940: Byron Reese | Humanity's Mysterious Journey from Antiquity to AI

21:51And that's when she became alive. And that's, I think, a microcosm of what happened to us 50 ,000 years ago when we got language. We think of language as being about communication. And that's nice that it does that. But really, it's about thought. Without language, your mental processes are incredibly limited. You'd like to think, oh, I can still think in complex ways. I don't need to be able to say it or articulate it. And yes, our inner dialogue is something like 4 ,000 words a minute, and our outer dialogue is much less, depending on how fast you talk, but it's still less than 4 ,000 words a minute.

22:22You really can't think in creative, complex ways without language at all. It's almost hard to believe that's the case, but it is. I mean, Helen Keller almost proved it right there, even if that's anecdotal piece. I got interested in why people have such different outcomes in animals, because no matter what you think of animals and no matter how great you think they are and how smart porpoises are and all of that, you have to admit their outcome is radically different than ours in terms of we have technology in cities. If a chimp uses a stick and sticks it in an ant mound to get ants, we're like, oh, it uses a tool.

22:56And it's like, that's nothing like an electron microscope. I'm sorry, it is just something different. So why are we so different? What is it about us that's so different? And why isn't there another thing that's 90 % of us in 80 and 70 and 60 percent. I happen to think my personal belief is that intelligence like ours is very volatile and dangerous. 99 point, as many nines as you want to put after it, percent of all life isn't intelligent. Bacteria aren't intelligent and all these things aren't. And we come along and I think we're very volatile. And I think, so you say, why are we here? And I would say we're here because planets that do not create life like ours, even if it's just all mindless, planets that do not evolve an intelligent species get whacked by an asteroid every 100 million years and die out.

23:44So they have to generate something intelligent. But it also tells us that planets that generate multiple intelligence also die out. Yeah, they probably kill each other with nuclear weapons or something. Yeah. That's exactly right, because it's so volatile. And that the Goldilocks amount of intelligent species is one. And that implies that's our purpose, ultimately, is to protect this planet from cosmic threats.

24:08You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Byron Reese. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing people for the show, it's because of my network. And I know networking is a gross word, but it's really just the circle of people that know, like, and trust you and vice versa. I'm teaching you how to build something similar for yourself in our six-minute networking course, which is free over at sixminutenetworking.com. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you.

24:36It's not gross or salesy. It's not gonna make you look like a jag off. It's not gonna make you look terrible or make anybody feel awkward around you. It's just gonna make you a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, and it only takes a few minutes a day. And hey, many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course still for free at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Byron Reese. If there was another intelligent human-like species at the same level of intelligence as humans, there's no way we wouldn't be at genocidal conflict with one another forever until one side lost.

25:11There's no way. You could say there used to be other sapiens and there aren't anymore for that reason. I mean, they weren't as intelligent as humans, I guess. Isn't that the verdict? But imagine if they were, we would just still be hunting them and killing them to extinction ourselves. As the human species, we still do that to each other and we're the same species. If it was a different species, it wouldn't even be a question. It's a sad commentary on us. You're made of cells, and every one of your cells has a life. It lives a life, and it dies. And it doesn't know you exist. But somehow, you come together, and there's Jordan, and you share the same physical reality with those cells.

25:47And so you're something emergent. You're something with all these new abilities. And I think you're also very dangerous. People are very dangerous. I like the idea of being dangerous. By the way, before I forget about this, you wrote about cave paintings. Some found miles into caves, which is shocking. Imagine walking into a cave, going miles in there, which is damn far by any account, and then being like, this is where I'm going to paint. Does that mean they lived in the caves? Or does that mean they went in there to do the painting and then left? Why do this? Do we know? We don't know. The most amazing historical fact I know probably is, imagine what you would think the first cave art would look like.

26:23I would think it would look like stick figures. Yeah. Like what a little kid would do. And then it gets better and better. But it isn't. The first cave art we have is like beautiful. I would frame it and put it on my wall. And so that's amazing. Like, that's the first cave art. The second strange thing about it is we executed it with technology. And so you can imagine if a cave painter at the very beginning wanted black, they had charcoal in the fire, right? But they didn't want to use charcoal. They used something called Haussamai, where you have to heat it 1 ,700 degrees, very hard to do in a campfire, but then it's a deep black.

