What Makes Great Leaders & How to Live an Extraordinary Life | Dr. Jared Diamond
Guests: Jared Diamond
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript — part 1
People regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders.
Perhaps the commonest generalization is that leaders have to be charismatic.
Nonsense.
Some leaders are charismatic.
Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, totally uncharismatic.
There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader of which charisma is one.
And any question that you or anybody else would ask about how can we generalize about leaders,
there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations,
because there are different ways to be an effective leader.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford
School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. Jared Diamond.
Dr. Jared Diamond is a professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles.
He's done research in biology, anthropology, and frankly, in so many areas that there really
isn't an appropriate title for him.
He's also a renowned author of books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel, for which he was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He has also been awarded the National Medal of Science and a
MacArthur Genius Award. Today, we discuss topics related to Jared's most recent book, which is
about leaders and leadership. It is entitled Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings. We discuss
political leaders, religious leaders, leaders in business, and in sports. Today, you're going to
hear a lot of myths dispelled, including the common myth that charisma is requisite for successful
leadership. And we discuss a lot of incredible biology. For instance, why observing birds,
yes, birds, because of their reliance on sight and sound, makes them one of the best windows
into understanding human behavior and human nature. We also discuss Jared himself, because
as you'll soon see, he is an incredible and very unusual human being. We discuss his obsessive
curiosity that's been there since childhood, and how it's migrated from topic to topic,
book to book, paper to paper, and what his process is for taking hard questions into the
laboratory and going out into the wild, literally, to observe things in their natural state and then
bring back all of that knowledge in a form that is unlike any other scientist or writer. So what
follows is a discussion with an absolute luminary of science and public education, and it's one that
I'm certain will inform, enchant, and inspire you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this
podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my
desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related
tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors.
And now for my discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond. Dr. Jared Diamond, welcome.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
Delighted to have you here. I'm such a fan of your books, Guns, Germs, and Steel was the first one I
read, and I'm going to resist the temptation to ask about the topics in each of all of your books
and mainly focus on your book, which is profits, phonetically the same, but profits as in making
prophets and prophets as in who become prophets and what they are. Coaches and kings, when do
leaders matter? I think now more than ever, people are thinking about modern leadership and themes of
past in leadership. First, I would like to know what is a prophet, P-R-O-P-H-E-T?
Prophet means, for my purposes, religious leaders, because my book about leadership
It looks at leadership in four spheres, the political sphere, the business sphere, sports, and finally religion.
I use the word prophets to refer to religious leaders because it makes for prophets, prophets, coaches, and kings.
I don't care about whether they prophesy the future.
It was simply my word for religious leaders.
Let's talk about leadership in each of those categories.
and people that stand out to you as the lightest and darkest in each of those categories.
And we can go into the middle of the continuum if you want as well.
But your book starts off talking about Hitler,
which for the vast majority of people alive is considered one of the darkest leaders ever.
Tell us about Hitler and what you learned about him
that perhaps can inform how we think about leadership more generally.
I was born in 1937, which meant that I grew up in World War II.
Growing up in the United States, I was not bombed, I was not orphaned, but every day of my life that I can remember was formed by the war.
My first memory, the first data thing that I can remember, was the first photo that the U.S. Army released of dead American soldiers.
It was a famous cover of Life magazine, two American soldiers dead face down on Bunangona Beach in New Guinea.
So I grew up in the shadow of Hitler.
My family is from Eastern Europe, Jewish from Eastern Europe.
The last of my family, of course, disappeared in the Holocaust.
I married into a Polish family.
My wife's parents came to the U.S. in 1948.
My wife's mother had survived Auschwitz.
Various members of my wife's family did not survive.
And so my life and Marie's life had been formed under the shadow of Hitler.
On top of that, then there are leaders, nonpolitical leaders, who've shaped my life mostly for the good.
There was a chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department.
I left a rubber hose pump, water pump, running all night to dry out radioactive isotopes.
The pump broke.
It flooded my lab.
It flooded the lab below my lab.
That was not a good choice of a lab to flood.
It was the lab of Lord Adrian, who was the father-in-law of my thesis advisor and who was the master of my college.
The next morning, the chair of the physiology department, Sir Brian Matthews, called me and I thought I was going to be expelled.
Instead, he said, you know, that was sloppy.
Don't do that again.
And that was – so there was a leader who could have ended my career but didn't.
There are other leaders who've done decisively good things for my career.
There are a few people who failed to do anything but have not been leaders.
Those are the reasons for my personal interest in leaders starting with the question of Hitler.
If there had not been Hitler, would my family in Eastern Europe and would Marie's family still be alive?
How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?
There were two famous near endings of Hitler's life.
My book begins, the first paragraph of my book is about a car accident in 1930, three years before Hitler became chancellor,
when his limousine, driven by a chauffeur, was driving into an intersection in Germany.
Hitler was in the passenger seat, the right-hand seat,
and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles with Hitler's sedan.
Both Hitler's chauffeur and the truck driver either braked or accelerated alternately,
and the truck hit Hitler's car face-on, pushed up against the curve,
and was about to ride up over the car, crushing Hitler.
It came to a stop just before that.
Hitler was injured, but he was not killed.
If he had died in 1930, would there have been World War II and would there have been a Holocaust?
And then the other famous almost was that in 1944, next to last year of the war,
Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who became disillusioned, attempted to kill Hitler.
He brought a small suitcase with a bomb into the conference room at Wolf's Lair.
He sat down next to Hitler, put the suitcase, which he had primed the bomb.
He put the suitcase just under Hitler's foot and the bomb went off.
But just before the bomb went off, Hitler leaned forward.
The result was that four other people in the room got killed.
Hitler's eardrum was blown out.
Hitler was seriously wounded, but he was not killed.
But if Hitler had not leaned forward—that was 1944—would various members of my wife's family have survived?
So those are reasons how close it came to Hitler not becoming chancellor and how close it came to World War II ending in 1944, World War II in Europe ending in 1944.
Was there anyone else that could have accomplished what Hitler accomplished?
Historians argue about that.
This illustrates the difficulties in figuring out whether leaders make a difference.
difference. The traditional method of historians is to write a biography. There are many people
who've written biographies of Hitler. Most biographers of Hitler conclude that Hitler was
unique in several respects. He was the most charismatic orator, unfortunately, of the 20th
century. He was anti-Semitic. There were plenty of anti-Semites in Europe, not just in Germany,
but in Poland.
But Hitler, all those other anti-Semites,
killed Jews one by one.
Hitler was the only one who got the idea of doing it
on an industrial scale.
Without Hitler,
there probably would not have been a Holocaust.
He was also brilliant at deceiving people,
deceiving famously Neville Chamberlain at Munich,
but he also deceived German politicians
He deceived German business leaders.
He deceived German generals.
He deceived his fellow Nazis.
He was just brilliant at deceiving people.
So those are the arguments for thinking that he made a difference,
that without Hitler there might not have been a World War II
and there would not have been a Holocaust.
Most historians tend to believe that leaders don't make a difference.
But in the case of Hitler, most historians would argue that Hitler did make a difference.
The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote a biography of Hitler using the same facts.
And with the same facts, A.J.P. Taylor came to the conclusion that Hitler was a normal German politician pursuing the goals of other German politicians, which was true, but that there wouldn't have been any difference if Hitler had not been a leader.
So those are the arguments about it, but that illustrates the weakness of the traditional biographic method.
One's limited by the facts, but different people come to different conclusions with the same facts.
That's why my book uses a different method, the method of natural experiments.
Who in your mind is the most unlikely leader that became a spectacularly successful leader, either toward positive or destructive ends?
There were many, many candidates for that. The first, having been born in 1937, I grew up under Roosevelt, but the first American president in whom I became interested because I was by then 80, Harry Truman.
The most unlikely significant American president.
He was selected as Roosevelt's third or fourth vice president for trivial political reasons.
He was a senator from Missouri, undistinguished.
He had become senator through dishonest shenanigans.
He was so insignificant that Roosevelt never met with him once Truman became vice president.
And when Roosevelt died, Truman was totally— Truman didn't know about the atomic bomb.
And yet the first decision that he had to make was whether to drop the atomic bombs.
At the time, Truman was widely despised.
I remember my own view of Truman.
He, I, and others looked down on Truman.
But in retrospect, we realized that Truman was courageous.
He didn't care whether people hated him.
He made courageous decisions, the Berlin airlift, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War, which people hated him for, firing General MacArthur, which people hated him for.
And so when Truman stepped down, he was widely loathed.
