PowerfulJREJoe Rogan Experience #2549 - Jared Diamond
PowerfulJRE
Why Diamond Wrote This Book 0:01
Jared Diamond explains that his new book grew out of a lifetime spent wondering whether individual leaders, good or bad, actually change history. Born in 1937, he grew up during World War II with a map of the European and Pacific theaters pinned to his bedroom wall by his father, constantly asking why the war happened and whether Hitler alone caused it. He later lived in Germany, where he came to love the language and music, and in Chile, the most democratic country in South America, where even Pinochet's fellow generals never saw his brutal turn coming. His wife Marie, who is Polish, lost family in the Holocaust, her mother survived Auschwitz while others did not, which kept the question of individual impact alive for him personally. He also recalls a moment at Cambridge when a flooded lab, caused by his own carelessness, could have ended his scientific career, but a sympathetic department chairman let him continue, reinforcing his sense that leaders and their choices shape outcomes in unpredictable ways.
Civilization's Fragility and Good versus Evil Leaders 3:33
Diamond and Rogan discuss how the post-World War II belief that atrocities like Hitler's could never happen again has proven false. Pol Pot killed about a quarter of Cambodia's population, encouraging children to kill their own parents, and Pinochet's torture methods in Chile, though smaller in scale, were in some ways worse than the Nazis', catching even his own generals off guard. Diamond suggests leaders generally either do good, do harm, or do nothing, and that predicting which requires looking at several factors together rather than a single simple answer.
Being in the Right Time and Place 6:02
Diamond lays out examples of leaders who recognized or stumbled into ideal moments. Bill Gates saw the Intel 8080 chip on the cover of Popular Electronics and told Steve Allen it was time to build a microcomputer before someone else did. Winston Churchill said becoming prime minister was the occasion his whole life had prepared him for, but he did not cause Germany's invasion of France that created that opening. Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984, happened to be a Harvard sophomore in 2004 when internet conditions made it an ideal year to launch social media, though he did not choose his birth year. Genghis Khan, Diamond notes, built the largest land empire in history partly because tree-ring studies show his birth decade was the wettest period in 2,000 years on the Mongolian steppe, producing the hay needed to feed both people and warhorses.
Genghis Khan's Combination of Luck and Skill 9:31
Rogan pushes back that Genghis Khan's success involved more than weather, citing his strategic brilliance, ruthlessness, tolerance of different religions, and tactics like patiently besieging cities. Diamond agrees it took both elements together, the right conditions and an extraordinary individual, since an equally remarkable person born elsewhere or at another time would be unknown to history.
Founding of Christianity and Islam 10:00
Diamond describes the first century Roman Empire as the ideal time and place for a religion to spread globally, and notes the New Testament mentions six rival messiahs killed by Rome, of whom Jesus proved most successful. He argues Jesus had a universal message reaching beyond one group, but it took Saint Paul, who never met Jesus and organized the movement decades later, to spread it, since Jesus himself wrote nothing down and the earliest gospel, Mark, appeared roughly twenty years after his death. Muhammad, by contrast, combined charisma, organizing skill, and military leadership in one person, though Islamic texts were not written down for two centuries, leaving even less certainty than with Jesus. Diamond suggests Christianity's real growth engine was social: it treated women and children better than Roman paganism, discouraged abortion, cared for the sick, and thus outlived and outbred pagans, while its literacy, inherited from Judaism, made early Christians useful as bureaucrats when Constantine needed them.
American-Born Religions and Mormon Success 16:31
Diamond points out that five religions with global reach emerged from 19th century America: Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science. He argues Mormonism spread not because of Joseph Smith's theology, which he calls modest, but because of Brigham Young's organizational skill and the religion's optimism, emphasis on happiness, and strict tithing of ten percent of income. Rogan adds that Mormon community bonds and the two-year missionary requirement for young men create unusual social cohesion, comparing this disciplined, all-in commitment to the appeal of strict religious observance seen in Islam, where large families and community care are similarly emphasized over theological argument as drivers of growth.
Reconciling Individuals with Guns, Germs, and Steel 26:30
Diamond addresses how his new book fits with Guns, Germs, and Steel, which focused on continent-scale forces over 10,000 years rather than individuals. He argues religion is the clearest case where one person's beliefs mattered for millennia, noting Jesus, Muhammad, and possibly Joseph Smith left effects lasting far longer than any politician or businessperson. Still, he stresses that charismatic leaders needed underlying material advantages, European diseases like smallpox and measles did more to conquer the Americas than guns or horses, and the Mahdi of Sudan, despite his charisma and military success against British-Egyptian machine guns, lacked the economic and demographic engine to spread his movement worldwide.
