Andrew Huberman interviews polymath scientist and author Dr Jared Diamond on leadership, curiosity, and living a full life
Andrew Huberman speaks with Dr Jared Diamond, professor emeritus at UCLA and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Summary
Andrew Huberman interviews Dr Jared Diamond, whose new book Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings examines leadership across four domains: politics, religion, business, and sports. Diamond argues that charisma is just one of roughly 37 ways to be an effective leader, and that personality generalizations about leaders are largely unhelpful. He draws on the method of natural experiments rather than traditional biography to assess whether individual leaders actually make a difference — concluding that Hitler was one of the rare cases where a single person likely changed the course of history. Diamond also reflects on his own extraordinary life: 13 languages, three distinct scientific careers, decades of fieldwork in New Guinea, and a practice of deep curiosity that began at age three. At 89, he speaks candidly about the finite time he has left and how he is choosing to spend it.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the nature of leadership
Andrew Huberman: 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 the University of California, Los Angeles. He has done research in biology, anthropology, and frankly in so many areas that there really isn't an appropriate title for him. He is 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 Prophets, Profits, 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 bringing back all of that knowledge in a form that is unlike any other scientist or writer.
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.
Dr Jared Diamond, welcome.
Dr Jared Diamond: It's a pleasure to be with you.
Andrew Huberman: 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 your books and mainly focus on your new book — which is Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter? I think now more than ever people are thinking about modern leadership and themes of past leadership. First, I would like to know: what is a prophet? P-R-O-P-H-E-T.
Dr Jared Diamond: "Prophet" means, for my purposes, religious leaders, because my book about leadership 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 a catchy title — Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings. I don't care about whether they prophesy the future. It was simply my word for religious leaders.
Hitler, near-misses, and whether individuals change history
Andrew Huberman: 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. 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.
Dr Jared Diamond: 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, but every day of my life that I can remember was formed by the war. My first memory — the first thing that I can remember — was the first photo that the US Army released of dead American soldiers. It was a famous cover of Life magazine: two American soldiers, dead, face down on Buna Beach in New Guinea.
So I grew up in the shadow of Hitler. My family is Jewish, from Eastern Europe. The last of my family there, of course, disappeared in the Holocaust. I married into a Polish family. My wife's parents came to the US 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 have been formed under the shadow of Hitler. On top of that, there are leaders — non-political leaders — who've shaped my life, mostly for the good. There was a chairman of the Cambridge physiology department. I had left a rubber hose 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, 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 that. So there was a leader who could have ended my career but didn't.
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?
Andrew Huberman: How close were we to there not being an adult Hitler?
Dr Jared Diamond: There were two famous near-endings of Hitler's life. My book begins — the first paragraph is about a car accident in 1930, 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, and a big truck came into the intersection at right angles. Both Hitler's chauffeur and the truck driver either braked or accelerated, and ultimately the truck hit Hitler's car head-on, pushed it up against the curb, and was about to ride up over the car, crushing Hitler — and it came to a stop just before that. Hitler was injured but not killed. If he had died in 1930, would there have been World War II? Would there have been a Holocaust?
Then there was the other famous near-miss: in 1944, the next-to-last year of the war, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who had become 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 — 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 were killed. Hitler's eardrum was blown out. Hitler was seriously wounded, but he was not killed. That was 1944 — would various members of my wife's family have survived if Hitler had not leaned forward? So those are reasons to reflect on how close it came to Hitler not becoming chancellor, and how close it came to World War II in Europe ending in 1944.
Andrew Huberman: Was there anyone else who could have accomplished what Hitler accomplished?
Dr Jared Diamond: Historians argue about that. This illustrates the difficulties in figuring out whether leaders make a difference. The traditional method of historians and biographers is to write a biography. 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 antisemitic. There were plenty of antisemites in Europe, not just in Germany but in Poland. But Hitler — all those other antisemites 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 — famously deceiving Neville Chamberlain at Munich, but he also deceived German politicians, German business leaders, German generals, and his fellow Nazis. He was just brilliant at deceiving people.
So those are the arguments for thinking 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 he did. The famous British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote a biography of Hitler using the same facts, and came to the conclusion that Hitler was a normal German politician pursuing the goals of other German politicians — which is true — but that there wouldn't have been any difference if Hitler had not been the leader. That illustrates the weakness of the traditional biographical method: one is 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.
The most unlikely successful leaders
Andrew Huberman: Who in your mind is the most unlikely leader who became a spectacularly successful leader, either toward positive or destructive ends?
