineer to figure out how it works when everybody knows how to do the things you're saying here.
00:42:03.000It is an insanely complicated thing from another planet.
00:42:05.000From childhood onwards, I've always been technophobe.
00:42:30.000My father then got – my father was a physician, a scientist.
00:42:35.000My father was a physician and scientist.
00:42:37.000He got someone in his lab to put my phone together.
00:42:41.000When I went to Cambridge, England to get my PhD in physiology, there were various organs I could have worked on.
00:42:51.000I could have worked on the electric organ of electric eels.
00:42:56.000I could have worked on muscle, but I had no idea how to build a plastic chamber that would allow an electric organ to separate two solutions.
00:43:09.000Lecturer in my beginning physiology course said, The gallbladder is a sack.
00:43:16.000The gallbladder is a sack coming out of the liver.
00:43:21.000It's just a simple sack and it absorbs salt and water, but we don't know how.
00:43:27.000I thought, My God, that's my, I can do that because to measure water transport by the gallbladder didn't require micropipettes and technology, didn't require chambers.
00:43:40.000I put a little plaster cannula into the mouth of gall and then I waited on a balance, but there was a balance in my lab.
00:43:47.000So I picked that organ because it was technologically so simple.
00:43:51.000And it turns out that the gallbladder does what the kidney and intestine and more important organs do, but the gallbladder is much more convenient to study.
00:44:01.000And so I made my reputation as a physiologist with a gallbladder precisely because I could not build the ham radio, nor can I figure out my iPhone, nor can I do any other technology.
00:45:45.000I spent yesterday revising a paper That I'm writing on the birds of the Wandaman Peninsula of New Guinea.
00:45:54.000New Guinea, the island of New Guinea, has 10 isolated mountain ranges on the north coast, and I personally have explored 10 of those, and for many of them, I've discovered the highest peak and I've inventoried their birds.
00:46:08.000So yesterday I was working on a paper on the birds of Wandaman Mountains.
00:46:44.000Trevor Burrus, so when you edit the draft when she types up a draft and you edit it, are you just writing on it, writing on the printed draft?
00:47:46.000There's a lot of people that I know that write longhand, and they like to write with a pen on paper, whether it's a book.
00:47:57.000Or anything, songs, a lot of songwriters, like most songwriters that I know, they write on pieces of paper or they improvise it and then write it down as they're improvising it.
00:48:07.000But it's so much easier and quicker to type.
00:48:13.000Like I know that I remember things much better when I write them down physically, but I can type pretty quickly and I don't have to look at the keys.
00:48:22.000Some things I produce the first draft by typing, but what I find.
00:48:29.000Is that my style, my English prose style, is different if I type it than if I write it.
00:48:37.000When I type it, I notice that my style is more wordy, whereas if I write it down, my style is more simplified and compressed.
00:48:46.000Interesting, because it takes longer to write a word than it does to type it or say it.
00:48:53.000So as you're writing the word, you have more time to think and you have more time to analyze whether or not you need extra words or You can sort of focus more on the structure of the sentence rather than if you're typing, it's like so quick that maybe you put some extra stuff in there that you didn't need to because you didn't have a time to really, as you're writing each word out, you're thinking, what's the correct word after this?
00:50:56.000With AI now, they have I think Google was the first to do this, and I think Samsung phones definitely had this, where you could have someone speak to you and it would translate their words in real time.
00:51:12.000So you could have a real, honest conversation with someone in another language.
00:51:16.000I 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.
00:51:23.000And in the future, they're going to have it set up where it'll do it in your voice.
00:52:40.000The reason was there were two things that were complicated that were not understood in the 1970s.
00:52:46.000One was we didn't understand enough about the structure of language, and I'll give you an example of that.
00:52:52.000And the other thing we didn't understand was the technology of simultaneous translation.
00:52:57.000The example of Not understanding enough about the structure of language was that in the initial trial runs of Xerox PARC, they had a sentence, the phrase, out of sight, out of mind.
00:53:15.000And they had their attempted technology to translate this into Russian and then from Russian to translate it back into English.
00:53:24.000And so they said, out of sight, out of mind.
00:54:24.000Well, which brings us back to religious texts, which is, I mean, the Bible, the Old Testament, there's versions of it in Aramaic and the Dead Sea Scrolls and some of the books, and then there's the ancient Greek version of it, the ancient Hebrew version of it.
00:54:43.000The translations to all these different languages, and how much is lost in those translations, and how weird do things get?
00:55:46.000The last foreign language that I learned was Italian, and I now read Italian every day.
00:55:52.000But in Italian, there are two words that mean I love.
00:55:57.000In English, there's only one word that mean I love.
00:56:00.000In Italian, you can either say amo or voglio bene.
00:56:05.000Voglio bene literally means I wish you well.
00:56:09.000Surprisingly to me, in Italian, physical love, sexual love is voglio bene, whereas amo, which is literally the word Amo is the root for amateur.
00:56:25.000It's the root for love in other languages.
00:56:28.000That's a friendly love rather than a sexual love.
00:56:32.000So, Italian has these two words for love.
00:56:36.000Another example Can I ask you one more question?
00:56:38.000Does Italian have a word for love for things that aren't sexual and not personal, not friendly, like a thing, like love race car driving?
00:57:15.000That illustrates the difficulty of translating from one language to another.
00:57:19.000So if I were to have an Italian girlfriend, which I'm happily married.
00:57:26.000If I were to have an Italian girlfriend and if I made the mistake of saying to her, ti amo, and I didn't say ti voglio bene, I would be thrown out.
00:58:35.000But mindia is to be referring to an animal.
00:58:40.000So the first sentence of foray that I learned on my second day in the foray area was there was a frog in a creek and I had already learned the word for water which is dakwa wani, wani in foray.