Bezos, Jobs, and Timing in Business 30:02
Diamond turns to Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs as examples of leaders who recognized their moment rather than created it. Bezos told his employer the internet had grown 2,300 times in a year and that it was the perfect time to build what he called an everything store. Rogan notes Bezos started with something as simple as books, an easy, uniform product to standardize online, before expanding into everything else, a strategy that succeeded partly by matching the public's growing preference for one-click convenience.
Amazon Built a Distinctive Everything Store 32:31
Jeff Bezos started with books because every copy of a book is identical, so customers had no reason to shop around, and warehouses could stock them easily. From there he strategically expanded into perfume and jewelry. Diamond notes that everything stores already existed in some form, through eBay and later Walmart's own version tied to brick-and-mortar locations, so the broad idea was not unique to Bezos. What made Amazon distinctive was Bezos building his everything store as a purely online operation and prioritizing customer satisfaction over investor returns, along with innovations like one-click ordering that let people get items like toilet paper delivered the same day.
Would Stock Markets Have Emerged Anyway 35:32
Rogan raises a hypothetical about what society would look like without a stock market, without the obligation businesses feel toward shareholders that can push them toward cutting corners and ruthless cost-saving. Diamond responds that stock markets would likely have developed regardless, comparing them to inventions like the internet that seem to arise from underlying logic rather than one person's accident. He extends this to cell phones, noting that devices existed before the iPhone, including Korean and Samsung models, but Steve Jobs put his own stamp on the category by cutting Apple's product line down to four items after returning to the company and insisting on simplicity, both in appearance and in the number of buttons.
Diamond's Discomfort With Technology 38:33
Diamond describes himself as a lifelong technophobe, recalling a failed attempt to build a radio in middle school and needing his father's lab assistant to help. He only discovered the volume buttons on his iPhone the night before this conversation, despite his wife having shown him years earlier. He explains that his incompetence with gadgets isn't accidental preference but genuine difficulty, and it even shaped his scientific career: he chose to study the gallbladder as a simple sac rather than more complex organs like the electric organ of eels, because studying it required only a plastic tube and a balance, no elaborate equipment.
Writing Books by Hand 44:32
Diamond explains that he writes his books entirely by hand using a 0.7mm mechanical pencil, editing drafts by crossing out or erasing before dictating the cleaned-up version into his iPhone for his secretary to type. He learned to touch-type as a child during a two-week bout of chickenpox but only mastered the bottom three rows of the keyboard before recovering, so he still cannot touch-type the top row. He notes that his prose style changes depending on method: typing produces wordier writing because it is faster, while handwriting forces him to slow down and think more carefully about word choice, making his writing more compressed.
Dictation and the Dream of Universal Translation 50:00
Diamond describes using his iPhone's microphone icon to dictate correspondence directly in Italian and German, a feature a friend showed him. Rogan brings up real-time translation technology from companies like Google and Samsung, imagining a future where translated speech could even be rendered in a person's own voice. Diamond shares the history of Xerox PARC's 1970s attempt at automatic simultaneous translation, which failed for two decades partly because language structure wasn't well understood, illustrated by an early test where "out of sight, out of mind" was translated into Russian and back into English as "invisible idiot."
Meaning Lost Between Languages 54:31
Diamond gives several examples of how translation strips away meaning. The opening of the Gospel of John, "in the beginning was the word," uses the Greek logos, which means not just "word" but "rational system," so the translation loses that fuller sense. Italian has two words for love, amo for affectionate love and voglio bene for romantic or sexual love, a distinction English collapses into one word. German similarly splits "to eat" into essen for humans and fressen for animals. Diamond recounts learning the Foré language of Papua New Guinea, where the verb "to be" differs for animate and inanimate subjects, and he was corrected for using the wrong form when describing a frog.
Homer's Iliad Loses Power in Translation 1:00:32
Diamond points to the opening line of the Iliad as an example of translation's limits, since the Greek word order, beginning with "wrath," then "sing," then "goddess," carries a force that English renderings like "I sing of the wrath of Achilles" cannot replicate. Rogan wonders whether AI could eventually retranslate classic texts more accurately, though Diamond suggests this might capture meaning at the cost of the original's condensed power. The conversation touches on ancient Hebrew, where letters double as numbers and vowels were historically omitted from written text, relying on context and later added marks, unlike English which cannot function without vowels. Diamond closes by noting that his own books, translated into 45 languages, always come out thickest in German editions.
Translation Between Languages Is Never Exact 1:05:00
Diamond notes that German editions of his books are always thicker than English ones, simply because German takes more words to say the same thing. When asked whether translations truly say the same thing, he says any linguist would answer no. Each language has its own grammar and vocabulary, so translation is always an approximation, never a perfect match.