Dr Jared Diamond: There are many candidates. Having been born in 1937, I grew up under Roosevelt, but the first American president in whom I became truly interested was 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. When Roosevelt died, Truman was totally unprepared — he didn't even know about the atomic bomb. And yet the first decision 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 — I and others looked down on him. But in retrospect, we realize 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. When Truman stepped down, he was widely loathed, but in retrospect he has gradually become appreciated as not equal to Roosevelt and Lincoln, but a second-tier, courageous American president who took decisions and didn't care that he was going to be loathed because of them.
Charisma, personality, and the myth of the universal leader
Andrew Huberman: 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. 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?
Dr Jared Diamond: 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. There are about 37 ways to be an effective leader, of which charisma is one. Any question that you or anybody else would ask about how we can generalize about leaders' personalities — there are some generalizations about leaders, but not personality generalizations, because there are different ways to be an effective leader.
Andrew Huberman: I'm getting the sense that in your understanding of leaders and leadership, 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, 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 face value are very complex — like how did we get here, how did cultures evolve. 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?
I'm going to set up a parallel with something we're going to look at later, which is bird watching. Every bird is different, but every bird belongs to a particular category and has particular features. What level of understanding and consistency of ideas is satisfying to you?
Dr Jared Diamond: There are generalizations that I came to in writing about leaders. But as background — people often ask me, "Jared, your book about leaders now seems to be the opposite of Guns, Germs, and Steel. 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 you've changed your mind and now recognize a role of individuals?" And my answer is no.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is about patterns of history on the continents over the last 10,000 years. Over those 10,000 years on whole continents, I can't think of any individual who made a difference. There was no individual who was responsible for the Fertile Crescent jumpstarting civilization. The Fertile Crescent jumpstarted civilization because it was where the most productive wild plants — peas, wheat, barley — and the most productive wild animals — cow, sheep, goat, pig, horse — lived. 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. I haven't changed my mind — it's that I'm looking at completely different sorts of questions.
Andrew Huberman: Is it a leap to say that Prophets, Profits, Coaches, and Kings is in some ways an autobiography of the things that impacted your life along the way?
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 do mention that Sir Brian Matthews, as a leader of the Cambridge physiology department, saved my career in physiology. But then once I launch into politics, business, the sports world, and religion — no, it's all stuff I haven't contributed to in any of those four areas.
Now, in the epilogue of the book I do ask what are the areas waiting for exploration by the method of natural experiments — 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.
Andrew Huberman: You mentioned the story about flooding the laboratory with 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?
Dr Jared Diamond: I've not been one to jump on other people for their mistakes. I've made plenty of mistakes myself. I've had very close calls. I've done things that could have ended my career on the spot — that flooding was one of them, but there were others. So I'm not inclined to blame other people for their mistakes. I recall a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that mentioned he committed theft and could easily have been fired, but the theft was overlooked and he went on to develop his career.
For 36 years I was professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School doing laboratory experiments, and I had graduate students and postdocs, and quite a few of them 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 I'm reminded how close I came myself to having my career ended, and people forgave me, and my career developed very well.
Andrew Huberman: I would say so.
Dr Jared Diamond: Since I was forgiven, it behooves me to forgive my students.
Religious leaders: Joseph Smith, Ann Lee, Jim Jones, and Jesus
Andrew Huberman: Religious leaders — who in your mind stood out as important enough to feature prominently in the book?
Dr Jared Diamond: In the book I have two chapters on religious leaders. The first chapter looks at three religious leaders in 19th-century United States, because we have lots of detailed information about them: Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion; Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers; and Jim Jones, the founder of Jonestown. The second chapter on religion looks at Jesus. We have minimal information about Jesus — no contemporary information whatsoever. The first information 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.
Did Jesus make a difference? Well, the New Testament mentions 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 born with the same properties in Sudan, we wouldn't know about Jesus. If Jesus had been a religious leader in Western Europe in 100 BC, we wouldn't know about him. He was in the right place at the right time.
Andrew Huberman: He definitely has the highest H-index of any religious leader.
Dr Jared Diamond: The right place at the right time. And I believe that Christianity is today the world religion with the largest number of adherents.
Andrew Huberman: I know you try not to generalize, but is there anything specific about Jesus the person that we know with certainty that spoke to his effectiveness? Or was it purely right place, right time?
Dr Jared Diamond: Right — there were other people at the right place at 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 a world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes?
