Jared Diamond

The conversation opens with Joe Rogan telling Jared Diamond that he enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel and has started reading Diamond's new book. Diamond says he has done quite a few podcasts from home, in his wife's study on her screen, as well as face-to-face interviews like this one.

Asked why he wrote the book, Diamond answers with his biography. He was born in 1937 and grew up during the Second World War "under the shadow of Hitler." His father pinned maps of the European and Pacific theaters to his bedroom wall, and the question of why the war happened was always present. He also lived in Chile, which he calls the most democratic country in South America before Pinochet. He says nobody saw Pinochet coming, not even Pinochet's fellow generals. That led to a question he has carried all his life: "do bad as well as good people make a difference?"

Family history adds to that question. Diamond says the last members of his family in Europe disappeared in the Holocaust. His wife Marie's mother ended up in Auschwitz and survived, but other relatives did not.

He adds a lighter example of how leaders shape individual lives. As a researcher at Cambridge, he left a water pump running overnight. It blew and flooded his lab and the lab below, which belonged to Lord Adrian. Diamond describes Adrian as a Nobel Prize winner, the father-in-law of his thesis supervisor and the master of his college. The story mentions the chairman of the Cambridge Physiology Department, but this excerpt does not say how the chairman handled the flood.

Rogan agrees that leaders matter and says that Nazi Germany frightens him because it was not long ago. He recalls a time when most people seemed to agree that a nation could never again treat a group of people as so completely "other" that they stopped counting as human. He says he no longer believes that.

As I've gotten older, I realize how fragile civilization really is

Rogan sets out a rough split. Some leaders want good things for their people and want to be remembered for making a difference. Others want to take over every system so that their power cannot be contested. He brings up the book's opening story, in which Hitler nearly died in a car accident. He asks what the world would look like if one car had been two seconds ahead or behind and the crash had killed Hitler.

Diamond turns to other leaders whose violence was unexpected. He says Pol Pot killed about a quarter of Cambodia's population and encouraged children to kill their parents. Pinochet's death toll was nowhere near Hitler's, Diamond says, because Chile is small and Pinochet did not try to exterminate part of the population. Even so, Diamond claims that Pinochet's tortures were "far worse than anything that the Nazis did" and that they surprised Pinochet's fellow generals. The excerpt offers no evidence for that comparison. Diamond's broader point is that leaders can do good, do harm, or do nothing.

If you want a simple answer to when leaders will make a difference, Jared Diamond doesn't give simple answers. But I can boil it down to four or five things.

The first factor he names is that "A leader has to be at the right time and place." The other factors are not listed in this excerpt. Instead, he sorts leaders by how they relate to their moment.

Leaders who see the moment and seize it: Diamond recalls Bill Gates seeing a Popular Electronics cover, names the collaborator as “Steve Allen” in the transcript, and describes an urgent move into microcomputers. Gates’s own retrieved interview gives a more precise account: he and Paul Allen saw an 8080-based kit computer, identified on the page as the Altair 8800, on the January 1975 cover (issued in December 1974), then offered its maker software and developed BASIC. This was a software opportunity around an existing computer, not a plan to manufacture the chip or computer. Diamond says Gates both recognized the right time and "made the time right." He also places de Gaulle among the leaders who chose their time and place, but gives no details.

Leaders who recognize a moment they did not create: Diamond says Winston Churchill became prime minister because Germany invaded France, which Churchill did not cause. He quotes Churchill as saying on his appointment, "I knew that this was the occasion for which my whole life was a preparation". Diamond adds that Churchill "didn't manufacture it."

Leaders who were at the right time and place without knowing it: Diamond names Mark Zuckerberg, who was a Harvard sophomore in 2004 (Diamond says "I think") and did not choose to be born in 1984. Diamond argues that changes in the Internet made 2004 an especially good year to jumpstart social media, even though there were social media efforts before and after.

Genghis Khan is Diamond's most detailed example. Diamond credits Genghis Khan with an empire stretching from China to Poland, a scope that is his oral attribution here rather than an independently checked distinction between his conquests and those of his successors. The transcript renders the comparison names as "Adel of Ahran" and "Timor, the Turk." Diamond recalls tree-ring research from the preceding decade as showing that on the Mongolian steppe, "the wettest time in the last 2,000 years was the decade of Genghis Khan's birth." He traces the mechanism: rain meant hay, hay fed sheep and goats that fed Mongol babies, and hay also fed the horses the Mongols rode into battle.

If he had been born 10 years later or 200 miles further away, we wouldn't know anything about Genghis Khan.

Diamond stresses that neither Genghis Khan nor modern historians knew about this climate advantage until the tree-ring study of the last decade.

Rogan asks whether climate was really the main reason for Genghis Khan's success. He describes Genghis Khan as a brilliant and ruthless strategist who was good at uniting different groups, including people of different religions, whom he accepted. Rogan also points to Mongol tactics: they never settled down, lived in tents, and camped outside cities to wait them out. "There was a lot to it other than just resources, right?" he asks.

