Joe Rogan Experience #2549 - Jared Diamond
In a Nutshell
Jared Diamond's new book examines how individual leaders can shape history when they combine extraordinary personal qualities with being at the right place and time, as exemplified by Genghis Khan's birth during Mongolia's wettest decade in 2,000 years, Bill Gates recognizing the Intel 8080 chip moment, and Jeff Bezos identifying the internet's explosive growth opportunity. Christianity and Islam succeeded through organizational advantages, demographic growth, and structural factors beyond theology alone, while translation between languages inherently loses meaning due to fundamental grammatical and vocabulary differences, as shown by "logos" meaning both "word" and "rational system" in Greek. Diamond's work on the Fore people revealed how kuru prion disease spread through endocannibalism, with 50-year latency periods, while his language studies across 13 tongues demonstrate how writing systems evolve independently or through idea diffusion rather than direct copying.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Joe Rogan expressed his admiration for Jared Diamond's work, particularly Guns, Germs, and Steel, and mentioned he had started reading Diamond's new book the day before.
Jared Diamond was born in 1937 and grew up during World War II under the shadow of Hitler. His father maintained maps of the European and Pacific theaters on his bedroom wall. This early exposure prompted lifelong questions about why the war happened and whether Hitler was essential to the outcome. Diamond lived in England and Germany, developing appreciation for German culture, and later moved to Chile, which was considered the most democratic country in South America before Pinochet.
Diamond's wife is Polish, and her mother survived Auschwitz while other family members perished in the Holocaust. These personal experiences reinforced his questions about whether individuals make a difference in history.
While at Cambridge, Diamond accidentally flooded his lab room and the room below belonging to Lord Adrian, a Nobel Prize winner. The department chairman responded by telling him it was sloppy and to be more careful with water pumps, allowing his scientific career to continue rather than expelling him. This demonstrated how individual leaders can determine outcomes.
Diamond notes that Nazi Germany was not that long ago, and there was once a belief that such events could never happen again. He has come to realize how fragile civilization really is and that battles between good and evil continue.
Diamond opens his book with the story of Hitler nearly dying in a car accident. Two cars were seconds apart from a perfect impact that would have killed Hitler, raising questions about how history would have unfolded differently.
Paul Pot killed approximately one quarter of the Cambodian population and encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet's actions in Chile were worse than the Nazis in terms of methods, though his body count was smaller due to Chile's size. Pinochet surprised his own fellow generals.
Diamond identifies four or five factors determining when leaders make a difference:
- Leaders must be at the right time and place
- Some leaders recognize the right time and place and seize it
- Bill Gates saw the cover of Popular Electronics featuring the Intel 8080 chip and recognized the moment to build microcomputers
- Winston Churchill recognized his appointment as Prime Minister as the occasion for which his whole life had been preparation
Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard sophomore in 2004, an ideal time to launch social media due to changes in the internet, though he didn't choose his birth year.
Genghis Khan established the largest land empire in world history, stretching from China to Poland. Tree ring studies from the last decade revealed that the wettest time in the Mongolian steppes in 2,000 years occurred during the decade of Genghis Khan's birth. This provided hay to feed sheep, goats, and Mongol horses for battle. If born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, history would not know of him.
Being at the right time and place alone is insufficient. Leaders must also possess extraordinary personal qualities. Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, ruthless, and skilled at organizing diverse groups including different religious persuasions.
The first century AD in the Western Roman Empire was the perfect time and place to found what would become a world religion 15 centuries later. The Roman Empire was the most powerful state in Western Eurasia. Jesus Christ did not choose his birthplace, and neither he nor his followers anticipated the religion's eventual spread.
Of six messiahs mentioned in the New Testament who were killed by Romans, Christ was the most successful. Christ was charismatic and had a universal message not directed only to Romans or men. However, he died too early, and St. Paul became the outstanding organizer of Christianity.