Well, there are a couple of things. One is Jesus's message and personal qualities. He had a universal message for all people. It was not just a message for the Essenes and not just a message for Jews. Yes, Jesus was Jewish, but his message was not addressed only to Jews. It was a universal message — and among the religious leaders of the Roman Empire at that time, that was a big thing in his favor.
Another thing in his favor was that a religion needs not only a charismatic founder but also an organizer. In some cases the organizer and the charismatic founder are the same person. Muhammad 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. The organizer was St. Paul, who was a great organizer. Just as with the Mormon religion: Joseph Smith was the charismatic founder, but even in his lifetime he had weaknesses as an organizer, and then he was lynched. The organizer was Brigham Young, who was a great organizer.
So: universal message, the good fortune of being followed by a great organizer in St. Paul, and being in the right place — the Western Roman Empire — at the perfect time.
The pairing of founders and organizers
Andrew Huberman: The picture I'm getting is that you need a leader and you need an organizer. Sometimes the leader is the organizer, but often there's someone else who can help organize the message. We see this in science quite often, especially in the biological sciences. Pairs — your advisor Hodgkin and Huxley won the Nobel Prize for describing the biophysics of the action potential. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize. It's very common that there's this pairing, and having known David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel a bit, there's often a personality complementarity — one tends to be a little more outspoken, one a little more reserved. Watson and Crick. Can we make any kind of generalization about pairings — two very complementary people that are especially effective in getting escape velocity on their leadership and their message?
Dr Jared Diamond: I don't think so. In the case of religion, it's not just pairings but often triplets — to launch a religion you need a charismatic founder, you need an organizer, but generally when you found a new religion there is pushback from existing religions, and often that pushback is violent. So new religions have often had to have generals as well. Muhammad 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 of thousands of Sudanese tribespeople 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 advisor was Alan Hodgkin. Alan Hodgkin was a great scientist, but he did not organize 50 people into a lab group. His strategy was to have one PhD student at a time. I was his PhD student for three years. He did not have another PhD student during that time. He did become Master of Trinity College and was an effective master. But there are scientists who are also outstanding organizers. Gerald Edelman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on figuring out how antibodies operated, had I believe something like 50 postdocs.
A friend of mine made a discovery about 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 before he had published, Gerald Edelman was in the audience and immediately told his lab, "Switch everything." His 50 postdocs went in and figured out how antibodies operated. Gerald Edelman got the Nobel Prize. My friend did not. But Gerald Edelman was a very effective organizer and fundraiser.
Andrew Huberman: And big personality.
Dr Jared Diamond: Yes. I met him on two occasions. Yes, he was a big personality. He ventured into neuroscience after immunology — big ideas, big lab.
Jim Jones, cult leaders, and the nature of followers
Andrew Huberman: I was surprised that you mentioned Jim Jones. Most people have heard of the Jonestown massacre — the top contour of that in my mind is a bunch of people who left the country to follow this cult leader and drank poison in a mass suicide. When I hear about cults and cult leaders, I default to thinking more about how impressionable the cult followers were rather than how persuasive the cult leader was. 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 there something about the dysfunctional pairing of the person prone to be a cult follower and the cult leader?
Dr Jared Diamond: Interesting question. A leader needs personal characteristics that will enable her or him to lead — they may be charisma, they may be the ability to terrify people, they may be the ability to persuade people. On one hand there's the leader, and 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. 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 that ended in the largest mass suicide in American history, 931 people drinking punch poisoned with cyanide — he can't be written off as simply crazy. He led the desegregation of Indianapolis. He attracted people by the noble ideals of the church he founded there. The people who followed him were not a random assortment — they were predominantly poor people, predominantly older people, a lot of them African-Americans, and they tended not to be highly educated. The People's Temple required the charismatic leader, but it also required people who were disposed to be followers.
Andrew Huberman: I didn't realize he led the desegregation of Indianapolis. If he had died before he moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco —
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 there — but he was gradually getting more and more unstable. This illustrates the point that you raise: one has to inquire not just about leaders but also about followers. Who is disposed to follow?
In the case of the Nazis, yes, there were Germans disposed to follow Hitler. In the case of Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my parents voted three times for Roosevelt — and my parents and other Roosevelt voters were not crazy or sick people. In that case, one cannot look to the pathology of their followers as one can in the case of Jim Jones.
Voluntary departure from power: the rarest of leadership traits
Andrew Huberman: 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. Can anything informative be said about powerful leaders who declare that they are not at the top of the hierarchy — that they obey God — versus those who say they are really the apex of power and understanding? And is this an informative dividing line?