26:55Chauvet in France, one of these caves, the closest source of that is 130 miles away. So they were like, I don't think this charcoal is dark enough. Let's go 130 miles, get this mineral, burn it to 1 ,700 degrees, make pigment out of it, and all of that. And then they would come back to the same caves for 4 ,000 to 5 ,000 years. And that's weird. We don't have any monument we go to, really, for 5 ,000 years, back again and again and again, and don't destroy maybe the pyramids. But no, nobody lived in the caves. We don't see those kinds of remains, and we don't really know why they're there. But oftentimes, animals are painted with eight legs.

27:29And the theory is, in flickering light, it looks like they're running. That's cool. Egypt, a place that I will probably not go anytime soon again, was just the most incredible thing. Seeing that stuff in person, walking around the Valley of the Kings, and having little kids take you for$2 to something that nobody is at, and then there's a hole in a fresco or whatever you call it, and you can just crawl in there and there's pottery in there. and you're not supposed to be in there, but you're just like, I can't believe this is just sitting here. There's not even tape over the door that says like, hey, don't go in here.

28:03It's just open. It's just a tomb that's thousands of years old. And they're like, yeah, you can go down in there. And I'm, you know, a hard pass on dying in an ancient tomb that collapses on me. But still, you can go in there and there's thousands of these things. And we had my friend Rami Romani on the show talking about how it's like a single digit percentage of the tombs have been discovered and explored so far. When I was there, I talked to a museum director who said not only do they think there are more tombs like Tuts and better, they're not looking for them because if they find them, then again, they have a chance of being destroyed and you have to preserve them and they're perfectly safe.

28:39So why not leave them there another 500 years and find them when we have better technology? I think that's a wonderfully long view. It's why the Chinese haven't excavated the first emperor's tomb. They know exactly where it is and they haven't excavated it for largely the same region. I did not know that. That is fascinating. Yeah, they're not trying to be like, we should dig this out and throw it in a museum and then build condos over this land. You mentioned also in the cave painting, going back to cave paintings here, that many handprints on the walls are missing a finger. Do we know why that's the case?

29:08And they're mostly left hands. That seems completely random, but it also speaks to the idea that maybe this particular place that people kept going back to for 5 ,000 years was not only a very special sacred spot, but also the only people that could go there were, I don't know, were they priests that had to cut off a finger to enter? I don't really get what's going on there. Maybe. I mean, that's a real theory. The first thing is there are these handprints on these walls and they're reverse handprints. So what they did is they would take pigment, put it in their mouth, mix it with saliva, and they would have a straw.

29:37They'd put their hand on the wall and they would blow that pigment on it. They would make a reverse handprint. The weird thing is we find these on all continents. So they weren't made like in one place and that was caught on. Somehow, I think they're a human universal. For some reason, people made those. And we're really intrigued by the idea that we might be able to pull because they use saliva to mix it and they blew it. We might be able to pull DNA out of the pigment that's left over from when it was blown. And we'll know exactly who they were. But to your point, most of them are left hands, which indicated right-handed people because they held the thing down.

30:14And a surprisingly large number are missing a digit. So the question is, did you just lose digits in the old world because life was rough? People think maybe it is something like ritualistic. I kept trying to figure out, could you bend your finger back in a way? Does it mean something? But nobody knows. There's also a number of symbols that aren't writing, but we don't know what they mean. Are they have marked somehow their identity or do they mean something we haven't deciphered? I suppose if we can pull DNA out of the pigment with future technology or whatever, and then we find remains of those exact same people because we could DNA match it, you could see if the remains were missing a finger or if just the handprint was missing a finger.

30:55And then you'd know if they were bending their finger or if they had actually chopped it off or lost it. Yeah. Man, this is what I'm talking about with the different subjects here. A lot of this stuff is just so fascinating. I was also surprised that the most common form of animal communication is bioluminescence. I really thought it was going to be smell or pheromones or something. I had no idea it was going to be light. Yeah, who would have thought? My kids just went down in a submarine half a mile under the ocean, and there was a brief point where they turn all the lights off, everything gets dark, and then he flashed it for just an instant, and everything lit up like a starry night.

31:30And that just gives you some notion of the untold trillions of creatures that communicate with bioluminescence in the ocean. So they flashed the submarine light just for a sec to signal to the creatures and they all sort of said, we see you? Exactly. That to me is straight out of Avatar. It's just crazy to think that there's billions of different creatures from bacteria to, I guess, fireflies that use bioluminescence to communicate. It does make sense. It's highly efficient. You can probably detect it in more efficient ways or quicker than smell or pheromones and through water. The whole thing is just mind-blowing.