Muhammad was charismatic, a great organizer, and a great general. The Mahdi of Sudan established an empire in East Africa through similar qualities but lacked the technological and demographic advantages to create a world empire.
Paul never met Jesus and had a vision on the road to Damascus. The first gospel, Mark, was written approximately 20 years after Jesus's death, meaning there are no first-person accounts of Jesus.
Muhammad's founding of Islam occurred two centuries before things were written down, leaving even less documentation than exists for Jesus. Saudi Arabia's emergence as the origin of a world religion raises questions about whether weather conditions similar to Genghis Khan's Mongolia played a role, though weather data for that period in Arabia is unavailable.
The United States produced five religions that spread globally in the 19th century: Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science. Mormon success stems not primarily from Joseph Smith's theological teachings, which Diamond describes as having modest merits, but from organizational strength under Brigham Young. Mormons tithe 10% of their income and maintain strong community bonds.
Christianity succeeded partly because Christians outbred pagans in the first centuries of the Roman Empire. Roman religion had low views of women and children, frequent abortions, while Christianity gave women higher roles, favored having babies, and emphasized caring for the sick. Christians lived longer according to tombstone evidence. Additionally, Christianity's emphasis on writing produced literate bureaucrats needed by Constantine's empire.
Muslim populations are rising while secular populations decline. Like Christianity, Islam's spread was driven by organization, motivation, military spirit, family connections, and possibly weather conditions rather than theological beliefs alone.
Strong belief systems provide structure and confidence that appeals to people experiencing existential uncertainty. The discipline required to pray five times daily and the community support create compelling social bonds. Mormonism demonstrates similar appeal through mandatory two-year missionary service for 18-year-old men.
Diamond's earlier work focused on continental outcomes over 10,000 years where individuals don't make a difference, while his current book examines individual leaders in the short term. Religion represents a case where individuals can have effects lasting 2,000 years, as seen with Jesus and Muhammad. Joseph Smith, gone for approximately 200 years, may also have lasting influence.
Guns, Germs, and Steel highlighted necessary structural factors for historical change, while leaders operate within those constraints. European Christianity spread globally after 1500 not only through convincing priests but also through European guns, germs, and steel, with smallpox and measles killing more Native Americans than European weapons.
The Mahdi of Sudan demonstrated extraordinary charisma and military success with minimal equipment, but his small-scale empire lacked the economic and demographic engine needed for global spread.
A single individual or force can establish an empire without necessarily possessing the economic and demographic power to spread their religion globally. Multiple factors must align for such widespread influence to occur.
Out of 340 million Americans, many possessed the business knowledge and computer skills to found personal computer companies, but Bill Gates was present at the right place and right time. Jeff Bezos recognized the internet had multiplied by a factor of 2,300 in a single year and identified this as the perfect moment to establish an everything store.
Bezos' explicit goal was never to create an online bookstore but rather to build an everything store. He strategically began with books because they are uniform products with no variation between copies. All copies of any book are identical, unlike diamonds where each one differs. Books could be sourced from a couple of warehouses, and customers would not need to compare different versions since every copy is the same.
After establishing the book business, Bezos systematically identified subsequent products to add. He moved into perfume and jewelry, waiting considerable time before expanding further. This strategic approach prioritized customer satisfaction over investor returns, focusing on making the purchasing experience as convenient as possible.
Before Amazon, eBay operated as an everything store but functioned differently. Walmart subsequently developed its own everything store, though it remained coupled to physical brick-and-mortar locations. Bezos created a distinctive model by building an everything store exclusively online from the beginning.
Bezos pioneered the one-click purchasing system where customers maintain accounts with stored credit card information, enabling instant purchases. This eliminated the need to visit physical stores, with products like toilet paper arriving by 4:00 p.m. The system eventually expanded to grocery delivery.
Without stock markets, businesses would operate as individual entities where people either own or do not own businesses, without obligations to shareholders that might encourage cutting corners, paying lower wages, or prioritizing short-term returns. Stock markets appear logically inevitable and comparable to the internet in their natural development.
