Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book https://www.harpercollins.com/products/profits-prophets-coaches-and-kings-jared-diamond?variant=46262156066850. Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not Christ, the Roman Empire having had prophets to spare — and observes that even Genghis Khan happened to be born at an auspicious moment for a conqueror of the steppes. Conditions ripen; somebody turns up. So which leaders do make a difference? Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana's success will endure, Jared's own place in intellectual history, and what he'd tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he's more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he'd do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur "genius grant" left him depressed for a week, why he's listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more. Read a transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jared-diamond/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/SwcVPrH_waU on YouTube. Recorded August 21st, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://x.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://x.com/tylercowen on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.com/invite/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:11 - On whether any leader is irreplaceable 00:21:35 - On his own replaceability 00:24:55 - On the decline of face-to-face skills 00:29:02 - On intelligence and genetics 00:32:57 - On why the Industrial Revolution began in England 00:36:38 - On environmental optimism 00:41:11 - On nuclear risk and the Dvorak keyboard 00:42:55 - On birdwatching 00:44:07 - On writing and productivity 00:47:06 - On what his parents gave him 00:49:51 - On what comes next 00:51:36 - Outro

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I am greatly honored to be speaking with Jared Diamond. Jared studied physiology at Harvard and Cambridge and became initially a leading expert on the gallbladder. He is also an ornithologist, anthropologist, sociologist, evolutionary biologist, ecologist, an environmental historian with a working knowledge of archaeology, genetics, and the epidemiology of human diseases. And on top of all that, he is professor of geography at UCLA. He has a new and notable book out called, "Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: When Do Leaders Matter?" Jared, welcome.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Who do you think is the least replaceable leader in human history?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Wow, wow. The least replaceable leader in human history. Frankly, my answer is none. There has been no unreplaceable leader in human history because over a long time, things wash out. A candidate, of course, would be Jesus Christ, but there were half a dozen other prophets in the Roman Empire at that time, discussed in the New Testament. And if Christ had died in childbirth, one of those other prophets might have taken over. So I would say that in the long run, there was no leader that has made a difference.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Well, you say might have taken over, but that's probabilistic, right? Say with a 40% chance, someone else would have taken over. It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Certainly, his religion made an enormous difference. Christ himself was the charismatic founder. But a religion needs three things. It needs a charismatic founder, it needs an organizer, and often it needs a general because new religions often face opposition. The organizer for Christianity was Saint Paul. In the case of the Mahdi's religion of the Sudan in the late 1800s, the Mahdi was the charismatic founder, and he was the organizer, and he was the general. In the case of Islam, Muhammad was the founder and the organizer and the general. So religions

• 2:49Speaker 01

  may have three roles, some of which are sometimes played by the same person.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  But without the figure of Muhammad at exactly the time he came along, is it not quite easy to imagine a Middle East not unified under Islam, not unified with the common language of Arabic, in some ways maybe a bit more like the Caucasus, which remains a crazy quilt of different patterns, and thus Muhammad is one of the three or four most consequential leaders ever?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  That's possible. That's the big question. It's harder to become clear about Muhammad than it is about Christ because we don't know what the weather was like in Arabia at that time. Weather makes a big difference. If it was rainy, that would mean lots of plant growth for lots of babies and for feeding an army. We just don't have information on the weather in Arabia at that time. A counter example is Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan, who developed the largest land empire in world history, all the way from China to Poland. Why did Genghis Khan do it when there were other step leaders like Adal of Hunan and

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Timur the Turk? We've learned recently that the wettest time on the steppes in the last 2,000 years was around the time of Genghis's birth. He was born at exactly the right time, at the right place. If he had been born 200 miles further away and 20 years earlier, we wouldn't know anything about him. And so in the case of Muhammad, we just don't know whether the time of his birth was a particularly propitious time to found a religion in that area or not.

• 4:30Speaker 00

  The very notion that the two first names we're talking about, they're both religious leaders, right? They're not kings, they're not inventors. Do you think that suggests a vision of the world where it's ideas that really matter and somewhat at variance with your own geography-based theories?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  My own geography-based theories, people often say, Jared, have you changed your mind? Here, here's this book about individuals and your other books, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and so on, about whole societies for 10,000 years. No, I haven't changed my mind. It's that I'm asking different questions, for questions such as, why is it that you and I are now speaking the English language, and you and I evidently of European background, but we're standing on the land of Native Americans? That's long-term history. The explanation is not individual leaders, but it has to do with plants and animals available for domestication in the Fertile Crescent versus in the New World. So that's a question whose answer does