But in retrospect, gradually he's become appreciated as not equal to Roosevelt and Lincoln, but the second tier, a courageous American president who took decisions and didn't care that he was going to be loathed because of his decisions.
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These days, at least in the tech sector and entrepreneurial space, there's been a lot of discussion about the disservice that introspection can do for people who are trying to build big things,
be leaders, be entrepreneurs. We have to be careful about painting with too broad a brush,
but in researching different leaders, both dark and light, is there a theme of powerful leaders
being able to just step into the next decision without too much thought about the past or how
they're going to be perceived? That's one form of introspection. I realize there are others, but
is there a correlation there? I would say no. And this illustrates a broad point. People
regularly look for personal generalizations, personality generalizations about leaders,
perhaps the commonest generalization, is that leaders have to be charismatic.
Nonsense.
Some leaders are charismatic.
Stalin, Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, totally uncharismatic.
§02Transcript — part 2
There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader of which charisma is one.
And any question that you or anybody else would ask about how can we generalize about leaders,
there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations
because there are different ways to be an effective leader.
I'm getting the sense that in your understanding of leaders and leadership,
based on what you just said,
that it's this weird confluence of circumstances
who's not available to lead better,
perhaps charisma or lack of charisma,
a weird constellation of things that give rise to history
and what we're experiencing now.
And so for me, and perhaps I'm wrong about this,
that contrasts a bit with my understanding of you
based on your prior books,
which is that you're trying to find thematic regularities.
You're trying to put structure on things that at the face of them are very complex,
like how did we get here?
How did cultures evolve, et cetera, and on and on.
So in this exploration of leadership, how do you go from being able to explain each circumstance
to some taxonomy that allows you to be satisfied?
And I'm going to set up a parallel with something that we're going to look at later, which is bird watching.
I mean, every bird is different, but every bird belongs to a particular category and has particular features.
And in many ways, I'm thinking about leaders and leadership the same way.
What is satisfying to you?
What level of understanding and consistency of ideas is satisfying?
There are generalizations that I came to in writing about leaders.
But I would say just as background, people often ask me, Jared, your book about leaders now seems to be the opposite of guns, germs, and steel.
Jared, your book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, was about big patterns.
There was nothing about individuals.
Instead, it was about domestication and the shapes of continents.
Does that mean that you've changed your mind and you now recognize the role of individuals?
And my answer to that is no.
Guns, Germs and Steel is about patterns of history on the continents over the last 10,000 years.
And over the last 10,000 years on whole continents, I can't think of any individual who's made a difference.
There was no individual who was responsible for the Fertile Crescent jumpstarting, quote, civilization.
The Fertile Crescent jumpstarted civilization.
Why? Because the Fertile Crescent was where the most productive wild plants, peas, wheat, barley, the most productive wild animal, cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse, lived.
And so in Guns, Germs, and Steel, there's nothing at all about individuals.
Whereas my book about leadership is about what people have done during my lifetime, usually on local scales.
And so it is about individuals, whereas Guns, Germs, and Steel was not at all about.
I haven't changed my mind, is that I'm looking at completely different sorts of questions now in Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings compared to Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Is it a leap to say that Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings is a, in some ways, is a autobiography of where you're, of the things that impacted your life along the way?
In motivation, yes.
In content, no.
In motivation, yes, the role of Hitler in my family's life and my wife's life, but the content of the book is all divorced from me.
In the introduction, I think, I do mention that Sir Brian Matthews saved, as a leader of the Cambridge Physiology Department, saved my career in physiology.
But then once I launch into politics and once I launch into the business world and once I launch into the sports world and religion, no, it's all stuff.
I haven't contributed to any of those four areas.
Now, in the epilogue of the book, I do ask what are the areas that are waiting for exploration by the method of natural experiments?
And I'm in science, which I am a scientist.
Art and music, I am a musician.
Military history, I'm very interested in military history.
Social unrest.
I'm hoping that in the future, people will apply these questions of leadership to things that involve me personally, particularly music and science.
But that's for the future.
You mentioned this story about flooding the laboratory with, I should point out, I heard you say radioactive isotope water.
What is your takeaway from that particular professor's response?
And has it made you more forgiving of other people's mistakes?
I've not been one to jump on other people for their mistakes.
Well, I've made plenty of mistakes.
I've had very close calls myself.
I've done things that could have ended my career on the spot, such as that.
There were other things that could have ended my career on the spot.
So I'm not inclined to blame other people for their mistakes.
I recall a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer mentioned that Oppenheimer, he committed theft and he could easily have been fired and his career might have been ended.
But the theft was overlooked and so he went on to develop his career.
It's interesting how when we are very low on a hierarchical ladder, like in academia in its traditional days anyway, that people hold tremendous power, obviously, to impact us and whether we move forward or not.
But it's always reassuring when something like the forgiveness of this professor, if people can hear that, because I think a lot of people associate powerful leadership with, here I'm generalizing again, with a sort of a lack of tolerance for imperfection, lack of tolerance for things that could threaten the whole department in this case.
So it's a very sweet story on the one hand, but I imagine it didn't happen a second time.
There's also that, right?
For 36 years, I was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School doing laboratory experiments.
And so I had graduate students and postdocs.
And quite a few of the graduates and postdocs screwed up.
They made big mistakes.
I remember my second graduate student, my department wanted to expel him because he didn't do well on an exam.
I convinced my department to let him stay, and he turned out to be an outstanding researcher.
A couple of others of my students had close calls, but again, I'm reminded how close I came myself to having my career ended.
And people forgave me, and my career developed very well.
I would say so.
Since I was forgiven, it behooves me to forgive my students.
I love it.
And I'm sure many people appreciate that.
It's a very different picture of academia than I think most people get.
So thank you for that.
Religious leaders.
Who in your mind stood out as important enough to feature prominently in the book?
In the book, I have two chapters on religious leaders.
The first chapter looks at three religious leaders in the 19th century United States because we got lots of detailed information about them.
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion.
Ann Lee, the founder of Shakers.
Jim Jones, the founder of Jonestown.
So we have a lot of information about them.
The second chapter on religion looks at Jesus.
We have minimal information about Jesus.
We have no contemporary information whatsoever about him.
The first information that we have about him is the letters of St. Paul and the gospel according to St. Mark, both of which follow his death by about 20 years.
So there's no contemporary information about him.
With Jesus, did Jesus make a difference?
Well, if you read the New Testament, it talks about names, six other messiahs.
Jesus was not the only messiah.
There were lots of people then who said, I'm the messiah.
And six of them are named in the New Testament.
A couple of them were killed by the Romans.
John the Baptist had his head cut off.
Jesus was killed.
But this was the Western Roman Empire.
the most powerful political entity of Western Eurasia,
just the right place to found a major religion.
Jesus, of course, could not foresee that 1,467 years after his death,
Columbus would sail the ocean blue and launch the European conquest of the world,
spreading the European religion.
But the European religion was Christianity.
Why?
because Christianity was the religion of the Western Roman Empire,
the most powerful entity at the time.
So if Jesus had been with the same properties in Sudan,
we wouldn't know about Jesus.
If Jesus had been a religious leader in Western Europe, 100 B.C.,
we wouldn't know about him.
He was the right place and right time.
He definitely has the highest H-index of any religious leader.
The right place and the right time. And I believe that Christianity is today the world religion with the largest number of adherents.
I know you try not to generalize, but is there anything specific about Jesus, the person that we do know with almost certainty or with certainty that spoke to his effectiveness?
Or was it, you said right place, right time, but that seems necessary but not sufficient.
Right. There were other people at the right place in the right time. There were those six other prophets mentioned in the New Testament. And there were the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why was world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes?
Well, there are a couple of things.
One, Jesus' message and personal qualities.
He had a universal message for all people.
It was not just a message for the Essenes and it was not just a message for Jews.
Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but his message was not addressed to just the Jews.
It was a universal message of those religious leaders of the Roman Empire at that time.
That was a big thing in his favor.
And another thing in his favor was that a religion needs not only a charismatic founder, but it also needs an organizer.
In some cases, the organizer and the charismatic founder are the same person.
Mohammed was a great organizer and also charismatic.
The Mahdi of the Sudan was a brilliant organizer and brilliant general, also a brilliant religious leader.
Jesus died too early.
He was not the organizer.
It was St. Paul.
St. Paul was a great organizer, just as with the Mormon religion.
Joseph Smith was the charismatic founder of the Mormon religion.
Even in his lifetime, he had his weaknesses as an organizer.
And he was then lynched.
The organizer was Brigham Young, who was a great organizer.
So your question, why Jesus?