Cell phones existed before the iPhone, including devices from Samsung and the Motorola StarTac. Steve Jobs put a distinctive stamp on cell phones by emphasizing appearance and simplicity, both in the device itself and in overall business operations.
When Jobs returned to Apple after being fired, the company had declined for a decade. One of his first actions was reducing Apple's product line from 100 products to just four, concentrating resources on these focused offerings. He emphasized products that looked good and operated simply, featuring only a couple of buttons.
A typical television remote control contains 49 buttons, making operations unnecessarily complicated. In contrast, the iPhone has four buttons. Jobs designed for simplicity rather than overwhelming users with options.
Jared Diamond describes himself as a technophobe who feels incompetent with technology. During middle school, he attempted to build a make-it-yourself radio but failed. When pursuing his PhD at Cambridge, he chose to study the gallbladder as a research subject because it required no complex technology—just a plastic cannula and a balance scale.
The gallbladder is a simple sac coming out of the bile duct that absorbs salt and water. Diamond selected this organ precisely because measuring water transport required minimal technology, making it an ideal subject for someone avoiding complex equipment.
Diamond writes all his books by hand using a 0.7 mm pencil, editing drafts by crossing out text and using an eraser. After completing handwritten drafts, he dictates them into his iPhone for his secretary to type. He finds that handwriting produces a more simplified and compressed writing style compared to typing, which tends to be more wordy.
At age eight, Diamond learned to type during a two-week chickenpox quarantine but only mastered the bottom three rows of keys. Despite this limitation, he types faster than any secretary he has employed.
Diamond uses his iPhone's microphone icon to dictate correspondence in Italian and German. A high school classmate demonstrated this feature, enabling Diamond to conduct his foreign language correspondence through voice dictation rather than writing by hand.
In the 1970s, Xerox PARC established a well-funded research group to develop automatic simultaneous translation technology. The project failed due to insufficient understanding of language structure and the technology required for simultaneous translation.
An early test involved translating "out of sight, out of mind" into Russian and back to English, resulting in "invisible idiot." It took several decades to overcome these limitations.
The Gospel of John begins "In the beginning was the word," originally written in Greek where "logos" means both "word" and "rational system." This demonstrates how translation can lose meaning—the phrase carried implications of system and organization beyond just a word.
Italian has two words for love: "amo" and "voglio bene." "Voglio bene" literally means "I wish you well" and refers to sexual or physical love, while "amo" refers to friendly love, as in the root of "amateur." Using the wrong term with an Italian romantic partner could result in serious consequences.
German distinguishes between "essen" (eating for humans) and "fressen" (eating for animals). A person who gobbles food might be described using "fressen."
The Fore language of Papua New Guinea has two verbs for "to be": "mindia" for animate beings and "windia" for inanimate objects. Diamond learned his first Fore sentence involving a frog in a creek during his second day in the Fore area.
Jared Diamond describes his early experience learning the Foray language, where he discovered that English lacks certain grammatical distinctions present in other languages. On his second day in the Foray area, he learned that the word for a frog in a creek required the animate form of "to be" rather than the inanimate form. When Diamond said "daquo wip wia" using the inanimate word, a Foray man corrected him because the frog required the animate form "windia mind."
Diamond emphasizes that translation between languages results in significant loss of meaning due to differences in vocabulary and grammar. He references the biblical term "logos," noting that the single English word "word" fails to capture the full meaning present in the original language, leaving room for interpretation and potential miscommunication by those relaying the text.
Rick Stman spent 16 years self-teaching ancient Hebrew to read the Bible in its original form, believing this was the only way to truly understand the intended meaning.
Diamond provides a specific example of translation loss using Homer's Iliad. The English version begins with a lengthy phrase about singing of the wrath of Achilles, but the original Greek opens with just three words: "wrath sing goddess." This demonstrates how the power and condensation of the original Greek is lost in English translation, where the first word is "wrath," the second is "sing," and the third is "goddess."