• 5:25Speaker 01

  not depend upon individual leaders. Whereas, if you want to know why Amazon is now the largest everything store, a store that cares so much about individual customers and doesn't care about paying dividends to its investors, that has everything to do with one person, Jeff Bezos.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Is it correct to think of your new book, again, "Prophets, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings," as in essence, the error term for guns, germs, and steel?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  No, I would just say it's a different book about a different question on a different timescale.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  But there is some larger model that ties it all together, right, in your mind?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Certainly, my current book, yes. My current book is looking at leaders not just in the sphere of politics, which is where I first got interested in this subject, but also in the business world and in the sports world, sports coaches, and in the world of religion. It turns out that there are common questions and common methods used for studying leaders in these different spheres. For example, I hadn't realized before I got into this area that much of the research on sports coaches has been done by business school professors because the questions of leadership that business school professors ask can be answered

• 6:42Speaker 01

  more easily in sports. In sports, there's a game every week, all the teams play by the same rules, there may be 24 teams in the same league. It's reproducible. Business is not so reproducible. And so much of the work about the methods for assessing leaders in business have been developed by business school professors, testing their methods and developing the methods in the world of sports.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  In politics, do you think destructive leaders matter more than constructive leaders just because it's easier and cheaper to destroy?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  No. When one looks at tables of leaders who made a difference in the 20th century, the list of constructive leaders is, if anything, slightly longer than the list of destructive leaders.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  But say we had not had Roosevelt and Truman, but we had other presidents. That seems to be a much smaller difference than if there had been no Hitler.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  That is true. Hitler is certainly the destructive leader who made the biggest difference in the 20th century. I was born in 1937, so I grew up in the shadow of Hitler. Hitler made a difference. Why? Because he was ultra-charismatic as a speaker, unfortunately, because he was a very skilled manipulator and deceiver. He deceived not only Neville Chamberlain and other politicians. He deceived German generals, and he deceived his fellow Nazis. He was a big risk-taker. He was not willing to wait. He was convinced that he would die early, and so he took big risks. He threw everything on a single cast. Sometimes

• 8:20Speaker 01

  his risk paid off, as in his invasion of France, or in sending German troops into the Rhineland when it was unprotected. Sometimes his gamble didn't pay off, most notably when he did not pull back the German army surrounded at Stalingrad, or when he threw his last tank armies into the Battle of the Bulge. So Hitler was a very distinctive person.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Do you think there are any individual leaders who have really mattered for the history of Papua New Guinea?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  For the history of Papua New Guinea? Really interesting question. I would say no. The closer to it was the founding president of Papua New Guinea, who could have made a big mess. He didn't make a big mess. On the other hand, he wasn't as spectacularly successful as Suretse Kama, the founding president of Botswana.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And what's your underlying model for why in PNG, the leaders matter so little? Is it that geography is so important there, or that it's never been unified? Or that it's so poor?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Good question. PNG was not unified until the Australian colonial era. And even today, so PNG has something like 700 different languages. The premiers of PNG tend to be devoted to their tribal group, even to their clan, or to their group of tribes. PNG has never had a national unity, and it's had a struggle to build a national unity today.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  How do you identify leaders who simply prevented events? So there's no great legacy to their name, but they stopped some very bad, or maybe very good, things from happening. And they're just a footnote to history, but they mattered a great deal.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Leaders who prevented events. One could say that Winston Churchill prevented events. He prevented the conquest of England by Hitler. He then joined with Roosevelt to overcome Hitler. Are the leaders who prevented events? Most of the leaders that we think of are the leaders who did things rather than prevented things from happening.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  But don't we, we undervalue the preventers. So Churchill was very active. He both did things and prevented things. But you know, maybe Khrushchev prevented World War III. We don't quite ever see that in the data in any obvious way, but he might have been extraordinarily consequential.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  That's an interesting way. John Kennedy, what was probably the most important thing that John Kennedy did? It was the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember very well, I was at a dinner when Kennedy made his speech announcing the crisis. For a week, it was touch and go whether the world would have ended up in nuclear war. In fact, after the crisis was over, and the Russians and the Americans began to talk to each other, we realized how close we had come. There was a Russian submarine whose captain launched a large nuclear missile, and it was the other officers on the crew who prevented the captain from doing, so it was a close call. Kennedy handled the discussions in the Cuban Missile Crisis brilliantly.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And so we can say, yeah, the most important thing that Kennedy did was to prevent nuclear war.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  With the onset of powerful artificial intelligence, will political leaders matter less or more?