Dr Jared Diamond: Jim Jones certainly did not deny God and did not claim to be superior to God. Here's another trait shared by leaders — and I mentioned that there are different ways to be an effective leader. In I think the third chapter of my book, I have a table in which I pulled together 22 outstanding political leaders of the period from World War II onwards. I asked myself: what generalizations can we reach about these 22 leaders? The obvious candidates — you can argue about them, but I include Stalin, Sadat, Mussolini, Hitler, and so on. I asked myself: are there any qualities shared by all of these leaders?
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 in his 80s and he retired voluntarily as president. Then Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, who served as prime minister for perhaps as long as 30 or 40 years but stepped down voluntarily. All other major leaders were either assassinated — as was Sadat — or committed suicide — as did Hitler — or were voted out of office — as was Winston Churchill — or 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. That's a generalization I had not anticipated.
Andrew Huberman: 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. You clearly don't slow down — you're teaching yourself Italian now. Is that right? Are you teaching yourself a new language?
Dr Jared Diamond: I learned Italian. Italian was the last of my 13 languages. I learned Italian 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. And once a week I have a two-hour Italian conversation with my Italian professor, who is a professor at USC.
Languages, curiosity, and the mind that loves lists
Andrew Huberman: What inspired you to learn 13 languages? Is it fun for you, or do you enjoy the challenge as part of the enticement of learning another language?
Dr Jared Diamond: My mother was a talented linguist. I just love learning languages. My school required us to study Latin for five years. I loved it. We had the alternative of studying either Greek or biology. I figured I'm going to be doing biology for the rest of my life, so I spent three years learning Greek. I can still recite the beginning of the Iliad. In college, I learned German — my mother helped me with that just before entering college. This was the time of Sputnik, so I learned Russian. I learned Spanish. Then my first summer after college, I spent the summer in Finland. Finnish 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. At that time in Finland, in the summer of 1959, very few Finns spoke English. In order to hitchhike, I had to start learning Finnish. I ended up in a national park in northern Finland where I hiked into a hut being looked after by four Finnish soldiers. The four Finnish soldiers didn't speak any language except Finnish, and I was with them for several days. They taught me Finnish by demonstrating things. They picked up a cup — the Finnish word for cup was kuppi. And then Finnish, instead of having prepositions, has postpositions and cases. So when you want to say "the cup is on the table," when you want to say "I'm putting the cup onto the table" — one suffix — when you take the cup off — another suffix. These four Finnish soldiers demonstrated for me by putting cups onto and off of tables.
I just loved it, and I seriously considered dropping out of science. I met my parents in Paris afterwards — they came to Europe 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. Fortunately, my father gently said, "Maybe it's a bit early to drop out. I know your 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."
Then when I went to New Guinea — New Guinea has a thousand languages. The first New Guinea people I worked with were a Fore tribe, famous for kuru, the laughing sickness, the first prion disease. At that time there was a New Guinea trade language called Tok Pisin. I was able to communicate with Tok Pisin, but I just loved learning Fore from a couple of Fore speakers. I remember asking my Fore informant — I was trying to figure out the word for "we." I'd already learned the word for "I" — nag — so I asked my Fore informant in Tok Pisin: "I — nag. So we — all the same one — mella?" And he gave me a word for "we," and then I responded, "Oh, we — nag kasik?" It turns out that Fore has a dual. English has singular and plural — "I" and "we." But some languages, like Slovenian and ancient Greek, have a dual — separate pronouns for two of us and three or more of us. So if I'm talking to just the two of us, we use one pronoun. But if there were a third person here, it would be a different pronoun. I just loved learning languages. I've always loved languages.
Andrew Huberman: It seems you love the puzzle of it, and you love the application of it, given that once you learned Italian you still have these conversations in Italian for a couple of hours a week. I'm struck by how, despite the tremendous variation in different languages, there's something about your mind where you're very comfortable with an immense amount of informational diversity within a category. Most people come in and try to simplify to clarify, but you seem to go to the widest range of variation possible and from that extract some deeper understanding. It's a highly unusual way of doing things. In biology we have lumpers and splitters — you can lump or you can split. But your mind works in a very different way. Has it always been that way?
Dr Jared Diamond: I've been that way only since age three. My mother, who was a teacher and loved teaching, 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. 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 list-maker. This is embarrassing, but I listed the numbers of street cars on the Boston street car system. I love making lists, and I've gotten 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 membranes to uncharged molecules — non-electrolytes. My first postdoctoral student and I measured the permeability of rabbit gallbladder to 210 non-electrolytes. They're all organic chemicals and there's lots of detail — branched non-electrolytes, non-branched non-electrolytes, ones with oxygen groups, ones with sulfur groups. I loved that project with those 210 non-electrolytes.