Diamond notes that while AI might reinterpret translated books to better reflect original context, using more lengthy prose to capture meaning would sacrifice the power and condensation that makes works like the Iliad effective.
Diamond discusses how ancient Hebrew letters double as numbers, giving words numeric value. He explains that Semitic Afroasiatic languages originally treated vowels as non-essential, with word roots specified only by consonants. Early biblical and Phoenician texts contained only consonants, not vowels, because context eliminated ambiguity.
Modern Hebrew and Amharic (the language of Ethiopia) use marks to convey vowels, but the original consonant-only system allowed significant meaning to be conveyed without vowel specification, unlike English where vowels are essential.
Diamond observes that his book Guns, Germs, and Steel has been translated into 45 languages, with the German edition being the thickest, followed by Italian, while the English edition is thinner. This demonstrates that German requires more words to express the same concepts as English.
Diamond clarifies that while translations attempt to convey the same meaning, any linguist would acknowledge that perfect translation between languages is impossible due to distinctive grammar and vocabulary in each language.
New Guinea contains approximately 1,000 distinct languages, making it the most language-rich region in the world. Most understanding of these languages comes from highly trained Lutheran missionaries whose purpose is Bible translation.
Diamond describes the process of linguistic fieldwork: a linguist is dropped into an area with no writing system and must figure out the sounds and meanings through observation and interaction.
Diamond shares the story of an American linguist who spent 15 years studying the Fawi Yao language in Indonesian New Guinea, identifying 12 tones with the possibility of a 13th. The language is tonal like Chinese, where the same syllable can have different meanings based on tone.
The syllable "ba" can mean sweet potato, snake, delicious, feces, or mother-in-law depending on which of the 12 tones is used. This creates significant challenges for language learners, as using the wrong tone can transform "Beloved mother-in-law, let me give you this delicious sweet potato" into "Vile snake, let me give you this feces to eat."
Due to the complexity of tonal languages, Fawi Yao children learn through a specific method where mothers say phrases and children repeat them exactly, with mothers providing corrections. This repetition-based approach differs from typical conversational learning because incorrect tones can completely change meaning.
The first known writing emerged in the fertile crescent of the Middle East using cuneiform, wedge-shaped symbols created with a stylus. Cuneiform was initially used for Akkadian, the language of the first empire in the fertile crescent, and later for Hittite, the oldest and most distinct Indo-European language from Turkey.
The earliest Greek writing was Linear B, a syllabic system used around the time of Homer's Troy. Greeks lost writing entirely for several centuries following the Bronze Age collapse, then developed a new alphabetic system around 800 BC derived from the Phoenician alphabet.
The Phoenicians, speaking an Afroasiatic language, did not need vowel symbols, but Greeks added vowels because their language required them for comprehension. The Greek alphabet was modified into the Etruscan alphabet in Italy, then further modified into the Roman alphabet for Latin.
Japanese uses four distinct writing systems: two syllabaries, Chinese-derived kanji characters, and the Roman alphabet. This makes Japanese the world's most complicated writing system. Japanese cannot put two consonants together, so foreign names like "Diamond" become "diamon do."
Diamond identifies the Korean writing system as the best in the world. Koreans group letters into syllables, creating visual boxes that represent entire syllables rather than individual letters. This allows Koreans to read faster than speakers of other languages because they process text by syllables rather than letter by letter.
The lost history of the Mongols was initially thought to be gibberish because it was written phonetically in Chinese characters. Joe Fletcher rediscovered how to read this text in the early 1960s.
Etruscan writing can be pronounced because it uses modified Greek letters, but the meaning remains largely unknown due to lack of bilingual texts like the Rosetta Stone. Six-sided Etruscan dice have been found with symbols presumably meaning 1-6, but researchers have only partially deciphered which symbols correspond to which numbers.