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Interesting question. I'm pausing because my sons, if they heard this conversation, would say, for heaven's sakes, don't ask our father about artificial intelligence, because he is the least competent person technologically. I will now show you the most advanced device I have. It is a cellphone. My sons and my wife forced me to get the cellphone.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  That's enough.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Therefore, I am not competent to press and pinny about artificial intelligence.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Now, in some of your particular explanations in the book, I'd like to push on a few of those. I read you as arguing that Rachel Carson mattered a good deal, and I'm not sure that's true, because it seems there's a lot of countries that when people get to something like $28,000 per capita income, that they just turn much greener and they clean up their air. We sometimes call that the environmental Kuznets curve. And the fact that there's a broad class of those countries, doesn't that mean Rachel Carson probably didn't matter that much?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  At minimum, Rachel Carson jumped out of the environmental movement about a decade before it would have been jump started. Yes, an environmental movement was starting in the United States then, but it had not gotten a great deal of attention. Her book, Silent Spring, that book and Darwin's Origin of Species are probably the two books by scientists that have had the biggest impact in the last century. When her book was published, the very next day, it was Senator, I think, Ribikoff of Connecticut, who announced the next day that he was launching a US government investigation into toxic chemicals.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  So she certainly caused the environmental movement to develop earlier than would have developed afterwards. But the environmental movement, you're correct, the environmental movement would have developed perhaps later and more slowly.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  But it seems if anyone is relatively easily substitutable, it was her. It might have come a year later, but there are plenty of people writing and thinking about the environment. And it seems odd to suggest that Jesus is just one of many prophets of his time, and he would have been substitutable, but that Rachel Carson had this unique role?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  This is interesting. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was a scientist, and she was respected by other scientists. So when she asked questions, they answered her questions. At that time, there was no professional scientist writing books for a broad public. The reason was, yeah, I remember it well, because I was getting into science in those days. In those days, the belief among scientists, professional scientists, was that if you write for the public, it's because you're washed up as a scientist, you're prostituting yourself. And in fact, the first scientists who achieved success in writing for the public, Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan, did not achieve their success until about 20 years after Rachel Carson.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Rachel Carson had some advantages compared to the scientists who later became famous. She was not a university professor, so nobody could say she was prostituting herself. She was a woman. She wrote beautifully. She was a poet. She read back her texts to listen to them. Even the best writers today, Richard Dawkins, they don't write as beautifully as did Rachel Carson. And a woman, not a university professor, she was a mild-mannered person, not a vigorous arguer like Carl Sagan, but as a mild-mannered person. When she was put on a crucial show where she and the spokesman for a chemical company

• 15:28Speaker 01

  squared off against each other, the spokesman for the chemical company pounded and screamed and basically looked embarrassing, whereas Rachel Carson responded calmly and convincingly. So I would say, thinking about it now, that it was another 20 or 30 years before the first scientist became famous for writing for the public.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Now, this is the podcast where we talk about the pomegranate juice industry. I'm well aware of the proximate influence of the Resnick family, but when I look around the world, I see India, Iran, Turkey, China, Egypt, Spain, South Africa, Azerbaijan, Italy, they all have a pomegranate juice sector. And it's hard for me to believe that without the Resnicks, the US would not have gone the same path a little while later, but inevitably so, no?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  No, because pomegranates have been around, domesticated about 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. The pomegranate juice market consisted of a salesperson squeezing a single glass of juice at a market. It's difficult to make pomegranate juice. Orange juice is easy to make. You cut the orange in half and it's soft inside. Pomegranates, much of the value of the pomegranate is in its very hard rind. And the contents of pomegranates is not a mush like orange juice, but it's these tiny seeds. The way that pomegranate juice is now made on a large scale consists of a three-story

• 16:58Speaker 01

  tower that squeezes the entire pomegranate, including the rind. It's much more difficult than making orange juice. So there was no pomegranate juice industry for 5,000 years around the world. In the United States, there was no industry until 2002. In 2002, there were about 22 pomegranate growers in the United States. They were all in California. 21 of them were small farmers without much money, without the motivation to invest huge amounts of money. Linda Resnick was, got interested in the medical value of pomegranates, and she sank huge amounts of money, a couple hundred million dollars. It took her 18 years to start making money on pomegranate juice.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  None of those 22 other farmers had the $150 million to pour in, or would have waited 18 years. And the big companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle, they never would have permitted a branch of their industry to sink $150 million and not make a profit for 18 years.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Are you convinced that the relative success of Botswana will endure? Their current politics seems much more personalized, much more corrupt. With artificial diamonds, the value of their most important resource is headed to some very low sum. Won't they just revert to mean and it won't have been an enduring success?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  What one can say is that Botswana became independent in 1966, and it's now, 60 years later, and Botswana, when it became independent, was the poorest country in Africa. And now Botswana...

