What Makes Great Leaders & How to Live an Extraordinary Life | Dr. Jared Diamond

The episode opens with a direct challenge to a familiar assumption. People, the speaker says, regularly look for personality generalizations about leaders, and the most common one is that leaders have to be charismatic. The answer given is blunt: "Nonsense." Some leaders are charismatic, the argument goes, but others were not. Stalin and Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, are offered as examples of leaders who were "totally uncharismatic."

There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader of which charisma is one.

The claim is narrower than a rejection of all generalization. The speaker allows that "there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations," because effective leadership can take different forms. The figure of 37 is stated as approximate ("about 37"), and this part of the conversation does not list those ways.

In the host's introduction, Andrew Huberman, who identifies himself as a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, presents Dr. Jared Diamond as a professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, with research in biology, anthropology and many other areas. The introduction cites Guns, Germs, and Steel, for which Diamond received a Pulitzer Prize, along with the National Medal of Science and a MacArthur award.

The discussion centers on Diamond's most recent book, about leaders and leadership, titled Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings. The introduction promises coverage of political, religious, business and sports leaders, the dispelling of myths including the idea that charisma is required for successful leadership, and some biology, such as why birds, because of their reliance on sight and sound, are described as one of the best windows into human behavior and human nature. It also previews a discussion of Diamond's own curiosity since childhood, how it has moved from topic to topic and book to book, and his process of taking hard questions into the laboratory and into the field to observe things in their natural state. The host notes that the podcast is separate from his Stanford teaching and research roles and that the episode includes sponsors.

The title rests on a homophone. In the conversation, one sense is profits as in making money, and the other is prophets, P-R-O-P-H-E-T. The book's subtitle is given as a question: when do leaders matter? Asked what a prophet means here, the answer is that the word simply stands for religious leaders. The book examines leadership in four spheres: politics, business, sports and religion. Whether these figures predict the future is explicitly set aside: "I don't care about whether they prophesy the future."

The conversation proposes looking at the lightest and darkest leaders in each category, starting where the book starts: with Hitler, whom most people regard as one of the darkest leaders in history. The question is what studying him can teach about leadership more generally.

The answer begins with biography rather than theory. The speaker was born in 1937 and grew up in the United States during World War II. They were not bombed or orphaned, but say that every day they can remember was shaped by the war. Their first memory is the first photograph the U.S. Army released of dead American soldiers, a Life magazine cover showing two soldiers face down on a beach in New Guinea (transcribed as "Bunangona Beach").

The family history makes the stakes concrete. The speaker's family is Jewish from Eastern Europe, and the last of that family disappeared in the Holocaust. They married into a Polish family: the wife's parents came to the U.S. in 1948, the wife's mother survived Auschwitz, and several of the wife's relatives did not survive. In the speaker's words, both their life and Marie's had been formed "under the shadow of Hitler."

Alongside the political leaders, the speaker points to nonpolitical leaders who shaped their life, mostly for the better. The main example is an incident at Cambridge. The speaker left a water pump with a rubber hose running all night to dry out radioactive isotopes. The pump broke and flooded both their lab and the lab below it, which belonged to Lord Adrian, described as the father-in-law of the speaker's thesis advisor and the master of the speaker's college.

The next morning the chair of the physiology department, Sir Brian Matthews, called the speaker in, and the speaker expected to be expelled. Instead the response was brief: the incident was sloppy, and it should not happen again. The speaker draws the lesson directly: "there was a leader who could have ended my career but didn't." Other leaders, they add, did clearly good things for their career. The next sentence in the transcript is garbled, but its apparent point is that few leaders failed them.

These experiences, the speaker says, explain their personal interest in leaders, beginning with Hitler. The counterfactual is framed in family terms: without Hitler, would their Eastern European relatives and Marie's family have survived? The transcript of that sentence is garbled, but the question that follows is clear: "How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?"

Two famous moments are described in which Hitler nearly died. The first opens the book: a car accident in 1930, three years before Hitler became chancellor. Hitler was in the right-hand passenger seat of a chauffeur-driven limousine entering an intersection in Germany when a large truck approached at right angles. Both drivers alternately braked and accelerated, and the truck hit the car head-on and pushed it against the curb. The truck was about to ride over the car and crush Hitler but stopped just before that. Hitler was injured, not killed. The counterfactual: if he had died in 1930, would there have been a World War II or a Holocaust?