Easter Island writing exists only in wood samples, with few known examples. The first European visitor in 1722 did not observe writing, but it was mentioned by visitors in the 1770s. Diamond suggests the writing system may have been invented after contact with Spanish visitors in 1770, inspired by observing Spanish wooden sticks and writing materials.
Sequoia, a Cherokee Indian, developed a writing system after observing Europeans' ability to communicate through written marks. Without knowledge of alphabets or syllabaries, he spent approximately 10 years developing a syllabary with 80 signs for different syllables.
Sequoia demonstrated his system's effectiveness by having one Cherokee speak across a football field distance, writing down the message, and having another Cherokee at the opposite end read and pronounce the original words correctly.
Three writing systems are confirmed to be independent inventions: cuneiform in the fertile crescent (earliest known), Mexican/Maya writing (700-900 BC), and Chinese writing (first attested around 1300 BC). Chinese writing is completely different from cuneiform, supporting its independent development.
The disappearance of Linear B writing from Greece was not caused by the Trojan War itself but by the broader Bronze Age collapse around the same period. This collapse affected civilizations across Crete, Cyprus, Turkey, the Hittite Empire, and the Levant.
Egyptian records mention "sea peoples" who fought with Egyptians, suggesting possible invasion, though climate change and new weapons may also have contributed to the collapse.
The Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley (3000-2000 BC) had a writing system evidenced by seals and rings, but no long texts survive. The longest text contains only 3-4 symbols among several hundred different symbols. This writing disappeared, and when writing reemerged in India after Alexander the Great's invasion, it was a completely different system.
Egyptian hieroglyphs emerged around 3000 BC, only a few centuries after cuneiform. Rather than the writing system itself spreading, the idea of writing diffused from the fertile crescent to Egypt, where Egyptians developed their own distinct system.
Similarly, Sequoia did not copy English writing but received the idea of writing and invented his own system. The earliest hieroglyphs appear as fully developed writing rather than gradual evolution, suggesting idea diffusion rather than direct copying.
Korean writing historically used a Chinese-based system until King Sejong around 1430 created a new writing system called Hangul. King Sejong's proclamation states that it grieved him that Koreans wrote the Korean language with Chinese-like writing when the sounds and words of Chinese were not similar to Korean. He devised a new writing system matched to the Korean language with no precedent, and this system has lasted 600 years.
Societies foster deep nationalistic identity through mandatory military service. Israel and Korea both require military service and maintain strong national pride. Finland developed a strong national identity without conscription, anchored instead by the distinctive Finnish language, which is poetic and singing and distantly related to Hungarian. Italy's unification in 1862 developed national identity through a national school system and national army.
Italy historically had around 100 dialects that were mutually incomprehensible, similar to how New Guinea classifies them as different languages. Even today, some Italian dialects remain mutually unintelligible. Universal education and the draft have caused these dialects to fade. The speaker's Italian teacher explained that modern literary and government Italian is close to the dialect of Florence.
In 1950, at age 12, the speaker visited Beckles on England's east coast and encountered a man whose local dialect was completely incomprehensible despite being a form of English. Dialects were far more developed in Europe 60 years ago, including in Italy, Germany, and England.
In 1961, while living in Munich, the speaker traveled with a friend from the Rhineland. At a Bavarian gas station, the speaker understood the attendant's thick Bavarian dialect, but his friend from northern Germany could not understand it at all.
The speaker began learning Italian in April 1999 after a family vacation in Italian Switzerland. His wife knew the word "dove" (where), prompting him to study Italian grammar for six weeks before a planned May 1999 trip to Italy. His father died the morning they were scheduled to leave for Germany. After the canceled trip, he spent another six weeks completing Italian grammar study, then began reading Italian. After eight months of reading, he hired Italian graduate students for conversation practice.