00:58:55.000And dakwa was the word for that sort of frog.
00:58:58.000So I said to – I was practicing the foray that I just learned.
00:59:02.000I said to a foray man, And he shook his head severely.
00:59:11.000Because I had used the inanimate word for to be to refer to this frog when I should have used the animate word to be.
00:59:20.000English does not make that distinction.
00:59:22.000The example that you brought about the word in the biblical scripture and logos, the difference, that is such a giant difference.
00:59:33.000So, there's a giant difference in what it means.
00:59:35.000And unfortunately, it leaves, when you just have the term word, it leaves so much to interpretation.
00:59:41.000There's so much spin that a pastor or someone who's relaying this can say what it actually means is.
00:59:49.000If they don't know the original language of it, well, my friend Rick Strassman, he's a researcher, a very fascinating guy.
00:59:56.000He learned ancient Hebrew over the course of 16 years.
01:00:00.000He self taught himself ancient Hebrew so that he could read the Bible in its original form.
01:00:10.000But he felt like the only way he could really understand what they were saying, what it really meant, was to really truly understand the language and be able to read it and speak it.
01:00:45.000The English text of the Iliad will begin by saying something like, I sing of the wrath of Achilles, the terrible wrath that destroyed so many Greeks.
01:01:01.000So that's how it comes out in English.
01:01:04.000The original Greek is, So the first word in the Iliad is wrath, menon.
01:01:50.000I wonder if AI could reinterpret certain books that have been translated and do so in a way that accurately reflects the context and what they were saying.
01:02:06.000Like instead of sticking to the original translations of these books, like the Iliad or any old book that's written in different languages, if there could be a way where it could analyze what the correct.
01:02:20.000Way of phrasing it in the English language would be with whatever extra words we would have to use or whatever different ways you would have to phrase it, but instead of just going with word for word the way we did it now.
01:02:37.000If that could be done, one might be able to get the meaning with more lengthy prose, but one would lose the power, the condensation of the Iliad.
01:03:26.000A word root was specified just by the consonant.
01:03:30.000And so the early texts of the Bible and of, say, Phoenician had just the consonants, not the vowels.
01:03:41.000The vowels – there wasn't ambiguity if you omitted the vowels.
01:03:51.000Nowadays, my understanding is that Hebrew does have Lines in the corner, and Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, which is an Afroasiatic language, also has lines in the corner that convey the vowels.
01:04:09.000But there's a lot with those languages that you can convey without specifying the vowels at all.
01:04:14.000Whereas with English, you can't dispense with the vowels.
01:04:20.000It's so interesting that different languages evolved like that, that they have so many variables that just don't exist in the English language.
01:04:31.000And that for us to try to understand exactly what they were saying, the power in their words, is almost impossible.
01:04:38.000An example is so my books get translated into lots of languages.
01:04:44.000The Guns, Germans, and Steel have been translated into 45 languages.
01:04:47.000And one thing that I can see I see how because I've got all the editions, I see how thick are the editions.
01:04:53.000The German edition is always the thickest, the Italian edition is the next thickest, the English edition is Is thinner.
01:05:03.000It just takes more words to say something in German than it does to say the same thing in English.
01:05:09.000Is it saying the exact same thing though?
01:05:13.000Like in their language, the way they interpret it, is it the same?
01:05:37.000We attempt to come up with an approximation, but we know that you cannot translate perfectly from one language into another language.
01:05:48.000I had a fascinating guy in here the other day that spent eight years of his life living with the Piedaha people in the Amazon jungle and learning their language.
01:06:07.000Brilliant guy and such a fascinating conversation.
01:06:10.000I mean, utterly fascinating that he had no writing, no studies, nothing to go by, and he had to construct their language and write it down over the course of years and years of learning how to say things with them.
01:06:25.000In New Guinea, New Guinea is the most language rich part of the world.
01:06:32.000There are a thousand languages, not dialect, but a thousand languages in New Guinea.
01:06:36.000Most of our understanding of New Guinea languages comes from missionaries, especially Lutheran missionaries who are highly trained linguists who are sent out there.
01:06:46.000Their purpose is to translate the Bible into a language.
01:06:52.000But the local languages, they start out – of course there was no writing in New Guinea, so a Lutheran linguist will be dropped into an area.
01:07:05.000He just listens to what they're saying.
01:07:07.000He has to figure out what they're saying.
01:07:12.000One example of that is that in 1990, I was in the lakes plains of Indonesia and New Guinea next to a tribe called the Faui-Iiao, being studied by an American woman who was devoting her life to understanding this language.
01:07:28.000The Faui-Iiao language is a tonal language like Chinese.
01:07:32.000Chinese has either five tones mainland and Mandarin and six tones Cantonese or vice versa.
01:07:41.000This woman linguist, she had been living for 15 years with the Fao Yi Yao and she had already identified 12 tones.
01:07:52.000She thought there might be a 13th tone, but after a dozen years, she wasn't sure of that.
01:07:59.000But among the Fao Yi Yao, you have to get the tone right.
01:08:04.000The syllables are mostly monosyllables like bae, but bae you can pronounce in 12 different ways.
01:08:15.000And one of those bays means sweet potato, and another bay means snake, and another bay means delicious, and another bay means feces, and then there's another bay that means mother-in-law.
01:08:31.000And so if a linguist or if a young child learning Fao Yi Yao says something with the word bay and gets the tone wrong, and you want to say, Beloved mother in law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato.
01:08:49.000And you drop the bay instead of rising the bay.
01:08:54.000What comes out is, vile snake, let me give you this feces to eat.
01:09:07.000A consequence of that is this linguist noticed that when little kids are going around the Fowey village with their mother, There's not a back and forth conversation.