Diamond agrees ("Absolutely") and says success took two things together: the right time and place, and an extraordinary person. The setting creates an opening, he says, but "who emerges depends upon the personal qualities." So Rogan and Diamond end up agreeing that timing and personal qualities both matter, rather than disagreeing.

If he had been an equally extraordinary person, at some other time and place, we wouldn't know anything about him.

Diamond applies the same framework to religion. He says the first century A.D. in the Roman Empire was the ideal setting for founding what would become a world religion 15 centuries later. In his account, the Roman Empire was the most powerful state in Western Eurasia and was "basically the father" of the European countries that later spread around the world. Jesus did not choose where he was born, and neither he nor his followers could have known what would happen 15 centuries later.

Diamond says the setting was not enough by itself, because there were rivals. "The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans." Of the six, Christ was the most successful. Diamond lists what a religion's founding needs: charisma, an outstanding organizer, and often a great general.

Christ died too early. It was St. Paul, who was the outstanding organizer.

Sometimes one person fills all three roles. Diamond says Muhammad was charismatic, a great organizer and a great general. He describes the Mahdi of Sudan the same way. The Mahdi was in the right place to build an empire in East Africa, but Diamond says East Africa lacked the technology and demographics needed for a world empire, which Christianity's setting had.

Rogan focuses on Paul. He says Paul was "really kind of the creator of Christianity," because Paul never met Jesus and Jesus never wrote anything down. Rogan describes Paul's spiritual encounter on the road to Damascus. He says the religion rests on Paul reporting what Jesus said about 20 years later, with nothing written down at the time.

Diamond describes the founding as the work of two people, Jesus and Paul. He says Jesus had an advantage over the rival messiahs: "It was a universal message." It was not aimed only at Romans or only at men, but at everybody. Even so, he says "a good message isn't enough" without Paul as organizer.

On the written sources, Diamond says the Gospel according to Mark, thought to be the first Gospel, is estimated to have been written something like 20 years after Jesus died. "So we have no first person accounts of Jesus." He says that for Muhammad it was two centuries before things were written down, so we know even less about Muhammad than about Jesus.

Diamond points out a gap in his own framework. For Jesus, he invokes the powerful Roman imperial setting: earlier he calls it the Roman Empire, dominant in Western Eurasia, while the later transcript says “Western Roman Empire.” That later wording is unresolved here and should not establish a formal periodization of a separate western empire in Jesus’s lifetime. For Muhammad, he asks why Arabia produced a world religion at that time. He wonders whether Arabia, like Mongolia under Genghis Khan, had an unusually wet period around Muhammad's birth, which would have meant more people and more arms. "We don't have the weather information about Arabia. So we don't know why." He says we can infer that Muhammad was probably at the right time and place, but cannot pin it down as with Genghis Khan or Jesus.

Rogan notes that Muhammad was a prophet rather than a son of God: a man who lived at that time and whose ideas, written down hundreds of years later, became the basis of a religion. He says it is striking how often this pattern repeats, with one person setting the rules and followers who break them being shut out. He names Muhammad, Jesus and Joseph Smith. Without passing judgment on religion, Rogan says not all of them can be correct if their origin stories differ, and that he is fascinated by how much comfort such structures give and how whole populations go along with them.

One might say that the religious teachings are secondary.

Diamond tests this idea on 19th-century America. He says the United States produced five religions that spread worldwide, but the transcript names only four: the Mormon religion, Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science. He asks why the Mormons have been so successful.

The religious teachings of Joseph Smith are of modest merits, but the Mormons were very well organized under Brigham Young.

Diamond also credits the religion's social features: optimism and an emphasis on living a fulfilling, happy life. He also cites tithing. Mormons are expected to give 10% of their income to the church and work out the amount themselves, with no 1040-style form, which he calls a big commitment. He concludes that the Mormon religion spread because Smith was charismatic and Brigham Young was an outstanding leader, not because of Smith's theology.

Rogan adds that Mormons have built a sense of community he doesn't think any other religion has matched. He calls them "the nicest people" and says he has never met a rude Mormon. He contrasts this with an origin story he finds "suss" and with plural marriage, using the unclear phrase transcribed as “an offset of the original idea.” The intended word and its doctrinal meaning are unresolved, so it should not be glossed as a confirmed deviation or offshoot.

Diamond applies the same argument to Christianity. With due respect to Christian theology, he says the virgin birth and the ascent to heaven stretch scientific understanding. He does not think belief in the virgin birth was a major factor in Christianity's spread, and points to other causes instead.

The Christians outbred pagans in the first couple of centuries of the Roman Empire because Roman religion had a low view of women.

In Diamond's account, Roman religion gave children little prestige and abortion was frequent. Early Christianity gave women a larger role than Roman religion did, favored having babies, and stressed caring for the sick. His evidence is tombstones from the first couple of centuries of the empire, which he says show that "Christians lived longer and they were less likely to die than were pagans." He says Christianity began with perhaps a few dozen people under Jesus, or perhaps 100 in St. Paul's time. Diamond continues that Christianity became the empire’s dominant religion and adds literacy as an administrative advantage under Constantine; the interview still gives no sample size or method for the tombstone claim.