Then when I went to New Guinea to start studying 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 Fore names — the Mabisena, the Pasaki, the Kenmame Toto, the Swanadaba. Sometimes I'll recite them by their Latin names — Crateroscelis murina, Crateroscelis nigrorufa, Crateroscelis robusta. I just love making lists.
One of my most influential teachers was 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 birds? 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.
Andrew Huberman: 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 seeing a bird in the woods — he said knowing the name doesn't help you understand it. But I'll say that based on spending a lot of time thinking about the names and 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. In neuroscience, for instance, the name "retinogeniculate" tells you what the origin structure and the recipient structure are. So the names actually matter — they tell you a lot more than just "this is different from that." As you made these lists and recite them 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 do the lists and the names have their own unique value independent of that?
Dr Jared Diamond: The names are the anchor for a lot of information. When I recite at night Crateroscelis robusta — the 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 I couldn't tell the Pasaki and the Mabisena apart until New Guineans explained to me the differences in their behavior. So there's a lot of information associated with the name. In addition, the name itself has information — Crateroscelis means that bird belongs to the genus Crateroscelis. And in the genus Crateroscelis is also Crateroscelis murina, which is the low-elevation equivalent of Crateroscelis robusta. But there's also Crateroscelis nigrorufa, which is the small-bodied scrub wren that shares the same altitudinal range. So there's information that goes along with the name.
Three careers, New Guinea, and the freedom to follow curiosity
Andrew Huberman: In the world of science, there are people who pick one thing and drill there sometimes for an entire career, and there are people who try to throw their arms around enormous batches of information. Clearly you're in the latter category. Was this always your tendency?
Dr Jared Diamond: Basically yes — 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 had a great history teacher, better than all the history teachers I had at Harvard College, and a wonderful Latin and Greek teacher. Then once I got my PhD in physiology in Cambridge, England, and returned to the United States, I realized 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.
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. But I had become a bird watcher at age seven. When I came back to Boston after getting my PhD, I and a college classmate — a great bird watcher — spent the summer in Peru. We climbed mountains, we watched birds. The next summer we went together to New Guinea. Why? New Guinea is the wildest place in the world, and New Guinea also has the most wonderful birds. And so I developed a second career in birds.
Then I developed a third career in history and geography. My career in laboratory physiology I eventually closed down in the year 2002. Why? When our twin sons were born — my wife and I have twin sons, born in 1987 — 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, and 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, 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 Van Rees Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. Next year I want to do a paper on the birds of the Biak Mountains of Indonesian New Guinea. And because I'm 89 years old and I have to figure out what to do with my remaining time — which is finite — one of the things I want to do is synthesize my work on New Guinea birds by looking at bird distribution on the ten 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 years of my life.
Andrew Huberman: 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. Did you at some point give yourself permission to move fields? It's not common in science for people to do that. And maybe this is also not to pry into your personal life, but it's one thing to decide you're going to switch fields, but there's a spouse 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 follow your curiosity.
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 realized in retrospect that one of my life crises was after I got my PhD, realizing with horror that I was expected to do one thing for the rest of my life. But that was not me.
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 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, 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 was with the dean, Sherm Mellinkoff, the longest-serving medical school dean at UCLA. Wonderful person. He was offering me an associate professorship in the physiology department. I told Sherm, "Yes, but I'm interested in New Guinea birds, and you've got to understand that I intend to continue my work on New Guinea birds. I've spent three months every summer working on New Guinea birds, and I want to continue. 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 made it possible for me.
As for my wife Marie — Marie had no problems whatsoever with it, because when I met Marie, I was already working in New Guinea. In fact, 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 repeatedly. And so Marie had to be willing to tolerate that. By the time our kids were born, I had a very secure position in the medical school. When the 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. My last New Guinea trip was 2019.
Andrew Huberman: It raises a very interesting feature of adventurous living — much less researching and living immersed in a different culture, a different ecosystem. Most people would think, "Oh, you can get a cheeseburger from McDonald's anywhere in the world now." But have you always been willing to put your physical comfort on the line in order to learn? Learning languages is hard. Putting yourself into a jungle environment where there's all sorts of diseases, political and social unrest — there are a lot of variables when you get out there. Was that something that was fun, a necessary evil? Where has that landed with you?