01:09:20.000Instead, the mother says something and the kid repeats the same thing, and the mother may correct the kid.
01:09:52.000It's almost like they left the door open to people with bad hearing to not be able to catch what you're saying as you're walking out the door.
01:10:15.000The first writing was in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.
01:10:21.000It was what's called cuneiform, these wedge shape symbols.
01:10:25.000It was written with a stylus that had different forms at the end.
01:10:35.000And so the writing was done, cuneiform writing was done with a stylus.
01:10:40.000Cuneiform was used to write many different languages.
01:10:43.000It was used first to write, I believe, Akkadian, which was the language of the first empire of the Fertile Crescent.
01:10:51.000And cuneiform, the Hittite language of Turkey, which is the oldest and most distinct Indo-European language.
01:11:01.000Hittite was also written in cuneiform.
01:11:04.000cuneiform 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 foray, the New Guinea language that I work with.
01:11:28.000The Phoenicians, the first Greek writing was linear B of Homer's Troy.
01:13:41.000The Japanese write in two, Diamond-no-do because Japanese doesn't put two consonants together.
01:13:51.000So my name comes out Diamond-no-do in either of these two writing systems.
01:13:56.000Japanese also has a third writing system which is basically Chinese derived, the kanji, and then a fourth writing system, which is the Roman writing system.
01:14:04.000So, Japanese is the most complicated writing system in the world.
01:14:16.000It's the best writing system in the world.
01:14:18.000What the Koreans do is they take their letters and they group their letters into syllables.
01:14:25.000So, if you look at Korean writing, you'll see that.
01:14:30.000There are several things pushed together in a little box.
01:14:32.000That box is a syllable, and the result is that Koreans, when they read, they read not letter by letter, but they read by syllables.
01:14:43.000And so Koreans can read faster than anybody else in the world because of this wonderful writing system.
01:14:49.000One of the more interesting things about the history of the Mongols and Genghis Khan is the book, The Lost History of the Mongols, that they initially thought was gibberish.
01:15:39.000But there are, of course, there are writing systems that we still can't read.
01:15:45.000The Etruscans, the people of Italy whom the Romans eventually conquered, so the Etruscans took the Greek alphabet and modified it slightly.
01:15:56.000We have some Etruscan writing in stone, the longest, but all Etruscan books got burnt or lost.
01:16:07.000The longest Etruscan text that we've got, there was a linen shroud that turned up in Yugoslavia.
01:16:14.000This linen shroud was used to wrap something, but the linen shroud was evidently a piece of Etruscan writing because there's a long Etruscan text on it, and the shroud was then reused to wrap someone's book.
01:16:32.000The result is that we can pronounce Etruscan writing.
01:16:36.000We can read it because it's Greek letters.
01:16:39.000We don't know the meaning of the words for the most part.
01:16:43.000There aren't rosetta stones for Etruscan.
01:16:46.000The closest that we come to it is that dies, dices, these six-sided dices have been found in Etruscan areas.
01:16:58.000And on the dices there are six symbols.
01:17:04.000So evidently the six symbols must mean one, two, three, four, five, six.
01:17:10.000And people have figured out one or two of those, but they haven't figured out the others.
01:17:16.000So we know the Etruscan symbols for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but we don't know which one of them is 6 and which one of them is 3 and which one of them is 4.
01:17:53.000The first European visitor to Easter Island of whom we have a record was the Dutch Roggeveen in, I think, 1722, and he did not observe writing.
01:18:06.000The first mention of writing was by the third or fourth European visitor to Easter Island in the 1770s.
01:18:13.000There's a suspicion that The Easter Islanders might have invented writing when the Spaniards came as the second visitor to Easter Island in 1770.
01:18:26.000The Easter Islanders may have seen Spaniards with wooden sticks, looking at the wooden sticks and doing things, and that may have given the Easter Islanders the idea to invent a writing system of their own.
01:18:39.000So it's possible that it was late invention inspired by the Spaniards.
01:18:43.000But a case where we know that happened, the Cherokee Indians.
01:18:49.000No Native Americans had a writing system in North America.
01:18:56.000The Maya, yes, but not in North America.
01:18:59.000There was a Cherokee Indian called Sequoia who had a store and he noticed that when Europeans came into his store, they had pieces—they would scribble things on paper.
01:19:13.000They would talk to each other and they got a lot of power.
01:19:18.000They were able to communicate with each other.
01:19:20.000So he realized that They were writing down words, but he had no idea about what the writing system was.
01:19:28.000He didn't know whether it was an alphabet.
01:19:30.000He didn't know about alphabets or syllabaries.
01:19:36.000And he finally ended up with a syllabary where the symbols are for syllables, not letters.
01:19:42.000The Cherokee syllabary has 80 signs for 80 different syllables.
01:19:48.000convinced the Cherokees of the value of this writing system by having two Cherokees at the opposite end of like a football field.
01:20:03.000And he had one Cherokee say something to him, which he then wrote down on paper.
01:20:09.000And then he went to the other end of the football field and handed that piece of paper to another Cherokee to whom he had taught his writing system.
01:20:18.000And that other Cherokee then looked at the paper and pronounced the words that the Cherokee at the other end of the football field.
01:20:34.000Like knowing the origin of a culture's written language and learning it from others.
01:20:42.000Well, they all had to originally have learned it most likely from someone else that they saw something being written down.
01:20:48.000I mean, or did they all come up with it at the same time?
01:20:53.000Have you seen the newest discovery out of Gobekli Tepe where they believe that they found what they think is probably writing that predates cuneiform by 5,000 or 6,000 years?
01:21:48.000Did Irving Finkel find ancient writing in Quebec Le Tepe?