Universal message.
and he had the good fortune that he was then followed by a great organizer, St. Paul.
And he was in the right place, the Western Roman Empire, at the perfect time.
And Columbus obviously was able to propagate his ideas far, as you pointed out,
with the desire to still avoid generalizations.
The picture I'm getting is that you need a leader, you need an organizer.
Sometimes the leader is the organizer, but oftentimes it sounds like there's someone else
or other people who can help organize the message.
We see this in science quite often, especially in the biological sciences, pairs of, well,
your advisor, Hodgkin Huxley, won the Nobel Prize.
They're famous for describing the biophysics of the action potential.
Hubel Wiesel won the Nobel Prize.
It's very common that there's this pairing and having known David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel a bit, Torsten's still alive.
There's often a personality complementarity there too.
One tends to be a little bit more outspoken, one a little bit more, you know, Watson and Crick.
I'm sure there are just as many examples that don't fit.
But in thinking about leaders, not just religious leaders, can we make any kind of generalization about pairings to very complementary people that are especially effective in getting escape velocity on their leadership, their message?
I don't think so. In the case of religion, it's not just pairings, but it's often triplets.
Namely, to launch a religion, you need a charismatic founder, you need an organizer.
But generally, always when you found a new religion, there is pushback from existing religions.
And often that pushback is violent so that often new religions have had to defend themselves, have had to have generals.
For example, the Mahdi Mohammed was an outstanding general as well as organizer and charismatic.
The Mahdi of the Sudan, who established an empire in East Africa towards the end of the 19th century.
Great general.
He led hundreds or thousands of Sudanese tribes with just sticks to wipe out a British-Egyptian army of 7,000 with machine guns.
Great general.
Great organizer.
Charismatic.
But in other spheres, in science, there are scientists who are large-scale organizers.
My thesis was Alan Hodgkin.
Alan Hodgkin did a great scientist.
He did not organize 50 people into a lab group.
Alan Hodgkin, his strategy was to have one PhD student at a time.
While I was his PhD student for three years, he did not have another PhD student.
He did become master of Trinity College.
And he was an effective master of Trinity College.
But there are scientists, also outstanding organizers, Gerald Edelman, who won a Nobel
Prize for his work on figuring out how antibodies operate.
Gerald Edelman had, I believe, something like 50 postdocs.
And a friend of mine made a discovery that so-called Bence Jones proteins in the kidney,
a discovery that was crucial to figuring out how antibodies operate.
But my friend operated alone.
He did not have 50 postdocs.
And so when my friend made the tactical mistake of giving a lecture about his discovery of Bence Jones proteins before he had published,
Gerald Edelman was in the audience, and I'm told, then immediately told his lab, switch everything.
and his 50 postdocs went in there
and they figured out how antibodies operated.
Gerald Edelman got the Nobel Prize
and my friend did not get the Nobel Prize,
but Gerald Edelman was a very effective organizer
and fundraiser.
And big personality.
Yes, yes.
I met him on two occasions.
Yes, he was a big personality.
§03Transcript — part 3
Yeah, he ventured into neuroscience after immunology
and yeah, big ideas, big lab, big ideas.
ideas. So there are just as many exceptions to the statements I'm making, I'm realizing as there
are things that meet it. I was surprised that you mentioned Jim Jones. And most people perhaps
have heard of the Jonestown massacre. The top contour of that in my mind is a bunch of people
left the country to follow this cult leader and drank poison and it was mass suicide.
When I hear about cults and I hear about cult leaders, for some reason, I default to thinking more about how impressionable the cult followers were rather than how persuasive the cult leader was.
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians was, you know, in my mind, the burn down the structure, killed everybody inside.
And when I hear Koresh's lectures, they have no impact in persuading me of anything except that he was nuts.
When you think about an effective cult leader, I think most people perhaps default to that they're preying on the vulnerable.
But is there a world where those effective cult leaders could have done something else in the context of regular society and been effective leaders?
Or is it there's something about the pairing, the dysfunctional pairing of the person prone to be a cult follower and the cult leader?
Interesting question.
A leader needs personal characteristics that will enable her or him to lead.
They may be charisma.
They may be being able to terrify people.
They may be able to persuade people.
On the one hand, there's the leader.
On the other hand, there are the followers.
Not everybody is a follower.
There are some people who are prone to follow, charismatic people.
And there are other people, lots of people, who are not going to follow even the most charismatic people.
Hitler.
They were the Germans who followed Hitler, were persuaded by Hitler, but the Nazis never got a majority in an election.
The majority of Germans were not persuaded by Hitler.
Jim Jones of Jonestown, notorious for founding a colony in Guyana, and the colony ended in the largest mass suicide in American history.
900, 931 people drank punch poison with cyanide.
But Jim Jones, he can't be written off as a crazy.
He led the desegregation of Indianapolis.
He attracted people by the noble ideals of the church that he founded in Indianapolis.
The people who followed him were not a random assortment of people.
They were predominantly poor people, predominantly older people.
A lot of them were African Americans.
They tended not to be highly educated people.
The People's Temple, as it was called, required the charismatic leader.
This is really an interesting point that you raised,
but it also required people who were disposed to be followers.
I didn't realize he led the desegregation of Indianapolis.
If he had died before he moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco, if he had died in his first couple of years in San Francisco, he was appointed one of the housing commissioners for San Francisco.
He attracted many idealistic people in San Francisco, but he was gradually getting more and more crazy.
But this illustrates the point that you make, which is an interesting point, that one has to inquire not just about leaders but also about followers, who is disposed to follow.
In the case of the Nazis, yes, it was clear that there were Germans who were disposed to follow Hitler.
In the case of Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my parents voted three times for Roosevelt and once they voted against Roosevelt.
My parents and other Roosevelt were not crazy sick people.
And Winston Churchill, the people who voted for Winston Churchill, were not crazy sick people.
In that case, one cannot look to the pathology or the strange qualities of their followers, as one can in the case of Jim Jones.
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I realize it's possible to divide leaders or people or animals or anything into different categories depending on where one decides to slice the line.
But can anything informative be said about powerful leaders who declare that they are not at the top of the hierarchy, that they obey God or a particular God versus that they are at the top of the pyramid?
And we'll leave Jesus out of this because that's an obvious one.
But in the case of like Jim Jones, you said he had a church.
Did he still talk about the existence of God?
Did he try to leverage God to make people convinced that he was humble to God?
Or was he saying that he was really the apex of power and understanding?
And I suppose we could apply this to just pretty much anyone we've discussed or anyone else.
Is this an informative dividing line?
Jim Jones certainly did not deny God and did not claim to be superior to God.
Here's another reason.
Are there traits shared by leaders?
And I mentioned that there are different ways to be an effective leader.
Charisma, da-da-da-da-da-da.
In, I think it was the third chapter of my book, I have a table in which I pull together 22 outstanding political leaders of the period from World War II onwards.
And I ask myself, what generalizations can we reach about these 22 leaders?
The 22 leaders, the obvious candidate.
You can argue about them, but I include Stalin, Anwar Sadat, Mussolini, Hitler, et cetera, et cetera.
I asked myself, are there any qualities shared by all of these leaders?
And the surprise for me was that of these 22 leaders, there were only two who stepped down voluntarily.
Nelson Mandela, the founding post-apartheid leader of South Africa.
He was, I think, in his 80s, and he retired voluntarily as prime minister.
Then Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, served as prime minister.
Might be as long as 30, might be as long as 40 years, but he stepped down voluntarily.
But of the other 20, those were the only two out of 22 who stepped down voluntarily.
All other major leaders were either assassinated, Anwar Sadat, or committed suicide, Hitler, or they were voted out of office, Winston Churchill, or they were thrown out by a coup.
which means that in politics, once you've become a powerful leader
and you've come to the conclusion that you are an effective, powerful leader,
you are very unlikely to step down voluntarily.
Only two out of 22 did it.
So that's a generalization that I had not anticipated.
Yeah, I suppose it's a lifestyle hit too.
Nobody wants to go backwards in terms of their comforts.
But I am surprised that some people have the vigor to continue to occupy these very high demand spots despite aging and fatiguing.
I mean, you clearly don't slow, but we'll talk about the fact that you're teaching yourself Italian now.
Is that right?
Are you teaching yourself a new language?
Did I hear that correctly?
I learned Italian.
Italian was the last of my 13 languages.
I learned Italian.
Just 13, yeah.
When I was 61 years old.
I read Italian every day.
All my leisure reading is in Italian.
I don't do leisure reading in English.
I read Italian every day.
And once a week, I have a two-hour Italian conversation with my Italian professor, who's a professor at USC.