Dr Jared Diamond: To work in New Guinea — it's a necessary evil. The year before I went to New Guinea, my friend and I went to Peru, spent a summer there, did mountain climbing. We did a first descent 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 — it's miserable. So yes, I experienced physical misery in Peru.
In New Guinea, to do anything there, there's lots of physical 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 I ended up with malaria. Climbing mountains in New Guinea. Being in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time. Occasionally — maybe once in three months — I can sit down at a 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 is uncomfortable, but it's fascinating — the fascination of the birds, of figuring out what's the difference between the Mabisena and the Pasaki.
Why birds are the key to understanding all of biology
Andrew Huberman: Let's talk about birds. The only other two birders I know from science are Jim Watson — who started off as an ornithologist of some sort and then decided to co-solve the structure of DNA — and the late Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark and was obsessed with birds and bird taxonomy. It's interesting that all three of you have, it seems, a kind of obsession with going after these big questions — entire societies, leadership, the structure of DNA, elementary particles — and birds. What information, what enrichment is to be gleaned from observing them? What does it inform you about, and what does it celebrate in you?
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 — 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 traps. 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 apply to other animals. 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 do you 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. The animals easiest to observe are birds. So when you say what could 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 from other animals.
Andrew Huberman: Many birds sing, some speak. Does the name Peter Marler mean anything to you?
Dr Jared Diamond: Yeah. He was at Davis when I was a graduate student.
Andrew Huberman: One of the most interesting observations he made was that the same species of bird would have a different song if raised at the Marin Headlands versus elsewhere, and that there was some innate relationship to the species — you could swap the young and they could learn the other location's song, but they would always learn their home location's song best. I feel like if ever there was a set of scientific findings that converges a number of your interests in language and location and migration, it's those Peter Marler studies. What did you think is perhaps interesting about bird song and bird language that can tell us about us?
Dr Jared Diamond: Everything. Bird song is a form of communication — what are birds trying to communicate? It's been assumed that the 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, a simple call note. When the birds see the hawk, they'll give that call note, and birds 200 feet away will hear it and will 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 has then inspired similar studies 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. So they started recording the grunts and playing them back. They noticed that some grunts made the monkeys look up, some made them look down, and some made them prop themselves up. They realized that the different grunts function as words. There's a grunt that means "eagle" — when a vervet monkey hears the grunt for eagle, the monkeys look up. There's another grunt that means "python" — when vervets hear it, they look down in the grass. There's another grunt that means "leopard" — when they hear it, they scramble up a tree. This is an example of the information conveyed by sounds, first studied in birds and then in monkeys.
Supervising students and tolerating intellectual independence
Andrew Huberman: In fairness to your earlier example where somebody forgave you for a mistake in the laboratory and you propagated that forward — when one of your graduate students or postdocs would walk in and say, "I realize we work on X, but I want to go work on this other thing," were you tolerant? Because the survival of a laboratory and a research program also depends on people hopping on board the main thrust of questions.
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 — a big investment on my part. I would make that investment only if it made sense for me.
Only one occasion did a student tell me that he wanted to have his own project. There was a wonderful Argentinian student who one day came to me and said he had been told that for postdocs, the norm in the department 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 I was taken aback. I said, "Okay, you can do your own project," and he did a project of his own as well as the project with me. But that's the only time 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 — for the student to get my full attention and to learn from me, it has to be something that I know about. The student cannot learn from me if it's something I don't know anything about.
Time, finite years, and the discipline of deep interest
Andrew Huberman: It's clear 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. What I was so struck by — positively struck by — is how clear you were, having met about 20 seconds prior, about the fact that some things in your life are a diversion — you're just not interested in them. And I think that fits beautifully with being interested in many other things. This is a somewhat strange question, 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?
Dr Jared Diamond: Absolutely not. And to give you a preview of coming events: 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 is not so widely known. When you reach the age of 70, your life expectancy is not 78. Your life expectancy is 93, because a lot of the risk is behind you. I knew that perfectly well. 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 I want to do: one is to synthesize my understanding of New Guinea's ten isolated mountain ranges. I did the first descents and the first ornithological explorations of several of them, and 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. I want to do a synthesis looking at those ten mountain ranges to understand what makes a species a good colonist — why are some bird species on all ten mountain ranges and other birds on only one? I've got that unique data set and I want to write it up while I'm still alive.