Tonal Languages and the Fayu Example 1:06:32
New Guinea has about a thousand distinct languages, mostly documented by missionary linguists who had to work out the sounds from scratch since there was no writing. Diamond describes the Fayu language, which may have as many as thirteen tones. The syllable "ba" can mean sweet potato, snake, delicious, feces, or mother-in-law depending on tone, so a small pronunciation slip can turn "beloved mother-in-law, here is a delicious sweet potato" into an insult involving snakes and feces. Because of this risk, Fayu mothers have children repeat words back exactly rather than holding open conversations.
The Deep History of Writing Systems 1:10:02
The first writing was cuneiform, made with a wedge-shaped stylus in the Fertile Crescent, used for languages including Akkadian and Hittite. Greek writing began as the syllabic Linear B, disappeared for centuries after the Bronze Age, then returned around 800 BC based on the Phoenician alphabet, with the Greeks adding vowels. That Greek alphabet later shaped the Etruscan and Roman alphabets, and eventually today's alphabet.
Japanese and Korean Writing Compared 1:13:00
Japanese uses four overlapping systems: two syllabaries, Chinese-derived kanji, and the Roman alphabet, making it the world's most complex writing system. Korean, by contrast, groups its letters into syllable blocks, letting readers process whole syllables at a glance, which Diamond calls the best writing system in the world for reading speed.
Lost and Undeciphered Scripts 1:15:00
A Harvard classmate, Joe Fletcher, only in the early 1960s figured out how to read a rediscovered Mongol history once thought to be gibberish. Etruscan writing, borrowed from Greek letters, can be pronounced but mostly not understood, since almost all Etruscan texts were lost or burned. Easter Island's undeciphered wooden script may even have been invented after islanders saw Spanish visitors writing in 1770.
Sequoyah Invents the Cherokee Syllabary 1:19:01
The Cherokee Sequoyah, seeing the power Europeans gained from writing, spent about ten years inventing his own eighty-symbol syllabary. He proved it worked by having one Cherokee speak a sentence to him at one end of a field, then walking to the other end so a second Cherokee, taught the new symbols, could read it back correctly.
Independent Inventions and Idea Diffusion 1:22:31
Diamond counts cuneiform, Mexican and Maya writing, and Chinese writing as independent inventions, since no contact existed between those regions. Egyptian hieroglyphs, appearing just after cuneiform, likely borrowed only the idea of writing, not the system itself, an example of idea diffusion. Korea's Hangul stands out as a deliberate invention, created almost overnight around 1430 by King Sejong to fit the Korean language.
The Bronze Age Collapse Erased Greek Writing 1:23:31
The disappearance of Linear B writing across Crete, Cyprus, and Turkey came not from the Trojan War itself but from the broader Bronze Age collapse, whose cause, whether invasion, climate change, or new weapons, remains unknown.
National Identity, the Draft, and Fading Dialects 1:32:32
Diamond and Rogan discuss how conscription often builds national identity, as in Israel and Korea, though Finland's identity rests instead on its distinctive language. In Italy, Germany, and England, strong regional dialects persisted into the mid-1900s, sometimes mutually incomprehensible, as Diamond experienced firsthand in 1950s England and 1960s Bavaria, before universal education and military service helped them fade.
Learning Italian From Scratch 1:39:00
Jared Diamond describes learning Italian as an adult, starting with six weeks of grammar study, then six more weeks to finish the grammar, followed by eight months of reading before he ever heard the language spoken aloud. He posted a notice at UCLA's Italian department seeking graduate students to converse with him, and when an Italian woman finally showed up and spoke to him, he compares the moment to having read about sex and then finally experiencing it. Two of the women who came to speak Italian with him both had troubled relationships with their American boyfriends, and Diamond ended up doing what he calls marital therapy in Italian, telling them that their parents' bad marriages didn't have to be their template. Both women married their boyfriends, and 27 years later Diamond still talks for two hours every two weeks with one of them, Francesca, who he says is the person he has the widest-ranging conversations with outside his wife and his companion on New Guinea expeditions.
Thirteen Languages and Mental Limits 1:41:31
Diamond says he has dealt with thirteen languages in his life, though he only ever read Greek, Latin, and Dutch without speaking them. He can currently lecture in English, Italian, German, and New Guinea talk pigeon, and was once fluent in Spanish and Russian, both of which got pushed out by other languages he later learned. He describes feeling like he has only four mental channels for languages at once, so learning Italian wiped out his Spanish, and starting Indonesian drove out his Russian even though the two are unrelated. His twin son is engaged to a Russian woman, Anastasia, which has tempted him to revive his Russian, but he worries doing so might drive out his German.