The second was in 1944, the next-to-last year of the war. Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who had become disillusioned, brought a small suitcase with a bomb into the conference room at Wolf's Lair. In the account given, he sat next to Hitler, primed the bomb and placed the suitcase just under Hitler's foot. Just before it went off, Hitler leaned forward. Four other people in the room were killed. Hitler's eardrum was blown out and he was seriously wounded, but he survived.

Each near-miss is tied back to the family stakes. Had Hitler not leaned forward in 1944, the speaker asks, would members of their wife's family have survived? The two episodes show how close history came to Hitler never becoming chancellor, and to the war in Europe ending in 1944.

The harder question is whether anyone else could have done what Hitler did. The speaker says historians argue about this, and that the dispute shows how difficult it is to establish whether leaders make a difference at all. The traditional method is to write a biography, and many biographies of Hitler exist.

Most of Hitler's biographers, by this account, conclude that he was unique in several ways. He was "the most charismatic orator, unfortunately, of the 20th century." He was anti-Semitic, though there were many anti-Semites in Europe, in Poland as well as Germany. The distinction drawn is that other anti-Semites killed Jews one by one, while Hitler was "the only one who got the idea of doing it on an industrial scale." The conclusion is hedged: without Hitler, "there probably would not have been a Holocaust."

Deception is the third trait. Hitler is described as brilliant at deceiving people: Neville Chamberlain at Munich, but also German politicians, business leaders, generals and his fellow Nazis. Together these traits make the case that he mattered, and that without him there might not have been a World War II and would not have been a Holocaust. The two claims are held with different confidence: "might not" for the war, "would not" for the Holocaust.

Most historians tend to believe that leaders don't make a difference.

Hitler is presented as an exception that most historians accept. Yet the speaker points to a dissent: the British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote a biography of Hitler from the same facts and concluded that Hitler was a normal German politician pursuing the goals of other German politicians. The speaker grants that part as true, but notes Taylor's further conclusion that nothing would have been different had Hitler not been leader. For the speaker, this disagreement exposes the weakness of biography as a method: "One's limited by the facts, but different people come to different conclusions with the same facts." That is the stated reason the book instead uses natural experiments, although this part of the conversation does not explain how that method works.

Asked to name the most unlikely person who became a spectacularly successful leader, for good or ill, the speaker notes there are many candidates and picks Harry Truman. Having been born in 1937, the speaker grew up under Roosevelt, but Truman was the first president they took an interest in. (The transcript gives their age at the time as "80th," which looks like a transcription error.) Truman is called "the most unlikely significant American president."

The case for his unlikeliness is laid out in detail. Truman was chosen as Roosevelt's "third or fourth vice president" for trivial political reasons. He had been an undistinguished senator from Missouri who reached the Senate through what the transcript renders as "dishonor shenanigans," apparently meaning dishonest ones. He was so insignificant that Roosevelt never met with him after he became vice president. When Roosevelt died, Truman did not know about the atomic bomb, yet his first decision was whether to drop it.

Truman was widely despised in his time, and the speaker admits to having looked down on him too. The reassessment came later: Truman is described as courageous and indifferent to being hated. The decisions listed are the Berlin airlift, the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Korean War and the firing of General MacArthur, with the last two named as decisions people hated him for. He left office widely loathed. Over time, in the speaker's ranking, he has come to be seen not as the equal of Roosevelt and Lincoln but as a second-tier president who made decisions knowing he would be loathed for them.

After a sponsor break, the conversation raises a question from tech and entrepreneurial circles: that introspection may hurt people trying to build big things. With a caution against painting with too broad a brush, the question is whether powerful leaders, dark or light, tend to make the next decision without much thought about the past or about how they will be perceived.

The answer is "I would say no," and it repeats the episode's opening argument. People regularly look for personality generalizations about leaders, the most common being that leaders must be charismatic, which is again dismissed as "Nonsense." Some leaders are charismatic, while Stalin and Pinochet were "totally uncharismatic." The segment ends here, so the transcript shows the rejection of a link between introspection and leadership success, but not a fuller explanation beyond the general point that personality traits do not reliably predict effective leadership.

There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader of which charisma is one.

The passage opens with a claim that undercuts the search for a leadership personality type. Charisma is presented as one route among many. Generalizations about leaders are possible, the speaker says, "but not personality generalizations", because effective leadership takes different forms.