Another thing I've been thinking about for quite a while: I am musical, and I particularly love the music of Bach. I sang in Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. I sang in Cambridge's musical society in England. Benjamin Britten came and did the premiere of Cantata Academica when I was singing in the Cambridge chorus. Bach wrote 210 church cantatas. I've sung in about 20 of them, and I've been telling myself for a while that I want to get to know all of them. A year ago August, the time had come. The time ahead of me is finite — better start on the cantatas now. And so I started on the cantatas at the rate of about one a week. Last night I re-listened to Cantatas 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 cantatas. But that's something I would like to do. I'm very conscious now of the amount of time left, and I've had that consciousness only in the past few years.
Andrew Huberman: Are 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?
Dr Jared Diamond: My first thought is no. By and large, I've done the things that I've enjoyed doing. Of course there are things that are not pleasures but have to be done in life. 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 tax as much as most other people would. Income tax has to be done and takes a lot of my time. 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 shopping. I excuse myself by noting that I spend the equivalent of a couple of 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. I'd rather spend the time doing birds, but it's not something I greatly object to.
Paul Ehrlich, population, and the world's three great risks
Andrew Huberman: I was gratified to learn that you were close friends with my colleague Paul Ehrlich. His wife Sandra Steingraber is still on the faculty at Stanford. Paul wrote The Population Bomb, of course. He and Sandra wrote the book Jaws — with, I think, a foreword by you and maybe an introduction from Bob Sapolsky — about mouth breathing being detrimental to facial structure development and health. Paul was a delightful person, as you know. He got some things right and some people would argue he got certain things wrong — like The Population Bomb, which argued we'd be badly overpopulated by now and that that was dangerous. Some people would argue that birth rates are going down and the replacement problem is more of an issue. But was he correct about some of the issues with population growth and environmental impact?
Dr Jared Diamond: He was certainly correct that the biggest threats humans face today 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 kind of conflict we saw with the World Trade Center, since 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 overexploiting our resources? Because the world population has increased. There are now what — nine billion people. Ten thousand years ago there were probably one million people on Earth. And now we've got nine 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 — about four billion of the world's people depend upon fish and seafood for their protein. We're depleting the world's forests. We're depleting the world's topsoil.
Paul and his wife Anne — The Population Bomb calls 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, here's one of the world's great modern scientists, and his Wikipedia entry instead harps on The Population Bomb and says it didn't prove correct. Well, out of the nine billion people in the world today, how many of them are underfed and starving? 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 a first-world lifestyle. Even in the United States, the polarization 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 people who attack him are willing to admit.
Andrew Huberman: Happy to hear you say this. I've long been a fan of his work and of him, and I agree. Jaws is a wonderful book, and I think The Population Bomb still has great value — there's real value in reading it even if the specific statements held up differently. It's still a really important work.
Sports leadership: coaches, CEOs, and the statistics of success
Andrew Huberman: We talked about political leaders, we talked about religious leaders and a bit about cults. Sports — are you into sports?
Dr Jared Diamond: Am I into sports? Well, I work out.
Andrew Huberman: You look very healthy. Is that an important part of your intellectual rigor as well?
Dr Jared Diamond: I've always been physically active. I began weightlifting in college. I ran for years. The day that my wife was in labor, 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. I still work out several days a week. Being physically active is a big part of my life. I get satisfaction out of it.
Andrew Huberman: I find that all the scientists I know who have had very long successful careers and are still going strong are all 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 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.
Dr Jared Diamond: In bed, I think.
Andrew Huberman: Okay. Well, better than in one's office or lab. So along those lines — athletics and sports. Which sport are you into? And what led you to explore leaders in sport?
Dr Jared Diamond: I explored leaders in sports for the same reason that business school professors do 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 are hard to measure. CEOs tend to be secretive. Businesses may not publish their results, or they do 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 the business world are often developed in sports and debugged in sports. For example, in the business world, one of the main questions is how much of business success is due to the CEO. CEOs say, "I'm responsible for the success, and therefore you ought to pay me billions of dollars — because my company makes a hundred billion in profit, you can pay me ten billion." Is that true? It's complicated to figure out.
There are a couple of methods. One involves doing what's called 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 institution. In the business world, it turns out that similarly, CEOs account for about 30% of the ANOVA, the individual company accounts for another 30% — Procter and Gamble is a very well-run company, it's been well-run for 150 years — and 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 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. 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 outcomes is due to factors that are random with respect to the CEO. If you're throwing dice and you throw a one, and so you say to the person who threw the dice, "You're a lousy dice thrower — I'm firing you" — for statistical reasons, the chances are five out of six that the next dice thrower will do better than one. 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 — five million, ten million, fifteen million dollars. Simply when you fire a CEO, the next CEO is likely to do better for random reasons, as with dice throwing. That illustrates why business school professors have gotten lots of their insights by analyzing sports.