How Pigeon Languages Are Born 1:44:30
Diamond explains that New Guinea talk pigeon, which sounds simple, is actually a full creole language with grammar and tenses, and its history illustrates how such languages form worldwide. German colonial administrators in New Guinea needed a way to communicate with workers from a thousand different language groups, so a stripped-down German-based pigeon emerged, good enough for plantation work but not for expressing full human emotion. When the children of these workers grew up needing to talk about everything, not just coconuts, they spontaneously enriched the language within about a decade, adding grammar, tenses, and prepositions. He notes the same pattern is documented in Hawaii, where missionary newspapers between 1890 and 1900 recorded plantation workers' creole becoming visibly more complex year by year.
Talk Pigeon Can Say Anything 1:51:01
Diamond demonstrates that pigeon is capable of expressing complex ideas by giving an impromptu explanation of the second law of thermodynamics in talk pigeon, crediting the Swedish scientist Onsager. He explains he picked up pigeon by talking directly with New Guineans rather than studying it first, later supplementing it with pigeon grammars and dictionaries. He notes that in Papua New Guinea, talk pigeon is one of the languages of parliament alongside English, and that New Guinean leaders are often more fluent in it than in English.
Cannibalism Among the Fore 1:53:00
Diamond worked for eight years with the Fore people, who practiced endocannibalism, eating their own dead relatives, as distinct from exocannibalism, eating dead enemies, which the Australian government suppressed quickly once it arrived. He recounts a worker who abruptly quit to attend a funeral feast because he was obligated to eat the forearm of his deceased prospective son-in-law, a duty as unavoidable to him as burying a mother would be to Diamond. He describes, secondhand, a practice in which a corpse decomposes on a slatted platform over a bucket, with the resulting fluid used to dip sweet potatoes, though he says he never witnessed this and was never offered the chance to participate, nor would he have accepted.
Kuru and the Mad Cow Connection 2:02:00
Diamond traces kuru, a prion disease resembling mad cow disease, to a single spontaneous case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease around 1910 among the Fore, spread afterward through cannibalism, especially when children licked or played with brain tissue during funeral rites. He notes that neighboring tribes and outsiders who lived among the Fore never developed kuru, confirming it was tied specifically to that one transmission chain. A researcher eventually shipped frozen Fore brain tissue to the National Institutes of Health, where it was injected into a chimpanzee that developed and died of kuru after three years, confirming the infectious nature of the disease. The last funeral feast took place in 1959 before Australian authorities banned the practice, and the final kuru death occurred in 2009, revealing a fifty-year latency period between infection and death.
Michael Rockefeller's Death 2:09:00
Diamond recounts the well-documented death of Michael Rockefeller, who was collecting art in New Guinea's Asmat region when a tidal bore capsized his boat. Unlike the Dutch patrol officer with him, who could not swim and stayed with the boat and was later rescued by plane, Rockefeller swam for shore himself. He had the misfortune of reaching land near a village where a Dutch patrol officer had killed four natives years earlier in retaliation for an earlier killing, and because Rockefeller was white and seen as belonging to that same outside group, the villagers killed him. Diamond says it remains unclear, at least to him, whether Rockefeller was also eaten, though his killing itself is well established.
Cultural Practices Among New Guinea Tribes 2:12:00
Diamond describes a former camp worker who practiced cannibalism on the dead, noting the man was otherwise a hard worker who knew his birds well. He also explains a widespread custom among tribes like the Foré, where boys lived with their mothers until age six, then moved into a communal men's house and formed homosexual relationships with adult men through their teenage years. Boys were taught that women were dirty and defiling, yet at a certain point a wife would be purchased for them and they were expected to switch to heterosexual relations, something Diamond saw documented on film as deeply distressing for the boys involved. He adds that similar arrangements existed among Central American tribes, where the Spanish, disgusted by a class of men who served as sexual partners, used trained war dogs to kill them.
Food, Comfort, and Cultural Difference 2:17:01
Diamond recalls declining an offer of sego grubs, fatty beetle larvae valued as protein by New Guineans, even though he suspects they would have tasted like fatty shrimp. He also describes bringing Highlanders to the coast for the first time, where one rejected sleeping in a bed after rolling out of it, and another refused ice cream because the cold hurt his mouth, having never experienced anything cold before. Rogan shares his own experience eating crickets and a live roach on Fear Factor, noting the taste was bland despite the unpleasant concept.
Seretse Khama and Botswana's Diamonds 2:20:30
Diamond details Seretse Khama, Botswana's first president, educated at Oxford and comfortable in both European and African worlds, who famously carried dried grasshoppers in his jacket to offer guests. As hereditary chief of the country's largest tribe, he was uniquely positioned to abolish the power of tribal chiefs and, when diamonds were discovered six months after independence on his tribe's land, to declare all underground resources national property rather than tribal. This decision, paired with long-term investment of diamond revenue, made Botswana one of Africa's richest nations, in contrast to Equatorial Guinea, whose high average income masks vast inequality between its ruler and citizens.
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