32:02My wife was a beekeeper for a while, and she told me something like, bees do something that signals future tense, whereas most animals, besides humans, can only speak or communicate in the present. There's no, hey, this happened, or this will happen. It's all just current, except bees can say something about the future using a dance, which I think is also fascinating. Yeah, they can do displacement where they can talk about things that aren't there. But first you have to realize that no bee is smart. Their brain is roughly the size of a grain of salt. So they aren't intelligent. And nobody teaches them the dance because a bee only lives six weeks.

32:37It probably only does the dance for about two weeks of its life. Nothing's teaching them how to do it. So they know it. Somehow it's coded in that tiny bit of DNA. That's the information that's encoded. So they don't know what they're doing. They're like a rectus making that thing. They do it, but they don't have any knowledge of what they're doing, and yet it's complex behavior. When they go to find a new home, which they do every year, there's about 20 factors. Is it shielded from the rain? Are there ants nearby? Are there other bee colonies nearby? Is the entrance hole this big, but not this big and not this big?

33:07All these factors, and they're able to make intelligent decisions, even though none of the bees are intelligent. And again, we're back to superorganisms. That's because the hive is smarter than a bee, and that's because you're smarter than yourselves, and that's why Agora, this creature, is smarter than us and lives on a different timescale. You see, a honey beehive can live 100 years. A bee only lives six weeks. And a gora lives thousands of years, and we only live 100. You mentioned pheromones, and the difference between pheromones and hormones is generally hormones are internal. You have hormones in your body, but pheromones are external.

33:40And so when you think about ants passing each other and releasing pheromones, they too are a single creature, and they're really hormones. They're really hormones that they're releasing because they're And so if you think in terms of this colony as an animal, they're just cells in this bigger organism. I keep saying this. It isn't touchy-feely. It's simple biology. This is just biology. It's testable hypotheses that these are animals. A honeybee hive is an animal that is made up of cells called honeybees. And yeah, I'm fascinated by it. Yeah, the bees are really incredible. We only gave them up when we had kids because they do require time that you don't have when you have two babies.

34:16Was it you who told me that bees on cocaine talk faster and exaggerate the amount of honey at the source? They do. Because I think that is hilarious just how much a worker bee and a Wall Street attorney have in common. That's funny. I'm thinking back to my Wall Street days and it's like, bro, there were so many hotties at the club last night. I spent like$25 ,000. Man, you should have been there. It's okay. Calm down. Come down from whatever you're snorting and meet me in the conference room. And it's like bees do the same thing. It's true. See, in the dance, they say how much honey is off in the distance.

34:46And on cocaine, they're like, there's a ton of honey there. You got to get over there. Oh, my God, there's so much honey. But their algorithm is error correcting. If other bees go there and come back and they're like, eh, not a lot of honey there, it falls apart. So it's an error correcting algorithm that the ship organism uses to get rid of the coked up bees input. Yeah. When he's high, he says all kinds of stuff. Don't listen to that guy. How do we know that languages have propped up almost at the same time the world over? You wrote about that in the book, but how can we know that kind of thing?

35:14On the one hand, we can't. Writing is only 5 ,000 years old, and language, we think, is 50 ,000 years old. There's not consensus on that, because there's no remains that prove it. But if you accept the hypothesis that we got language when we got art, when we got figural representation, that is, we could carve a rock to look like a lion, that we got it the same time we got music, because we can find flutes. If you accept that, then what you find is we got figural representation, we got cave art, and we got musical instruments all on the same day. And if we got them all at the same time, they probably came from the same cause, and we infer that that's language.

35:53And the point is that all over the world, our oldest caves are all roughly the same age. So the oldest ones we have are, say, 45 ,000 years old. The oldest ones in Western Europe are 35 ,000. The oldest ones in Africa or 40 ,000. So they're all the same age over to these people that didn't have any contact with each other. And you start finding loots and cave art and figural things carved all at the same moment. Either something happened that spread really quick, and it could be a thousand years. Some human was born with all this stuff, and they had such a survival ability that they populated the world, and they went out and bred with everybody else, and it passed down and rippled through, which could have happened, or something woke up in humanity all at once.