What inspired you to learn 13 languages?
Is it fun for you and or do you enjoy the challenge as part of the enticement of learning another language?
My mother was a talented linguist.
I just loved learning languages.
My school required us to study Latin for five years.
I loved it.
We had the alternative of studying electives, either Greek or biology.
I figured I'm going to be doing biology for the rest of my life.
I will now take—so I spent three years learning Greek.
I can still recite the beginning of it: Maina aeta thea, Pelea do akelea.
Then, in college, I learned German just before—my mother helped me with that, just before entering college.
In college, this was the time of Sputnik, so I learned Russian.
I learned Spanish.
And then my first summer after college, I spent the summer in Finland.
The Finnish language is a non-Indo-European language.
It's a really difficult language.
When I went to Finland, I did not have a Finnish grammar, but I was hitchhiking around in Finland.
And at that time in Finland, summer of 1959, very few Finns spoke English.
In order to hitchhike, I had to start learning Finnish.
and I ended up in a national park in northern Finland
where I hiked into a hut that was being looked after by four Finnish soldiers.
The four Finnish soldiers didn't speak any language except Finnish.
And I'm with them for several days.
They teach me Finnish by demonstrating things.
Cup. They picked up a cup.
The Finnish word for cup was kuppi.
And then Finnish,
Instead of having prepositions,
it has postpositions, cases.
So when you want to say,
the cup is on the table,
kuppi,
pöydällä.
When you want to say,
I'm putting the cup onto the table,
pöydälle.
When you take the cup off,
pöydältä.
So these four Finnish soldiers,
they demonstrated for me
by putting cups onto and off.
I just loved it.
And I seriously considered
dropping out of science.
I met my, after I'd been to Finland, I met my parents in Paris.
They came to Europe, saw them for the first time in a year.
And I was seriously considering dropping out of science and becoming a simultaneous translator.
I was going to go to Switzerland to become a translator.
Fortunately, my father, he gently said, maybe it's a bit early to drop.
I know science is frustrating for you now, but you've been doing it for only a year.
Why don't you give yourself another six months?
And after six months, if the experiments aren't going well, you can be a translator.
But I loved learning Finnish.
And then when I went to New Guinea, New Guinea has a thousand languages.
The first New Guinea people that I worked with were the Fore tribe, famous for Kuru, laughing sickness, first prion disease.
and at that time there was a New Guinea trade language,
called Tok Pisin.
So I was able to communicate with Tok Pisin
but I just loved learning Fore from a couple of Fore people.
I remember asking my Fore informant,
I was trying to figure out the word for we.
I'd already learned the word for I, nage.
So I asked my Fore informant in Tok Pisin, I, nage, so we, all the same one, me, Pella.
And he said, then he gave me word for we, and then I responded, oh, we?
And he said, no, nage, kasige.
It turns out that Fore has a dual.
dual. English is singular and plural, I and we. But among European, Slovenian and ancient Greek
have a dual, namely separate pronouns for two of us and three of us. So, for example,
if I'm talking the two of us, we do this. But if there were a third person here,
it would be a different pronoun. In four, it would be quasi. Long in a ways, I just loved
learning language. I've always loved languages. It seems you love the puzzle of it. You love
the application of it, given that once you learned Italian, you still have these conversations in
Italian for a couple hours a week. Once again, I'm struck by how, despite the tremendous variation
in the different languages, for instance, that there's something about, I'm not trying to play
psychologist here, but there's something about your mind where it seems you're very comfortable
with immense amount of informational diversity
§04Transcript — part 4
within a category like language or leaders.
Most people come in and they try and simplify to clarify,
but you have this, it seems your mind goes to,
let's find the widest range of variation possible.
And from that, we're going to extract
some deeper understanding.
This may occur to you,
but it's a highly unusual way of doing things.
I mean, in biology, we have lumpers and splitters,
as we say, I teach neuroanatomy.
So you can lump or you can split.
You can say brain or we can start dividing it.
And you can divide everything right down to the subdivisions of the mitochondria if you want, right?
So you have to pick your level of analysis.
But we tend to put frameworks, nomenclatures, and try and name genes in ways that we can think about other genes that are similar.
Your mind works in a very different way.
And what I'd like to know is, has it always been that way?
Have you looked at the taxonomy of stuff in the world and said, that's crazy.
Why do they organize it that way?
Maybe we should look at it through the most detailed lens and from that extract clarity.
I've been that way only since age three.
My mother, who was a teacher and loved teaching, mom taught me to read when I was three years old.
And so I began keeping a notebook.
I've still got my three-year-old notebook in my notebook.
I made lists.
I made lists of the names of rivers, the names of animals, the names of animals of the Rocky Mountains, the names of birds of Europe.
I was a lister.
This is embarrassing, but I listed the numbers of streetcars on the Boston streetcar system.
I had long lists on the numbers.
I love making lists.
And I've got a lot of mileage in biology out of making lists.
After my PhD, I was a membrane biologist.
And among my contributions to membrane biology, I did the largest study ever carried out of the permeability of biological membrane to uncharged molecules, non-electrolytes.
I and my first postdoctoral student, we measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-electrolytes.
They're all organic chemicals, and there's lots of detail there.
There are branch non-electrolytes.
There are non-branch non-electrolytes.
And there are ones with oxygen groups.
And there are ones with sulfur groups.
So there's lots of detail.
I loved the project with those 200 non-electrolytes.
Then when I went to New Guinea to start to study birds,
I've been studying New Guinea birds since 1964.
New Guinea has about 600 bird species.
I've encountered and gotten to know most of them.
When I'm falling asleep at night, often I'll recite to myself lists of New Guinea birds.
Sometimes I'll recite them by their foreign names, the Mapusana, the Pascakeame, the Kenamitoto, the Suwanataba.
Sometimes I'll recite them by their Latin names,
Sericornis papuensis, Sericornis perspicillatus,
Sericornis nouhuysi.
I just love making lists.
But one of my teachers, one of my influential teachers,
Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist,
Ernst Mayr loved making lists.
And he and I spent 30 years preparing a book together
on the birds of northern Melanesia,
the islands east of New Guinea.
Ernst and I were very compatible.
Both of us loved making lists.
Whenever a question would come up, Ernst would say, let's make a list.
And he would make a list and I would make a list.
And then we would go over that list, the list of all the mountain birds of northern Melanesia.
What generalizations are there about the mountain bird?
There's a lot of scientific mileage that I've gotten from making lists, which I've done ever since I was three years old.
It's the exact opposite way that Richard Feynman talked about how to look out at the world.
He actually used the very example of if you see a bird in the woods and somebody says, that's like a whatever, whatever thrush.
He said, knowing the name doesn't help you understand it.
But I will say based on spending a lot of time thinking
about the names of and the connectivity
of different brain structures,
often there's a way of naming things in a field
that actually tells you a lot about the functionality.
Like in neuroscience, for instance,
we the first name in retinogeniculate,
it tells you what the origin structure
and the recipient structure are.
So like the names actually matter.
They tell you a lot more than just,
this is different than that.
So as you made these lists,
And as you recite these lists when you're falling asleep, are you also able to call to mind the functional distinctions between these?
Is that simply the way that you batch information?
Or is it that the lists and the names have their own unique value that's independent from that?
The names are the anchor for a lot of information.
when I recite at night,
Sericornis nouhuysi.
Sericornis nouhuysi,
the large, large scrub wren.
What about it?
Well, it's the larger of two birds
in an altitudinal sequence.
It's the larger of two coexisting species,
which are very similar,
so similar that the Pascakiabi and the Mabasena,
I couldn't tell them apart
until the New Guineans explained to me
the differences in their behavior.
So there's a lot of information that's associated with the name.
In addition, the name itself has a serocornus.
It means that that bird belongs to the genus serocornus.
And in the genus serocornus is also serocornus vergatus, which is the low elevation equivalent of serocornus norusi.
but there's also seroconus perspiculatus,
which is the small-bodied scrub rand
that shares the same altitude ranges.
So there's information that goes along with the name.
I mean, in the world of science,
you and I both know there are people who pick one thing
and they just drill there,
sometimes for an entire career
or for five or 10 years at a time.
And then there are people that try and throw their arms
around enormous batches of information.
Clearly you're in the latter category.
And so once again, I'll ask, was this always your tendency?
You wanted to know all the information?
Basically, yes.
I mean, I've always been interested in lots of things.
I was fortunate to go to a secondary school that gave me options to study lots of things.
My secondary school, although I expected to go into science, my secondary school had a great history teacher, better than all the history teachers I had at Harvard College.
wonderful Latin Greek teacher.