01:21:51.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: We know that for cuneiform there were marks going back several thousand years and there's a debate among linguists whether those marks are the earliest proto-writing.
01:22:05.000It's suspected that the marks were used to count sheep.
01:23:25.000So it's suspected that the Chinese developed writing independently of the Fertile Crescent, which would mean that we have three independent inventions of writing namely cuneiform in the Fertile Crescent, Mexican writing, and then Chinese writing, and then possibly East Rhode Island writing.
01:23:43.000Trevor Burrus The thing you were talking about with Greece is so fascinating that a war, the Trojan War, could be so catastrophic that the entire culture becomes illiterate for hundreds of years.
01:23:54.000It was not the Trojan War that did in Greek writing.
01:23:59.000It was a much broader phenomenon called the collapse of the Bronze Age.
01:24:05.000So Bronze Age cultures, this was just as iron was emerging.
01:24:10.000Bronze was the main metal used in the Middle East, in Turkey.
01:24:19.000Bronze Age cultures included Troy, Homer's Troy, Crete.
01:24:26.000So the island of Crete had Linea B, which was the earliest, the syllabic Old Greek writing system.
01:24:36.000But Linea B was derived from another writing system called Linea A, which we can't read yet.
01:24:56.000That would have been – might have been another independent invention.
01:24:59.000But anyways, the Bronze Age encompassed Crete and Greece and Cyprus and the Levant from Palestine up to Lebanon and then Anatolia, Turkey.
01:25:24.000All of that Bronze Age civilization collapsed.
01:25:30.000roughly around the time of the Trojan War.
01:25:33.000So the Trojan War may have had something to do with collapse of Troy itself, but the Trojan War certainly didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of Linear B writing from all of Crete and from all of Greece.
01:25:46.000There were this Greek pottery that turned up in the Fertile Crescent, making one suspect that there was a mass invasion, and the mass invasion destroyed the Bronze Age civilization of Crete and Cyprus and Turkey.
01:26:05.000But then just to go back to Troy, the fall of Troy was the fall of Troy and that's all.
01:26:12.000But there was a much broader collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the whole Eastern Mediterranean and we don't know why.
01:26:22.000We don't know whether it was an invasion.
01:26:26.000Egyptian writing at the time talks of sea peoples, people who came by the sea and fought with the Egyptians.
01:26:32.000So we don't know whether the collapse of the Bronze Age was because of invaders from the sea or whether it was because of climate change or whether it was because of invention of new weapons.
01:26:44.000It's just insane that they could completely lose their language and then come up with a whole new way of writing.
01:27:00.000India, the so-called Harappan civilization of India and Pakistan in the In the Indus Valley, there was a high civilization called Harappan civilization between about 3000 and 2000 B.C.
01:27:41.000Harappan writing disappeared and then writing reemerged in India with Alexander the Great.
01:27:52.000When Alexander of Macedon invaded India after Alexander evacuated India, writing came back in India but it was a completely different writing system, the progenitor of modern Indian writing system.
01:28:11.000So there's another case of writing disappearing.
01:28:14.000the Harappan writing, and then 2,000 years later, a completely different writing system emerged.
01:28:52.000But it's suspicious that hieroglyphs emerged only a few centuries after cuneiform.
01:29:03.000This is an example of what's called idea diffusion.
01:29:07.000It's not that the writing system itself, it's not that cuneiform writing spread to Egypt, but the idea of writing spread.
01:29:14.000Similarly with Sequoia, this Cherokee Indian, it's not that Sequoia Copied English writing.
01:29:23.000It's that he got the idea of writing and then he invented the writing system himself.
01:29:28.000So we suspect that hieroglyphs were idea diffusion, that Egyptians got the idea of writing from the Fertile Crescent and then they developed their own writing system.
01:29:40.000Trevor Burrus And it makes sense if you think about how complex and beautiful and beautifully illustrated hieroglyphs are.
01:29:47.000Trevor Burrus And then you look at how complex and beautifully constructed ancient Egyptian society was.
01:30:06.000It's a clear example of a writing system being invented, not gradually involving but bang, the earliest hieroglyphics are full hieroglyphics.
01:30:19.000Okay, so Korean writing, the Korean writing, Hangul, which groups letters into syllables.
01:30:31.000This is not a writing system that gradually evolved.
01:30:35.000Instead, a king of Korea called King Sejong around roughly the year 1430.
01:30:43.000Until then, Koreans wrote with a Chinese-based writing system.
01:30:50.000And King Sejong has a famous proclamation which Koreans learn by memory.
01:30:59.000King Sejong's proclamation says, it grieves me that our people write the Korean language with Chinese-like writing when the sounds of and the words of the Chinese language are not similar to the Korean writing.
01:31:17.000Therefore, I, King Sejong, have devised a new writing system which I wish all of my subjects to learn.
01:31:25.000My writing system is matched to the Korean language.
01:31:45.000It's also an example of a leader coming up with an invention that has lasted already for 600 years, a leader not doing something ephemeral that Gets replaced, but a leader devising a writing system that has carried on.
01:32:05.000There's an interesting thing with the Mormons when you were talking about how 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.
01:32:19.000One of the things societies have figured out is to get people to be deeply nationalistic, you almost have to have them serve.
01:32:27.000It's like conscription for all young people to do a certain amount of time in the military.
01:33:37.000It's related somewhat distantly to Hungarian.
01:33:43.000But I mentioned it as a counter you're probably right in many cases.
01:33:51.000that national identity was fostered by the draft.
01:33:56.000In Italy, the unification of Italy in 1862, the development of Italian national identity depended heavily on a national school system but also on a national army.
01:34:13.000So I have Italian conversation once a week with my Italian teacher.
01:34:19.000She explained to me that the national identity Italians Had lots of dialects, 100 dialects, mutually incomprehensible.