36:38It was all lightening and all of a sudden it just happened. Or we don't know. It's a big mystery why you would think our oldest cave art, we would find it a million years old here and then 500 ,000 years old here and then 100 ,000 years old here and then 10 ,000. But it isn't like that. It's like all over the world happened at once. Last thing I'll say, we think we're not going to find anything older. We may find something 2 ,000 years older or something. But when you know of 500 caves with art, that all date to the same narrow period. Yeah, I'm not an aliens built the pyramids guy at all, but it is like, what happened?

37:09What was the thing that happened? It's such a mystery and it's such a fascinating one because could that kind of thing happen again in human evolution? That is a great question. Noam Chomsky believes it was a mutation that happened in one person. What it suggests is that if a tiny genetic tweak makes us live twice as long as chimps, then there's probably a tiny genetic tweak in us to make it live twice as long or make it twice as smart. There's no reason to believe we are the pinnacle of animal intelligence or animal longevity at all. It makes you wonder about genetic engineering and like you hear like China's engineering kids that are smarter.

37:49And what happens if you figure out how to make somebody not 10 percent smarter, but like a thousand percent smarter or even 100 percent smarter? that would be really hard to contain because the benefit to that could be absolutely enormous for a nation state. And then by the time you figure out that it's a terrible idea to do that, the genetic cat is out of the bag. It's probably a different show, but that kind of thing is fascinating. And if we don't kill ourselves through nuking each other by then, imagine, I don't know, I'm tempted to joke and say that there are plenty of humans that are half as smart as other humans, but I think we're talking about an order of magnitude, which is really going to be a crazy difference.

38:24It's going to be like a different species. Do you think people with 200 IQs are more effective than people with 180, more effective than people 140, more effective than people 120? Maybe not. Not really, but I think somebody with an IQ of 1000 plus whatever other boosts you get from being a 10x improvement, you're probably going to be on a completely different level. What's actually happening is that our brains are getting smaller and we're getting less intelligent. And you say, wait, what? No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I feel it in myself. Yeah. The last three to 5 ,000 years, our brains have been shrinking.

38:58And you know why? Everybody listening probably knows what the division of labor is, that you specialize and I specialize. And one guy grinds the pens and one person does this. Because we specialize, we do more collectively, but less individually. There's a cognitive division of labor in that your average hunter-gatherer knew how to do a bunch of things that you don't know how to do. Sure, you know estate planning or whatever it is you do, you know that better than any hunter-gatherer. But the other hundred things you don't. The hunter-gatherer need more about. So what is happening is because we're all specializing, which is what happens in super organisms, by the way, we all specialize.

39:33There's the queen bee and the worker bee and the drone bee. We all specialize cognitively. And so each of us is less and less intelligent. Collectively, the species are smarter and smarter, but individually, we're all less intelligent. Unless we get in there and start flipping switches, that's the scenario you're talking about. Yeah. We're not gradually migrating that way. I think you can say Agora, the collective intelligence, is getting smarter and smarter. Agora can do anything at this point. If there were a big asteroid heading towards the Earth, Agora, a euphemism for the collective of humanity, could stop it if we were all willing to work together.

40:06Yeah, that's a big if. I saw that movie. Exactly. We could do it if we would work together. But see, bees are harmonious in the sense that it isn't like half the bees are potting against the other half. If we have that going on, we are dysfunctional as a creature. But anyway.

40:22This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Byron Reese. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Also, if you can't find it, can't remember what the sponsor is, go ahead and email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am happy to surface those codes for you. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Byron Reese.

40:54Maybe the big jump for humanity then isn't making us more intelligent. It's flipping off the tribalism switch that keeps us killing each other and doing stupid crap like that. Because if you could flip that off, which in theory is easier than turning yourself a thousand times smarter. If you could flip that off, then it would be like, wait a minute, we have people in our collective human tribe that are suffering greatly over here and over here and over here and due to these different belief systems. All right, we all need to figure out how to come to the level. And you would overnight be able to get rid of a lot of these crazy tribal conflicts, which is what's keeping us from realistically being able to defend ourselves against something like that.

41:31I mean, just look at diseases. You can't even keep people from spreading them to each other through basic principles of hygiene, let alone, hey, there's an asteroid headed towards Earth. We need China and the United States and Russia to all drop everything, knock off the crap and really just put our finest minds in one room and in good faith attack this problem. It sounds horrible to say this. We almost do need a genetic intervention where we're like we're flipping off the tribalism switch in your brain. Or some kind of a threat. But Ronald Reagan asked Mikhail Gorbachev, he said, if aliens were to invade, would we be willing to drop our conflict and work together to defend ourselves?