Then once I got my PhD in physiology in Cambridge, England,
and returned to the United States,
having gotten my PhD in salt and water transport by the gallbladder,
in retrospect, I didn't know what I was doing at the time,
but in retrospect, I realized that I was now understanding with horror
that I was expected to devote myself to the gallbladder for the rest of my life.
But that just went against everything that I had done from age three onwards.
And so I shopped around for another career.
I seriously considered making another career in pre-Columbian ceramics.
I seriously considered becoming a conductor of an orchestra.
I didn't have the insights into pre-Columbian ceramics.
To be a conductor, you have to be able to ignore time lags, and I couldn't ignore time lags.
But I had become a bird watcher at age seven,
and when I came back to Boston after getting my Ph.D.,
in my first summer, I and a college classmate,
the college classmate was a great bird watcher,
we spent the summer in Peru.
What do you do in Peru?
We climb mountains.
We watch birds.
The next summer, we went together to New Guinea.
why New Guinea's the wildest place in the world,
but New Guinea also has the most wonderful birds.
And so I developed a second career in birds,
and then I developed a third career in history and geography.
So I've had three careers.
My career in laboratory physiology eventually closed down in the year 2002.
Why?
When our twin sons, my wife and I have twin sons, they were born in 1987.
when our twin sons were born,
I realized the future of Max and Joshua
is not going to depend upon gallbladders.
It's going to depend upon history and geography.
And so gradually I began spending more of my time
in history and geography.
I was less interested in gallbladders.
Finally, with great difficulty,
I got UCLA to transfer me
from being professor of gallbladder physiology
in the medical school
to being professor of geography in the college.
I've still kept up the two careers in history and geography.
At the same time as I was writing my book on leaders,
at the same time I've also been writing papers on my work on New Guinea birds.
I think a week ago Friday I completed a long paper on the birds of the Wandammen Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea.
Next year I want to do a paper on the birds of the Bawani Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea
And because I'm 89 years old, I have to figure, my remaining time is finite.
What am I going to do with my remaining time?
One of the things that I want to do with my remaining time is to synthesize my work on New Guinea birds by looking at bird distribution on the 10 isolated mountain ranges of New Guinea.
What generalizations can I recognize about the birds that are good colonists?
So that's what I want to do for the remaining 10 years of my life.
I have to say that despite having colleagues who have a lot of interests, it's very rare to encounter somebody who's been successful in several different domains of serious scientific exploration, much less writing books about them as well.
And did you at some point give yourself permission to move fields?
It's not common, as we know, in science for people to do that.
And if people do it, they tend to do it somewhat cryptically and gradually.
And maybe this is also not to pry into your personal life, but it's one thing to decide, you know, my twins are arriving and maybe I'll switch fields.
But there's a spouse there who's probably thinking, do you have tenure?
How are we going to pay the bills?
So I imagine there was likely support or maybe you're just very defiant and you just follow your curiosity.
There were the career issues and there were the issues of interest.
The issues of interest were that ever since I was three years old, I've been interested in lots of stuff.
And I realize in retrospect that among my life crises, one of my life crises was after I got my Ph.D., realizing with horror that I was expected to do one thing for the rest of my life, but that was not me.
And it took some effort to carve out a second career in birds.
I had a postdoctoral fellowship.
Most postdoctoral fellowships bind you to do one thing.
I was in the biophysics lab of the Harvard Medical School,
but I was fortunate that my postdoctoral fellowship
was with the Harvard Society called the Society of Fellows.
I was a junior fellow at Harvard, and as a junior fellow, I had freedom.
I could tell the boss of my biophysics laboratory,
I'm going to New Guinea for three months this summer to study New Guinea birds.
I didn't ask his permission.
I just said, I'm doing it.
Now, he could have fired me and he could have said, well, if you want to do that, get out
of the biophysics lab.
But I was doing good work in biophysics.
And so he was willing to tolerate my going off to New Guinea for three months.
Then when I moved to UCLA, the crucial piece of my negotiation with moving to UCLA, where
I was offered an associate professorship in the physiology department.
The dean of UCLA was the longest serving medical school dean in the United States,
§05Transcript — part 5
Sherm Mellinkoff, wonderful person.
He was offering me a job in the physio.
I told Sherm, yes, but I'm interested in New Guinea birds,
and you've got to understand that I intend to, the last several years,
I've spent three months every summer working on New Guinea birds,
And I want to continue my work on New Guinea birds.
And if I accept your position, will you tolerate my continuing to work on New Guinea birds?
Most medical school deans would have said, get the hell out of here.
Sherm Mellinkoff said, Jared, UCLA Medical School is interested in New Guinea birds.
I'm going to give you $5,000 every year to spend studying New Guinea birds.
And so he tolerated it and he made it possible for me.
I'm then fortunate that I had a dean who permitted it.
As for my wife, Marie, Marie had no problems whatsoever with it.
When I met Marie, I was already working in New Guinea.
In fact, the development of our relationship, a crucial issue in our relationship was that Jared was going off to New Guinea for every three months.
And Marie knew what happened in New Guinea.
I got nearly killed in New Guinea repeatedly.
And so Marie had to be willing to tolerate that.
By the time that our kids were born, I had a very secure position in medical school.
I was going to New Guinea.
When our kids were born, it was not that Marie told me, Jared, don't go there for three months.
It was that I realized, Jared, you're not going to go there for three months anymore.
And so when the kids were born, I reduced my time in New Guinea to one month at a time.
And my last New Guinea trip was 2019.
Yeah, it raises a very interesting feature of adventurous living, much less researching and living, you know, immersed in a different culture, a different ecosystem, which is that it can be hard on the body to go places that you're not familiar with, eating food you're not familiar with.
Most people think, oh, what are you talking about?
You know, you can get a cheeseburger from McDonald's anywhere in the world now.
And perhaps that's true.
But have you always been willing to put your physical comfort on the line in order to learn?
I mean, learning languages is hard.
Putting yourself into a jungle environment where there's all sorts of diseases, where there's political and social unrest.
Like there's a lot of variables when you get out there.
And so then you become an intellectual explorer, but truly in the wild.
Was that something that was fun, a necessary evil?
Where has that landed with you?
To work in New Guinea, it's a necessary evil.
It's not until I went to New Guinea, when I was in Peru.
The year before I went to New Guinea, my friend and I went to Peru, spent a summer in Peru.
We did mountain climbing.
We did a first ascent of a 17,000-foot peak.
Being at high altitudes, going straight up from sea level to 10,000 feet,
and then three days later going to 16,000 feet, it was miserable.
So, yes, I experienced physical misery in Peru.
In New Guinea, to do anything in New Guinea, there's lots of physical misery.
misery. The food is sweet potatoes and rice, three meals a day. Being in the jungle, I'm getting
bitten by scrub mites. My first year in New Guinea, I ended up with dysentery, which the doctors at
Harvard couldn't cure it, remained with me for a year. My third year in New Guinea ended up with
malaria, climbing mountains in New Guinea. Being in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the
time. Occasionally, like maybe once in three months, I can sit down at campsite and look out
and say, my God, that's beautiful. But the rest of the time, I'm physically miserable,
and I'm having to deal with New Guineans who have their own ideas about what to do in life.
Being in New Guinea, it's uncomfortable, but it's fascinating, the fascination of the birds.
of figuring out what's the difference between the marvisan and the paschiabi let's talk about birds
um the only other two birders i know from science are jim watson was started off as a birder
ornithologist of some sort anyway decided to solve this co-solve the structure of dna so he went a
different way um and then the late also late Murray Gell-Mann who discovered the quark as a i
think a two nobel winner maybe one no anyway smart guy um who was obsessed with birds and bird
taxonomy and bird watching it's interesting that all three of you have it seems a kind of obsession
with going after these big questions,
like entire societies, leadership,
the structure of DNA,
you know, elementary particles
and all the rest.
But birds, of which I know some,
certainly not as much as you,
there's this tremendous diversity.
And unless one is really into birding,
it's easy from the outside to say like,
yeah, okay, so you've got
the black-capped chickadee, and you got this one, and you got that one. And what information,
what enrichment is to be gleaned from observing them? I'm not being disparaging of it. I myself
love birds. In fact, I had the weird and unique opportunity to talk birds with Murray many years
ago at a physics meeting. But my knowledge of birds is very, very superficial compared to yours,
obviously. So what is it about knowing all these nomenclatures and details about how they move and
seeing them in the wild, what does it inform you about and what does it celebrate in you?
What does it inform us about, inform me about? Birds inform ornithologists about everything.