01:34:28.000In New Guinea, we would say that they're different languages.
01:34:32.000Even today, there are different dialects in Italy that different Italians cannot understand, in contrast to Yeah, my grandparents would speak in dialects.
01:34:44.000And if you just spoke classic Italian that you learned in college, you would have no idea what they were talking about because they were speaking like a Sicilian dialect.
01:34:52.000Dialects were far more developed in Europe 60 years ago.
01:35:01.000My first – and that's true in Italy, Germany, and England – my first trip to England was at the age of 12 in 1950.
01:35:10.000My sister and I were taken by my parents to a small town on the east coast of England called Beckles.
01:35:18.000My father was a doctor and was visiting a doctor in Beckles.
01:35:21.000So my parents and their friends were talking.
01:35:26.000And my sister and I were bored, so we wandered off into the town.
01:35:32.000And 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.
01:35:43.000So we asked a man on the street in American English how to get back to the house of the Grantham Hills, and he said something which he thought was that we couldn't understand a word of it.
01:35:53.000That's just an example of how strongly differentiated.
01:35:56.000Dialects were in England as recently as 1950.
01:36:00.000When I was a student in England in 1950.
01:36:16.000Presumably because when we got back to the house and we said we couldn't understand what that guy was saying, then the Grantham Hill says, well, that's the local dialect.
01:36:25.000Hill says, well, that's the local dialect.
01:36:28.000But similarly, in Germany, when I lived in Germany in 1961, I lived in Munich, capital of Bavaria, and Bavarians have a strong, strong dialect.
01:36:44.000Instead 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, Ich bin ein Bayer und ich habe eine dicke Haut.
01:36:55.000So when I was traveling around, With a friend of mine from northern Germany, from the Rhineland, where they speak what is closest to Hochdeutsch literary German.
01:37:06.000And we stopped at a gas station in Bavaria and asked to be filled up with gas because I had been living in, I understood what the guy was saying.
01:37:15.000But my friend Josef from the Rhineland what did he say?
01:37:18.000He couldn't understand the Bavarian at all.
01:37:30.000It's often regarded as a separate language.
01:37:34.000As you know, there are books written in Sicilian.
01:37:37.000Modern literary and government Italian is close to the dialect of Florence, but there are dozens and dozens of Italian dialects which persisted until after World War II and were mutually incomprehensible, but those dialects now have been fading because of universal education plus the draft.
01:38:18.000I can date it because my wife and I and our kids had been on a vacation in Italian Switzerland and our son Max fell and he hurt his leg so we had to go to a hospital.
01:38:37.000None of us knew Italian, but my wife knew that the Italian word for where was dove, dove, dove l'ospedale.
01:38:45.000And so when we were scheduled to have a family vacation in Italy in May 1999, I thought, dove, that's simple.
01:38:59.000Why don't I learn enough Italian that I can ask where the bathroom is and I can order meals in restaurants?
01:39:06.000So I studied Italian grammar for six weeks and we were scheduled to go to Germany on May 11th, and my father died that morning, so we aborted the Italian trip.
01:39:14.000But after the Italian trip, I said, I've spent six weeks learning much of the grammar.
01:39:19.000Let's put in another six weeks and learn the rest of the grammar.
01:40:49.000Marital therapy in Italian for two years.
01:40:52.000I talked through with my Italian teachers.
01:40:56.000I said that the horrible relationship their parents had and their boyfriend's parents had didn't necessarily need to be the model for any marriage.
01:41:07.000They can make a relationship of their own.
01:41:09.000So both of them got married, their boyfriend.
01:41:19.000I still, every week, I talk with Francesca for two hours every two weeks.
01:41:31.000Francesca is the person with whom I talk the most and I have the widest range of conversation of anybody in the world except for my wife and my Australian companion on my New Guinea expedition because in our conversation we talk about everything.
01:43:11.000When I started to learn Indonesian, and I was initially struggling with Indonesian and I couldn't find a word, out would come the Russian word.
01:43:21.000Russian and Indonesian, they're completely different from each other, but I felt that it's as if I have What, four channels for languages?
01:43:28.000I can keep straight English, Italian, German, and a fourth language.
01:43:37.000But a fifth language, if I attempt to bring back a fifth language, I'll confuse that language.
01:43:43.000And so Indonesian and Russian, although they're totally different, once I started Indonesian, it drove out my Russian.
01:45:17.000Grasp belongs to you and top belongs to you, head belongs to you, go Finnish, teeth belongs to you, or eye belongs to you, brown pella, lick, lick.
01:45:28.000Oh, I said that the hair on your head is somewhat sparse and you have brown eyes.
01:45:34.000Grasp belongs to you, lick, lick, hassle, lick, lick, brown pella.
01:45:38.000So here's how New Guinea talk pigeon arose, and it's a model for how similar pigeon languages have arisen all around the world dozens or hundreds of times.
01:45:51.000German colonial administrators came to New Guinea.
01:45:55.000New 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.
01:46:08.000The Germans had to communicate with their workers and the workers had to communicate with each other.
01:46:14.000So it's not that anybody invented something.
01:46:17.000The Germans began speaking a stripped down, easy German.
01:46:23.000The New Guineans began picking up some elementary German words, but they also picked up words from other New Guinean languages.
01:46:31.000This first language was called a pigeon language.
01:46:37.000It's not adequate to express the range of human emotion, but it's enough to discuss plantation agriculture and was enough for adults who had their own main language and were using the pigeon language just to discuss the coconut plantation.
01:46:54.000Where pigeon became inadequate was once you get the children of pigeon-speaking parents and the children from pigeon-speaking parents of different native languages, children are starting to communicate with each other.