Two Italian speakers came weekly for conversation. Both had difficult relationships with American boyfriends and the speaker provided marital therapy in Italian. Both eventually married their boyfriends and remain married 27 years later. The speaker continues weekly two-hour conversations with Francesca, the person he talks with most besides his wife.
The speaker has dealt with 13 languages in his life. Three he only reads: Greek, Latin, and Dutch. Languages he can lecture in include English, Italian, German, and New Guinea Tok Pisin. He was formerly fluent in Spanish and Russian, but Russian was displaced by Indonesian. He learned enough Finnish to hitchhike and speaks rudimentary Fore.
Languages interfere with each other in the speaker's mind. Italian drove out his Spanish completely. When learning Indonesian, Russian words would emerge when he couldn't find Indonesian words. He can keep straight English, Italian, German, and Tok Pisin, but attempting a fifth language causes confusion. Indonesian displaced Russian despite being completely different languages.
The speaker's twin son is engaged to a Russian woman named Anastasia. He practices elementary Russian phrases when she visits for dinner but fears bringing back Russian might drive out his German.
New Guinea Tok Pisin is now a written creole language of enormous significance for understanding human language development. It arose when German colonial administrators hired or kidnapped New Guineans from different language groups who needed to communicate. Workers developed a stripped-down pidgin language mixing German and New Guinea language elements, adequate for plantation agriculture but not expressing the full range of human emotion.
Children of pidgin-speaking parents spontaneously modified the language within a decade, adding grammar, tenses, future tense, and prepositions. The best documentation comes from Hawaii, where newspapers from 1890-1900 show the progression from pidgin to creole with increasing complexity over just two years.
Tok Pisin is Papua New Guinea's government language. New Guinean government leaders are often more fluent in Tok Pisin than English. Parliament uses either English or Tok Pisin. The speaker learned Tok Pisin by talking with New Guineans and later acquired grammar books and dictionaries.
The speaker can lecture on the second law of thermodynamics in Tok Pisin, demonstrating that anything can be expressed in the language. He explained that a Swede named Onsager developed the second law of thermodynamics, which concerns rates of reactions and heat.
New Guineans can explain the difference between the taste of human red meat and human fat in Tok Pisin. They describe human red meat as tasting like cassowary (a large flightless bird) and human fat as tasting like pig fat.
The speaker's first eight years of work were with the Fore people, who practiced cannibalism and suffered from kuru, a prion disease similar to mad cow disease. The Australian government forbade cannibalism, and exocannibalism (eating enemies) disappeared quickly because the targeted tribes complained. Endocannibalism (eating dead relatives) was culturally equivalent to not throwing away a mother's body.
Precise rules governed who ate which body parts. In 1965, a worker quit because he needed to attend his prospective son-in-law's funeral feast to eat the forearm, as expected by custom. Bodies were placed on raised wooden platforms with buckets underneath to collect putrefying liquid, which was then consumed with sweet potato.
Kuru was transmitted through eating uncooked brain tissue. Prion diseases survive cooking temperatures of several hundred degrees. The speaker was never offered or required to consume human tissue, as endocannibalism had strict rules about who could eat which parts.
Prions can survive temperatures that kill most microbes. Boiling, ordinary cooking, and standard steam sterilization are not reliably sufficient. Resistance varies by prion strain and whether the material is wet, dried, or embedded. Boiling at 212 degrees is not dependable. 1,000° Celsius is reported to destroy prions ineffectively. 900° Fahrenheit for several hours is reliably destructive.
Kuru is a prion disease transmitted through cannibalism. The disease arose when someone in the Fore area around 1910 developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and died. The Fore practiced endocannibalism where women would cut up the brain and skull, and babies would play with the brain tissue and lick their fingers. This transmission was particularly to babies. Kuru arose with one Fore person who had Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease around 1910, was eaten by others who were in turn eaten by others, causing the disease to spread explosively among the Fore.