42:08And Gorbachev said, yes, we know this happened because they both tell the story. Gorbachev in one of his books and Reagan told it as well. So it's almost like at some level we need a shared threat. Yeah, but the threat has to be credible and so great and not affected by disinformation to the point where everybody actually believes it. It depends how fast an alien invasion really comes, right? back to human cooperation. Tell me about eye sclera, the white part of our eyes. People have said, and I think you wrote that maybe this was selected for so that we can see what other people are looking at.

42:40And when I hear about theories like this, this is just an educated guess, right? There's no way for us to have tested that sort of thing. Scientists just ask themselves why our eyes are like this when other primates' eyes aren't, and they just say like, oh, maybe it's because of this. Is that how that happens? Absolutely. That said, you can't tell across the room what somebody's looking at. Yeah. And that's because of the whites of their eyes. There's only one animal that if you point at something, it will look at that dog. A dog, yeah. Yeah, and that's because we've bred them for that. We bred them to help us so that if there were two dogs and one looked at what you were pointing at and the other didn't, you ate the other one.

43:15That was dinner. And then people in Russia bred tame foxes, basically, in about 50 generations. generations we've had 40 ,000 years of domesticating dogs and we've bred them to be this creature that is very much in tune with us and they can tell what we're looking at and they can even tell if you don't point what you're looking at and so that's the theory is that other apes that don't cooperate they don't have as much white in their eyes you can't tell what they're looking at therefore they didn't cooperate so gradually humans got a little more white in their eyes you could see what somebody was looking at you could cooperate with them you could do that the old side eye yeah exactly yeah we used to communicate threats silently too do people still keep foxes?

43:50That sounds like a cool pet to have, although it could be one of those things that sounds great in theory and then bites you all the time. That was what they wanted to try to figure out was how long it would take to domesticate a species that hitherto had resisted it, and it didn't take very long at all. They showed all the other signs of domestication. Their ears began to lay flat, their tails changed, and all these other things that happened in domesticated dogs, and many of which happen in domesticated people. We are essentially self-domesticating. I don't want to get on the rabbit hole, but there's a theory that grain domesticated humans.

44:19Wheat wants to propagate and wheat wants to grow. So wheat's like, oh, I need these people to plant and harvest and weed and whoever, whatever ended up domesticating us or we self-domesticated, we show these same attributes. The rabbit hole is that wheat actively domesticated us. Not really. I'm kidding that wheat actively domesticated us. Because I'm like, that's a little bit out there, man. I agree. I was joking with that. But we probably self-domesticated and we show these other signs of domestication. What about when animals, was Coco a gorilla, the one that had the kitten? so she could speak sign language right i don't think so no she could sign i have a whole chapter in a book about this first of all she obviously couldn't speak anything but she could sign so all kinds of things communicate that's easy a dog communicates by biting you to say it disappears communication but speech is this high bar and all of these creatures the first thing you have to understand is there's never been a creature that has ever asked a question none of these talented apes have ever asked a question.

45:18There may be one bird, Alex the parrot, who asked one question one time, maybe. But other than that, we don't know of anything. So they're not interrogative. They can do signs of different words, but language is a specific thing. You have to be able to talk about things that aren't there. You have to be able to combine things in new ways together to make new meanings. You can't just have a symbol for banana that you hold it up when you want a banana, and then you get a banana, and you hold it up, you get a banana. It's just training something that if you do this sign, you get a banana. That isn't like, ah, I shall sign banana, and then I shall sign banana in two, and I will ask for two bananas.

45:55There's nothing that does anything like that. So I don't believe. Also, oftentimes there's only one person that can read the signs of the creature. Often it's their handler. I'm not saying that they deliberately mislead. I really don't think they do. But sometimes they'll ask a question, get a nonsensical answer, and say, oh, stop joking, stop kidding, come on, when maybe they weren't kidding at all. We seem to want there to be other animals that have language, and I just don't think there are. Oh, I see what you're saying. So since they can only communicate with the handler, basically the handler's filling in blanks that are just enormous gaps in the communication.

46:29So if she says, how are you feeling today, Coco? And Coco says nothing and just does a bunch of nonsense, the handler goes, well, I'm going to disregard that because none of that was anything. and then Coco says, I want a banana. And the handler goes, oh, you're telling me that you're hungry. That's not really what happened. That's your interpretation of what this sign would mean in this particular context. But the gorilla itself doesn't necessarily have that. The gorilla doesn't say, I had a rough night. I'm really hungry. I didn't eat much for dinner last night. I want a banana. She just said, banana.