Andrew Huberman: 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 the "why" behind things being so important. Is that actually the case?
Dr Jared Diamond: Yes, but rarely. John Wooden is usually regarded as the greatest coach in the history of American sports in any sport. Under John Wooden, the UCLA basketball team won 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 were many reasons. He got his players in peak physical condition. Although his players might be five inches shorter than Duke players, he got his players to jump higher. He was a master of detail — he cared about what socks they wore because the socks affected 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'd 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. His great players, Bill Walton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, said, "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 is a model for life." That's unusual among coaches. I've never heard anyone say that Bill Belichick is a model for life. Nobody says that Bobby Knight was a model for a philosophy of life.
Why was John Wooden 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 you can't fake. You can learn how to train your players to jump higher, but you can't fake a philosophy of life as John Wooden did.
Andrew Huberman: Is there an analog inside the tech sector? Nowadays it seems it's tech CEOs and entrepreneurs — we have these looming larger-than-life figures. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, it was Hewlett and Packard when I was a kid, and then Steve Jobs obviously and Bill Gates up in Seattle, and now we have Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei at Anthropic is quickly emerging as another one of these big figures. Steve Jobs clearly had a philosophy of creating beautiful things and design and technology being fused in a way that was highly accessible — objects had a friendliness to them. So it seemed there was something philosophical, even slightly mystical there. How do you look at these technology leaders?
Dr Jared Diamond: Bill Gates I've met and I have had several lengthy conversations with him, and I like him. Elon Musk I met once. Jeff Bezos —
Andrew Huberman: Oh yeah, forgive me — I should have mentioned Bezos.
Dr Jared Diamond: Jeff 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 Yvon 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-rank mountaineer. I know him. I wrote the preface for his autobiography. He has a philosophy of life.
Do any of the other 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, his philosophy was that Apple should produce not a hundred products but four products, and the products should look nice and be attractive and 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 47 buttons and we had to call up our sons each time to tell us how to operate it. So Steve Jobs's devices don't have 47 buttons. But he had a philosophy certainly of products. I don't know whether he had a larger philosophy of life as John Wooden certainly did.
The four categories of leadership and what makes prime ministers different
Andrew Huberman: So we talked about political leaders, religious leaders, sports. You said there's a fourth category you cover in your book.
Dr Jared Diamond: Political leaders, business leaders, sports leaders, and religious. Those are the four categories.
Andrew Huberman: Business and sport seem to kind of interdigitate a bit — it sounds like the connection between business studies and sports studies has been especially tight.
Dr Jared Diamond: But it's also the case that the business school professors who've studied sports have also studied success in politics. Perhaps the best single paper I know on developing new methods for studying the success of leaders looks at leaders in politics as well. The conclusions 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.
Advice for living: do what you enjoy, what you're good at, and what matters
Andrew Huberman: Many people are interested in many things and have a genuine excitement about pursuing music 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 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. What, if anything, would you like to pass along to people of any age?
Dr Jared Diamond: 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 that when he was a teenager, he 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? 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've got to do this or that, tell them to go to hell. Literally. So many people say you've got to live your life this way. You've got to iron your shirts. When I was a graduate student, I didn't iron my shirts. Someone irons my shirts now, 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 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? Am I doing something that's good for the world? I've spent a lot of time designing the national park system for Indonesian New Guinea, designing the principles for national parks in general. I've written a lot 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 discovered I was not good at. I would have loved to be a conductor of orchestras, but to conduct an orchestra, you see the players out there and you've got to give the downbeat — not when the players are playing, but because of the speed of sound, you've got to give the downbeat ahead of time. I could not block out the sound of the players. I could not give the downbeat before the players play. UCLA invited me to conduct 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 things that are important for the world.
Closing reflections
Andrew Huberman: I agree on all fronts. 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 Prophets, Profits, 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. It's inspired a ton of curiosity and learning in me through your books, and today's conversation is just another extension of that. I'm sure this next book will 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.
Dr Jared Diamond: Thank you. I've enjoyed talking with you very much. You know, when one does interviews and podcasts, interviewers differ — they're not all the same. Some interviewers are better prepared than others. Some interviewers know more about the subject than others. It's a real pleasure to do a conversation with you. It's a pleasure for me to be interviewed by you.
Andrew Huberman: Thank you. The pleasure was mine, and we'll do it again.