Joe Rogan Experience #2549 - Jared Diamond

Chile was the most democratic country in South America before Pinochet took power.

Chile did have one of the more stable and long-running democracies in Latin America before the 1973 coup, so there is real substance here. But calling it flatly the most democratic country in South America overstates it, since Uruguay is widely regarded as having the longest continuous democratic tradition in the region and is often given that title instead of Chile.

The Gospel of Mark was written approximately 20 years after the death of Jesus.

This understates the actual gap by about half. Mainstream biblical scholarship dates the Gospel of Mark to around 70 CE, tied to its reference to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple during the Roman Jewish War, which puts it roughly 40 years after Jesus's traditionally dated death around 30 CE, not 20 years.

It took two centuries for the teachings of Muhammad to be written down.

This is true for hadith collections but not for the Quran. The Quran, which Muslims regard as containing Muhammad's revealed teachings, was substantially compiled into a standard written text within about 20 to 25 years of his death under Caliph Uthman. It took roughly two centuries for the hadith, the separate reports of Muhammad's sayings and actions, to be gathered into major written collections like Sahih Bukhari, so the two century figure only fits part of the picture.

Xerox PARC attempted to develop a device for simultaneous machine translation in the 1970s.

Xerox PARC did have real machine translation and computational linguistics research starting in the 1970s, led by pioneer Martin Kay who joined in 1974 and helped form the Language Understander project there. But that work was software and theory aimed at helping humans translate written text, sometimes called a translator's assistant, not a hardware device built for simultaneous, real time spoken translation, which was far beyond the speech technology of that decade.

The Fawi (Faui) language in Indonesian New Guinea is a tonal language with 12 identified tones.

There is no language actually named Fawi or Faui, but Indonesian Papua really does have unusually tonal languages in the Lakes Plain family. The closest match, Iau, is described as having 8 core phonemic tones and 11 tone patterns on nouns, and the similarly named Foau language spoken in Fuau village has 8 tone melodies, not 12. So the general idea, a New Guinea language with a huge number of tones, checks out, but the specific name and the number 12 do not match any documented language.

The unification of Italy in 1862 relied heavily on the development of a national school system and a national army to foster national identity.

The core idea, that Italy used schools and a national army to build a shared national identity after unification, matches real history and the famous line attributed to Massimo d'Azeglio about needing to 'make Italians.' But the unification date is wrong: the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861, not 1862, and full unification wasn't completed until Rome was taken in 1870.

Prion diseases are not reliably destroyed by standard boiling or steam sterilization, often requiring temperatures near 900 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours.

It is true that ordinary boiling does not reliably destroy prions, and that is a real problem for sterilizing surgical tools. But the 900 degree Fahrenheit figure is far too high. CDC and WHO guidance calls for autoclaving at 121 to 134 degrees Celsius, about 250 to 273 degrees Fahrenheit, usually combined with a sodium hydroxide or bleach pretreatment, not temperatures anywhere near 900 degrees.

Writing in India completely disappeared after the Harappan period and did not reemerge until the invasion of Alexander the Great.

There really is a long gap between the disappearance of Harappan writing and the appearance of Brahmi script in India, but tying its reemergence specifically to Alexander the Great's invasion misstates the evidence. Historians point instead to contact with the Persian Achaemenid empire in the 6th century BCE, a century or more before Alexander arrived, plus indirect evidence of earlier literacy such as Panini's grammar, and some Brahmi inscriptions may predate Alexander entirely. Alexander's expedition gets mentioned in sources mainly because Greek writers who traveled with him recorded seeing Indian writing already in use, not because he brought writing back to India.

The Mahdi of the Sudan was able to defeat British-Egyptian armies equipped with machine guns using troops armed with sticks and stones.

The Mahdist forces did win major victories against Egyptian armies that had machine guns and artillery, most notably wiping out Hicks Pasha's expedition at the Battle of Shaykan in 1883, where about 7,000 Egyptian troops were killed. But the Mahdists were not armed with sticks and stones, they fought with rifles captured in earlier battles along with swords and spears, and Hicks's force was Egyptian led by a British officer rather than a true combined British-Egyptian army. At the later Battle of Omdurman in 1898, machine guns under Kitchener devastated the Mahdists, so the claim only holds for the earlier fights and overstates how primitive their weapons were.

The Foray language of Papua New Guinea has two separate verbs for 'to be', one for inanimate objects and one for animals.

There is no language actually called Foray. The name almost certainly points to Fore, pronounced FOR-ay, the very first New Guinea language Jared Diamond learned by his own account. Papua New Guinea highland languages do have real documented systems where the verb for existence or being changes based on the noun class of the subject, including animacy, for example Enga and Kuman, but these systems usually involve several verb categories sorted by shape, posture and state rather than a simple two way animate versus inanimate split, and none of the sources checked confirm this specific two verb animals versus objects setup for Fore or its close relative Foi. So the general idea has real linguistic roots but the specific claim as stated does not match documented grammars.