Daniel Everett noted that the Papuan people have endocannibalism and he believes they still practice it secretly, but they do not have kuru. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is rare, occurring at rates of one in 10,000 to one in 100,000. It was pure chance that the mutation arose in the Fore and not in any other tribe in New Guinea.
Kuru exists in cows, sheep, and goats. Scrapie is the prion disease in sheep and goats that gave medical researchers the idea that kuru might be infectious. When Jared Diamond arrived in the Fore area in 1964, kuru was completely mysterious and affected only the Fore. If a Fore person went to Port Moresby, they might still develop kuru, so it was not linked to the Fore environment. Foreigners and other New Guineans who came into the Fore area did not develop kuru.
The symptoms of kuru were similar to scrapie, suggesting it might be infectious. An infectious disease expert obtained the brain of a Fore man who died of kuru, shipped it frozen in dry ice to the National Institutes of Health, and injected it into a chimpanzee. After three years, the chimpanzee developed kuru symptoms and died. The last death from kuru was in 2009, and the last funeral feast was in 1959 when Australians banned the practice. The latency period was 50 years from infection in 1959 to death in 2009.
Michael Rockefeller collected art in the Baliem Valley and went to the south coast where great art was produced in the Asmat area. He was coming down a coastal river in a boat with a Dutch patrol officer when a tidal bore capsized the boat. The Dutch patrol officer could not swim and stayed on the boat. Michael Rockefeller swam for shore. A plane spotted the overturned boat and rescued the Dutch officer. When Michael Rockefeller approached shore, he encountered a canoe of natives. About five years previously, a Dutch patrol officer had killed four natives from that village as punishment for killing natives of another village. The natives killed Michael Rockefeller because they viewed him as belonging to the same clan as the Dutch officer.
Each wife had her own hut, and men lived in a communal men's house. Young boys lived with their mothers until age six, then moved into the men's house where they developed homosexual relationships with adult men. At teenage, the tribe would buy a girl from a neighboring tribe for the boy and tell him he was supposed to have sex with a woman. Boys had been told that women were dirty and defiling. Jared Diamond saw a film of two 13-year-old boys the night before their marriages to teenage girls, where older men explained how to have sex with a woman, and the boys were dispirited about having to have sex with women.
Such relations are not rare around the world. In Central America, there were Native American tribes where there were classes of young men who acted as sex partners. When the Spanish came, they were disgusted by this practice and used war dogs trained to rip people apart, bringing them into enclosures with these professional sex partners.
Jared Diamond was offered sago grubs, the larvae of a big beetle that injects eggs into the sago palm. The larvae grow into large objects resembling shrimp that are fatty and high in protein. He declined to eat them despite being curious. New Guineans from the Highlands who had never encountered ice cream rejected it, saying it was cold and hurt their mouth.
Jared Diamond has eaten rattlesnake. In Mexico, he encountered bowls of what looked like fried crickets. He noted that Seretse Khama routinely carried dried grasshoppers in his suit pocket as standard food from his area of Botswana and would offer them to guests.
Seretse Khama was the first president of Botswana and the hereditary chief of the largest tribe. He was one of only 22 college graduates in Botswana at independence and was educated at Oxford. He was comfortable in both European and native African society. Botswana set up a two-house legislature based on the British model with an upper house of chiefs that would perpetuate chiefly rule. Seretse Khama was the only person who could abolish the power of the chiefs because he was the most powerful chief.
Diamonds were discovered six months after independence on the land of Seretse Khama's tribe. Normally in Africa, tribes claim rights to resources found on their land, but Seretse Khama proclaimed that all underground resources in Botswana are the property of the Botswana nation, not individual tribes. He nationalized the diamonds and contributed the wealth to all of Botswana. Botswana is the second richest country in Africa, with a population of three million. Diamond money goes into a sinking fund invested on a long-term basis, similar to Norway's approach.
Equatorial Guinea has the highest average per capita income in Africa at $10,000 to $20,000 because the president has an annual income of about $500 billion while everybody else has about $100, averaging out to that figure.
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