01:47:12.000This stripped-down language that's enough to talk about coconuts but is not enough to talk about the gamut of human emotion.
01:47:20.000The 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.
01:47:45.000The best information we have about how – and these pidgin languages, these Creole languages, which are the more complex ones with prepositions, have developed all around the world.
01:47:58.000Our 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.
01:48:11.000So again, workers are thrown together on a plantation.
01:48:15.000They 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.
01:48:29.000and doesn't have tenses, but it's adequate for discussing what you're going to do with a sugar cane.
01:48:34.000But the children of these workers who now want to talk with each other and have a normal life, the pigeon language is not adequate.
01:48:45.000And the children spontaneously made the pigeon more complex.
01:48:50.000Within a decade, the children invented prepositions and they invented future tense.
01:49:00.000and 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.
01:49:23.000And then you can see from a newspaper of 1894 how much more complicated Creole had gotten in 1894.
01:49:31.000So New Guinea talk pigeon. which is actually what's called the Creole language, is a full complex language with prepositions.
01:51:05.000Just as an example, Thermodynamics is a complicated branch of science.
01:51:11.000But to demonstrate that you can say anything in talk pigeon, I can give a lecture about the second law of thermodynamics in talk pigeon.
01:51:21.000He got one fellow man, man savvy, two man's name was on Saga, on Saga, he got dispellite.
01:51:26.000He talked long, hot two months, na dispell hot two months, and he, thermodynamics, na dispell, on Saga, he got strong pell, tintin, na, and he, and, Rule number two belongs tin tin, belongs hot.
01:51:46.000What I said is that a Swede called Laws Onsaga developed the second law of thermodynamics, which is thermodynamics is about heat.
01:51:56.000And Onsaga developed the thermodynamics of rates of reactions.
01:52:04.000And so I explain, dispel Onsaga, e makam rule number two, long savibolong heat.
01:52:14.000Savibolong heat, literally, knowledge about heat, which is thermodynamics.
01:52:18.000Rule number two, long savibolong heat.
01:52:21.000Ansagi got this strong peloton, and Ansagi's got he's a smart man.
01:52:25.000Have you talked to someone in this talk pigeon where you could explain something like that and they could relay it to you, like they understand what you're talking about?
01:52:37.000With New Guineans, so in my work in Papua New Guinea, in Indonesian New Guinea, they don't use pigeon.
01:52:43.000In Papua New Guinea, they do use pigeon.
01:52:45.000With New Guineans, they and I can discuss anything.
01:52:51.000In pigeon, I can explain to them the second law of thermodynamics, and they can explain to me the difference between the taste of human red meat and human fat.
01:53:58.000There's what's called endocannibalism and exocannibalism.
01:54:02.000Exocannibalism is eating your dead enemies whom you kill in war.
01:54:10.000Endocannibalism is eating your dead relatives.
01:54:14.000When the Australian government came in, it was easy.
01:54:17.000They forbade cannibalism and quickly exocannibalism disappeared because the tribe that was being eaten complained to the government and the government told the people who were eating the other people.
01:54:30.000But endocannibalism – in New Guinea traditionally, you would as soon fail to eat your dead mother as you or I would just throw away the body of our dead mother.
01:54:43.000There are precise rules about who gets to eat what.
01:54:48.000But in general, the relatives eat the body.
01:54:57.000And there are rules about what part of the body is.
01:55:39.000Because the young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter, you make down payments when a girl is young.
01:55:52.000So there was a young man who made a down payment on my worker's daughter, and that young man had died.
01:55:59.000He was the prospective son-in-law of my worker, and because he was the prospective son-in-law, But it's true.
01:56:12.000My worker was expected to eat the forearm.
01:56:16.000So he quit his work, quit his work with me, and walked away.
01:56:22.000There's no way that he would fail to eat the forearm of his prospective son in law any more than you or I would throw our mother's body into the ditch.
01:56:32.000So he quit working with you because of that?
01:56:39.000Was going to the son in law had just died.
01:56:42.000This guy walked into camp, had brought the news to my worker that your prospective son in law has died, and the funeral feast is going to take place three days in the future.
01:56:55.000So you'd better come now so that you're there before the body rots.
01:57:00.000That's a very similar tale to what Daniel Everett was talking about how the Piedaha deal with their dead.
01:57:23.000It's hard for you and me to understand because in the area where my worker quit, it's a warm, hot area at about 3,000 feet, and the body, a dead body, is put.
01:57:42.000is, was, the government has largely put it down.
01:57:48.000The body is put on a raised wooden platform with slats on it and underneath the platform is a bucket.
01:58:43.000Absolutely never, because endocannibalism, there are precise Rules about who gets to eat which body.
01:58:50.000What if you had engaged in a romantic relationship with someone there and you decided to get married and you married someone of the tribe and then that person died, would you have had to eat them?
01:59:18.000Probably, yes, husbands and wives are expected to eat the other person.
01:59:26.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: I would not have eaten because the first tribe that I worked, the Foray tribe, they were the people who had Kuru, which is basically mad cow disease.
01:59:36.000The commonest cause of death among the Foray when I was there was Kuru, mad cow disease.
01:59:45.000That's the uncooked brain tissue, right?
01:59:47.000Even if you cook it, it's a prion disease, correct?
02:00:00.000Not thousands, but they certainly survive.
02:00:01.000They survive a couple of hundred degrees.
02:00:05.000I thought it was a lot more than that.
02:00:07.000I thought that was one of the issues with mad cow disease that no matter how, if you had beef that was infected with these prions, no matter how hot you make it, it doesn't cook it off.
02:00:37.000I think the issue is any brain tissue of the same species as you is where this disease comes from, which is why cows get it from eating brain tissue of cows, and then those prions are transferable to human beings if you eat the tissue.