• 18:36Speaker 01

  For most of these sixty years has been either the richest or the second richest country in Africa. So for sixty years, they've got a great record. What will happen in the next sixty years? I don't know.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  It's only, I think, two million people or so. I'm not sure of the number and one resource. So you divide up the value of the resource and they do well. But the value of the resource goes away and they're like Namibia, no?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  They have three million people. And so the value of the diamonds is divided among only three million people instead of divided among the hundred million people, as in the case of Nigeria. We've had artificial diamonds for quite a while now. And despite that, natural diamonds are still very popular. I know this firsthand because one of our two sons has just gotten engaged and what he bought for his fiance was a natural diamond, not an artificial diamond.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  You have a section on John Wooden, the former basketball coach at UCLA. And when I think of his success as a coach, I'm most inclined to think his great talent was as a recruiter, not as a coach per se. What's your view on that? He gets Lew Alcindor, later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bill Walton, among others, to come to UCLA to play. Isn't it all about recruiting?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yes, that's recruiting. But recruiting was the least of his talents. He won national champions with Walton and with Alcindor, but he also won national championships without them. He was distinctive in many ways, his practices. He spent two and a half, three hours planning his practices. When he ran the practices, his players described him as, they said, when he ran the practices, we ran a play, and then he would say, do it faster, and then do it faster, fast, faster. With the result that his players could do things almost subconsciously. He also insisted on his players being in top rank condition.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  So there was a year when UCLA played against Duke, and the Duke players were six foot nine, and the UCLA players were six foot four. But John Wooden had trained his players to jump high. He was a great psychologist also. He understood his individuals. He understood teamwork. One of his decisive moves was that in a year when UCLA didn't do very well, you wondered, why is it? And he figured out that he was practicing his players just in groups of five, which meant that if one player had to pick a rest and another player was brought in, the other player hadn't worked out with that group. So he trained his players in groups of seven rather than five. And then finally, his players themselves, when

• 21:14Speaker 01

  they talked about John Wooden, they didn't talk about him as a basketball coach. They talked about him as a person. Bill Walton said this, John Wooden made more difference in my life than anyone other than my mother and father. Because for him, basketball was not a sport. Basketball was a metaphor for life.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  If you think of your own model of the intellectual world, how consequential a figure are you? Would Guns, Germs and Steel in some other way have been written, rewritten ten years later if you hadn't done it? Or it just would have been a vacuum?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I have some prejudice.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  That's fine. Let's hear them.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  All right. There are other books about the theme of Guns, Germs and Steel, which is why societies in different parts of the world had different successes. Why the argument of others is that it depended upon the distribution of domesticable plants and animals around the world, and it also depended upon the axes of the continents, Eurasia being east-west, the New World being north-south. Contributions that I made were the role of domestic plants, domestic animals, in the development of infectious diseases. What killed the most Native Americans was not European swords and horses. It was European infectious diseases. But why did

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Native Americans not have their own infectious diseases to give back to Europeans? And the reason is that the epidemic infectious diseases of the modern world come from domestic animals. But the Fertile Crescent had the most domestic animals, five big domestic animals. The New World had only one big domestic animal, the llama. And the llama is not cuddly. We haven't gotten any infectious diseases from llamas. But I was professor at a medical school. My brother-in-law was an expert in infectious disease. And so I did make a contribution in the importance of infectious disease, and the reason why infectious diseases developed

• 23:20Speaker 01

  especially in the Old World. Also, the importance of continental axes, the rapid spread east-west of domestic animals and of people and inventions, which was always at the same latitudes, same day length. That was something that a botanist told me, but it's not something that students of history were aware of. And so I got that message from the botanist and I put it in Guns, Germs and Steel. So the fact is Guns, Germs and Steel has made a difference. I'm prejudiced.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  What do you think of the people who say, if you take all the variables, put them in a cross-country regression, that it's really distance from the equator that dominates and that that's the one factor? And that would have been discovered, say, eight years later?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  The answer to that is it's not distance from the equator at all. Of the centers of agriculture around the world, there are people who say Europe and the temperate zones, distance from the equator, helped Europe. Well, the domestic plants and animals of Europe and the writing of Europe and the metal tools of Europe and the centralized political governments of Europe were not developed in Europe. They were developed in the Fertile Crescent, in Mediterranean latitudes. In the New World, the most advanced societies were not at high latitudes. Most advanced societies were the Maya of the Yucatan and the Incas close

• 24:46Speaker 01

  to the equator. So distance from the equator has not been a major factor, except that if you get too far from the equator, the Inuit and Siberians, you don't have agriculture there.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  What is it you think that a typical, highly ambitious twenty-five-year-old most misunderstands about becoming consequential?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  What is it that a twenty-five-year-old most misunderstands about being consequential?

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, they come to you as a consultant and they say, Jared, I'm just dying to be consequential in human history. What is it that I should know? What should I do? What should I change? What can you teach me? What's the main lesson?