Birds are the easiest of all animals to observe and to understand. Birds operate by the same
senses that you and I do. Birds operate by sight and by sound. We, humans, operate by sight and
sound, whereas mammals operate especially by smell. One can't rat watch. Yes, you can watch
antelopes, but you don't go around watching rats. If you want to understand rats, you have to have
a good sense of smell. You catch them in a trap, but birds you can watch. And so most of what we
know about ecology and evolutionary biology and biogeography and behavior has been learned
first on birds and has been learned in most detail about birds, and then that knowledge
we can learn apply to other animals.
So the things that I've written about birds, lots about ecology, lots about how birds divide ecological niches, lots about evolution, how bird species evolve in New Guinea, how to get new species in an uninterrupted mountain range, biogeography, the distribution of plants and animals around the world,
began especially with the distribution of birds and then mammals and other things.
The animals easiest to observe are birds.
So when you say, what can we learn about birds?
An honest answer is we can learn everything about birds,
and everything in the biological world is easier to learn from birds than about other animals.
Perfectly acceptable answer.
There, many birds sing, some speak.
I don't know if you're interested
in the language evolution from birds,
but there's the name Peter Marler.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he was at Davis when I was a graduate student.
And one of the most interesting observations,
in my opinion, that he made was that the same species
of bird would have a different song
if they were raised at the Marin headlands
versus naturally raised by their bird parents
at the Marin Headlands versus elsewhere,
and that there was some innate relationship to the species.
Like you could swap the young
and they could learn the other location song,
but that they would always learn their location song best.
And I feel like if ever there was a set
of scientific findings that kind of converges
a number of your interests in language
and location and migration,
it's those Peter Marler studies.
If you met, what did you guys talk about?
And what do you think is perhaps interesting
about bird song and bird language that can tell us about us?
Everything.
Bird song.
It's a communication.
What are birds trying to communicate?
So birds are singing.
Why are they singing?
What information are they conveying in the bird song?
It's been assumed that bird songs of males are territorial to stake out territories.
But in recent years, we've learned that there's really detailed information in bird calls.
For example, birds that gather in flocks like chickadees and titmice.
If they see a hawk, there's a call note, just a small, a simple call note.
When the birds see the hawk, they'll give that call note.
and birds then 200 feet away will hear that call note
and they'll know that the hawk is there
before the hawk can fly those 200 feet.
So there's a lot of information in bird songs.
That then has inspired similar studies,
especially in monkeys.
There was a husband and wife couple,
Seyfarth and Cheney, who were at UCLA
and moved to Pennsylvania.
They did wonderful studies on vervet monkeys.
Vervet monkeys make grunts.
And Seyfarth and Cheney thought some of these grunts sound a little different.
And so they started recording the grunts and playing the grunts.
And they noticed some grunts, the monkeys looked up.
And some grunts, the monkeys looked down.
And some grunts, the monkeys propped themselves up.
And they realized that the different grunts function as words.
There's a grunt that means eagle, and when a monkey, a vervet monkey, comes up with
a grunt for eagle, the monkeys look up.
And there's another grunt that means python.
When vervets hear python, they look down at the grass.
There's another grunt that means leopard.
When they hear leopard, they scramble up a tree.
So this is an example of the information conveyed by sounds, first in birds and then in monkeys.
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The layers of sophistication in different animals,
I think is really underappreciated.
I mean, even for somebody like me as a biologist, you know, it's always pleasantly surprising how sophisticated these other species are.
Even if this stuff is hardwired, it's wild.
In fairness to your earlier example where somebody forgave you for a mistake in the laboratory and you passed on or you said you were already rather forgiving, propagated that forward.
When one of your graduate students or postdocs would walk in and say, listen, I realize we work on X, but I want to go work on this other thing.
Were you tolerant, amused?
Because the survival of a laboratory and a research program also depends on people hopping on board the main thrust of questions.
I'm just curious.
I'm not holding your feet to the fire.
I'm just wondering how much adventurousness you tolerated in your scientific offspring.
My postdocs and graduate students, when they were working with me, I negotiated with them to make sure that they would do a project that interested me and interested them.
It had to be a project that interested me because I worked hard to find the funds and I could take only two or three students at a time.
A student would be with me for three or four years.
Big investment on my part.
I would make that investment only if it made sense for me.
On only one occasion did a student tell me that he wanted to have his own project.
§06Transcript — part 6
There was a wonderful Argentinian student who one day came to me and said he had asked around in the physiology department.
And he had learned, he had been told that for postdocs, it was the norm in the department, he alleged, was that the postdoc would spend half his time working on a project of his advisor and half the time working on his own project.
Now, that was untrue.
But he had found another postdoc of whom that was true.
And he was an interesting guy.
And I was taken aback.
Okay, you can do your own.
And he did a project of his own as well as the project with me.
But that's the only time that I've had a student do a project that did not interest me.
Otherwise, the projects have always been projects that interested both me and the student.
And that's good for the student to get my full attention and to learn from me.
the student can learn from me if it's something that I know about.
The student cannot learn from me if it's something that I don't know anything about.
It's clear because you've told us and your career demonstrates this that you have had and maintain a lot of interests,
deep interests and deep curiosity, almost a compulsion to follow them and solve certain things about those for yourself.
Before we started recording today, we were having a quick conversation about one's preference or lack of preference for certain pets,
for certain things in the world.
And we don't have to go into it.
It wasn't contentious.
But what I was so struck by,
positively struck by,
is how clear you were.
I think we had met about 20 seconds prior
about the fact that some pets,
some things, some topics,
to you are, in your life,
are a diversion.
Like you're just not interested in them.
And I think that fits beautifully
with being interested in many other things.
So this is a somewhat strange question I'm about to ask,
but do you think about time?
Like how much time do I have in life to do this?
And did you always think that way?
As somebody who just turned 51,
I think about this more and more,
but the beautiful thing about an academic career
is you sort of know, okay,
I've got four to six years for this thesis, boom.
And then there is an opportunity to pivot slightly or a lot.
But life is somewhat different, right? But it's clear to me that you were saying, that's all fine and good for other people, but I don't want to be bothered, invest my life energy in those things.
clear period, end of story. And it's very refreshing in fact, because I, and it runs
countercurrent to this idea that you're interested in everything. You're not interested in everything,
if I may. You're very interested in a lot of things. And that provides a really nice
razor to separate out all the things that you're just not going to be bothered by.
Has this always been a feature of you? Absolutely not. And to give you a preview of coming events of
what's ahead of you, when I turned 80, 80 was not a shock to me. 81 was more of a shock because 81
meant that I was firmly embedded in the 80s. But even though I knew perfectly well the numbers for
life expectancy, life expectancy of an American man at birth is something like 78, life expectancy
of an American man who's reached the age of 70, this is not so widely known. When you reach the
age of 70, your life expectancy is not 70. Your life expectancy is 93 because a lot of the risk
is behind you. And I knew that perfectly well. But when I was 81 years old, I wasn't counting
what I could do. But in the last couple of years, since I'm now 89, I'm very conscious of time left
and what I want to do in the time left. A couple of specific things that I want to do in the time
left are to synthesize my understanding.
New Guinea has 10 outlying mountain ranges.
I did the first ascents and the first ornithological explorations of several of them, the most
detailed explorations of the rest.
If I don't write that up, that knowledge will die with me because those mountain ranges
are difficult to get into.
And I wanted to do a synthesis looking at those 10 mountain ranges to understand what is it that makes a species a good colonist?
Why some bird species are on all 10 mountain ranges and other birds are on only one mountain range.
I've got that unique data set and I want to write that up while I'm still alive.
Another thing that I've been thinking for quite a while, a musical, I particularly love the music of Bach.
I sang in Boston's Handel and Haydn Society.
I sang in Cambridge's, Cambridge, England's Musical Society.
Benjamin Britten came and did the premiere of his cantata Academica when I was singing in the Cambridge chorus.
So I've been interested, and I've sung in the composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whom I particularly love.
He wrote 210 church cantatas.
I sang in about 20 of them.
And I've been telling myself, sooner or later, I want to get to know all of those cantatas.
A year ago, August, the time has come.
The time ahead of me is finite.
Better start on the cantatas now.
And so I start on the cantata at the rate of about one a week.
Last night, I re-listened to cantata 61 and 62.
Next will come cantata 63.
At the rate I'm going, it will take me maybe three or four years to get to know all of the Bach cantata.
But that's something that I would like to do.
But I'm very conscious now of the amount of time left.
And I've had that consciousness only in the past few years.