46:58And the handler's filling in all this stuff. And that's some of the criticism I've read about this too is this is just saying banana, that's it. It's not telling you about the day or the evening. It's very simple stuff. But when it comes through the handler, it ends up almost exaggerated. It sounds like you're saying that's because humans in general, we just want to think. I taught this guerrilla sign language and look, it unlocked the mind of this intelligent being that just couldn't speak. And that's not really true. Correct. I'm not saying any of these people are being deceptive. Like, they really believe that about these animals.

47:29Sure. Here's Noam Chomsky's argument against this. Speech is very complicated. It's a complicated mental thing. And the idea that somehow apes could do it, they had this big mental ability, and they just didn't know until a human came along and showed them. He says it would be analogous to humans can really fly, we just don't know it, until a bird comes along and shows us, and then we're like, oh my gosh, I can fly. You don't evolve the ability to fly without gradually learning to fly. And the idea that these animals, somehow they've evolved this enormous mental ability that they could do it, and until we came along and taught them sign, they just didn't, just not credible.

48:06It's not how evolution works. Chomsky goes so far as to say that if that were true, you have just disproven evolution because evolution doesn't evolve you some ability to do language. But guess what? Nobody for a thousand generations ever did, but it persisted and evolved anyway. Chomsky, by the way, for people who don't know, formerly a linguist at Harvard, just very famous in the space and also very famous for having crazy L takes on political topics that I mostly disagree with these days. I don't know. He seems like a cranky guy now. He is a linguist and, as you point out, a political commentator as well.

48:39He's famous in like four different areas, and I'm specifically talking about him as a linguist where he is, I think, a trailblazer. Although, again, not universally. He believes humans have an innate ability to do language and that animals don't. He has plenty of adherence, but that's by no means a settled question, and I don't want to imply that it is. Whenever I play fairy tales for my kids, my wife and I tend to look at each other and go, what the hell is this? And we Google it. What is the meaning of this? Tell me about fairy tales, because these are the concept of stories and communication.

49:10Where were these created and why are they so weird? A lot of them are violent and dark, too. They've been redone for YouTube kids. But if you look at the original one, it was at Hansel and Gretel. My wife is playing something. And I was like, I remember it very differently. Didn't they get eaten by the witch? They didn't just escape and run home. They got eaten in the candy house, I thought. And my wife's like, no, that's disgusting. And we looked it up and sure enough, there's different versions of this. What are these from? What are they for? You're entirely right. The Snow White, they killed the evil stepmother by heating up some shoes to red hot metal and making her wear them and dance.

49:45So they killed the witch that way? I didn't know that. That's horrible. Yeah, just made her dance to death. So linguists can figure out how old these stories are, which is very fascinating. They can look at commonalities in different places, figure out how the language progressed, and they can actually say, this originated on this date in this place with some amount of, we think, confidence. So our oldest of these fairy tales are much older than we thought. They go back 5 ,000 years. The Smith and the Anvil, a tale about fooling the devil, we think predates writing. And Jack and the Beanstalk, which is a story about an imperialist who goes to another land, kills all the natives, takes all the gold and comes home, goes back a long way and so forth.

50:25One theory is that they came from a violent world. Why do people go to Saw movies? They think it's the same way. It's a safe way to experience something like that. That's interesting. I looked up a lot of these old fairy tales because I was like, oh, the Pied Piper, they paid this guy and he got all the rats out of a town. And it's like, actually, what happened is they told the guy they were going to pay him. He got all the rats out of town. and then they ripped him off and then he took all their kids by using his magic pipe. And I was like, oh, that is horrific. He stole their kids. That one actually may be based on a fact.

51:01There's an inscription in a Bible that was 100 years ago today that the children all left the town in Amland. They think that might be a real story. What, a guy with a magic pipe led all the children away? Well, I don't know. Somehow took all the children. Oh, my God. That's like a genocidal little fairy tale. And it could have been a euphemism for something else. Something else that surprised me was that many older movies were shot with alternate depressing endings for the Russian market. Is that true? Because that is so weird. What is the deal with that? So we're talking the silent era. So like black and white films that have subtitles written on them or whatever?