• 25:19Speaker 01

  What's the main lesson? The main lesson is learn to talk to people face to face and put away your indirect means of communication. Traditionally in New Guinea, there were no telephones. All communication was face to face. New Guineans are very skilled at communicating face to face. Particularly in the last forty, fifty years, I've seen the deterioration of social skills. It's very striking. In New Guinea, I was environmental consultant for the Chevron oil fields in New Guinea. And there was an occasion, we at Chevron wanted to develop a new oil well. So they brought their international lawyers out from Switzerland to New Guinea to negotiate with New Guinea villagers who had never been

• 26:03Speaker 01

  out of their villages. The international lawyers thought this is going to be a piece of cake. These people don't have experience of negotiating. In fact, New Guineans had far more experience at negotiating. They had far more negotiating tricks than did the international lawyers. The lawyers expected to be out of there with their agreement in a day. In fact, at the end of the first day, the international lawyers thought they had an agreement with the New Guineans. And the next morning, the New Guineans said, oh, no, that agreement, we are forgetting that agreement. The people made that agreement. They don't count. Here are some different negotiators. New Guineans had a wide range of negotiating skills because they spent their lives negotiating face to face. Nowadays,

• 26:46Speaker 01

  particularly in the last twenty years, I'm shocked at the deterioration of social skills in the generation of my children who are thirty-nine years old, because most communication nowadays is not face to face. And so we don't understand people.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  But aren't a lot of current political leaders, especially in America, highly skilled at social media? If I look at AOC, as we're speaking, she's favored to win the Democratic presidential nomination. She may or may not win the election, but she's basically well-known because of social media. Or no?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Well-known, yes. Politically skilled and socially skilled, no. Why not politically skilled? Because people today spend so much time dealing indirectly. You and I are now talking indirectly. The telephone was the first indirect communication, telephone and radio. Then in came computers. Because I teach at UCLA, I've seen the shocking deterioration of writing skills and speaking skills in UCLA students in the last several decades. Why? Because...

• 27:57Speaker 01

  The internet communication is indirect now and they're not developing the socialist skills.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  And so who are the people that you think are highly effective, whether or not you agree with them, but highly effective as leaders because of their direct face-to-face social skills?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Highly effective as leaders. First of all, I won't pass judgment on leaders who are still active today because of premature. We can't yet judge Angela Merkel, Donald Trump will look sometime from now. Leaders in the business world, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, they made a difference. Each of them, none of them created his sphere without Jeff Bezos. We would have had everything store. There already was an everything store, namely eBay, but Jeff Bezos developed a distinctive sort of everything store

• 28:56Speaker 01

  and online store that prioritized the customer. So those in the business world are some of the leaders who've made a difference.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Now, I've never been to Papua New Guinea, but should I think that the people there are smarter or possibly even genetically smarter?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I will answer yes, and I will tell you, there have been people who hate me for saying that.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  You won't get cancelled here, don't worry.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  My impression, because I've spent 60 years out there, is that New Guineans are more curious, on the average, they're more curious, smarter than our Westerners. Why is that? Think of how natural selection operates in New Guinea and how natural selection has operated in Europe in the last 10,000 years. In Europe, survival depended especially on surviving infectious diseases. Didn't depend so much on how smart you were, but it depended on whether you overcame the main causes of death, the infectious diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis and measles. In New Guinea, the main causes of death are dealing with this very difficult environment and

• 30:03Speaker 01

  dealing with other New Guineans because warfare is constant there. I think this explains why my impression that New Guineans are more curious and smarter than Westerners. I think this explains why it happened. But I must say, when I tell Americans or Europeans that New Guineans are on the average, I think smarter, they really hate to hear that. The usual view is that they're dumber because they had stone tools and they didn't have metal tools. Well, they didn't have metal tools because their agriculture was much less productive.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  There was a recent piece in Nature, I think a few months ago, that argued there's genetic evidence that West Eurasians, since the Stone Age, have become somewhat smarter through whatever mechanisms of interbreeding. Do you think that's also true? I mean, you could imagine protecting yourself against infectious disease does require a lot of smarts. You've got to provision food, you've got to know what's coming, you have to build social alliances, right? Or maybe treat people the right way to whatever extent you can. Can't that also have been a positive mechanism for selection?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  The fact is that particularly European scientists want great efforts for the last century ever since they have IQ tests to demonstrate that Europeans have higher IQs than do other people. And there's no evidence whatsoever for it. There are lots of people who try. I've not seen this particular Nature paper, but for more than a century, eugenicists have been trying to argue that Europeans are smarter and there's just no evidence that they're smarter.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  But this paper doesn't show Europeans are smarter than other people. It just shows they're smarter than they were 25,000 years ago.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  How on earth would we demonstrate that Europeans are smarter now than they were 25,000 years ago? There's no way that you could demonstrate that. We know that 25,000 years ago, Europeans and Indonesians were making great art, the great art of Lascaux. We know that about 80,000 years ago, there was a takeoff in human societies with much more rapid inventions, inventions gradually of finer stone tools and inventions of clothing and sewn clothing. What happened 80,000 years ago? My guess, and this is something that I argued in my book, The Third Chimpanzee, my guess is that that great leap forward of 80,000 years ago might have been associated with the