02:02:47.000The guess is that someone in the Foray area around 1910 developed Creusville Jakob and died, but the Foray were practicing endocannibalism.
02:03:00.000The women would cut up the skull, and the babies with the women would be playing there with the mother, and here's this soft tissue, the brain that's fun to play with, so the babies would Would play with the brain and then lick their fingers.
02:03:20.000So the transmission was by cannibalism, particularly to babies at the time of Endwick.
02:03:26.000And it's all thought to have arisen with one foray person who had Kreutzfeldt Jakob and died of it in around 1910, but was then eaten by others who were in turn eaten still by others, so that Kuru, Kreutzfeldt Jakob, then exploded among the foray.
02:03:46.000What's interesting is that Daniel Everett was saying that this disease does not occur with the Pitaha.
02:03:50.000That they do have endocannibalism, and he thinks they still practice it.
02:03:56.000He thinks they secretly still practice it.
02:04:09.000Kreutzfeldt Jakob, it's a rare mutation, like one in 10,000, one in 100,000.
02:04:16.000It's pure chance that one Kreutzfeldt Jakob mutation arose in the foray.
02:04:24.000and not in any other tribe in New Guinea.
02:04:27.000So it doesn't surprise me in the least that the Purana, whatever their name is, didn't have Kuru because nobody in the world, no human population in the world had Kuru except for the foray as a result of that accident of one person with Kreutzfeld Jakob evidently getting eaten around 1910.
02:05:02.000There's a disease of sheep and goats called scrapie, which is basically, it's a prion disease.
02:05:09.000And it was scrapie that gave the idea to the medical physician working in the foray area that, so when I arrived in the foray in 1964, Coor was completely mysterious.
02:05:27.000If a foray went down to Port Moresby, the foray might still develop kuru so it couldn't be leaked linked to the foray environment.
02:05:39.000Foreigners who came into the foray, I didn't develop kuru.
02:05:44.000Um other New Guineans who came into the foray area didn't develop kuru.
02:05:49.000The only people who developed Kuru were were the foray.
02:05:52.000But the symptoms of foray of kuru were because the disease is now gone were similar to the symptoms of scrapie and so that gave the idea that Kuru might be an infectious disease.
02:06:07.000So an infectious disease expert managed to get the foray to provide him with the brain of a foray man who had died of Kuru.
02:06:22.000And the doctor managed to get dry ice shipped into the foray area in order to freeze the Kuru.
02:06:31.000He got it shipped back to the National Institute of Health.
02:06:39.000A couple of days, but it was frozen in dry ice.
02:06:45.000He then injected this brain tissue into a chimpanzee, reasoning that the animal most likely to be able to be infected with human kuru would be a chimpanzee.
02:08:27.000But is it possible that they were doing what Daniel Everett feels like the Piedaha were doing, was lying about whether or not they're still engaging in funeral feasts?
02:08:36.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: Very unlikely because the Foray area, by the time I got there in 1964, they were missionaries.
02:08:42.000Aaron Powell, Jr.: You watched them do this thing where they dipped a sweet potato into the petrified no, I have not.
02:08:52.000I was told about it by the missionary in the area who didn't know what was going on.
02:08:58.000But you knew that they were engaging in this?
02:09:31.000This was Michael Rockefeller who collected art in the Balam Valley and then he wanted to come down to the - did come down to the south coast where there's great art produced in the Asmod area.
02:09:45.000He was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer and there was a tidal boar that capsized the boat.
02:10:17.000In fact, so Michael Rockefeller was a good swimmer.
02:10:21.000He figured that the chances of being picked up were so low that he swam for shore.
02:10:26.000A plane did spot The overturned boat and picked up the Dutch patrol officer.
02:10:32.000picked up the Dutch patrol officer, Michael Rockefeller, swam for shore and when he got close to shore, he had the misfortune that as he approached shore, there came a canoe of natives who about five years previously, a Dutch patrol officer had come to that village to punish the natives for killing natives of some other village.
02:11:01.000And the Dutch patrol officer killed four natives from the village.
02:11:05.000So when the natives in that village saw Michael Rockefeller, as far as the natives are concerned, Michael Rockefeller belongs to the same clan.
02:12:43.000I know it very, yeah, because that was that was the practice of the foray and many other tribes with whom I worked.
02:12:53.000Um, it was, um, it was not a rare practice.
02:12:57.000The the the way of life there was that that each woman, um, each wife had her own hut and the men lived in communal, a communal man's house.
02:13:11.000Um, the young kids. live with a mother until the boy reached the age of six.
02:13:18.000And when the boy reached the age of six, he then moved into the men's house where he developed a homosexual relationship with the adult men.
02:13:29.000At teenage, suddenly, this boy who's had only men-men relationships, suddenly the tribe has bought for him a a girl from the neighboring tribe, and he's told that he's supposed to have sex with a woman.
02:13:50.000Until then, the boys have been told that women are dirty, defiling.
02:13:55.000If you touch a woman, it'll be very dirty.
02:13:59.000I saw a film made by a medical photographer of two of these small boys the night before they were going to be married to teenage girls.
02:14:17.000teenage girls and the older men were explaining to these 13-year-old boys how you have sex with a woman.
02:14:26.000The two boys, they were just appalled, disgusted out of their mind to have to have sex with a woman.
02:14:41.000But there's then this sudden transition from The homosexual adult male, young male society to having sex with a woman?
02:14:56.000What a strange culture where they've got this ubiquitous homosexual experience that every young boy has and they think it's essential to their growth.
02:15:07.000It's essential to, like, that another man's semen is essential to them becoming strong.
02:15:14.000Trevor Burrus You think that's strange, but wait till you hear what New Guineans have to say about.