51:36Correct. OK. So they would do two things. They would have multi-ethnic casts for different localities. So they would shoot a scene with European-descended actors, and they would shoot it with Asian-descended actors and so forth. Really? So that they could— Sounds pretty woke for the silent era. Yeah, they could say, hey, we've got the cameras, we've got the sets, we've got the people, we've got everything. Let's do multiple ones. And then they would evidently shoot depressing endings for Russian films. Why? We don't want people to be happy. Make sure this ending sucks. The argument was that was regarded as realistic to them, whereas the soccer and Hollywood ending is considered unrealistic.

52:13Maybe we think it's unrealistic, too, but still want it. But evidently, in pre-revolution Russia, they wanted the dark, depressing ending. It's funny because the psychology behind this is like, OK, in America, oh, look, a happy ending. I want to believe my life is like that. And then it's like Russian version. Wow, they all died. At least I'm still alive and I'm sitting here watching this movie. My life's not that bad. We want the positive comparison, like maybe I'll turn out like that. And they're like, I'm glad I didn't turn out like that. I guess it's just a cultural desire. And they dialed that in.

52:42It's so funny. Why don't we do that now? Why doesn't a Marvel movie end with Iron Man just getting his ass kicked? And it's like, well, shouldn't have tried. Should have stayed where you were, Tony Stark. Why don't we do that now? I don't know. You know, movies gross different amounts in different markets. And I think if they felt like they could crack the code on why, they would have different endings in different markets. Huh. It seems like we already did crack the code on Y and then just ditched that knowledge. Maybe. Yeah. It can't be that hard to make Spider-Man die in the end. I guess there goes your sequel, though.

53:13That's the problem. I'm not sure where this fits, as with everything else in this conversation, but I've always wondered, why do we use Arabic numerals in alternative ways of counting? The reason I thought about this is because somebody mentioned that they were teaching Arabic numerals in school, and they posted it on Facebook, and you could see all these old people get like, I can't believe it. What is society coming to? Because they don't realize we've been using Arabic numerals for thousands of years, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Why don't we use Roman numerals for things like math? You never see V minus IV equals I, right?

53:44We don't do that. Why not? That's a great question. So the scientific revolution is what made progress in the West. It came along when we got math in Western Europe, because you go to the 1600s, you didn't have the plus sign, you didn't have negative numbers, all these things we just couldn't do. We didn't have math because you can't do math with Roman numerals. They had workarounds, but you're right. XVII times Xi is hard to do. People often hear, okay, the big advance was the invention of zero. And you've probably heard that, but that isn't really a good way to describe it. Everybody knows what nothing is.

54:24The breakthrough that we got with Arabic numbers was the place value of numbers. So you could have a one and you put a zero next to it and it was a 10. And then you could put two zeros next to it, and it was 100. So that where it was in a column told you its value. And that allowed you to do math. You know, when you multiply how you do it. When you had zero, you could have place value numbers, and then you could do complex math, and then you could do science. They were hard to get people to adopt because accounting needed them for double-entry bookkeeping, which allowed businesses and corporations and raising money and all of that.

54:58And they really didn't want to change. And you still see them. Sequels and movies Super Bowl numbers. Only one Super Bowl has, by policy, not been represented by a Roman numeral. And that was Super Bowl 50, was 5-0. They didn't want to be Super Bowl L. Every other one is done with that. Queen Elizabeth II is never done with a two after it. Clock faces and so forth. So that gives you some sense of how hard they are to get rid of when they serve no purpose. It's always an amazing reminder when you hear Arabic numerals were this way because of counting dot, dot, dot, science and the scientific method, because when I look at the Middle East now, I just do not associate it with enlightenment, scientific advancement.

55:37Now it's associated with religious fundamentalism and being almost in the Stone Age in terms of human rights. And this is probably a different show, but it's almost like, man, these places started out so much further ahead of the rest of the world in pretty much every way. And then religion made a comeback. I'm not even sure what happened. Again, it's probably a different podcast. It's so crazy to me. It is true that there was an enlightened period where a lot of those advances came from. Our word algebra is obviously Arabic. Our word algorithm is Arabic origin as well. A lot of it, they were translating the early Greek works on math and all of that when they weren't translated in other Western languages.

56:15So they had access to different body of knowledge. There's a lot of really interesting reasons, but cultural ones as well, like you just said. Man, we went all over the place with this one, but I knew there was too much to fit into a coherent topical conversation. Thank you very much for bearing with me on that and coming on the show, man. Really interesting conversation. You're full of factoids is the wrong word. Interesting knowledge is the polite way to phrase that. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. You still seem to have an honest sense of wonder about the world. Like, that blew my mind.