• 32:29Speaker 01

  development of complex human language. Human language requires a complex voice box. Chimpanzees can produce about four vowels and consonants, but the voice box of chimpanzee cannot produce complex spoken language. My guess is that it might have been changes in the voice box 80,000 years ago that resulted in the great leap forward that then resulted in art and much finer stone tools.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Are you familiar with Greg Clark's hypotheses in economic history, that the English in particular, possibly also the Dutch, that they cross, you know, interbred themselves into lower rates of time preference, more savings, more investment, more patience, and that that's why the Industrial Revolution came to England? Do you have a view on that?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Why did the Industrial Revolution come to England? England is an island. England did not need standing armies. England did not constantly get invaded. In fact, the last successful invasion of England was 1066. England being an island allowed England not to need an army, gradually to develop democracy. Democracy is a productive form of government. Also, England is on the Atlantic coast. England and the Netherlands and first Spain and Portugal, they were the countries that spread around the world because they were on the, on the Atlantic coast. Also, Spain and, Spain was on the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean was the testing ground for developing ships and

• 34:02Speaker 01

  navigation that were then used across the Atlantic. So I'd say that it was geography that accounts for England's predominance.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Deirdre McCloskey attributes the differences to ideology, individualism, ideas of liberty, enlightenment, and maybe to some extent Christianity. What do you think of her work?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I don't know her work, but the idea that it has to do with the Enlightenment, nothing related to what I was just telling you, that in the case of England, not having an army meant that England could develop a democracy. It was in the 1600s that England chopped off the head of its king and then Parliament became powerful in England. But democracy, as Winston Churchill said, is the worst form of government, except for all other forms of government that have been tried. With democracy, you can suggest an idea and there's not a dictator who will tell you to shut up. Also, in the case of Netherlands, why did the Industrial Revolution begin first in England? Democracy, it didn't have a standing army. And why did it next spread to the Netherlands?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Partly because the Netherlands faced England, but also the Netherlands was a democracy early.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Do you have a view on the historical theories of Daron Asomoglu, that it's fundamentally about whether or not you have extractive institutions versus inclusive institutions?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I do have Daron and Jim Robinson, who shared the Nobel Prize together, particularly Jim Robinson. I've had more to do with Jim Robinson. I've learned more from Jim Robinson in the last 20 years than from any other individual. It was Jim who taught me the power of natural experiments. My career was as a laboratory scientist, as a gallbladder scientist, who did manipulative experiments in laboratory, but on people, we can't do manipulative experiments. We can't go around experimentally killing people and seeing what happens. In my work in New Guinea, studying New Guinea birds, I can't go around exterminating New Guinea birds. I had to develop techniques of natural experiments, comparing mountains that did or did not have a competing bird species.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  But my natural experiments were relatively crude. Jim Robinson and Daron, they're masters of natural experiments. So my book on leaders uses natural experiments to answer questions about political leader than business leaders and sports coaching. So I admire Daron and Jim a lot. I think that they give less, less credit to geography and more credit to institutions than I do, but they are great scientists and great writers.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Now, your book on environmental collapse, that one seemed too pessimistic to me. Have you become more optimistic since then?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  In some ways, yes. I'm more optimistic now than I was 20 years ago.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  One life's save, heaven's sakes. Why? Because now there are more people. We have more destructive power and there's less time left before we risk going over the cliff. But in the last 20 years, there have been two developments that make me cautiously optimistic. One is what has happened in the world to big businesses. 20 years ago, I would have said that the most evil destructive forces of the world are big businesses. And it was true, the 20 years ago, big businesses, for the most part, were not much interested in the environment. But within the last 20 years, big businesses have been increasingly interested in the environment.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Walmart, for example, has taken a lead in sustainable products. Or Unilever has taken a lead in sustainable fishery. And even oil companies. I was sent out by World Wildlife Fund in 1999 to do environmental studies in the oil fields that Chevron manage in Papua New Guinea. And I went out expecting that they would be awful. I learned, in fact, that Chevron is the most ultra cautious in the oil fields because they knew that if they made a mess, New Guineans would sue them. If they made a mess, they would not get contracts for developing the Norwegian oil fields. So one thing that makes me optimistic is that I've learned that at least some big

• 38:20Speaker 01

  companies care a lot about the environment. The other thing that makes me optimistic is the increased role of young people. 25 years ago, young people were not much interested in the environment. Now they've got a lot of interest in the environment. My own sons at age five and six, I remember them and their class at age six, marching to make a plea for protecting the rainforest. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I would say the chances are 51% that we will have a good outcome and only 49% that we will have a bad outcome. And I'm more optimistic now than I was 20 years ago, particularly for those two reasons. The development of environmental concerns among some big businesses and the much more