Were there any things that you used to do out of feelings of obligation that you no longer do that allow you more time for the things and the people that are important to you?
And that you wish you had perhaps permitted yourself to do earlier?
My first thought is no.
By and large, I've done the things that I've enjoyed doing.
Now, of course, there are things that are not pleasure, that have to be done in life.
Sure.
I spend lots of time, probably I spend at least a month, maybe two months of the year,
on our income tax returns, which are complicated.
I have a pathological tolerance for manipulating numbers,
So I don't object to doing income taxes as much as most other people would do it.
The income tax has to be done and it takes a lot of my time.
What else do I do?
My father washed the dishes.
I wash the dishes together with my wife.
Marie does the gardening.
I have no interest in gardening.
Marie does the gardening.
Marie does the shopping.
I excuse myself by—Marie knows that I spend the equivalent of a couple months of the year on income tax, and I take care of the insurance, and I do much of the organization of travel.
I don't mind dealing with insurance.
I don't mind doing income tax, and I'd rather spend the time doing birds, but it's not something that I greatly object to.
I would never ask someone to come here
and speak for somebody else,
but I was gratified to learn that you were close friends
with my colleague, Paul Ehrlich,
and his wife, Sandra Kahn,
is still on the faculty at Stanford.
Paul wrote, of course, The Population Bomb.
The book, Paul and Sandra wrote the book, Jaws,
with, I think had a foreword by you
and maybe an introduction from Bob Sapolsky
about mouth breathing being detrimental
to facial structure development,
and as well as health perhaps,
and they called it an epidemic.
There's some interest in nasal breathing
and apnea and so forth.
Paul was delightful person as you know,
you knew him much better than I did,
but he got some things right,
and some people would argue he got certain things wrong.
Like the population bomb, my understanding,
was that it argued that we're going to be badly overpopulated by time we reach now,
and that that was dangerous.
Some people would argue that birth rates are going down.
The replacement problem is more of an issue.
But was he correct about some of the issues with population growth and environmental impact?
This isn't an area that I have any expertise,
but what do you think are some of the places where he was oh so correct?
because he was an incredibly smart and in many ways prescient on some of these topics.
He was certainly correct that the biggest threats that humans face today,
of course, they include the nuclear risk of exterminating ourselves.
I'd say the three biggest risks we face are the nuclear risk,
the consequences of inequality in our globalized world.
Now, anybody anywhere is affected by anybody anywhere else, and that's an invitation to the world trade towers.
In a globalized world, it's dangerous to have inequality.
And then the third risk is, of course, the risk of running out of resources, destroying our resources, which we are doing at a rapid rate.
Why are we in the process of over-exploiting our resources?
because the world population has increased.
There are now, what, 9 billion people.
10,000 years ago, there were probably 1 million people.
1 million people on Earth, and now we've got 9 billion.
But what counts is not just the number of people,
but the consumption rate per person.
Consumption rate per person in the first world has gone up,
and the result is that we are depleting fisheries,
But like four billion of the world's people depend upon fish, seafood for their protein, we're depleting the world's forests, we're depleting the world's topsoil.
Paul and his wife Anne, the book The Population Bomb, called attention to the danger of population growth.
And one can now add to population growth multiplied by consumption per person.
Paul predicted big dangers within the next few decades.
He predicted widespread starvation.
If you look at his Wikipedia entry, so here's one of the world's great modern scientists,
and his goddamn Wikipedia, his Wikipedia entry instead harps on his book, The Population Bomb,
and says it didn't prove correct.
Well, out of the 9 billion people in the world today, how many of them are underfed and starving?
Are they starving to death?
No, they're not starving to death quickly, but they've got short lifespans and they're having miserable lifespans because a small fraction of the world's people have first world lifestyle.
Even in the United States, the polarization in the United States between the people who have enough and the people who don't have enough is growing.
So to blame Paul Ehrlich for getting it wrong, no.
He got it right, but he got it right in a broader sense than the idiots who attack him are willing to admit.
Happy to hear you say this.
Long been a fan of his work and him, and I agree.
And Jaws is a wonderful book, and I think the Population Bomb still has great, there's real value in reading it, even if the specific statements, as you pointed out, held up differently, it's still a really important work.
We talked about political leaders.
We talked about religious leaders and a bit about cults.
Sports.
Are you into sports?
Am I into sports?
Well, I work out.
Yeah, you look very healthy. Is that an important part of your intellectual rigor as well?
I've always been physically active. I began weightlifting in college. I ran for years.
The day that my wife was in labor and was about to deliver our twins, I was going running.
And I was so excited that she was about to deliver twins that instead of putting my lunch in the refrigerator and my shoes on the floor, I put my running shoes in the refrigerator and my lunch on the floor.
So I still work out several days a week.
Being physically active is a big part of my life.
I get satisfaction out of it.
And I think for somebody to do physical exercise nowadays with the intention of building and preserving both their mind and body is pretty common.
But when you were in college, if I extrapolate, that wasn't really talked about.
In fact, the separation of intellectual and athletic endeavors was kind of a theme.
It was like people played sports, right?
But working out was sort of the stuff of like military jocks and bodybuilders and running less so, right?
But I find that all the scientists that I know that have had very long successful careers and are still going strong, all are very physically active and have been for a long time.
All of them.
And the ones who aren't are mostly dead, if I'm honest.
The great Harvard organic chemist, Woodward, R.B. Woodward, who won two Nobel Prizes.
Woodward did not do any physical exercise whatsoever.
He didn't want to spend any time doing anything except organic chemistry.
And of course, he died at an early age.
In the lab, presumably.
I think in bed.
Okay.
Well, better than in one's office or lab.
So along those lines, athletics and sports, which sport – are you into spectator sports?
And what led you to explore leaders in sport?
I explored leaders in sports for the same reason that business school professors do a lot of their – much of their research on sports outcomes.
In fact, I would say that much or maybe even most of the research on sports outcomes is done by business school professors.
The reason being that business school professors are, of course, interested in business outcomes.
But business outcomes, they're hard to measure.
CEOs tend to be secretive.
§07Transcript — part 7
Businesses may not publish their results or they publish them every five years.
So the data for the business world is limited.
But in sports, games are played every week or a couple of times a week.
The results of the games are announced.
The coach is there on the sidelines, usually jumping up and down, screaming.
The players are well-known.
Sports is on television.
The result is that the methods that business school professors have developed for analyzing CEOs and for analyzing the business world are often developed in sports and they're debugged in sports.
For example, in the business world, one of the main questions is, of course, how much of business success is due to the CEO?
This is a loudly—CEOs say, I'm responsible for the success, and therefore you ought to pay me billions of dollars because my company, our company, makes $100 billion.
But because I'm responsible for that $100 billion profit, you can pay me $10 billion.
Is that true?
It's complicated to figure out.
There are a couple of methods.
One involves doing an ANOVA analysis of variance.
Analysis of variance applied to sports shows that roughly 15% to 30% of the variance in sports success is due to the coach.
About another 30% is due to players.
And about another 30% is due to the institutions.
That's in sports.
In the business world, it turns out that similarly, CEOs account for about 30% of ANOVA, and the individual company accounts for another, Procter & Gamble, very well-run company, been well-run for 150 years.
Another 30% is due to the industry.
Perfume companies and computer companies and teenage T-shirt companies tend to be very profitable.
whereas departments of water and power tend to be unprofitable.
Why? Because they're tightly regulated by governments.
So ANOVA gets applied to the sports world and also to the business world.
But in addition, coaches frequently get fired if they have a losing season
and CEOs get fired if the company has a poor year, low return.
So if you fire a CEO because of a losing season,
the next year, usually, the new CEO has a better season.
Why?
Because 70% of the variance in sports outcome
is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO.
If you're throwing dice and you throw a dice and you get a one, and so you say to the person who threw the dice, you're a lousy dice thrower.
You got one.
I'm firing you.
For statistical reasons, the chances of five out of six that the next dice thrower will do better than one could be there's two, three, four, five, six.
In the sports world, when you fire a coach, usually the new coach has a better record.
Why?
Because of all the random factors.
My university, UCLA, our athletic department is now $150 million in debt.
Why?
Because we fired all of our basketball coaches since John Wooden.
And when we fire them, we have to buy out their contract.
So, buy out their contract, $5 million, $10 million, $15 million.
Simply, when you fire a CEO, the next CEO is likely to do better for random reasons.
As with Dice, that illustrates why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing sports.
How important is a coach's philosophy and, by extension, a CEO's philosophy on why we are doing this?
We hear so much about this, that the why behind things is so important.
But is that actually the case?