02:15:57.000But for example, in Central America, there were Native American tribes in Central America where there were a class of young men who acted as sex partners.
02:16:13.000The Spanish, when they came into this area, were utterly disgusted by this practice.
02:16:22.000These were dogs that were trained to rip people apart.
02:16:26.000And so the Spanish, being disgusted by this practice, would bring war dogs into an enclosure with these professional sex partners, and the war dogs would then rip them apart.
02:18:16.000If you cook it, it makes even more sense.
02:18:20.000As an example of something that we love but appalls New Guineans, a couple of New Guineans who lived in the highlands I brought down to the coast when we were starting a survey of a coastal mountain range.
02:18:37.000They had never encountered ice cream or anything cold because, of course, they had hot food from cooking, but they had no way of making cold.
02:18:48.000First of all, we stayed in a motel and for the first time in their life they got to sleep in beds.
02:18:55.000When I asked them the next morning, I like sleeping in the bed, one of them said, no good.
02:19:01.000He had no experience of sleeping in the bed.
02:19:03.000He rolled out of the bed at night, so he didn't like sleeping in the bed.
02:19:06.000But then I offered them ice cream and one of them rejected the ice cream.
02:19:15.000Well, you and I are accustomed to eating ice cream.
02:19:18.000We are accustomed to eating cold food.
02:19:21.000Has never had experience of anything cold.
02:19:24.000Well, that makes sense that it would be odd because it's an odd sensation, but I would feel like once they tasted it, they'd be like, oh, I get it.
02:20:23.000So in my book, I have a chapter on Soretsi Kama, who was the first president of the African nation of Botswana.
02:20:34.000Soretsi Kama was the hereditary chief of the largest tribe in Botswana, but he also was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at the time of independence.
02:20:51.000And so he was sent to England for higher education.
02:21:13.000But in his suit pocket, in his jacket pocket, he routinely carried a bag of dried grasshoppers, which was standard food in his area of Botswana, and he would offer his guests, his European guests, or his African guests, would you like to have a dried grasshopper?
02:21:36.000And he would pop in the dried grasshoppers.
02:21:38.000I have had friends who've eaten dried grasshoppers and they say they were okay.
02:22:09.000It's also in your book where you discuss the transformation of Botswana under this guy's leadership.
02:22:18.000There was a leader who really made a difference, and that's a case of someone.
02:22:27.000He was the only one who could have done it.
02:22:30.000The reason is he was the only one who could have made Botswana successful.
02:22:36.000as founding president because he was the chief of the largest, most powerful tribe in Botswana.
02:22:45.000When Botswana became independent, they set up a two-house legislature based on the British model.
02:22:52.000But the upper house was a house of chiefs.
02:22:55.000And a house of chiefs would have perpetuated the rule of the chiefs.
02:23:01.000So it was a bad idea for Botswana democracy.
02:23:05.000But Suretsi Kama, as the chief of the most powerful tribe.
02:23:08.000He was the only person in Botswana who could have abolished the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief.
02:23:15.000The other thing was that Botswana's financial stability has come from diamonds.
02:23:21.000The diamonds were discovered after independence.
02:23:23.000If they had been discovered before independence, the British and De Beers would have made a deal favoring the British and De Beers.
02:23:30.000But in fact, the diamonds were discovered like six months after independence and they were discovered on the land of Siretsi Kama's tribe.
02:23:39.000Normally in Africa, when precious stones or oil are found on the land of a tribe, that tribe then claims the rights for themselves.
02:23:50.000But because the diamonds were on the land of Soretsi Kama's tribe, and Soretsi Kama wanted the diamonds to contribute to the wealth of all of Botswana and not just his tribe, Soretsi Kama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana, wherever they are, are the property of the botswana nation, not of the individual tribe.
02:24:15.000So he was the only person who could have nationalized the diamonds and he was the only person who could have undone the power of the chiefs.
02:24:26.000Plus in addition, because he was equally comfortable in European society and in African society, and he'd married a European woman, he was respected in Europe.
02:24:45.000Very successful as a diplomat, and he was respected among African countries.
02:24:49.000Imagine 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.
02:25:03.000Imagine how different this world would look if the oil and gas, just the oil and gas, and of course the minerals, the rare earth minerals, imagine if they were just the property of the collective United States.
02:25:20.000In most African countries, it's as in the United States.
02:25:27.000Diamonds and emeralds and oil belong to the tribe on whose land they're found, but not in Botswana.
02:25:37.000The result is that Botswana is the I believe they're the second richest country in Africa.
02:25:44.000The richest country in Africa is, I believe, Equatorial Guinea.
02:25:48.000Guinea and it's very rich because it's got oil and the average per capita income in Equatorial Guinea is something like $10,000 or $20,000.
02:26:03.000That's because the president has an annual income of like $500 billion and everybody else has an annual income of like $100 and you average it out and that's why Equatorial Guinea has the highest average income.
02:26:22.000But in Botswana, the population of the country is only 3 million and the money from the diamonds, as in the case of Norway, goes into a sinking fund.
02:26:34.000It's not spent as you go, but it's invested on a long-term basis.
02:26:39.000And that's an excellent example of a great leader.
02:26:44.000I just want to thank you for all your work over the years collapse, guns, germs, and steels.
02:26:55.000You've really done an amazing job of relaying these incredibly complex and impactful moments in society and in history and made it very entertaining and very consumable.
02:27:15.000I was told in advance that I would enjoy a lot.
02:27:21.000Talking with you, provided that I was not identified with something that you disapprove of, but that otherwise I should look forward to a pleasurable experience.
02:27:32.000And in fact, my wife got Joshua to send her three snippets of you.
02:27:40.000And yes, I anticipated that it would be a pleasurable time.