• 39:05Speaker 01

  increased interest of young people in the environment and in our future.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  And are you more optimistic about Australia? Won't water desalination just solve their major problems?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Water desalination requires energy.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  But they have solar energy, right? Batteries will get better. Maybe it costs them 2% of GDP. That's one year's growth. They give up a year's growth and they have all the water they need.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  We shall see. It has not happened yet. Fortunately, there is development of sustainable forms of energy, particularly wind energy and solar energy, which now account for what? 10 to 15% of energy production in the United States. Nuclear energy, about 85 or 90% of the energy in France comes from nuclear energy. There's work on getting energy from tides. There's work on getting energy geothermally from heating in the ground. We shall see.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  And what do you think is the single biggest environmental problem at the macro level for the world? Is it climate change? Is it biodiversity? Is it water? Something else?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I'm laughing because welcome to why interviewers find interviewing Jared Diamond so frustrating. When they ask me a question, what is the single most important thing? My answer is always, the single most important thing is not to look for the single most important thing, because the world is complicated. When a couple who are about to get married asks me, what is the single most important thing for happy marriage? My answer is the single most important thing is not to look for the single most important thing for a happy marriage. You need to get 37 things right. And if you get 36 things right and you disagree about sex or you disagree about religion, the marriage will fall apart. So to go to your question, what is the most important thing in the world today? There are many things that we have to get right.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  The most important things that we have to get right are climate change, inequality, and the nuclear risk, the risk that we will have nuclear war and that we will have nuclear winter. So I didn't give you one answer, but I gave you three answers.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Do you have ideas on what we should do to limit nuclear war risk?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  What should we do to limit nuclear war risk? Conversations? Sure, it's obvious. Conversations between the countries that have nuclear weapons. There have been such conversations. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia and the United States had uninterrupted conversations because Russia and the United States saw how close we had come to rolling up the world. And China and the United States have not come that far, but we're at least having conversations. The big danger player today is, of course, North Korea. And our current president has made an effort and now says he's going to make another effort to get conversations going with North Korea.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  So in short, my answer to your question, what do we need to avoid a nuclear war? Conversations among the nine countries that have nuclear weapons.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Do you still type using the Dvorsjak keyboard layout?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I'm looking at my wife's computer here, which is Dvorsjak keyboard. I would say that we are invested in the Dvorsjak keyboard. Yes, another keyboard will be much more efficient, but we've got the Dvorsjak keyboard. I don't see any movement towards replacing the Dvorsjak keyboard.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  You think there's too much inertia in the world of standards then?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Wouldn't say it's inertia. I would say we just got too much investment in the Dvorsjak keyboard. Young people learn how to use the Dvorsjak keyboard. Yes, another keyboard will be more efficient, but they learn the Dvorsjak keyboard and it works. There are other things that they care about rather than getting a different keyboard.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Where's your favorite place to go bird watching?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  My favorite place to go bird watching is the street where I live in Los Angeles, Stone Canyon Road. My list of species for my street is 189 species. I go bird watching on my street every Saturday and every Sunday. That's my favorite place to go bird watching in the United States. But of course, my favorite place to go bird watching in the world is New Guinea. No close second. New Guinea has the birds of paradise, world's most beautiful birds. New Guinea has bowerbirds, the animals that build the most complex structures other than us humans. The bower of a bowerbird, a bird this size, about the size of a jay. A male builds a bower that may be nine feet tall and is decorated with hundreds of blue

• 43:44Speaker 01

  fruits and red flowers and orange mushrooms. It has dozens and dozens of pounds of stuff, of shells, of pandanus leaves. Once you've been to New Guinea, the rest of the world is boring. That's the only disadvantage of being in New Guinea.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Panama, Costa Rica, Santa Marta, Colombia? Are they worth going to for birds?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  They're worth going to, but they're second to New Guinea.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Now, you've written quite a fair number of books that one could call big picture or big idea books. In terms of your method, how does each one come about? An idea comes to you in the shower? Or you start writing out many ideas and you abandon most of them? Or what would you say is your method for a thing that you do and very few people have done in the quantity that you've done it?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  I'm interested in lots of things. I'm interested in languages, genetics, human evolution. It means that until the 1980s, I was the world's expert on the gallbladder. And then my twin sons were born in the year 1987. I realized that the future of my twin sons was not going to depend upon gallbladders. It was going to depend upon history and geography. But there were many major questions in history and geography. My first book, The Third Chimpanzee, had chapters on things that then ended up in other books. One chapter of my book, The Third Chimpanzee, my book from 1991, got expanded into Guns and the Steel.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Another chapter of my book, The Third Chimpanzee, got expanded into Collapsed. Still, another chapter got expanded into Why is Sex Fun? My current book, Bound Leaders. Is a subject that has interested me for a long time as a result of being born in 1937 and growing up in the shadow of Hitler and then wondering whether World War II would have and the Holocaust would have achieved the form that they did if it hadn't been for Hitler.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  What's your most unusual successful work habit? You get a lot done, right? You're extremely productive in multiple areas.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Do I have a single unusual work habit? Once again, welcome to Jared Diamond. No, I don't have one work habit. My work habits are that I'm comfortable sitting down at a desk and working at the desk. I've learned to take off time in the evening instead of working on my book in the evening. In the evening now, I listen to music, the composer Johann Sebastian Bach. I've sang, I play the piano, I play the organ, I play the viola. Bach wrote 200 cantatas and I've been telling myself, I would like to get to know all of Bach cantatas. A year and a half ago, I found the time has arrived. I'm now going to listen to Bach cantatas at the rate of one per week.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I'm now up to cantata number 57, but it means that in the evening I'm relaxed and I'm not fretting, I'm not wasting my time getting anxious, I'm instead listening to Bach cantatas. So I get good sleep.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Are you listening to the Suzuki recordings or the Harman Kord or which ones? Gardner?