Yes, but rarely.
So John Wooden is usually regarded as the greatest coach in the history of American sports and in any sport.
Under John Wooden, UCLA basketball team won, what, nine national championships, including seven in a row.
No other college has won more than two national championships in a row.
Why was John Wooden so successful?
There are many reasons that he was successful.
He got his players in peak physical condition.
Although his players might be five inches shorter than Duke's players,
he got his players to jump higher than Duke players.
He was a master of detail.
He cared about what socks that they wore because the socks that they wore affected, you know, how they jumped and how they played.
He paid a lot of attention to getting his players to train not just in groups of five, which they'll be on the court, but in groups of seven so that he could substitute.
But perhaps the most important thing about John Wooden was that for him, basketball was not a sport.
Basketball was a philosophy of life.
and John Wooden's great players, Bill Walton and Alcindor,
they said, Coach Wooden, I learned more from Coach Wooden
than from any human other than my parents.
But what I learned from him was about life, not about playing basketball.
Basketball was a model for life.
That's unusual among coaches.
Bill Belichick, I've never heard anyone say that Bill Belichick is a model for life.
and what Bobby Knight, nobody says that Bobby Knight was a model for philosophy of life.
So why is it that John Wooden was so successful?
Partly he was a master of detail, but also because he regarded basketball as a form of living life,
and that's something that you can't fake.
Yeah, you can fake and you can learn how to train your players to jump higher.
but you can't fake a philosophy of life as John Wooden did.
Is there an analog inside of the, well, nowadays it seems it's tech CEOs and entrepreneurs.
I mean, we have these looming larger than life figures that having grown up in the San Francisco
Bay Area, you know, it was Hewlett and Packard when I was a kid and then Steve Jobs, obviously,
and Bill Gates in Seattle. And then now we have Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman,
Dario at Anthropic is sort of quickly emerging as another one of these big figures, but I probably missed a few out there.
But those are the big, whether they like it or not, celebrity technologists that people look at and to for like where is humanity going, politics aside.
Steve Jobs clearly had a philosophy of creating beautiful things and design and technology being fused in a way that was highly accessible, that objects had friendliness to them or something, even if it was an apple.
So it seemed there was something philosophical, even slightly mystical there.
How do you look at these technology leaders and what do you see?
What do you think?
Bill Gates, I've met and I've had several lengthy conversations, and I like him.
It's a good experience in my conversation with him.
There are people who've met him under other circumstances who have different views of him.
Elon Musk, I met once.
Jeff Bezos.
Oh, yeah.
Forgive me.
I should have mentioned Bezos.
Yeah.
Jeff Bezos.
Bezos, I met once.
Of the leaders in the business world, I don't know that many of them.
The one that I admire as a person is Chouinard of Patagonia.
For him, as with John Wooden, Patagonia is a model for life.
He emphasized having his staff have time off.
He emphasized Patagonia being sustainable.
He had the opportunity to acquire more cotton, produce more product.
No, he chose not to acquire more cotton because he didn't want to overdevelop cotton agriculture.
He is or was a full person, not just a leading business person.
He did the first ascent of the most difficult face in Yosemite.
He was a top-ranked mountaineer.
I know him.
I wrote the preface for his autobiography.
He has a philosophy of life.
Do any other of the big names, does Jeff Bezos have a philosophy of life?
Does Mark Zuckerberg have a philosophy of life?
I'm not aware of these big names having a philosophy of life that goes beyond their business.
Now, Steve Jobs certainly had a philosophy of life as regards business.
when he came back to Apple
after he'd been fired the first time
and Apple was in difficulty,
he was brought back the second time.
His philosophy was that
Apple, he reduced,
instead of Apple producing 100 products,
he said we should produce four products.
And the products should look nice
and they should be attractive
and they should be easy to handle.
They should not be like the remote for my wife's and my TV to watch the World Soccer Cup.
Our remote has, what, 47 buttons, and we had to call up our sons each time to tell us how to operate the remote.
So Steve Jobs' devices don't have 47 buttons.
He had a philosophy, certainly, of products.
I don't know whether he had a larger philosophy of life, as John Wooden certainly did.
So we talked about political leaders, religious leaders, sports.
You said there's a fourth category that you cover in your book.
So we got political leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, and religious.
Those are the four categories.
And business and sport seem to kind of interdigitate a bit, right?
it sounds like. The connection between business studies and sports studies has been especially
tight, but it's also the case that the business school professors who've studied sports
have also studied success in politics. So perhaps the best single paper that I know
on developing new methods for studying the success of leaders,
looks at leaders in politics,
looks at leaders in business and leaders,
But it also looks at leaders in politics.
And the conclusions that it comes to are that prime ministers
make more of a difference than do governors of states,
and governors make more of a difference than do mayors,
Why? Because prime ministers have more power. Also, dictators make more of a difference than do democratic leaders. Democratic leaders in wartime make more of a difference than do democratic leaders in peacetime because in wartime democratic leaders are given more power. So the business school professors have also applied their methods to politics as well.
many people are interested in many things and they have a genuine excitement and they reverberate on
the idea of pursuing music or singing or an instrument or a topic of study or a sport.
What would you tell those people? Because we've all heard the just do it mantra and that's great.
But again, I'm not a psychologist, but it seems that within you there is or perhaps has always been this almost compulsion to go in a certain direction.
But you're structured in how you go about that.
You didn't just try to do everything at once.
And you clearly succeeded in each of these domains.
I'm sure there were challenges along the way.
But what would you, if anything, would you like to pass along to people of any age?
I would begin by saying, do what you enjoy.
But it's got to be broader than that.
A friend of mine, the great biologist, Tom Lovejoy.
Now, unfortunately dead, Tom told me when he was a teenager, Tom asked his father, Daddy, what should I do for a career?
And his father said, do something that you're good at.
Do something that you enjoy.
Do something that makes a difference in the world.
What advice would I give people?
So perhaps the main advice, because it's what most people do not do, is make sure that you do something that you enjoy.
And if people tell you, no, you got to do this, this, this, tell them to go to hell.
Literally.
So many people say, you got to live your life this way.
You got to iron your shirts.
When I was a graduate, I didn't iron my shirts.
I'm now someone who irons my shirts
but as far as I'm concerned
if anyone tells me
Jared spend your time ironing your shirts
go to hell
there are other things that I want to do with my time
and whether this shirt is iron
but whether my shirts are ironed or not
doesn't make much difference to life
what does make a difference is
am I doing something that I enjoy
am I doing something that I'm good at
yep
am I doing something that's good for the world
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time designing the national park system for Indonesia and New Guinea, designing the principles for national parks in general.
I've written books about the big risks facing the world.
So I've devoted a lot of my life to trying to convince people to live better lives and not to mess up the world.
I've done things that I enjoy.
I've done things that I'm good at.
There were some things that I wanted to do, but I discovered that I was not.
I would have loved to be a conductor of orchestras, but to conduct an orchestra, you see the players out there, and you got to give the downbeat, not when the players are playing, but because of the speed of sound, you got to give the downbeat ahead.
I could not block out the sound of the playing.
I could not do the downbeat before the players play.
And I tried conducting an orchestra.
UCLA invited me to conduct the orchestra.
And I conducted the orchestra once.
And because I cannot anticipate the downbeat, I gave up my desire to conduct an orchestra, although I would have loved doing it.
But I've ended up doing the things that I'm good at, doing things that I love doing, doing things that are important for the world, good for the world.
I agree on all fronts.
Not that you need my agreement.
I said there were two questions.
§08Transcript — part 8
You answered the second question in the process of answering the first question.
So I just want to conclude by saying thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come share with us and educate us.
I'm super excited about Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings, When Do Leaders Matter?
Today's conversation only makes me more excited about it.
I will say that your father, despite his encouragement to you to continue and become a biologist and not a translator, with all due respect, he partially failed.
Because for me and for millions of other people, you've become a translator of ideas that we would have never encountered or considered.
And it's inspired a ton of curiosity and learning in me through your books.
And today's just another extension of that.
And I'm sure that this next book will just continue that.
So thank you for not obeying his request and at the same time obeying his request.
I really appreciate your time and coming here today.
And hopefully we'll do it again.
Thank you.
I've enjoyed a lot talking with you.
You know yourself.
For writing a book, one does interviews and podcasts.
And interviewers differ.
They're not all the same.
Some interviewers are better prepared than other interviewers.
Some interviewers know more about the subject than other interviews.
It's a real pleasure to do a conversation with you.
It's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you.
Thank you.
The pleasure was mine, and we'll do it again.
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Jared Diamond.
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Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings,
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