56:43I love that. I thought about that all day. That was like so incredible. And it's just wonderful to feel that way about knowledge. That's what makes America around. Yeah. Thanks again for coming on. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Egyptologist and television host Remy Romani. We're talking about 6 ,000 years of history. Everything you see about ancient Egypt today, everything that we've discovered, is calculated to be about just 12 % of ancient Egypt. 88 % is still hiding under the sand. Egypt is mentioned in so many different sources of history. One of the sources is obviously on the ancient Egyptian wall, There are very similar stories in the Bible.

57:26I personally believe that the Bible stories, whether completely true or not, they were always inspired from true stories. But I'm trying to finish the alignment of religious history and ancient Egyptian history. I find it fascinating. I think the key to our future is in our death. Today, you study the dead to make sure you're prepared for the future. We have the dead. we have mummies. They're just dead people. And what archaeologists struggle with all the time is if I start digging into this mummy today to unlock secrets of the past that would help us in our future, am I doing it too soon? Am I hurting this mummy?

58:08You want to dig, you want to find more, you want to know more about the past, but if you dig now with the tools you have now, you might hurt some of the data that is stored into all these little pieces. It's a massive dilemma that archaeologist Seth DeWitt. And today, we do have technology good enough to tell us so much about these mummies, so much about the past that we never knew before. For more about ancient Egypt and Rami's daring escape, check out episode 784 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Byron's a super interesting guy. Humans don't just talk about the future with language. They also plan for the future.

58:47Animals do not do this. I forgot to clarify that earlier in the conversation. Apes don't really do this. They actually, I know some people go, well, what about apes? They actually stop caring. Their sort of perspective on the future ends a few minutes ahead of their current timeline of the present. And it really kind of only affects things like hunger. They don't really think, huh, in a couple of years, you know, we could probably clear this area and yet they don't do anything like that. Humans do something dramatically different. One kind of funny, possibly apocryphal example is the Swedish naval fleet, if you can even call it that, planted oak trees in 1831 to provide strategically important timber for future ship construction.

59:23Imagine in 1831, you're thinking, hey, in 1980, we're going to need this. And that was the plan. That was really the plan. It's actually kind of unbelievable. They planted 300 ,000 oak trees. Additionally, St. Basil's Cathedral, you know, the building in Russia, probably the most famous building in Russia, actually, that very colorful cathedral. They ordered, if you can even call it that, enough tiles for the next thousand years or so. So they will never run out of tiles to replace the outside. So if they, something falls off, it gets weathered, they're not going to go, oh, we need something that's exactly this blue.

59:58They already have it. It's already there, ready to go. Unbelievable. So animals don't do anything like this. Humans really are the only species that even comes close. I was also surprised to learn that Navajo language and Mongolian language, share a bunch of words. They also share a bunch of stories, especially stories about stars. So like the Big Dipper is a bear and it's being chased by hunters. Siberians also have that same story. So the idea here, this is not a coincidence. The idea here is that once upon a time, this was one people before they spread out thousands of years ago. And it's amazing to think about stuff like that, isn't it?

1:00:33It's really incredible to think that Native Americans or First Nations and Mongolians and Siberians. They were all one people. So they all these old words and old stories, they all kind of made it. And you can see this in other language patterns. For example, the word for wagon might be the same, but the word for car will then be different because cars were invented so much later. All the wagons were at the same time. So before wagons were invented or as they were invented, everybody was in one spot. Then you invent something like the wagon and suddenly the civilization spreads out and starts to change and evolve.

1:01:05So those words that existed before that are similar or the same. And the words that existed after that, that's where the language really diverges. I don't know. Maybe I'm just a nerd. That stuff is so interesting for me. Anyway, all things Byron Reese will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot on the website as well. Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Also, we've got our newsletter every week. the team and I dig into an older episode of the show.

1:01:36We dissect the lessons from it. So if you're a fan of the show and you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do that. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. We're going to be doing some giveaways on there. We finally finished the fricking flashcards. So stay tuned for that, the logical fallacy flashcards. Those are going to be ready to rock by the time you hear this. So you can go to the Thinkific course, Six Minute Networking, grab those. I better come up with some copy to steer people over there.

1:02:04Don't forget, we do have 6-Minute Networking over at 6minutenetworking.com. If you are already registered, you can grab the flashcards there. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:02:33If you know somebody who's interested in language, evolution, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you can apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.