• 46:49Speaker 01

  I have three recordings. Gardner is one, another is, you know, although I listen to them every night, I can tell you Gardner, but I can't tell you the names of the other Bach cantata recordings that I listen to every night. I just listen to them.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  We once had Suzuki on as a guest. He was great. Your father, Lewis Diamond, he was a great benefactor, right, in hematology? How did that shape your life?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  My father and my mother, they were different people. Dad was a hematologist and pediatrician, a children's doctor. The result was that growing up, whenever people asked me, what do you want to do when you grow up? My answer was, I want to be a doctor like my father. Well, Dad also did scientific research. And so when I went to college, initially I was pre-med, I thought I would be a doctor like my father. But then I realized that what really interested me is science, including medical science. And so I went into physiology, which is a medical science. So Dad shaped my career in that direction.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  My mother was a linguist and a teacher. Mum taught me to read when I was three years old. And when I started learning languages in school and my first language was Latin, it was my first foreign language, I didn't realize that you had to learn grammar. So I just memorized vocabulary and after a month, I was way out of shape with Latin because I hadn't learned the grammar. My mother then sat every night for a year, mum sat down with me and we went through my Latin lessons. From mum, I developed my love of languages. Mum was a concert pianist, so I developed my love of music. So I gained different things from mum, languages and music particularly, and from my father, science.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Do you think your own shift away from studying the gallbladder shaped the lives of your children?

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yes, not because I taught them not to study gallbladders, but because the birth of my children made me realize that I better do something more important for the world than studying gallbladder. I'm an optimistic person, I don't get depressed, usually. The one time in my life that I was depressed for a week was when I learned that I was awarded one of these MacArthur fellowships, so-called Genius Awards. When I got the MacArthur Fellowship, I thought I would have been excited and happy. Instead, I was depressed for a week. Why? Because the news of the MacArthur Fellowship told me, Jared, people expect big things of you and you haven't delivered. You've been working on the gallbladder. You could do better things than that.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And on top of that, my sons, their future is not going to depend on gallbladders, it's going to depend on history and geography. So the combination of the birth of my sons and the MacArthur Fellowship caused me to switch from medical physiology into writing books on big subjects such as why you and I are now speaking English rather than speaking, speaking Nahuatl.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Before my last question, let me just plug your book again. It is called Prophets, P-R-O-F-I-T-S, Prophets, P-R-O-P-H-E-T-S, Coaches and Kings, in parentheses, when do leaders matter? So that's prophets, prophets, coaches and kings, when do leaders matter? Final question, other than Bach cantatas, what is it you hope to learn about next?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  I'll be eighty-nine years old next month and statistically, so maybe I have a decade ahead of me. I have two goals in the next decade. One is to get to know all those 200 Bach cantatas. I'm only up to number 57 last night. And the other thing is that I've been working in New Guinea for 60 years. I personally explored all of the 10 outlined mountain ranges of New Guinea. For some of them, I'm the only person who explored them, but I haven't synthesized what I've learned. I want to compare the bird formers of those 10 mountains of New Guinea to understand why some birds are better colonized than other birds.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  But New Guinea birds, the questions that one can ask about New Guinea birds are broad questions one can ask about other animals, but birds are the easiest of all animals to observe. So the other thing that I want to do with my remaining decade, besides listen to Bach cantatas, is to synthesize my work on New Guinea birds and to publish an account of why some New Guinea birds have colonized every one of those outlined New Guinea mountains, while other New Guinean birds have colonized none of them. Those are my two main intellectual goals. But then my biggest goal, of course, is to continue to contribute to the happiness of my wife and children.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Jared Diamond, thank you very much.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. You are really interesting to do an interview with.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cowen Convo's. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.